"Jack and the Beanstalk" has captivated audiences for millennia, with a 2016 study by Sara da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani revealing its origins to be over 5,000 years old. This tale's enduring power lies in its embodiment of universal creative principles, such as lack, separation, and hyperphysicality, which resonate deeply with our collective unconscious. The beanstalk itself symbolises the creative process, bridging the mundane and the magical through foundational creative elements. By understanding these principles, we unlock our potential to transcend ordinary reality and achieve extraordinary feats of imagination.
Let’s look at one creative idea that has long resonated in the popular imagination: Jack and the Beanstalk. Why is this tale so meaningful, evocative and memorable? What is the secret to its enduring power? Scholars Sara da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani published a 2016 study in Royal Society Open Science which found this story to be 5,000 years old, so it clearly has something going for it beyond the surface plot details.
The answer is that Jack and the Beanstalk contains a very clear manifestation of each and every one of the generators. It rates 10/10 for the key principles behind creative magic and so evokes a sense of that magic in the popular consciousness, or the collective unconscious as Jung would have it.
Here is an abridgement of the best known version of Jack and the Beanstalk published in 1890 by Joseph Jacobs:
Jack and his widowed mother are poor and rely on selling the milk from their cow, Milky-white. When Milky-white stops giving milk, Jack’s mother asks him to sell the cow at the market. On the way Jack meets an old man who offers him some “magic beans” in exchange for the cow, and he accepts. On arriving home with only the beans, Jack’s enraged mother throws the beans away and sends him to bed.
When Jack wakes, outside his window a giant beanstalk has grown up to the sky. He decides to climb up, and at the top he finds a road leading to a house. He knocks at the door and when a giant woman answers, Jack says he’s hungry and asks for breakfast. The woman says her husband is an ogre who likes to eat children, and after feeding Jack she hears her husband coming and hides Jack in an oven. The ogre enters and cries out,
Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.
After eating a breakfast of some broiled oxen and then counting some bags of gold, the ogre falls asleep. Jack takes one of the bags and escapes down the beanstalk.
Soon after, Jack returns up the beanstalk and, arriving at the house, asks the ogre’s wife for some food once more. She feeds him, and after hearing her husband coming again hides Jack in the oven. The ogre enters, giving his “Fee-fi-fo-fum” speech, then has his breakfast of three broiled oxen. Afterwards the ogre asks his wife to bring him the hen that lays the golden eggs. The ogre orders the hen to lay a golden egg, and she does so before the ogre falls asleep. Jack emerges and steals the egg, disappearing down the beanstalk.
Jack decides to go up once more, this time evading the wife and sneaking into the house before hiding. Soon the ogre comes into the room with his wife and he cries out, “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. I smell him, wife, I smell him.” Suspicious, his wife checks the oven but Jack is nowhere to be found, so the ogre eats his breakfast as usual. This time he asks his wife for his golden harp. She puts it on the table and he tells it to sing, which it does, sending the ogre to sleep. Jack sneaks out and takes the harp but it cries out to its master, waking the ogre who pursues Jack down the beanstalk. At the bottom Jack asks his mother for an axe and chops the beanstalk in two, sending the ogre crashing to his death. Jack and his mother become rich and Jack marries a beautiful princess, and they all live happily ever after.
Let’s break down the tale into abbreviated narrative segments. It will become clear exactly how each interesting and memorable event and entity is constructed through the application of a generator.
Narrative segment: Jack and his widowed mother are poor.
Generator: Lack
Description: Inadequate funds and a permanently absent father.
Narrative segment: Milky-white’s milk has dried up.
Generator: Lack
Description: A functionally deficient cow.
Narrative segment: Jack goes off to market to sell the cow.
Generator: Separation
Description: Jack sets off on a journey, becoming detached from mundane domestic reality and moving away towards something much more interesting.
Narrative segment: Jack meets an old man who offers him some magic beans for the cow.
Generator: Hyperphysicality
Description: The beans possess supernatural potency (albeit latently).
Narrative segment: Jack returns home.
Generator: Contiguity
Description: Having separated from his default position at home, he now reconnects with it: but this time there is an asymmetry because he has returned in possession of a magical gift – life can never be the same as it was.
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Narrative segment: Enraged, his mother throws the beans out of the window. In the morning a beanstalk has grown up, so vast it reaches to the sky.
Generator: Activation and distortion
Description: The central image of the tale. The mother throws the beans away: the intention is to discard them. Instead, they grow. This therefore is a product of unintended consequences – a counterintuitive cause and effect, or activation. But this is no ordinary plant. Its unusual form is the product of distortion on two counts: firstly it grows at a hugely accelerated rate. Secondly, it is enormously high.
Narrative segment: Jack decides to climb the beanstalk.
Generator: Separation
Description: Jack again embarks on a journey, this time on a vertical rather than horizontal plane. The disconnection is yet more radical than the first as it takes the protagonist as far away as is symbolically possible – to the sky.
Narrative segment: At the top he finds a road leading to a house.
Generator: Contiguity
Description: In any real sky there is little except perhaps birds or clouds or particles of debris stirred by the wind. Yet here exists a road and a house. Two utterly unrelated kinds of thing – sky and road/house – are brought together in a way that is intuitively implausible.
Narrative segment: A giant woman opens the door.
Generator: Distortion
Description: As if to drive home the fact that this is a magical tale and that therefore special kinds of happenings can be expected, this is no ordinary woman: she is unfeasibly large.
Narrative segment: A hungry Jack asks for something to eat.
Generator: Lack
Description: Jack is deficient once more, this time in dietary terms.
Narrative segment: She warns Jack of her husband, an ogre who eats boys.
Generator: Penetration/envelopment
Description: The ogre is a classic devouring monster, consuming things that are not supposed to be consumed – human beings.
Narrative segment: Once inside, upon hearing the ogre coming she hides Jack in the oven.
Generator: Penetration/envelopment
Description: Jack is inserted into a place people are not supposed to be inserted.
Narrative segment: When the ogre approaches he makes his “Fee-fi-fo-fum” speech.
Generator: Multiplicity
Description: The first line of the ogre’s speech uses the linguistic device of alliteration – the repetition of consonants at the beginning of consecutive words, in other words, a multiplicity of consonantal forms. In addition, lines one and two rhyme as do lines three and four; rhyming is a case of repeated vowel sounds, so the structure of the whole utterance is again a product of multiplicity.
Narrative segment: The ogre eats broiled oxen for breakfast.
Generator: Penetration/envelopment
Description: Evidence of the ogre’s identity as a bizarre swallower.
Narrative segment: When the ogre falls asleep, Jack swipes one of his bags of gold.
Generator: Switching
Description: Theft is about ownership moving or shifting – i.e. switching – from party A to party B in an unexpected (and illegitimate) manner.
Narrative segment: Jack returns to earth.
Generator: Contiguity
Description: Another (re)contiguity. Jack’s life (and narrative status) is now very different from before his decision to scale the beanstalk. Now he has been to a magic land and come back with an even more concrete manifestation of transformational power – gold, a universal symbol of value which will make Jack and his mother rich.
Narrative segment: Jack climbs the beanstalk again.
Generator: Multiplicity
Description: Jack creates a pattern by ascending the beanstalk in the same way a second time – note that it seems particularly unwise for him to do so, violating the intuitive sense that he is lucky to have escaped with his life and should only have gone a single time.
Narrative segment: The ogre again says ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum’ while entering.
Generator: Multiplicity
Description: Now the fact that the ogre re-utters the rhyme in itself constitutes a new form of multiplicity; he is recapitulating his previous statement in a memorable way.
Narrative segment: His wife brings him the hen that lays the golden eggs.
Generator: Hyperphysicality
Description: Biological reality precludes the possibility of an animal giving birth to precious metals. This is not a natural but a supernatural hen.
Narrative segment: Jack steals the hen and returns home.
Generator: Contiguity
Description: Another re-joining of normal society, another asymmetrical return.
Narrative segment: He goes up the beanstalk a third time.
Generator: Multiplicity
Description: Final confirmation of the repetitive pattern.
Narrative segment: The ogre’s wife brings him his singing harp, which cries out to its master when Jack steals it and flees.
Generator: Fusion
Description: This object is both harp and human, in this case a servant. It (presumably) looks exactly as an instrument looks but it possesses a mind, language, singing skills and even loyalty. The characteristics of two things have merged into a single implausible thing.
Narrative segment: Pursued by the ogre, Jack chops down the beanstalk.
Generator: Separation
Description: The vast plant is divided in two.
Narrative segment: The ogre is killed.
Generator: Lack
Description: The ultimate loss – of life itself.
Narrative segment: Jack and his mother are now rich.
Generator: Switching
Description: A complete inversion of the initial condition: from poverty and misery to abundance and happiness.
Narrative segment: Jack marries a princess.
Generator: Contiguity and penetration/envelopment
Description: As in so many fairytales, the ending sees an act of marital joining (contiguity), which “closes the circle” of the tale, along with the secondary implication of sexual intercourse underpinned physically by penetration (or envelopment).
But there is more. The story’s central image, the beanstalk, is a kind of master metaphor – a metaphor for creativity itself. The beanstalk symbolises a remarkable structure that helps transport you from the mundane world to a place of magic and wonder – just like a creative idea does. And how is it constructed? Using counterintuitive seeds. Jack’s beans are none other than the counterintuitive seeds of thought you make, find and recall, encoded in our collective memory. The tale of Jack and the Beanstalk is thus a grand symbol of the generative, creative power of humankind to transcend itself, one that encodes the very secret of how this impossible feat can be achieved. That is some story, I think you’ll agree.
"Jack and the Beanstalk" endures because it embodies universal creative principles like lack, separation, and hyperphysicality, making it resonate deeply. The beanstalk symbolises the creative process, bridging the mundane and the magical. A 2016 study by Sara da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani traces the tale's origins to over 5,000 years ago, highlighting its timeless appeal. Understanding these principles helps us unlock our own creative potential.
da Silva Sara Graça and Tehrani Jamshid J. (2016) "Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales." Royal Society Open Science. Volume 3, Issue 1.