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

4 The ambivalence of Make Believe and Convention

The idea of make-believe, as I mentioned earlier, is more perverted and dangerous than we can imagine. This is because even Mr. Darling, who is supposed to be immersed in the common sense of the world by manipulating the difficult words of “stocks and shares” that seems to be an economic term, sometimes performs a make-believe that is exactly the same as Peter and his children. For example:

“George,” Mrs. Darling entreated him, “not so loud; the servants will hear you.” Somehow they had got into the way of calling Liza “the servants”.


The Darling family, which is not very wealthy, has no servants, except for Liza, who babysits. But the couple refers to her as “servants” in the plural. They are pretending to be a wealthy family with a large number of servants. There were other make-believes of this kind. Here’s another example:

Mrs. Darling loved to have everything just so, and Mr. Darling had a passion for being exactly like his neighbours; so, of course, they had a nurse. As they were poor, owing to the amount of milk the children drank, this nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana, who had belonged to no one in particular until the Darlings engaged her.


In the same way that the Darlings refer to their babysitter Liza as “servants,” they also refer to their dog Nana as “babysitter” and pretend to hire her as one to have it actually do the babysitting work. They are conscious of how their neighbors live, and they use a dog as babysitter in an attempt to maintain a social appearance. It may be kind of practical, and it seems also not very practical. By having Nana babysit, is their respectability really duly maintained? This shows the mysterious part of the term “make-believe”. What does it really mean to “pretend to believe”? If you say “pretend", you really don’t believe it. But is make-believe really “believing in something you don’t believe”? Or does make-believe mean “not believing that you believe”? This phrase contains a precarious implication that shakes the foundations of introspection related to our perception of reality and our intuitive ability for grasping absolute truth. (note)

note:
In other words, make-believe is a vague projection of the system that operates our thinking and cognitive mechanisms, which is in principle impossible for us to be directly conscious of, and it is also an afterimage of the white board of the mind (tabula rasa) that has been initialized for the blank unconscious to be loaded. Manifested in this way, it can be a description of the intersection between the zeitgeist of the second half of the 20th century and the antifantasy strategy adopted by James M. Barrie.


Neverland was the world that embodied the essence of make-believe, and Peter’s most distinctive attribute was that he was a genius at make-believe. Focusing on this key word, let’s follow the story of Peter and Wendy for a while. First of all, the children are already starting to be swept up in the problems regarding to make-believe on their way to Neverland with Peter.

Sometimes it was dark and sometimes light, and now they were very cold and again too warm. Did they really feel hungry at times, or were they merely pretending, because Peter had such a jolly new way of feeding them?


Children don’t know whether they’re hungry or not. That’s because Peter teaches them an unusual way of eating, which is to steal food from the birds they encounter in the air. Did they really take food from the birds’ beaks? Or had they already been drawn into Peter’s favorite game of make-believe? “Eating” is an important issue. It is because this act implies the ruthless constraints of the real world that accompany the activity of sustaining life. To eat is to kill, to rob. If you refuse to eat and become a saint, it makes a very easy, false fantasy. There was such a popular work of mock-fantasy before. One specific example is the motif of “eating” that was introduced in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Since the world depicted in a literary work is a different world from the real one, it is not necessarily required for the characters to obtain food in order to construct the reality of the fictional world. The author can omit such troublesome parts and proceed with the description. As long as it does not disturb the order within the axiom system as an internal law of the world of the work, the author cannot be held responsible for the arbitrary choice of the object to be described. However, this story makes a fatal mistake that disrupts the internal laws of the work world.
The basic condition that Dorothy suddenly finds herself in another world and needs to find food in order to survive is not ignored in this work. Dorothy eats the bread in the basket and finds fruit to eat. There is no contradiction in the fact that the characters continue to eat food in order to continue their survival. However, in terms of the ethics associated with eating, this work exposes the author’s slovenly attitude that cannot be overlooked. (note)

note:
One work that has this ethical paradox presented by eating even more seriously betrayed as a disruption of the axiom system of the narrative world, is Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle in the Moon (1928). It was this work that brought to light in a tragic way the practical constraint of having to kill in order to eat, which can not be separated from the realization of the utopia of symbiosis of all living things. Akiko Waki’s The Secret of Fantasy (2004), discusses this in detail. Furthermore, the question of whether or not human beings, who live as one of the species incorporated into the ecosystem, can speak of universal ethics was a serious problem faced by Kenji Miyazawa, a rare Japanese fantasy writer who inherited the dreams and hopes of German Romanticism and aspired for uniting poetry, science, and religion. Barrie’s answer to this ethical question in Peter and Wendy was that “to live happily you have to be heartless.” Kenji’s own answer to this question was probably “He wanted to sacrifice himself for the happiness of others,” but if we consider this conclusion as a logical answer rather than as a personal desire, we may say that this is a very irreverent solution. If everyone had made such a decision over passing away abandoning their lives, then all living things would be exterminated. Behind the idea of linking the happy lives of others with the renunciation of one’s own life is a sense of privilege as a specified savior, who can choose to be sacrificed. Also, if we reframe this issue in terms of the concept of atonement in the Christian context, even if Jesus Christ, the Son of God, actually had compassion on those who lived a life of suffering and had the power to atone for their sins, the act of compensation must be an extreme suffering that goes beyond mere physical suffering. But wasn’t the greatest suffering for Jesus just that people would continue to suffer like this? If this is the case, his act of redemption by sacrificing himself to save others cannot be fulfilled by crucifixion. Wasn’t it the price that Jesus should have paid to witness people continue to live horrible lives bound by the pain of childbirth, the pain of old age, and the heartache of killing and eating? If this is the case, then we, the objects of Jesus’ mercy, will never be saved by His Atonement. Let's call this dilemma “the paradox of redemption.” The idea of the art of salvation by separating oneself from others does not have the power to transcend the constraints of this logic. This paradox of redemption was reversed by Ursula Le Guin, in her psycho myth “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” “Atonement” can be seen as a paradoxical act in which the sacrificial rituals performed by ancient people, who were once forced to live a life of pain while being toyed with by the forces of Nature, were dynamically reversed as an act of voluntary salvation of others. Conversely, Le Guin saw the forced sacrifice in the atonement. The world of Omelas is a peaceful utopia built on the pain inflicted on a single victim. The people of Omelas are compelled to learn that the happiness they enjoy has been obtained in exchange for the endless torments of the helpless one chosen as a sacrifice. And most of Omelas allow them to settle in this deceitful utopia. But some reject this happiness that has been granted to them as false and choose to leave Omelas. A fable is depicted here that attempts to re-examine the question of ethics based on a perception of reality that excludes illusions. Le Guin used the term “psycho-myth” to refer to this kind of allegory based on simple ethical questions, but what is usually called fantasy actually has a much more subtle mechanism, as in the case of Barrie. Though the people of Omelas were able to walk away from Omelas of their own free will, we who live in real life know that it is literally impossible to walk away from it. The real world is not as easy as the world of Omelas. Barrie transfigures the mechanism of this “paradox of redemption” into an equation formula of “good form and reflection” and tells us a bittersweet story.

When Dorothy, who has eaten up all the bread left and has no idea what to get for the next day’s breakfast, the lion offers to go to the forest to catch a deer, but the Tin Woodsman begs him not to do that because it is pitiful. So the lion goes into the forest alone and finds his own dinner. However, some time after this scene, when the Tin Woodsman finds a wildcat trying to capture and eat a wild mouse, he cuts off the wildcat’s head to save the wild mouse, because “he knows” that it is wrong to try to kill such a cute and harmless animal. It’s a literal opportunistic childish trick, but the truth is that children are more sensitive to the exactitude of the story’s inner consistency than adults. Many adults accept the contradictions in the fictional world, arguing that the fictional world is a sham that is different from the real world and can be easily tolerated. Their mistake is that they forget that the axiom system presented by the narrative world is an independent system that is quite different from reality, and they impose on each other a tacit understanding that it is no problem to dismiss contradictions that are impossible to be overlooked in reality because it is a story, and to abandon their obsession with contradictions. In other words, adults, who share social common sense, have a fatal illusion when it comes to setting the conditions of convention for the acceptance of a fictional world. (note)

note: convention
Oscar Wilde uses this term to describe the factors that determine the axiomatic system of the work world, in “The Decay of Lying”. In considering the genre of fantasy as one of the possible worlds, the equivalent concept is discussed using the words “perspective”, signifying “depth” and “correlation formula”. Cf. Eric Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (1976).