In my earlier post “How Superman's Father Saved the World” I discussed Superman’s origin story: how as a baby, his father saved him from the destruction of his birth world by rocketing him to Earth. I wrote:
“This is a variation of an archetypal story of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. The old and dying bestow upon their children the best of their culture, in this case symbolized by a spaceship. The legacy of the past is passed down to the hope of the future—to protect the young from calamity and launch them toward their destiny. The aged redeem the tragedy of their own approaching deaths by promoting new life.”
This narrative archetype is more explicit in the Superman movie of 1978. The film’s script has Jor-El addressing his son, right before sending him off, as follows:
“You will travel far, my little Kal-El. But I will never leave you. Even in the face of my death the richness of my life shall be yours. All that I have learned, everything I feel, all of this and more I have bequeathed to you my son. You shall carry me inside you all your days. You will make my strength your own…”
Jor-El wasn’t speaking figuratively. He deposited into Kal-El’s spaceship cradle a collection of crystals, which we later learn is a vast library. After baby Kal-El is launched into space, a posthumous recording of Jor-El tells him that:
“Embedded in the crystals before you is the total accumulation of all literature and scientific fact from dozens of other worlds spanning the 28 known galaxies.”
This treasury of knowledge—like an intergalactic audiobook Library of Alexandria—is transmitted to Kal-El en route to Earth, indicating that Kryptonian infants must be superhumanly precocious.
On Earth, Kal-El is adopted by a human couple and is raised as Clark Kent. Upon coming of age, Clark rediscovers one of the crystals, which he takes to the Arctic. There, it causes a crystalline palace to emerge from the ice. Within this “Fortress of Solitude,” Clark discovers more crystals as well as an array of slender tubes. As Clark discovers, the crystals are data drives, the fortress is a vast computer, and the tubes are computer ports for the crystals.
Clark loads one of the crystals, and a projection of Jor-El introduces himself as the young man’s long-dead father. Kal-El learns that the lessons he received as a baby were only the beginning. Kal-El is now to graduate from facts to values, from knowledge to wisdom. The script has Jor-El saying:
“The knowledge that I have of, matters physical and historic I have given to you fully on your voyage to your new home. These are important matters, to be, sure, but still matters of mere fact. There are questions to be asked and it is time for you to do so. Here in this Fortress of Solitude we shall try to find the answers together. How does a Good man live? What is virtue'? When does a man's obligation to those around him exceed his obligation to himself'? These are not simple questions - even on Krypton there is no precise science which provides us with the answers. I can only tell you what I myself believe. To this end, I have tried to anticipate your questions, and in the order of their importance to you.”
Clark learns who he is and where he comes from. He is then launched “through time and space” and, over the course of 12 Earth years, receives a moral education, at the end of which his deceased father says:
“Your education nears a kind of completion now, Kal-El, although no limit to understanding or knowledge has ever truly existed. Over the years you have asked important questions and I think together we have almost always found the answer to them. Now it is time for you to return to the world which I have chosen for you. When new questions arise, come back to me and I will try to be of help...”
What Jor-El bequeathed to his son looked like diamond shards. But the true value of those crystals resided in the gems of wisdom and knowledge they contained.
By incorporating the culture he inherited from his father, Kal-El made his father’s moral strength his own and is now ready to become Superman.