Identity and Individuality of Derivative Fictions -- continued

　The personal figure of Captain Hook in the movie Peter Pan, set in a pirate castle is a deft adaptation from the original Peter and Wendy’s description, and it faithfully follows the main subject of the story. Hook’s line uttered when he tried to make use of Wendy’s brothers as decoys to ambush Peter, is particularly interesting. As a brilliant strategist, Hook was keenly aware of the tactical effects of surprise attacks.

Like all surprise attacks…it must be conducted…improperly.

The part of the original Peter and Wendy that seems to correspond to this line is a description of a skillful maneuver in which Hook succeeded in inflicting a devastating blow on the intractable Indians, which was omitted from the movie Peter Pan. The author’s narration is effectively used to describe the characteristic phase of the original work as an ideational novel.

The pirate attack had been a complete surprise: a sure proof that the unscrupulous Hook conducted it improperly, for to surprise redskins fairy is beyond the wit of the white man.


The somewhat incongruous word “improper” used by the original author Barrie was deliberately introduced to describe the spiritual qualities of Hook, a brilliant tactician with an artistic sensibility who was always able to boldly execute operations that transcended the boundaries of common sense. However, the details of the philosophical significance and aesthetic evaluation of the “pirate” as a rebel against authority and common sense, which were implied in the original, are omitted in the film Peter Pan. In the original novel, Peter and Wendy, elaborate writing was adopted focusing on Hook’s unconventional behavior. The description that follows is a particularly good indication of the ideational aspect that Peter and Wendy retains as a conceptual novel.

By all the unwritten laws of savage warfare it is always the redskin who attacks, and with the wiliness of his race he does it just before the dawn, at which time he knows the courage of the whites to be at its lowest ebb. The white men have in the meantime made a rude stockade on the summit of yonder undulating ground, at the foot of which a stream runs, for it is destruction to be too far from water.
There they await the onslaught, the inexperienced ones clutching their revolvers and treading on twigs, but the old hands sleeping tranquilly until just before the dawn. Through the long black night the savage scouts wriggle, snake-like, among the grass without stirring a blade. The brushwood closes behind them, as silently as sand into which a mole has dived. Not a sound is to be heard, save when they give vent to a wonderful imitation of the lonely call of the coyote. The cry is answered by other braves; and some of them do it even better than the coyotes, who are not very good at it. So the chill hours wear on, and the long suspense is horribly trying to the paleface who has to live through it for the first time; but to the trained hand those ghastly calls and still ghastlier silences are but an intimation of how the night is marching.
That this was the usual procedure was so well known to Hook that in disregarding it he cannot be excused on the plea of ignorance.


The description around this part forms the most dense ingenuity of writing in the original Peter and Wendy. The author’s narration makes full use of an elaborately eloquent style to recount the details of the exceptional maneuvers employed by Hook.

The Piccaninnies, on their part, trusted implicitly to his honour, and their whole action of the night stands out in marked contrast to his. They left nothing undone that was consistent with the reputation of their tribe. With that alertness of the senses which is at once the marvel and despair of civilised peoples, they knew that the pirates were on the island from the moment one of them trod on a dry stick; and in an incredibly short space of time the coyote cries began. Every foot of ground between the spot where Hook had landed his forces and the home under the trees was stealthily examined by braves wearing their mocassins with the heels in front. They found only one hillock with a stream at its base, so that Hook had no choice; here he must establish himself and wait for just before the dawn. Everything being thus mapped out with almost diabolical cunning, the main body of the redskins folded their blankets around them, and in the phlegmatic manner that is to them, the pearl of manhood squatted above the children’s home, awaiting the cold moment when they should deal pale death.


Here, we can see that in fact impossible nonsense is being cleverly spoken, by using a plausible and majestic description. The deception that can be achieved by making full use of the method of storytelling must be the very essence of the art of weaving a tale. Statements that speak of the truth of the world and common sense that all people already agree with must be regarded as tantamount to child’s play. This is because a new axiom system that follows otherworldly standards that are completely different from the real world is about to be developed there. This is the part of the original Peter and Wendy where the most elaborate meta-description that transcends logic and science has been chosen.

Here dreaming, though wide-awake, of the exquisite tortures to which they were to put him at break of day, those confiding savages were found by the treacherous Hook. From the accounts afterwards supplied by such of the scouts as escaped the carnage, he does not seem even to have paused at the rising ground, though it is certain that in that grey light he must have seen it: no thought of waiting to be attacked appears from first to last to have visited his subtle mind; he would not even hold off till the night was nearly spent; on he pounded with no policy but to fall to. What could the bewildered scouts do, masters as they were of every war-like artifice save this one, but trot helplessly after him, exposing themselves fatally to view, the while they gave pathetic utterance to the coyote cry.


A scout is a soldier whose job it is to conduct reconnaissance of the battlefield. In this case, the scout can take a strategic action to notify the main body of the attack by signaling it and follow behind the enemy who launched it and make a pincer attack. Facts and causal relationships that are completely different from common sense are developed in the description of this fictional world. The reader is required to appreciate not the objective substance of the fictional world that is supposed to have been depicted, but rather the method of description itself. It is precisely the effect of the narrative that speaks of falsehood in the fictional description that more accurately presents the dimension of development of the intrinsic meaning structure implied by the fiction. Naturally, fiction must be the psychological world of the reader, which is made up of the art of narrative and the positive acceptance of its effects, and it should be a transcendental dimension that is determined by metaphysical speculation. This theory of art, presented by Oscar Wilde, was only properly understood through the concept of scientific pantheism after the general acceptance of Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. The original Peter and Wendy was an extremely radical extravaganza built on the intellectual background that preceded the common acceptance of this extradimensional logical phase space. The description of Hook’s “inappropriate” maneuvers continues for some time, but the conclusion of this interesting series of fictional description is led as follows:

It is no part of ours to describe what was a massacre rather than a fight. Thus perished many of the flower of the Piccaninny tribe. Not all unavenged did they die, for with Lean Wolf fell Alf Mason, to disturb the Spanish Main no more, and among others who bit the dust were Geo. Scourie, Chas. Turley, and the Alsatian Foggerty. Turley fell to the tomahawk of the terrible Panther, who ultimately cut a way through the pirates with Tiger Lily and a small remnant of the tribe.
To what extent Hook is to blame for his tactics on this occasion is for the historian to decide. Had he waited on the rising ground till the proper hour he and his men would probably have been butchered; and in judging him it is only fair to take this into account. What he should perhaps have done was to acquaint his opponents that he proposed to follow a new method. On the other hand, this, as destroying the element of surprise, would have made his strategy of no avail, so that the whole question is beset with difficulties. One cannot at least withhold a reluctant admiration for the wit that had conceived so bold a scheme, and the fell genius with which it was carried out.


This description, which summarizes the tactics employed by Hook, was pretentious in a particularly grave and dignified style. The impression is as if it were a part of a history book that is minutely discussing a historical event. In order to properly understand the virtues of this scrupulous and serious composition, it will be necessary to have the literacy of a learned adult. In fact, a typical fraudulent writing technique of forcibly creating a deliberately distorted fait accompli is brilliantly accomplished, by proceeding in a highly pretentious style with actually very simple facts. This is a conspicuous example of the genuine fictional description free from the shackles of the phenomenal world, that Oscar Wilde argued for in “The Decay of Lying”. It suggests the existence of an extremely ironic perception of the universe, which tries to twist the mechanical worldview based on realism. The self-reflection and contemplation that Hook embodies, is shown as the essence of the existence of the pirate captain, which is the opposite of Peter’s ignorance and lack of consideration. In this aspect, one is able to confirm the virtuosity of the original Peter and Wendy’s writing as an attempt to construct a speculative conceptual world. It is in this part of the narrative that focuses on Hook’s behavior that can be read as the act of creating a new phase space in the protoplasmic dimension that the original author Barrie contemplated. On the other hand, movie Peter Pan’s unique creative strategy is to disrupt and rearrange the subsets that form the components of the original story. (note) In either case, the character of Captain Hook, the rebel of the pirate ship, as a martyr of aesthetics, is correctly reflected.

note:
This creative manipulation is perpetrated onto the parts of the work itself, in the movie Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Please refer to the author’s article, “Meanings and Ambiguity in Visual Art: Pleroma Motive in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders”, included in Existence, Phenomenon and Personality, Bokka-sha,(2014), the comprehensive argument of the relationship between cosmology and consciousness, where the discussion of the creative strategy of the visual presentation adopted in the movie is argued together with the need for reconsideration of the concept of identity.