Apologies for the late post, everyone. I’m very fond of Peter Pan, especially the 1911 novel version of Peter Pan and Wendy. An Omnibus review, quoted by Rose, of the 1982 RSC theatrical production states that “‘Peter Pan goes straight to your centre . . . to something about which you are defenceless’” (114). I feel this way about Peter Pan and Wendy. The novel goes straight to some soft underbelly that has to do with life, death, transcendence, liminality, and the secrets of the universe beyond the vault of the sky. Naturally, I wanted to get to the bottom of all that in this blog post.

First, down to business. In the interest of brevity, a few things that stand out to me from the readings are (i) Gubar’s “kinship model” of childhood, with which I agree; (ii) Perry Nodelman’s somewhat conservative review of The Case of Peter Pan, with which I partially agree (minus his Freudian and sexual readings); and (iii) Chapter 5 of The Case of Peter Pan, “Peter Pan, Language and the State,” which diverges from the book’s thrust but nonetheless offers a fascinating history of language in British schools that I had never encountered before.

Enough of business; back to soft underbellies. Rose and children aside, I love stories about long-lost, primitive truths that transcend the social and political present and cause the veil of mundane reality to shimmer. I read such stories reparatively, and I am not terribly interested in whether children or adults were Barrie’s primary audience, because Peter Pan and Wendy’s audience is me. In my forthcoming work on whimsy, I argue that works of whimsy communicate with a self-selecting audience without defining or insisting on the categorical nature of that audience. You either like it or you don’t; you either relate to an unapologetically idiosyncratic expression and the inexpressible, ineffable glob of ideas it signifies, or you stand there with your head cocked grasping for a Freudian explanation. I first read Peter Pan and Wendy as an adult, but every time I read it, I feel personally addressed by the narrator’s confidential tone and gleeful indifference to dissent. I was puzzled by Rose’s discussion of Barrie’s reluctance to convert the play into a novel because I think the narrative voice is so powerful; I can’t figure out where she was going with that, although it unsettles me.

Here are a few raw allegorical interpretations of Peter Pan (yes, I am going somewhere with this): Peter represents (i) childhood mortality (he’s like an airborne disease that blows into the nursery and takes/kills all the children one night); (ii) mortality in general, (iii) anything addictive but unhealthy and detrimental to progressing along a normalized bourgeois path (thumb-sucking, heroin, infatuation, etc.); (iv) irresistible, charismatic, unattainable objects of infatuation who perhaps tend towards the dangerous end of the sociopathic spectrum; and (v) refusal of a particularly beige script of conformance, monotony, sacrifice, aging, and death that constitutes “growing up” in the modern industrialized west. These are wildly different interpretations, and yet they all work. Peter is both good and bad; the Neverland is both good and bad. It’s wonderful to fly, but terrible to be cold, hungry, sleepy, or forgotten while flying. Peter is enchanting, but he’s also out of his mind and won’t fulfill your needs. Make believe is fun, but too much can get tedious or eclipse memories of relationships to which we assign meaning when not under make-believe’s influence, like getting lost among the lotus-eaters.

I offer this list because these matters pertain to young, medium, and old people alike, and because there is so much going on that a reading focused on sexuality or the adult-child relationship seems somewhat arbitrary. Balancing responsibility and desire, choosing objects to which we assign meaning, a longing to aestheticize our own mortality and make it somehow okay, feeling drawn to romantic things and people that aren’t sustainable in the long run without great sacrifice—these are the unresolved and unresolvable challenges of life in all stages. In the end, we just choose; the Darlings and the Lost Boys choose London and Peter chooses the Neverland. Even falling out of the pram as an infant is represented as a conscious and perfectly valid choice, not to be judged. All simply live (or die) with the consequences and the universe is essentially indifferent.

So how does this kind of absurd existentialism reach that soft underbelly and conjure up those lost secrets beyond the vault of the sky? Peter Pan validates our longing for transcendence amidst these unresolvable matters, and it renders the phenomenon of unresolvability its own source of wonder and transcendence instead of comedy and horror (a la Beckett). Peter’s absurd world offers a colorful, imaginative, aesthetic option, and even if we choose London in the end, traces and memories of the experience linger with us. The Neverland is also a resolution to—a reparation for?—the sense of loss of something precious and the longing to find it again, or at least to find some evidence that this lost pearl is “real” beyond the individual imagination, and therefore, though lost and forgotten, it will one day find us again. This kind of longing isn’t unique to adulthood and it need not idealize the child. I embrace Gubar’s “kinship model” of childhood in part because I remember vividly my own fascination with stories about long-lost, primitive truths when I was a child. What could be more compelling at any age than the idea that we glimpsed these as we came into being—and will therefore come to know them again someday?

I think the Oedipal complex and many of Freud’s ideas are twaddle, but I’m mildly obsessed with Freud’s description of the “oceanic feeling” in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” so I have to bring it up. Though Freud says that he, himself, has never experienced this “oceanic feeling,” he describes it as “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole,” and the sense that “we cannot fall out of this world.” He speculates that this oceanic feeling “may” [Freud’s emphasis] be a surviving trace of the infant that does not yet distinguish his ego from the external world. I am less interested in the origins of this oceanic feeling (early childhood for Freud and cultural myth for Jung, as Rose points out), as I am in Peter Pan’s ability to conjure it up. The novel’s acknowledgment of feelings of loss and longing for recovery/resurrection does something to conjure up that indissoluble bond beyond the self, unto itself; we can fall out of a pram or out of the sky, but we cannot fall out of the world. The infant who died of smallpox continues to be in the world as though Neverland is an afterlife without gods. Or, maybe Freud really was right, and the lost pearl is just the newborn infant’s inability to differentiate the ego from the outside world, and the Neverland is just that state of being.

Or… maybe I’ve just wandered off into Neverland with this post.