Fantasy as Antifantasy: 8 Kiss and Riddle concluded

His unreasonable resentment towards mothers in general is quite deep. When Peter returns to the Darling house with the children and sees Mrs. Darling, he says to Tinker Bell:

“It’s Wendy’s mother. She is a pretty lady, but not so pretty as my mother. Her mouth is full of thimbles, but not so full as my mother’s was.”


Peter provokes an unreasonable hostility towards Mrs. Darling, who in this work is to be regarded as a guardian angel with boundless mercy and generosity, and a loving fairy godmother who will never abandon any felon. Moreover, the misunderstanding instilled in him by Wendy has even led him to mistake Mrs. Darling’s “kiss” for “thimble.” But now, through involvement with Wendy and her mother, Mrs. Darling, Peter has come to know the deep truth of the “kiss” in a two-sided way, and here he is aware of the pain that aches in his heart. Parting ways with the Darling children and leaving the Lost Boys, who had always been his loyal henchmen, Peter looks back at the children from the window for the last time.

He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at one joy from which he must for ever barred.


For Peter, who had experienced something he had never known before, the “kiss” and Wendy, the incident involving the Darling family’s children must have been very special. And it was also the solemn fact of the story where Peter’s adventure was narrated, that he had completed the complementary and brilliantly circular act of losing Wendy and the Lost Boys and taking his mother’s kiss with him. If so, is it that we have witnessed a historical turning point in this story that the deity named Peter Pan has never experienced before. At this point, will the process of creation and development of the universe enter a new phase of manifestation and bring about the birth of a next mode in the cosmos? At first glance, it may seem that way. In reality, however, this is not the case. This is because Peter is depicted as follows when he leaves the Darling family with Tinker Bell.

“Oh, all right,” he said at last, and gulped. Then he unbarred the window. “Come on, Tink,” he cried, with a frightful sneer at the laws of nature.


What were the “laws of nature” that Peter sneered at in this scene? Could it be that curse that governs us all equally, like the harsh fate of all living beings to experience, grow, and change? If this is the case, then Peter is not suffering any changes as a result of the episodes depicted in this story. Because Peter forgets. He had forgotten about Hook’s betrayal, and he had completely forgotten about Hook himself. Rather, the hidden significance of the deep mystery that Peter embodies should be found in the fact that his very existence continues to function as a mockery of the rational reasoning that constitutes the laws of nature, that is, as a permanent driving force that brings about the impossibility of system construction.
Alternatively, the mystery of Peter's existence could be illuminated in relation to Hook. Peter and Hook are enemies who cannot stand in a low, but the author narrates Hook’s relentless hatred for Peter.

Peter was such a small boy that one tends to wonder at the man’s hatred of him. True he had flung Hook’s arm to the crocodile, but even this and the increased insecurity of life to which it led, owing to the crocodile’s pertinacity, hardly account for a vindictiveness so relentless and malignant. The truth is that there was something about Peter which goaded the pirate captain to frenzy. It was not his courage, it was not his engaging appearance, it was not—. There is no beating about the bush, for we know quite well what it was, and have got to tell. It was Peter’s cockiness.


Just as Peter’s reason for viewing Hook as his arch enemy had nothing to do with the practical interests involved in a life-or-death conflict, Hook’s boundless hatred for Peter was not caused by the inconvenience of having his hand cut off, or the anxiety of life caused by being stalked by a crocodile. It is not in grudge or awe of such substantial interests. Peter’s cockiness is what bothers Hook more than anything else. To Hook’s sensitive mind, Peter’s cockiness is a mockery, even an insult, to his lofty spirit. Hook sneaks into Peter’s hideout and finds him sleeping alone. Seeing how vulnerable he was, Hook, who was not evil at heart, may have turned back out of sympathy, as the author actually narrated. But there was certainly something about Peter that held him back.

What stayed him was Peter’s impertinent appearance as he slept. The open mouth, the drooping arm, the arched knee: they were such a personification of cockiness as, taken together, will never again one may hope be presented to eyes so sensitive to their offensiveness.


There is no doubt that Peter’s “cockiness” described here is in fact the product of a brilliant rhetoric, as in the case of his inexplicable baby teeth, which revolves around the ingenious manipulation of ideas by overturning the order of causality. If we dare to expose the disguised truth, it is not one of Peter’s attributes that irritates Hook’s heart, but Peter’s very existence that inevitably irritates Hook, which is why Hook senses the overwhelming subjective impression of “cockiness” in Peter’s appearance without choice. Hook is an eternal victim who is incessantly tormented by Peter’s presence, a fateful sufferer who has inevitably been deprived of the means of salvation. The truth of the matter is that as an example of new device of descriptive method for the presentation of interactive phenomena in which the relationship between the two has subverted the subject-object relationship, it was casually described adopting the attribute or concept of “cockiness.”
　Even during the final battle on the pirate ship, the mystery of Peter’s existence once again stirs Hook’s vulnerable heart. The pitiful sufferer actually has one thing that precipitates in his mind. Hook asks in a hoarse voice, “Pan, who and what art thou?” Peter’s answer is:

“I’m youth, I’m joy,” Peter answered at a venture, “I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”
This, of course was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form.


Again, Peter’s answer is, as usual, guesswork. Peter doesn’t know anything for sure. And that, tragically for Hook, tells that Peter is the embodiment of his only weakness, good form. For it is precisely because of the fact that Peter is “ignorant” in his self-knowledge that he can remain free from any sense of guilt, from any doubt about his raison d’être. In Peter, like Alice straying in the Nameless Forest, a release is implied from the relentless bondage of self-consciousness that everyone must have to carry in order to exist as an individual. However, this unlimited freedom granted to Peter was actually nothing less than a supremely harsh curse, as it will eventually become clear if we examine its mysterious development field where he embodies it, by adding more dimensions.