Fantasy as Antifantasy: 7 Peter’s Ignorance and Mysterious Wisdom continued

Another big secret that Peter knew was concerned with the Lost Boys. When Wendy is told that Peter lives with the Lost Boys in Neverland, she asks, “What are the Lost Boys?” Here’s Peter’s answer:

“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses, I’m certain.”


This is the very modernistic myth-making mechanism that Barrie achieved in Peter and Wendy. The phrase “fall out of a perambulators” was a euphemism for the loss of life of a baby in London at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when infant mortality was high. The Lost Boys are the souls of the infant dead who passed away before they reached adulthood. Barrie did a great job of giving concrete images to this conceptual expression. The fairies born from the bursting bubbles of laughter and the Lost Boys who come to Neverland through the eerie doorway of death are also the product of an extremely dry and notional irony. In this sense, it can be pointed out once again that the way in which the nature of fairies is depicted and the way in which the whimsical existence of the Lost Boys is introduced have extremely modernist elements in this work. (note)

note:
However, if we look back at the works of German Romantic writers, for example, Clemens Maria Brentano’s specialty of fairy tales, in which he fabricates a fictional world from a play of pun and manipulation on language, and the fairy tales based on ideological game, which Hoffmann often performed, in which dreams and reality are mixed together to make the world of the story non-existent; already contained genuine elements of modernism. (Cf. Thalmann, pp. 63-120) This is the reason why it is not possible to distinguish Romanticism, modernism and post-modernism in a distinct classification. Romanticism, as Oscar Wilde put it, is an ambivalent notion that includes both realism and anti-realism. According to Wilde, realism shows the rigidity of an idea that is bound by a single convention and can have only one unambiguous standard of value, while Romanticism shows the flexibility of an idea with an ambiguous standard of value that recognizes a variety of conventions. Therefore, from the point of view of Romanticism, realism can be recognized as a type of Romanticism with a certain manifestation form, but from the standpoint of realism, Romanticism is decisively unacceptable because it deviates from its standard of value. (Ref. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”)
In addition, among the Gothic romance writers who were the pioneers of the rise of Romanticism in England, such as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe; Jane Austin, who could be called an anti-Gothic romance writer taking a position to ridicule purely medieval retrospective Gothic romance writers such as mentioned above, and Thomas Love Peacock, who caricatured the movement itself were also included in the circle. For more information on the fundamental ambiguity of the concept of Romanticism, please refer to Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England. (1973).
　Of course, this issue also applies to the definition of the term fantasy, which is discussed under the term “the fantastic” and defined as “180 degree reversal of ground rules of a narrative world.” in Eric S. Rabkin’s The Fantastic in Literature, (1976). This study discusses the relationship between reality and fantasy from the same perspective as Wilde did, and argues that the world of the fictional work has its own cosmological constants. Focusing on the fact that they exist as different kind of possible worlds that are fundamentally dissimilar to reality, he concludes that all works of art, including paintings and movies, are fantasy. (pp. 213-227)
　In the preface to The Fantasy Works of Peter Beagle (1978), “The Self=Made Werewolf,” Beagle, the author of The Last Unicorn, wrote, “I am likely to announce that all writing is fantasy anyway: that to set any event down in print is immediately to begin to lie about it,…” (p. 10) , exactly corresponds to Oscar Wilde’s theory of lying.
These issues concerning the differentiation of opposite concepts centering around the notions of “modern” and “novel” are discussed in the author’s lecture “Modern and Novel”, which has been developed shared on the web, during the Covid-19 period, and compiled as an archive on Academia.

Modern and Novel
https://www.academia.edu/72457067/Modern_and_Novel


The whimsical expression is often pointed out as a characteristic element of Barrie’s works, but the “whimsical” parts are the product of the strategic imagination pioneered by Barrie, and Barrie’s creation itself was never done on a whim. Peter’s seemingly innocuous character-setting elements, sometimes innocent and sometimes full of profound wisdom, are connected in a deep layer. These must be seen as the two poles of fluctuation that have emerged as the expression of the wonderfully consistent character of this boy.
　Peter doesn’t understand the feeling of jealousy that is peculiar to women. Peter describes Tinker Bell pulling Wendy’s hair in an attempt to prevent Peter from kissing Wendy, in this way.

“She says, she will do that to you, Wendy, every time I give you a thimble. ”


Even as he translates Tinker Bell’s words in this way, Peter doesn’t know what kind of psychology makes her do it. Peter innocently asks Tinker Bell, “But why?” But Wendy knows. Peter is the only one who doesn’t know about this all-too-human feeling. On the other hand, Peter has a strangely clever side that seems to see into the depths of people’s hearts. In an attempt to lure Wendy to Neverland, Peter sets up various seductions. After talking about the many charms that await in Neverland, such as flying and mermaids, Peter brings up the decisive words of seduction which are described in this way.

“Wendy,” he said, the sly one, “you could tuck us in at night.”