26 March

Fantasy as Antifantasy: 10 Deconstruction in Antifantasy continued

Let us examine a few more examples. There’s a scene where Wendy gets an acorn from Peter instead of a kiss.

It was lucky that she did put it on that chain, for it was afterwards to save her life.


The narrator and the reader are clearly working together in the process of narrating and reading, foreseeing the progression and conclusion of the storyline. What is presented here is not an underplot scheme set with the intention of convincing the reader later. The result has already been accepted. The following example is no different. On the way to Neverland, the pirates spot Tinker Bell’s light, and the children, who are targeted by a cannon, hide her in John’s hat. However, at John’s request, Wendy carries the hat.

Presently Wendy took the hat, because John said it struck against his knees as he flew; and this, as we shall see, led to mischief, for Tinker Bell hated to be under an obligation to Wendy.


While Faulkner’s legendary world was built on a mechanism of mystery in which hidden events behind the work world were revealed before the reader, by the author’s arbitrary manipulation of time axis repeating information exposure and intermittent discoveries by several witnesses in a multilayered manner, through internal monologues of the characters in the work and the facts they discover in their experiences at various occasions; the fictionality of Peter and Wendy can be said to be more self-conscious in its semantic structure. If Faulkner’s attempt is similar to the fictionality construction procedure accomplished in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in that it has the effect of concealing the explicit fictional nature of the work, then the world of Peter and Wendy is more metafictional in that it emphasizes the playfulness of manipulating the fictionality itself. The awareness of non-existence of the narrative world as a story being told, and constructing a pseudo-reality in a possibility phase on the condition of the involvement of reader’s consciousness that is supposed to collaborate in the configuration of the story world, can be seen throughout Peter and Wendy. In this chapter, we will examine the examples of this trait faithfully following the progresses of the text.
When the Darlings learn that something is wrong with their children, they rush home. The narrator describes the occasion:

Will they reach the nursery in time? If so, how delightful for them, and we shall all breathe a sigh of relief, but there will be no story. On the other hand, if they were not in time, I solemnly promise that it will all come right in the end.


We’re reading a story. The narrator does not ask the reader to confuse the reality of the story world with the real one. The only thing that the narrator humbly and confidently assures is that an interesting story will unfold if the reader tolerates a “willing suspension of disbelief.” (note)

note:
This is the psychology on the acceptance of the fictionality pointed out by the Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria. This point of view which is related to another of his points to the latent tendencies of Gothic romance, the desire to overthrow the social system, can be acknowledged to be a reagent to detect antifantasy tendencies that are equally rooted in the depths of fantasy literature.


In introducing the various adventures of the children in Neverland, the narrator is ready to provide several anecdotes. However, the narrator says that it is required, to tell all of them, a book as large as English-Latin, or Latin-English dictionary. (p. 76) After listing a few possible episodes that should be told, the narrator continues:

... but we have not decided yet that this is the adventure we are to narrate....


The narrator is still undecided, so he brings up the episodes of how the pirates baked a cake to trap the children, and how Peter saved his friend bird’s nest when it fell into the sea. However, the episode that the narrator actually tells the reader from now on is thus determined.

Which of these adventures should we choose? The best way will be to toss for it. I have tossed, and the lagoon has won.


It’s a clever strategy. Some of the information have already been told, even though the narrator says he hasn’t said it yet. The debate over the style of narrative in which “one chooses what one should tell” is referenced to the mechanism of self-referential narrative. This kind of reflexive logical manipulation was a characteristic part of metafiction that Brian Attebery pointed out fully aware of the influence of postmodernism.
(Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy, pp. 40-8 )

At the end of the Lagoon episode, when Neverbird comes to the rescue of the injured Peter, the narrator introduces this method of narration.

I forget whether I have told you that there was a stave on the rock driven into it by some buccaneers of long ago to mark the site of buried treasure.


In fact, it is a rather palliative tactic to casually talk about the subject by talking about issues that seem to deviate from the main plot of whether or not the topic is being told, without taking the form of directly narrating the topic. The author’s self-consciousness of his narrative is intense. Wendy tells the stories when she puts the children to bed. Wendy’s stories were based on the children who listened to them. There is another nested box structure here, in which Wendy, one of the characters in the story Peter and Wendy, tells about the children in the same story.

“O, Wendy,” cried Tootles, “was one of the lost children called Tootles?”
“Yes, he was.”
“I am in a story. Hurrah, I am in a story, Nibs.”


It was the typical metafictional structure of the late 20th century that the characters in the story were aware that they were fictional beings, but here one of the characters in the story is pleased to know that he appeared in the story that was being told. (note)

note:
One of the typical instances is found in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. In fact, there is an interesting opinion that it was Beagle himself who first started this presentational innovation. It was stated by Conner Cochran in “A Conversation with Peter S. Beagle”, which is included in The Last Unicorn, Deluxe compilation edition, Roc (2007).


Wendy’s story continues.

“Let us now,” said Wendy, bracing herself up for her finest effort, “take a peep into the future”; and they all gave themselves the twist that makes peeps into the future easier. “Years have rolled by, and who is this elegant lady of uncertain age alighting at London Station?”