Fantasy as Antifantasy: 4 The ambivalence of Make Believe and Convention -- concluded

In the case of Barrie, he is actively trying to use the convention itself, as a strategic weapon in his work, which is closely related to the reception of such a fictional world. This is also a fact that can be pointed out as a metafictional mechanism. Barrie does not respond to the reader’s naïve desires and give them an easy illusion of justice. In this respect, the ethical concerns of Peter and Wendy are more ruthless and intense than any other realistic literary work.
　Eating is closely related to the subject of make-believe, and forms the basis for the depiction of children’s lives in Neverland as well as adventure. Here’s how they eat.

This meal happened to be a make-believe tea, and they sat round the board, gazzling in their greed; and really, what with their chatter and recriminations, the noise, as Wendy said, was positively deafening.


This pretended meal is one of the things Peter strictly orders his children to do. Wendy has to go out of her way to prepare make believe cooking for it, and the children have to perform a fake ritual of eating the treat against their will. The only time they can really eat is when they can prove that their fasting has made them so thin that their bodies no longer fit the size of the holes in the trees that lead them in and out of their secret underground house.

The cooking, I can tell you, kept her nose to the pot.... but you never exactly knew whether there would be a real meal or just a make-believe, it all depended upon Peter’s whim. He could eat, really eat, if it was part of a game, but he could not stodge just to feel stodgy, which is what most children like better than anything else; the next better thing being to talk about it. Make believe was so real to him that during a meal of it you could see him getting rounder. Of course it was trying, but you simply had to follow his lead, and if you could prove to him that you were getting loose for your tree he let you stodge.


Peter, who forces his minions to play a game called make-believe, is somewhat similar to the god who forces sacrifices and offerings and demands rituals, but also he has a little different traits. For Peter, eating is a game, and living and dying are nothing more than a game of make-believe as a “tremendous adventure.” Make-believe is sometimes a very childlike fantasy, empathizing with others and playing out other characters. This is revealed in the scene where Peter has defeated Hook and captured the pirate ship, then he takes Hook’s belongings and disguises himself like the pirate captain.

It was afterwards whispered among them that on the first night he wore this suit he sat long in the cabin with Hook’s cigar-holder in his mouth and one hand clenched, all but the forefinger, which bent and held threateningly aloft like a hook.


The arch enemy Hook who must be defeated someday, is not really an obstacle for Peter that must be eliminated for practical or ethical reasons. Rather, because he is a formidable opponent, he even seems to have a certain admiration for Hook. As if to mock the limitations of the real world, where you cannot be yourself unless you survive by defeating others, and you cannot keep yourself alive without killing and eating living creatures, Barrie depicts the tyranny of absolute power wielded by Peter’s transcendent divine whims. There is an unsurmountable gap between the children who play make-believe following Peter, and Peter who is the leader of the adventure.

The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were exactly the same thing.


For the children who participate in the game under Peter’s direction, both good and evil, and life and death are absolute and unambiguous things with a grave significance that cannot be neglected. However, Peter, who has the power to change even these ground rules, sometimes betrays his mates with impunity.

It [the adventure] was a sanguinary affair, and especially interesting as showing one of Peter’s peculiarities, which was that in the middle of a fight he would suddenly change sides.


What we can point out about the mechanism of make-believe is that, while in our perception of reality, we, as the perceiving subjects, can never discern whether the laws of principle describing the rules of operation of our world have a positive vector or a negative vector in its absolute value, in spite of our real life being subject to absolute control by it, in the case of a transcendent being like Peter, they can be selectively manipulated arbitrarily. For Peter, who has omnipotent powers when it comes to make-believe, sometimes even the alternative “not to go on adventures that he should be able to enjoy” can be chosen by harnessing the power of make-believe.

Peter invented with Wendy’s help, a new game... It consisted in pretending not to have adventure... To see Peter doing nothing on a stool was a great sight.



In other words, in Almighty God, even non-existence is possibly selectable a phase. The proof of the existence of God in scholastic philosophy, which states that “God must exist under the condition that He is omnipotent,” should have premised that “even God is subject to the restriction of logic.” However, a truly Almighty God may be able to transcend the imperative of such binary logic. (note)

note:
For example, the Eleatic mystic philosopher Parmenides’ notion of the “unity of being and thinking” may be recalled as a variation of this kind of metaphysical speculation. One interpretation that reveals Peter’s identity would be the view that regards him as “the metaphysical transcendence of the principle of existence.”


It can be said that this recognition was newly reaffirmed by modern people who discovered the physical fact that “the universe has been created from fluctuations in a vacuum” in the latter half of the 20th century. This is reflected in the latent problematic nature of fantasy literature, which Attebery later admitted the need to point out again. (note)

note:
This peculiarity of fantasy literature will be discussed later in relation to the metaphysical ideas, quantum mechanics have brought forth, in the author’s article “Quantum Logic, Paradox and Impossible Worlds ─ Actualism and Antifantasy”, included in Fantasy as Antifantasy 2: A Study of The Last Unicorn: Bokka-sha (2009).

　However, what is very unsettling for us is that Peter for himself, who must control the mechanism of make-believe, shows a spontaneous fluctuation, forgetting the rules of the game world, that is, his own identity. He doesn’t know if the fact that he was playing the role of the father of the children, as “the Great White Father” was true or a game, and asks Wendy anxiously, “It’s just make-believe that I’m the father of these children”. (p. 97).
　What can be seen here is the ambivalence implied by the act of make-believe. Peter, who is full of life and always enjoys adventures, is actually an enigmatic god who does not even take food, and is willing not to venture or even ceases to be living if he feels like it. Combining one side of god who is full of the joy of life and fertility and another side of the god of death who brings the lifeless void, is the actual figure of the god, Peter Pan, who lurked in the depths before our memories take shape.
　After all, Peter does not actually eat. However, the ethical issues associated with eating are not avoided in this story. This is because they are actually committing “killing," which is a more straightforward and immoral act than eating. Peter and Wendy is a fantasy work that depicts the cruel acts of children. And, like many literary works that depicted utopias, the world of Neverland had an anti-utopian aspect of dystopia, in that in order to live happily, there must be adventures in which people kill each other.