Table Talk

THE BOOK begins with one of the best opening lines ever: “All children, except one, grow up.” Barrie’s wit is inexhaustibly self-referential, and when it’s not sliding into parodies of axioms or little hymns to the novel’s real hero, Mrs. Darling, it is clowning, bittersweetly, on the sidelines. His genius, like Austen’s, is disruptive. He’s the kid who gains attention by mirroring the mannerisms of the adults he finds ridiculous or merely loathsome. The under-theme of Peter Pan is that the narrator cannot understand how the child can be the father of the man and at the same time how the grown man can ever mature into something more than a child.

Peter Pan himself begins as a figure of thought in the middle of the nineteenth century, which was as preoccupied as ours with paganism. The image of Pan begins slowly to burble out of the nineteenth century until it becomes a pointer to something interesting but hard to recognize outside of its own genre. Peter Pan’s textual cousins are Dickon Sowerby, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, even the Jimmy Gatz who becomes Jay Gatsby. He is interesting because his lineage is to our pagan past what the cardinal in the elm is to the dinosaur: a memento mori, a reduction of something once enormously significant and now irreparably diminished. He is also morally disturbing. In that great whorehouse without doors, the internet, breed hundreds of Pan-wannabes who dress up (for their web-cams) in bright green tights and