The book begins with one of the best opening lines ever: “All children, except one, grow up.” Barrie’s wit is inexhaustibly self-referential, and when it’s not sliding into parodies of axioms or little hymns to the novel’s real hero, Mrs. Darling, it is clowning, bittersweetly, on the sidelines. His genius, like Austen’s, is disruptive. He’s the kid who gains attention by mirroring the mannerisms of the adults he finds ridiculous or merely loathsome. The under-theme of Peter Pan is that the narrator cannot understand how the child can be the father of the man and at the same time how the grown man can ever mature into something more than a child.
Peter Pan himself begins as a figure of thought in the middle of the nineteenth century, which was as preoccupied as ours with paganism. The image of Pan begins slowly to burble out of the nineteenth century until it becomes a pointer to something interesting but hard to recognize outside of its own genre. Peter Pan’s textual cousins are Dickon Sowerby, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, even the Jimmy Gatz who becomes Jay Gatsby. He is interesting because his lineage is to our pagan past what the cardinal in the elm is to the dinosaur: a memento mori, a reduction of something once enormously significant and now irreparably diminished. He is also morally disturbing. In that great whorehouse without doors, the internet, breed hundreds of Pan-wannabes who dress up (for their webcams) in bright green tights and caption the images with quotations from the gospels. The gooiest of religions is the religion of childhood.
If it were not that Barrie recognized the Y.A. genre as a Romantic invention, we would probably have the novel that celebrates the Eternal Child only to bury him—or, to be more exact, close and lock the window on him in the last chapter. Barrie doesn’t like his main character because children, his book claims, are “gay and heartless.” And because the essence of childhood is to live in a world without consequence, we are too kind to “the child within us.” Don Henley was right: get over it. The exceptional child, the one who doesn’t grow up, is nothing more than an unacknowledged death wish. This is why anyone who survives childhood and escapes a full psychotic break often has a particular religion, his or her childhood. Wordsworth, first great capitalizer of Childhood as a kind of visionary trust fund, made it plain: within the magic citadel of imagination that surrounds me there lives—lives on and on—the bliss of childhood, the fire where we find the warmth the world denies us.
Years ago I had a student named Adam who constantly disagreed with me. One day a colleague said, “Relax. It’s not that he disagrees. He doesn’t understand.” Exactly. We are all Adams, or like the Adam whose questions I parsed and litigated (and failed to answer). It is easier to say you disagree when you really don’t understand because you do not understand that you do not understand. You are guilty of a basic human incapacity. You have to learn to live with that incapacity. You need something to knit you up, and nothing does this more effectively than a story, than narrative, especially one that’s about you. There is no better story than the story of yourself, where we begin. So Peter Pan, the child who never grows up, also never knows that it is a story that also ends. As DeLillo teaches us, “all plots tend deathward.”
So when Peter Pan enters the second-floor nursery looking for his lost shadow, there is a lot going on. Wendy is the bringer of stories to Neverland, a place that could never be not only because it never was, but because it exists outside those two primal tenses, present and past, where narrative lives. Peter kidnaps Wendy because Wendy tells stories. Stories connect. What a beautiful accident that her initial act of heroism is a compassionate repair job, the knitting of the lost shadow back on Peter Pan, who needs radical reconnecting at the level where we are most raw and sensuous and human, as pre-teens. As Virgil leads Dante up Mt. Purgatory, the sun begins to rise behind them. Dante is startled to see only one shadow on the ground. Regard that, says Virgil, who cast no shadow. The shadow is your mortality, and mortality is the stuff of story.
Peter Pan’s disconnectedness, which is where the story begins, is the plot point that Barrie ironizes because he knows it can neither be resolved nor ignored, only straddled and mocked. Peter Pan is a pure unmediated presence, an ontological monstrosity as necessary to our thinking about ourselves as is the existence of God or of the point particle. If there is a childhood that goes on forever, it logically must go on outside the reference frames of those of us who are startled by our shadows and know we will die and not come back. We know because we can count (Peter can’t: he’s innumerate), we can remember (Peter remembers nothing), we cultivate loyalties and friendships (Peter is feckless, constantly switching sides), and we grieve (Peter Pan: “Once I kill ’em I forget ’em”). “I am a bird,” he cries at one point—birds being the elected imaginative figures for the unmoored soul in Dante, or for the purely reflective soul as in Yeats, who is gripped with anxiety when he looks at the cold “rook-delighting” heaven.
Peter Pan is as far from being a children’s book as Gravity’s Rainbow. Jacqueline Rose makes the point that the child who sees himself in Peter Pan is in for a tricky career because the novel idealizes the child “as a pure point of origin.” The only one who benefits will come to view the history of his own becoming as the Seven Days of Creation. The only book we probably pay less attention to than Barrie’s short novel is Tristram Shandy, but both make the same point. Wordsworth was wrong. There are no origins, only destinations. If you can’t remember your origin, make one up. In the longest run you can always lie about it, change it, move the date. On the one hand, what is essential is the fiction of originality. Yet on the other, real people recognize real destinations. Why did the Llewellyn-Davies boys end up as they did? One drowning, one suicide. Not one of them lived happily ever after.
J. T. Barbarese’s latest book of poetry is True Does Nothing. His translation of selected poems of Jacques Prevért, After Prevért, will appear later this year.
