The Peter Pan Mythos 3: The Critical Legacy.

In going over the nature and content of J.M. Barrie's most famous creation, the focus has mainly been on the usual bells and whistles of the story.  So far we've looked at the original version of the narrative, the one that first arrived as a stage play in the Christmas theatrical season of 1904.  We've also examined the life and creativity of the author in terms of his background, influences, and artistic practices.  For me, the major takeaway from this has always remained the same.  I'm forever surprised at just much of a poor job the final product is.  If there are any readers out there who can claim to be one-hundred-percent unironic fans of James Barrie's frustrated attempts at creating a modern myth, then all I can say to that is I wish I could see whatever it is you do.  Until I'm lucky enough to have such a breakthrough, my final judgment call will have to remain the same.  Say sorry, but this sucks.  It's one of most cloying and annoying pieces of literature that I've ever read or seen performed.  I'm very tempted to say that we've all been the victims of an elaborate prank played by the author on what is an otherwise legitimate and respectable form of Fantasy writing.  Despite this fact, I'll swear the text often reads as if the author doesn't just believe in the value of this kind of fiction, he also sounds like he bears a whole slew of unspoken grudges against not just the material he was given to work with, but also the greater reality of which it is a reflection.

Even if it is possible to maintain that Barrie was trying to do justice to the literary tradition he was working in and with, the results we're left with still read like the stifled remains of a half-caught dream.  Barrie seems to be living out the poetic irony of an old Bob Dylan lyric.  It's the one that goes, "You know there's no success like failure".  If that's true, then the punchline is that Barrie's failure still remains no success at all.  Everything about the play and its later novelization read like a good idea gone wrong.  The opening hints at great mysteries to be explored, yet we're given less than treacle by the end.  The barest outlines of the main cast sound like a winning formula for an engaging fantasy with characters we'll come to know and love.  However, their potential is squandered by an author who can't seem to allow himself to perform the most necessary job of any writer.  That is to allow the character's to both find and speak, or grow into their own unique voices.  The basic details of the plot, meanwhile, show all the hallmarks of a great adventure, and so Barrie tosses it all aside as he gets caught up in a catalogue of his own bitter regrets, grievances, and neurosis, and then insists on dragging us along for the ride under the mistaken notion that misery loves company.  In other words, the original version of Peter Pan is a textbook example of everything going wrong for the story all at once.

Now I'd like to do something a bit different.  I'd like to take a look at all this same material from a different angle.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about the modern Myth of Peter Pan is that it's just possible to say it all has a happy ending.  That's because a careful study of the history of the Myth reveals an intriguing discovery, something more like an unspoken rule.  The Story of Neverland is best thought of as an incomplete narrative.  What the chronicle of this tale's composition reveals is that even an incomplete Myth can be finished if anyone with enough talent comes along.  Granted, this also counts as one of the rarest possible accomplishments in the history of creative writing.  It's a difficult needle to thread, and to my knowledge, I can count the number of times it's been done with any great success on one hand.  The best examples of a narrative that was left in an unfinished state by one author, only for another to come along and give the writing all the finishing touches it needed are that of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, and the third act of Mark Twain's otherwise brilliant masterpiece known as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I'm pretty sure there are one or two others I'm forgetting at the moment.  Yet it is these two that stand out the most to my mind.  Each work tells the same story.

An author has a brilliant idea for a book.  They go at it to the best of their ability, and to their credit, they are able to take things a great deal of the way.  They can go far enough, let's say, to the point where its possible to catch glimpses of a great piece of literature.  The perfect capping irony is that when it's time for the author to deliver the best possible closer to the work, their Inspiration falters for whatever unfathomable reason, and what begins as a journey into an American form of epic Storytelling ends on a note of burlesque parody which can't do justice to what came before.  This was Twain's dilemma.  Or else, in a perfect fit of desperation to sell the "High Seriousness" or Integrity of the creative idea, the author makes the sometimes fatal error of burying an otherwise solid fable of Gothic Adventure on the High Seas under a mountain of literary pretension which all but smothers the initial spark or kernel of motivation that gives the idea life, and from which it started out from.  This was Melville's mistake.  In each case, the initial writer dropped the ball when it mattered most.  Each time someone else came along later down the line, and was able to complete what was left unfinished.  In Melville's case, it was with the help of director John Huston and the master fantasist Ray Bradbury.  For Twain, the help came from an obscure TV writer named Guy Gallo, as part of a now overlooked PBS miniseries adaptation.

It's just one of the artistic life's great little ironies, which can also sometimes function as their own quiet miracles of genuine creativity.  It's therefore gratifying to say that J.M. Barrie's botching of a literary archetype was also given a second chance at life.  This happened not just once, but twice upon a time.  That leaves us with just two more items to discuss in the history of the Pan Mythos.  Before we get there, it makes sense to help clear the ground a little for it.  To provide a brief look at the initial legacy that Barrie's missteps created in terms of what came before and after.  This means taking a bit of a detour into the kind of technical details that go to make up the contents of the Archetype from which Neverland emerged.  In what follows, I'd like to examine Barrie's efforts as an example of an Individual Talent writing within a long established Literary Tradition.  More specifically, I'd like to examine the folklore that Barrie drew upon in the halfway house creation of his secondary world.  I'd like to examine this Tradition both on its own terms, as well as how it relates to Barrie; how his lack of talent led him to screw up a good thing; and whether or not that very same Tradition showed a way forward.

In order to do this, I'm going to draw on the help of one other.  His name was J.R.R. Tolkien.  Drawing upon the co-creator of Middle Earth makes at least a certain amount of sense in drawing up a proper critical commentary on Barrie's place in the Tradition of the Fantastic.  For one thing, he spent most of his life toiling away in the same branch office as that shared by Peter Pan's would-be biographer.  For another, it's clear Tolkien knew a greater deal about the Tradition he was writing in than Barrie himself ever did.  And last, Tolkien always appears to have been aware of himself as something of an inheritor of the ideas and notions contained in the Pan Myth.  This seems to be the one aspect of his life and writings that has received little to no sustained commentary until now.  Perhaps, then, this essay can also help take a step examining this last bit of uncharted ground by using Barrie as a natural foil.

Of course a fair question might be what does Middle Earth have to do with Neverland.  I think Tolkien can help offer a necessary critical corrective to Barrie's initial efforts.  He can do this by giving us a clearer look at the playing field that the author of Peter Pan was working in, and help to suggest a better idea of some of the ways in which he got his material all wrong.  I think a brief look at the bells and whistles both within and in back of Barrie's play and novel are a good way to start re-orienting things around this series.  So far, every word I've had to say about the Neverland Mythos has been pretty damned negative.  The sorry exucse there is on account of the writer never gave me much to work with.  Or least there goes my two cents, anyway.  At the same time, I've always maintained that the Pan story never really ended with Barrie.  There was still a happy ending waiting in the wings.  So why not let this article be a prelude to those better days.  It will serve as a nice pallet cleanser to stop and take a bit of a deep dive into the literary inspirations and generic connections of Peter Pan.

The Literary Background. 

When I speak of J.M. Barrie as an author writing in a Literary Tradition, what I'm talking about is a number of things all at once.  To start with, the very genre of Fantasy can be considered a Tradition all by itself, whether taken in isolation, or seen as part and parcel of a whole tapestry or Cauldron of Story.  The various tropes we've come to associate with stories written in this mode (the child protagonists, the humble peasants, the rural villages, the magic woods, all the lost pathways, the quest, the slaying of the dragon, etc.) are really just the collection of creative ideas, literary devices, types, imagery, and topos that make up the content of the Tradition of Fantasy.  In other words, when you see either a story written in the category of the Fantastic, or even just the genre itself, as a topic, you're seeing the lore or creative heritage that countless artists over the years have been able to build up one narrative brick at a time.  The Tradition itself counts as just one half of the equation, however.  The finishing touch comes from the addition of the artists themselves.  These are the Individual Talents at work in their chosen Literary Tradition.  In Barrie's case, it's easy enough to pinpoint his relation to the Fantasy genre.

In her book Hide and Seek with Angels, Lisa Chaney writes that "Peter Pan appeared at what is now recognized as the high point of a golden age of children’s literature in Britain: the last quarter of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century. In this period virtually all the books we now think of as the classics of children’s literature were written. Before this flowering, children’s literature consisted largely of edifying tracts lecturing on the perilous results of disobedience and non-conformity. With the advent of children’s fiction in the eighteenth century these themes were sometimes modified by humor or illustrations of daring deeds, but the intention was still the same. Translations of the brothers Grimm and Hans Andersen’s fairy tales in the 1820s and 30s were very popular and helped make fantasy acceptable. And in the 1880s and 90s Barrie’s friend Andrew Lang would make his contribution to the genre with his fairy novels and the famous collections named after colours, The Blue Fairy Book being the first.  

"The publication of Edward Lear’s Nonsense Poems in 1845 is one of the major precursors of this new wave of writing, which began seriously to flourish with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in 1865. The strain of popular literature from which Lear’s and Carroll’s writing sprang drew upon the traditional violence and anarchy of the long-established nursery rhymes, and thus set a cheerful precedent for anarchy and irreverence in the growing number of stories for children.   Of the hugely popular boys’ adventure stories, Ballantyne’s The Coral Island and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island are only the most famous; a later example being Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. Beatrix Potter wrote The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902 and Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, Just So Stories and Puck of Pook’s Hill had all appeared by 1906. Kenneth Grahame’s seminal descriptions of the egocentricity and ruthlessness of children had appeared in The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898), while his great animal fantasy, The Wind in the Willows, was published in 1908. A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh was a continuation of the late-Victorian and Edwardian love affair with childhood and the ‘other world’ children were believed to inhabit (207-8)".  Like most critics (and even some fans) of this specific genre of literature, Chaney speculates on what gave rise to this wave of Romanticism.

I think she's right enough to stress the psychological factors at play in the creation of all of these works.  However, she needs to go further in terms of realizing how the therapeutic factor in turn ties into both the social, cultural, and therefore also the historical dynamics that helped birth the trend of the modern Children's Story.  For instance, while she does bring up the Romantic Movement in passing, the critic never stops to ask whether there might an important connecting thread between the writings of the Lake Poets and the birth of the contemporary fairy story.  The obvious reason for this glaring omission is because Chaney neither sees nor believes there to be any discernable link between the work of writers like Barrie, Potter, or Carroll, and an earlier monumental tome of criticism such as the Biographia Literaria.  This makes her focus on the psychological origins of fairy stories all the more ironic, as a case can be made that it was the thoughts of poets and thinkers like Keats, Goethe, and Coleridge that helped give us our modern notion of psychiatry.  It's because of overlooked facts like these which grant the earlier claims of scholar Stephen Prickett a greater deal of critical and aesthetic validity.

In his study Victorian Fantasy, Prickett gives perhaps the closest critical diagnosis on the roots of the birth of the Young Adult story by point out the original group of authors who made up the collective creation of the the Fantasy narrative was a phenomenon that had its roots in the Romanticism of the previous generation.  "This tradition was not a new one. Some years after he had first published The Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge added as a kind of preface a  Latin quotation from the seventeenth-century "divine," Thomas Burnet.  In English it runs: I can easily believe that there are more invisible than visible beings in the universe. But of their families, degrees, connections, distinctions, and functions, who shall tell us? How do they act? Where are they to be found? About such matters the human mind has always circled without attaining knowledge. Yet I do not doubt that sometimes it is well for the soul to contemplate as in a picture the image of a larger and better world, lest the mind, habituated to the small concerns of daily life, limit itself too much and sink entirely into trivial thinking.  

"As so often, Coleridge’s desire for “the image of a larger and better world” was to prove prophetic. Towards the end of the century Arthur Machen, himself a confessed Coleridgean, tried to create a fiction that would adequately convey his own “overpowering impression of ‘strangeness,’ of remoteness, of withdrawal from the common ways of life” that accompanied the most ordinary events of lower middle-class London.. Machen’s conclusion, that “man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions” is one that would have found an echo in almost every one of the minority tradition of writers in this book. Deliberately, they tried to extend and enrich ways of perceiving “reality” by a variety of nonrealistic techniques that included nonsense, dreams, visions, and the creation of other worlds. Against the mainstream of realistic fiction there developed a much stranger undercurrent that included works by Thomas Hood, Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, Nesbit, and Kipling. In place of limitation and exclusion, each in his or her own way was in search of a wider vision, seeking the complexity and ambiguity that reflected their own experiences, even at the expense of form (1-3)".  It is because of this integral role that the children's authors of the 19th century played as inheritors that they deserve to be labeled as the Victorian Romantics.

The Important Failure of the Author.

J.M. Barrie represents perhaps the most anomalous contribution to this literary movement.  I'll have to admit that he's made an actual achievement in the world of letters.  However, it's of a very ironic, even negative kind.  A better way to phrase it is that with the initial version of the Neverland Myth, we're looking at an artistic example of the Peter Principle.  The failure of the venture is of such a spectacular nature, that it all sort of has no choice except to fail upward.  What Barrie has given his readers is a almost like a perfect paradox.  The Pan play and novel can both be categorized as objectively bad works of art.  And it's very easy to point out all the reasons why.  Like Prickett said, it's the general nature of the Victorian Children's Fantasy to want to expand the picture frame as far as it can go.  It's a natural sort of open revolt against the constricting and straight-jacketing of the horizons of human perception.  In conjuring up phantoms, and elemental or mythical creatures, this later strain of Romanticism is always an attempt at granting a greater, and therefore humanistic outlook on the nature of things.  The well wrought work of the Imagination is one good way to achieve such a healthy, psychological goal.  Hence the tendency of the children's story to always reach further upwards. 

It's this natural inclination of the fairy story to try and reach the proverbial and metaphorical stars that allows us to have a pretty clear and concise litmus test against which to judge Barrie's own efforts as an Individual Talent within this Tradition.  It helps if we've some concrete examples to measure against.  So lets have Lewis Carrol's Alice series and Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books as two examples of the good fairy story.  How do Barrie's efforts stack up against the both of them?  Well, for one thing, it looks as if we're staring out on a decent enough footing.  Barrie begins his narrative with a rumination on the natural maturation process that all human beings undergo.  Everything sounds fine, until we come to the story's first off-note.  "All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, 'Oh, why can't you remain like this for ever!' This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end".  That first off-note arrives right at the end, when Barrie introduces a sense of ambivalence about growing up.

Some might defend his last few opening lines there as an example of the author just laying out the major themes of his story.  In his case, Barrie seems to be setting up the story's main conflict between that of children versus adults.  It's a notion that makes sense from a creative standpoint.  It can also help if we keep in mind that the concept wasn't an original one with Barrie.  The theme of childlike wonder up against, and having to contending with a type of cynicism that others might insist on framing as the proper definition of adulthood is just as present in the works of Carroll and Kipling.  The major difference and problem for Barrie is in the way he handles this idea in contrast with the other two artists.  For both Kipling and Dodgson, the idea of maturity is kind of like a goal that has to be approached through a very careful, almost shepherded process.  The child is never meant to give up its sense of wonder, though it can't keep it by always remaining a state of ignorance, either.  Mowgli not only likes being a denizen of the Jungle, but even thinks of himself as just another wolf among many.  And yet his entire arc is all about him learning how to embrace his humanity without sacrificing all of the best lessons he's learned from all his time amongst the animal kingdom.  It's the same with Alice.

Carroll's twin fantasies detail the rich inner life of an otherwise ordinary girl living (so it's implied) in the midst of Oxford University in the era of Queen Victoria.  On an outward, surface level, there is nothing special about Alice.  It's when we're let in on the contents of her dreams that we begin to see the glimmers of a very bright and mature young mind in the making.  Just like Barrie, Carroll is concerned with the theme of children versus adults.  The difference between the two stems from the kind of outlook on human nature that each separate writer brings to bear upon their subjects, and hence the general tone and denouement of their respective stories.  Throughout her exploits in both Wonder and Looking Glass Lands, Carroll grants his readers the ongoing sense that we're dealing with a mind and outlook undergoing a gradual process of expansion.  As we Alice along her journey, there's always the lingering sense that she keeps making forward strides in her store of knowledge about her life.  It comes from the way she makes careful observations about the method underlying the madness all around her.

Each surreal character and encounter she has or meets leaves her with a better sense of how to keep her head while everyone else (i.e. the adult world) is losing there's.  This is a nascent pattern in the Wonderland text.  By the time we've reached the second book, and our protagonist decides to take part in a Great Game of Chess, the nature or ultimate meaning of her dreams becomes clear.  In learning to tell the difference between nonsense and intelligence, Alice is starting to make her first strides toward a genuine form of maturity.  It's implied to be one that leaves plenty of room for the Romantic view of life, while also acknowledging the need for common sense.  In this sense, the author's framing of the story as an intricate, almost metaphysical game of Chess begins to make a surprising of narrative sense for a story based around lapses of reason.  It's about trying to find all the right moves to arrive at that cherished level of common sense, or actual logic, that Carroll wants his child readers to takeaway from his works.  Scholar David Day has even gone a bit further and maintained that one of Carroll's unstated goals in the Alice books was the desire to encourage the admission of women to halls of academia.  It was radical for his time, because women weren't allowed to take part in a University education then.

In just a few simple moves, therefore, Alice is allowed to grow up into a complete woman.  Someone who has a strong grasp of a greater sense of the word maturity, and hence is able to earn the true title of adult without reducing the word to nonsense.  If any of this content can be said to form the core of the Alice books, then it's just possible that Lewis Carroll (a school teacher by trade) has given not just his students, but all pupils one of the best potential grounding the Art of the Humanities.  It's one of those rare feats that only great literature is able to pull off if you ask me.  Let's just say there might be plenty of thoughtful reason for why Alice and her adventures are considered treasured classics.  The point of all this, however, is that if you compare Carroll's achievement to Barrie's, then the contrast between the two writers couldn't become more stark and polarized.  

Here for instance, are two snippets that neatly summarize the main problem of Barrie's attempts at telling a story.  Both fragments come near the end of the book, and each of them goes together to convey the true outlook that the author ends up conveying to his readers, whether he meant to or not.  The first comes in the following description of the character of Wendy's mother, Mrs. Darling.  "You see, the woman had no proper spirit. I had meant to say extraordinarily nice things about her; but I despise her, and not one of them will I say now. She does not really need to be told to have things ready, for they are ready. All the beds are aired, and she never leaves the house, and observe, the window is open. For all the use we are to her, we might go back to the ship. However, as we are here we may as well stay and look on. That is all we are, lookers-on. Nobody really wants us. So let us watch and say jaggy things, in the hope that some of them will hurt".

This is the author's description of a parent worried sick about her children.  His biggest mistake is the use of the first person frame of reference.  Barrie is stating that he himself bears a grudge against this character.  The writer gives us the picture of a woman concerned for the safety of her own kids, and he can't seem to help it.  Everything about Mrs. Darling he seems to find offensive.  A careful look into the real world upbringing of the artist goes a long way toward discovering the logic behind his life-long grudge against mothers and parental figures.  If you're hoping for any silver lining somewhere in all that misogynistic outburst on the writer's part, such as that maybe he'll demonstrate that he was always on the side of children against what he perceived as their adult abusers, then the final line of the novel does a fair job of shattering that hopeful illusion.  At the close of things, Barrie sums up his opinion of his own child readers: "and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless".  I'm reading the words of a man with not much to spare in the way of milk of human kindness for anybody.  J.M. Barrie seems to have hated children just as much as he did parents and others in general, and mothers and favorite sons in particular.  Again, all of this can be explained by a look at the writer's personal biography.  Barrie has placed a lot of himself into his own novel.  In a way, this is all part of the standard operating procedure of any story.  James Baldwin was right that all art is confession.

The trick there is that the Imagination seems to be the mind's way of protecting itself from any and all forms of mental imbalance.  In other words, it just makes sense to view a lot of the best stories out there as examples of the artist working through a lot of issues (both on a public and even cultural, as well as the personal level) by means of creativity.  It's what accounts for a lot the important themes behind some of the best novels and films.  In a novel like It, for instance, all Stephen King has done is to provide the reader with a catalogue of the entire dark side of the American psyche and the negative impact it left on him and his generation.  It's literature as psychological exorcism.  The catch, however, is that in order for any of this rich artistic ore to be mined in a proper fashion, the writer has to be willing to get out of the Imagination's way, and let it go to its appointed work.  That appears to have been the one provision that Barrie couldn't bring himself to meet.  He was a bit too fond of his own neurosis to allow the archetype behind his story to have a life of its own.  In other words, the author of Peter Pan doesn't seem to have been much of a believer in P.S. Beagle's maxim of "Magic, do as you will".  His motto seems to have been more along the lines of "All for one, and none for all the rest".  It's a lot of cold comfort for chump change, and it's no real way to write a narrative into the bargain as well.

As a result, the first initial draft of the Neverland myth is never really able to make it out of the starting gate.  It's career is sort of over even before it has a chance.  The natural enough result is that we get to see an Individual Talent mangling the Tradition he's working in.  The best description I've got for that is to say that Barrie offers us a more or less textbook example of what it's like to watch a good idea wasted and spoiled.  We're treated to the sight of a number of fairy tale tropes, each with their own fitting sense of narrative dignity, as they are taken by an uncreative mind and then drained of any possible life that they could have given to the plot in the hands of an artist with a surer grasp of the Imagination.  We get to enjoy the sight of Lewis Carroll's and Edith Nesbit's questing child protagonists as they are reduced to a series of card board cutouts.  Robert Louis Stevenson's pirates, meanwhile, are robbed of all their sense of threat and awesomeness for the sake of a sense of humor that is probably beneath the five years up age brackets the play was intended for.  The worst part about the way Barrie handles that buccaneers under his own "creative" initiative is that he robs them of life at the same time as the Imagination is able to give him the perfect villain to work with.  Nor is that any kind of exaggeration.

If there's any element of the story that helps to mark it out as an example of stifled Inspiration, then aside from the title main character, it would have to be the figure of Captain Hook.  In the right hands, this character can't help being one of the major highlights of the narrative.  He not only has the look, but also the atmosphere of a proper villain, one that effects a careful balance between humor and menace.  You can get the sense just from looking at him alone that if you can play the cards right with how he's written.  If you're able to thread that particular needle, then it's like half the work of the narrative has been accomplished.  It's not like you can just say everything is 100 percent complete after that, yet a lot of the heaviest lifting has been taken care of.  That's because even in his debased, initial state, it's more than clear that Hook is always one of those imaginary figures who demands to be allowed to jump off the page.  Part of the reason Hook and Peter are meant to work so well together is because both of them are a pair of "livewires".  Their full of this edgy, nervous tension which allows them to have these larger than life personalities.  The trick with the needle threading here is that each of them needs to find their proper volume level.  If they're played too low key, as Barrie does with them, then they'll come off as lifeless.  If they're too loud, they become impossible to take seriously, which is the ultimate threat.

At either extreme, these two figures wouldn't work as characters whose narrative arcs you can get invested in.  It's only when the writer is able to find that fine line where all the eccentricities of the characters can find their manageable expression that even someone like Hook is capable of flying off the pages.  It serves as a least a hint of what good characterization can do for a story.  The fact that imaginary portraits like those of Peter and Hook were able to occur in Barrie's mind even in the face of his general lack of creativity is the greatest clue that, for all his faults, the author did in fact uncover a genuine Story Fossil, or Archetype.  It's just a shame he didn't have either the talent or the will to do anything with it.  Once more, Carrol and Kipling serve as great foils for Barrie's amateurish approach to this shared set of materials.  Much like Peter and Hook, Alice and Mowgli are able to step out of their respective pages.  They each do so in a tenor that is different from the excited, Mercurial qualities of the Neverland denizens, yet that's to be expected in a genre that thrives on variety of characterization.

The real point is that both of these other authors are able to tap in to where the Imagination wants to take things.  Even someone like Kipling, who by his own admission seemed able to take things just so far before his imaginative capabilities ran out of gas, was still talented enough to uncover enough of the Fossil for his audiences.  As a result, each fantasist is able to present a more complete and understanding, sometimes even humanist view of maturity than Barrie was ever capable of.  It's clear that each of these other child protagonists has a healthier grasp of the conflict between the intertwined themes Innocence and Experience.  Mowgli, for instance, learns that being a human doesn't have to count as a liability, but rather a strength.  While Alice proves herself to be a very smart, clever, and capable girl as outlined in the contents and processes of her dreams.  Carroll gives us the inner portrait of a girl who on some level realizes that the world of the so-called "adults" around her has gone mad, and that in order to maintain herself and find an actual level of maturity, she must learn to navigate her way through the various little insanities and neurosis that make up modern life, and cling to those wells of inner strength and common sense that she already knows about on some level if she's to survive.

At the end of Through the Looking Glass, it's clear that Alice has been able to work through these issues in such a way that she has arrived at a greater understanding of the nature of things, and is now ready and mentally equipped to face it head on.  It's a bit of shared theme that both Carroll and Kipling have going between them.  Something tells me that this was the same Creative Idea or theme that Barrie was given to work with, and yet he just didn't have it in him to realize all of this.  He didn't possess Kipling's hard won experience of learning from the failures of Imperialism, or Carroll's academic and analytical frame of reference that allowed the artist to both see and cut through all of the BS that made up a lot of modern life in the Victorian Era, and thus allowing him to skewer and satirize it in the pages of a Fantasy.  Granted, I don't think this means that Neverland was ever meant to go as far as the Mad Tea Party, or even Lord of the Rings.  However, it does seem clear enough that Barrie stumbled upon yet another riff chord from this same Story Idea, and for that it deserved better than he ever gave it.

An overlooked aspect of Barrie's failure as a teller of tales is what it says about his inability to grasp the nature of the Literary Tradition in which he was working.  Throughout the original Pan text (whether on stage or page) he reveals himself to be the literary equivalent of a drifter passing on his way through a rich secondary landscape that always fails to capture his attention, and hence spark his Imagination (if it be permitted, and in his case the answer seems to have been a flat-out "No").  It can't be called any real surprise in that sense to discover the author utilizing the tropes and tools of the fairy story in a way that highlights his lack of familiarity with the territory.  This sense of compositional illiteracy on Barrie's part is combined with a very determined degree of carelessness in terms of such basics as plotting, characterization, and a disregard for the need to find any real, proper way to handle the rising and falling nature of the story's action.  What might be termed the Laws of Enchantment all amount to a series of guideposts that didn't interest Barrie in the least.  It leaves us with one of the most puzzling botched attempts at a Fantasy narrative.  It also leaves us with an overlooked question to be asked.

What kind of story was Peter Pan supposed to have, if any?  What I mean is, might it be possible to take a guess from all the underused bells and whistles that went to make up the initial draft of Neverland, and see if we can't arrive at a closer approximation to a better version of the story that Barrie was meant to write, yet somehow never could?  For what it's worth, I think it's not only possible enough, it's also been done, after a fashion.  Like I've said before, I've seen Peter's story brought to as vivid and entertaining a life as possible, not once, but twice.  The best part is that each attempt is of such a quality as to classify them as two parts of the same story.  This is anticipating things to come.  Before we get to these later two successful attempts at exploring Neverland, we still need to help prepare the ground a little.  We have to gain just a bit of further understanding of the Tradition of which the Pan Myth, even in it's initial, incomplete state formed just one individual artistic expression (however imperfect).  We've talked a bit about that Literary Tradition above.  Now it's time to cap things off with a look into how those Laws of Enchantment might be meant to determine the workings of a place like Neverland.

I've already given at least some hints of what a better version of Peter Pan should be like.  It comes from the observations on how both Hook and the title protagonist should be handled in terms of their Mercurial character.  I'd like to think I've gotten at least somewhat closer to idea of what a better iteration of Peter's narrative arc should have been by both comparing it to the work of Kipling and Carroll, and suggesting that it was more or less meant as yet another riff on their shared theme of the Journey from Innocence to Experience.  Now it may be possible for some to object that this is just what Barrie was trying to tackle with the play in the first place.  The trouble with this line of thought for me is that even if the writer was trying to go there, the text itself demonstrates that he had so little knowledge of either Innocence, nor the anything like a proper sense of maturity that comes from genuine Experience.  Instead, I'm reading something by a guy who strikes me as racist, misogynist, and even anti-natalist, and a misanthrope.  Nor is it possible for me to buy into this as a valid mindset to take in relation to reality.  It still can't explain the experience of either sanity or it's troubled opposite.

These are the two fundamental facts of life, and Barrie's execution of his narrative is enough to prove that his has a very immature, perhaps even dangerous grasp of what it all means.  The trouble with any Doctrine of complete and utter Depravity is that somehow, it can never quite manage to cover all the bases of observable human nature.  In other words, if everything was complete and total insanity, how would you even be able to know this?  What's the basis for comparison or observation?  Others may disagree, yet the charge still remains unanswered, though not perhaps unanswerable.  It's just that we always seem to need a wider scope or lens which will allow as much of reality in as possible.  Here is where other Individual Talents, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, can come along and help to grant of balance to Barrie's fundamentally warped sense or vantage point.  There's a lot the creator of Middle Earth can tell us together about the Tradition of which Barrie's Myth forms just one aspect.

Conclusion: The Proper Relations between Tradition and Individual Talent.

It's one thing to claim that J.M. Barrie was an Individual Talent working within a Tradition.  It's another to have an understanding of the type of story he was trying (and failing) to write.  In other words, the real question that needs to be asked is what kind of Fantasy did the author have on his hands with the idea for Neverland and its inhabitants?  Here is where a closer look at the generic aspects of the plot can tell us a lot about the story we're dealing with.  At it's core, Barrie's novel is concerned with two intertwining tropes.  The first is the narrative of a Journey to the Otherworld.  The second has to do with an ancient mythic idea that might be termed as: An Adventure Among the Folken and their Realm.  The first part of ingredients from the Cauldron of Story that Barrie draws from is still a familiar conceit to most audiences.  Most of us can point to some book or film which sends the protagonists on a journey through a fantastical realm where the normal laws of everyday life are jettisoned in favor of the kind of place where all sorts of magical creatures and beings are commonplace.  The best examples of this specific plot in the modern era still belong to the work of Jim Henson and Guillermo Del Toro.  C.S. Lewis and Charles Dodgson, meanwhile, still remain the masters of the type in the world of letters.

Of the four listed above, it is Henson's 1986 movie that carries the strongest resemblance to Barrie's efforts.  That's because both of their secondary worlds are populated by one specific type of imaginary creature.  It's presence  of this one, specific, denizen or being from the otherworld in both of their works that goes a long way toward laying out the nature of the earlier Pan play.  Like with Henson and Del Toro, Barrie's story idea is concerned with the kind of adventures children can have in the realm of the Fair Folk.  It's the most obvious aspect of the narrative, and yet in some ways the most difficult to talk about.  That's because the notion of a Visit to or with the Element Beings is one of those fictional conceits that are so primeval that there's bound to come a point where the modern rendition of the idea as we know it today is able to vanish as it is subsumed into older versions of the story, such as the Myth of Prometheus Stealing Fire from the Gods.  The basics of the trope can be thought of as "just the same", and yet the stage setting is so different from our current conception of the idea that most of us would have a very hard time recognizing the Greco-Roman Myth and the Edwardian Play have any specific relation to one another, much less that they each belong to a particular narrative tradition.

Part of the reason for our inability to recognize this trope in its different faces is because as Tolkien pointed out, there are so few of them out there to be had, read, or seen.  "Stories that are actually concerned primarily with “fairies,” that is with creatures that might also in modern English be called “elves,” he once observed, "are relatively rare, and as a rule not very interesting.  Most good “fairy-stories” are about the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches (322)". Barrie's creative idea is somewhat unique in this sense.  It's one of the few times an artist has tried to take his audience somewhere into the regions (if never quite the heart) of Elfland.  The author even tries to give his readers a map of this secondary world, and if credit must always go where it's due, then this is one of the few times where Barrie's writing can be said to come alive.  A lot of it seems to be because (again, to his just amount of credit) he knew at least something of the history of this Tradition, along with a goodish number of its literary machinery and stage dressing.  In describing the fictional home of his protagonist, Barrie tries to combine all the versions of Elfland into one single setting.  It's one of the few times where he allows the literary pedigree of his story to shine through to the tale's benefit.

"I don't know whether you have ever seen a map of a person's mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child's mind which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all; but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needlework, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on; and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.

"Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents, but on the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance, and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have each other’s nose, and so forth. On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more".  I'd argue that what allows these passages to stand out so well from Barrie's usual mediocrity is down to two things.  First, the author got out of the story's way, for whatever reason.  Even if it was just for a page or two, it allowed the Fossil to display its record.  In being allowed to do so, what it reveals is that the story is setting out its parameters in a way that makes a very subtle yet noticeable allusion to commonplace trope of Romantic writings.

This is the theory that the Enchanted Other Realm is meant to stand as psychological symbol for the inner mind, and all of its hidden capabilities.  It's a hypothesis that critic Janet Spens traces back to artists such as Edmund Spenser and the Lake Poets.  "Faery Land then is the mind, the inner experience of each of us, and the subject of The Faerie Queene was the same as that of Wordsworth's projected magnum opus more than two centuries later - the apprehension, description, and organization of the inner world (52)".  The Fossil that Barrie either dug up or else just stumbled upon seems to be aiming for a similar goal.  It's a mistake to claim that the Pan Myth wanted to be anything like the next Prelude.  Rather, like the Romantics, it seems to be aiming for the same message as that found in the literature of Jung.  That the mind must tap into its hidden riches in order live a fully sane existence.  Barrie, meanwhile, has no interest in this, and so all the really tantalizing possibilities inherent in the narrative are left to stifle.  Instead, we have a case where the author drags the proceedings into the worst abuses and offense perpetrated and committed against the Fantasy trope in the Victorian setting.

It's something Tolkien discussed with great insight, as it was a particular pet peeve of his.  Tom Shippey, one of the few leading experts in all things Middle Earth related, gives us a neat starting summary of the Professor's views on the matter.  "Tolkien remained strongly ambivalent about the very notion of “fairy”. He disliked the word, as a borrowing from French — the English word is “elf’ — and he also disliked the whole Victorian cult of fairies as little, pretty, ineffective creatures, prone to being co-opted into the service of moral tales for children, and often irretrievably phony. Much of his essay “On Fairy Stories”, indeed (published in 1945 in a memorial volume for Charles Williams, and there expanded from a lecture given in 1939 in honor of Andrew Lang the fairy-tale collector) is avowedly corrective, both of scholarly terminology and of popular taste (xii)".  As far as the charge of being "ineffective", "co-opted", and "irretrievably phony" is concerned, then the bad news for Barrie is that his play, or at least his handling of what could otherwise be considered legitimate. traditional. story material, is able to check all the boxes, and hence all the strikes against him.  Tolkien can help us gain a further grasp of the Mythic elements contained in the story of Peter Pan as opposed to the author's use or misuse of it.  The distinction is subtle in this case, yet it's an important one to keep in mind.

Tolkien is said to have held a lot of strong views on what constituted good and bad writing in the creation of fairy stories.  Like a lot of things about the writer of Lord of the Rings, it's one of those statements that are "true" for a given amount of Truth.  That Tolkien was a lifelong discerning reader of Fantasy is without question.  That he was as narrowistic and closed minded about it all is an unfortunate popular conception which still clings to his reputation to this day, even amongst his most die-hard fans.  In fact, the idea of Tolkien as disliking most of what constituted the Fantasy genre both before and after him has done enough damage to our perception of his thinking on the matter, that it's easy for us to miss all those notes of careful nuance where the Professor can be seen introducing a lot of fine and more open-ended shades to the discussion.  Take for instance this moment in the aforementioned Fairy Stories essay, where he pays what might sound like a surprising compliment to one of his Elizabethan forebearers.  He tells us there that "Spenser was in the true tradition when he called the knights of his "Faerie" by the name of Elfe.  It belonged to such knights as Sir Guyon rather than to Pigwiggen armed with a hornet's sting (321)".  The critic is congratulating the author of The Faerie Queene for a genuine artistic accomplishment with these words.  It's interesting to note, because under the still reigning popular conception, Tolkien is believed to have had nothing but white hot antipathy for the poem.

Instead, the note of measured yet genuine appreciation of Spenser's poetic achievement stands as the first sign of the more open-ended aspects of Tolkien's thinking about this type of story.  In general, it might introduce a further distinction between the type of Allegory as it was used in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as opposed to the kind of flattening approach of modern authors like George Orwell.  In particular, it might send the message that the creator of Hobbits might have been willing to meet the pop culture conception of the Folken halfway, at least to some extent.  To further complicate matters in relation to Neverland, we have the words of John Garth, who notes the kind of impact that the story of the Boy Who Could Fly left on the great fantasist's Imagination.  "A debt is surely owed to Peter Pan's Neverland. Tolkien had seen J. M. Barrie's masterpiece at the theatre as an eighteen-year old in 1910, writing afterwards: 'Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live.' This was a play aimed squarely at an orphan's heart, featuring a cast of children severed from their mothers by distance or death. A chiaroscuro by turns sentimental and cynical, playful and deadly serious, Peter Pan took a rapier to mortality itself- its hero a boy who refuses to grow up and who declares that 'To die will be an awfully big adventure (73)".  Garth provides a further bit of context for both Tolkien and Barrie.

"Yet even in 1915 fairy was a problematic term: too generic, and with increasingly diverse connotations. Tolkien's old King Edward's schoolteacher, R. W. Reynolds, soon warned him that the title he proposed for his volume of verse, The Trumpets of Faerie (after a poem written in the summer), was 'a little precious': the word faerie had become 'rather spoiled of late'... For now, though, the fate of the word was not yet sealed, and Tolkien stuck pugnaciously to it. He was not alone: Robert Graves entitled his 1917 collection Fairies and Fusiliers, with no pun apparently intended.  Great War soldiers were weaned on Andrew Lang's fairy-tale anthologies and original stories such as George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, and Faerie's stock had surged with the success of Peter Pan, a story of adventure and eternal youth that now had additional relevance for boys on the threshold of manhood facing battle. Tinfang Warble had a contemporary visual counterpart in a painting that found a mass-market in Kitchener's Army. Eleanor Canziani's Piper of Dreams, which proved to be the belated swansong of the Victorian fairy-painting tradition, depicts a boy sitting alone in a springtime wood playing to a half-seen flight of fairies. Reproduced by the Medici Society in 1915, it sold an unprecedented 250,000 copies before the year was out. In the trenches, The Piper of Dreams became, in one appraisal, 'a sort of talisman'.

"A more cynical view is that 'the war called up the fairies. Like other idle consumers, they were forced into essential war-work.' A 1917 stage play had 'Fairy voices calling, Britain needs your aid.  Occasionally, soldiers' taste for the supernatural might be used to perk up an otherwise dull and arduous training exercise, as Rob Gilson discovered on one bitterly cold battalion field day: 'There was a fantastic "scheme" involving a Witch-Doctor who was supposed to be performing incantations in Maddingly Church. C and D Companies represented a flying column sent from a force to the West to capture the wizard.' On the whole, however, the fairies were spared from the recruitment drive and wizards were relieved from military maneuvers. Faerie still entered the lives of soldiers, but it was left to work on the imagination in a more traditional and indefinable way. Though George MacDonald had urged against attempts to pin down the meaning of fairy-tale, declaring 'I should as soon think of describing the abstract human face, or stating what must go to constitute a human being', Tolkien made the attempt twenty four years later in his paper 'On Fairy-stories', in which he maintained that Faerie provided the means of recovery, escape, and consolation. The rubric may be illustrated by applying it to the Great War, when Faerie allowed the soldier to recover a sense of beauty and wonder, escape mentally from the ills confining him, and find consolation for the losses afflicting him- even for the loss of a paradise he has never known except in the imagination.

"To brighten up trench dugouts, one philanthropist sent specially illustrated posters of Robert Louis Stevenson's poem 'The Land of Nod', with its half-haunting, half-alluring version of fairyland. To raise money for orphans of the war at sea, a Navy Book of Fairy Tales was published in which Admiral Sir John Jellicoe noted that 'Unhappily a great many of our sailors and marines (unlike the more fortunate fairies) do get killed in the process of killing the giant.' Faerie as a version of Olde England could evoke home or childhood and inspire patriotism, while Faerie as the land of the dead or the ever-young could suggest an afterlife less austere and remote than the Judaeo Christian heaven (76-8)".  The context just outlined by Garth can help us gain a sense of the nature of the Myth uncovered by Barrie if we link it up with Prickett's earlier assessment that the modern Victorian Young Adult novel was, at it's core, a carrying forward of the Romantic strain of thought as that contained in the poetry of writers like Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth.  It might help to look at Barrie's rough draft of the Myth that wound up in his lap from at least two potential angles.  One of them is from the literary context he shares with Tolkien as a creator of a secondary world.  The second, related facet is to see if we can't find the themes contained within the archetype, or Inspiration point, that Barrie found himself confronted with. 

If it's possible to nail down the Truths that the lie was trying to tell, then while it can't erase Barrie's mistakes, it can suggest an idea of what a better version of this story was meant to be.  I've already hinted at some idea of what the themes Barrie was meant to tackle might be when I noticed how he seemed to be following in the footsteps of writers like Lewis Carroll.  The Alice books are a series very much concerned with how the child grows up.  In fact, a good laconic tag for Carroll's literary preoccupation might be "The Art of Maturity".  For the creator of Wonderland, this problem winds up centering around the question of Character.  The books imply that in order to evade the nonsense of the modern world, the child must learn to have their wits about them.  The Neverland archetype seems to hint at taking this same thematic idea, and carrying it forward.  Carroll, as an educator, was naturally concerned with the pedagogy of the child's mind.  Barrie's Inspiration, meanwhile, is less concerned with education so much as with the preservation of a Vision of Life, if that makes any sense.  The whole crux of Peter's journey, in other words, has to do with a worldview, or way of looking at things.

The "Vision" that Barrie keeps circling around might be described as "child-like" as opposed to anything childish.  There's the suggestion that the former can have its place in a mature outlook on the life, whereas the latter is a potential road to a whole world of troubles.  Another way to put it is to go back to those same Blakean terms of Innocence and Experience, and to ponder over the relationship between the two.  It's a mistake to claim that Barrie, or anyone who would try to tackle the Neverland archetype must be tasked with creating this kind of "Grand Epic Statement", or anything like that.  Instead, it's more that any would-be author of the Pan Myth must be willing to find out what a healthy relation between those two states of mind is supposed to be.  If there's even a shred of plausibility to this chain of reasoning, and Neverland is meant as the setting for a story of Innocence and Experience.  Then it makes sense to suggest that while Peter may be the Boy Who Could Fly, he might also be the Child Who Learns to Grow.  It's difficult to say this idea flies smack in the face of Barrie's story.  Some may argue that it defeats the whole purpose the author was writing toward, yet 'd I'd respond that there's plenty of room for doubt.  For one thing, Tolkien himself felt the author was evading the point.

In one of the rough drafts Tolkien made for his Fairy Stories essay, he notes that "Since Barrie was successful in making the Fantasy credible, the result leaned inevitably to the diabolic, but characteristically he shirked or sought to shirk his own dark issues, both in Dear Brutus and in Mary Rose (274)".  This also applies well to what he's done (or left undone) in Peter Pan.  In that that play, it's very much as Tolkien says, "with this accumulating dramatic stuff nothing was done (ibid)".  It's worth noting that Tolkien cites Barrie's "shirking" of his responsibilities as a writer toward his stories as something "characteristic" about the man and his efforts.  He's a repeat offender when it comes to not taking his duties as a storyteller seriously.  I think Tolkien just gave us the ultimate critical judgment call and summation of Barrie's literary shortcomings.  Is it any wonder then if his Faerie Play leaves us feeling like we've gotten less than our money's worth?  Tolkien labels him as diabolic, though the more accurate description is to say that he is cynical and uncaring.  In fact, the full implication of Tolkien's writings on Barrie (few as they are) leaves one with the implication that the man was some kind of sadist.  Therefore not the type of mind that is interested in the meaning of Innocence and Experience.

The archetype behind Neverland, however, demonstrates a very serious thematic concern with these ideas.  I  just can't shake the idea that the story Barrie stumbled upon was naturally oriented towards an exploration of what it means to grow up in a way that never talked down to kids in the way the author does.  In fact, the preoccupations of the tale hint at a particular type of maturity as an ideal worth reaching for.  You can call it growing up, if you want, I suppose.  Or else you can just frame it as being able to reach some kind of workable understanding of life.  One that doesn't have to sacrifice the ability to look at things through the lens of wonder that most children are lucky enough to have and enjoy in a good home, with a family that loves them.  If you come away as adult and still say that a lot of it remains true, then perhaps you've made at least some kind of valuable achievement for yourself.  That's the best suggestion I can give to the type of story Barrie should have been able to tell if he'd allowed either himself or the archetype an opportunity for an actual form of creative self-expression.  It would have been the type of narrative that never shies away from the tougher aspects of life.  Any authentic account of the Neverland Myth would have to point out that there are plenty of dangerous dragons out there.  At the same time, it would also point that such dragons can also be slain.  It would have been in the vein of Coleridge and Carroll, and it's theme would have been Romanticism Comes of Age.

The idea it would leave the readers with is that it's important to hold on to certain lessons learned in the nursery, even while you still have the task of at least trying to be an adult.  It would be about keeping that one final spark of knowledge from a time of Innocence alive, even as you tackle things from the vantage point of Experience.  That to me seem to be a good idea of what the narrative of Peter Pan supposed to turn out as.  The pity of it is that Barrie never quite achieved it.  That's not the same as claiming that others didn't, however.  Like I've said before, this is a story with a happy ending.  J.M. Barrie wouldn't end as the sole author of Neverland.  Sometimes it turns out that you might need more than just one cook to make the best possible broth.  I'm not sure what "Perfection" means in terms of any act of creative writing.  I don't we have it in us to create the Ultimate Work of Fiction.  Perhaps even Shakespeare could never pull that feat off.  Nor am I certain we need to.  The final result just has to be of enough quality to say that it's entertaining.  If you can manage that, then you've probably got a good story to tell.  Barrie couldn't do this on his own.  He kept getting in the way of himself, as well as the Fossil.  There were two other artists who did let Peter have his Hero's Journey, and they both came along way later down the timeline.  That, however, as they say, is a tale for another time.

The Griffin and the Minor Canon (1885).

The history of the fairytale  reads like a list of forgotten names.  This is something of a perennial truism of the genre as a whole.  Everybody has at least heard of the Brothers Grimm, even if most of us don't have  clue who they were.  We know that their names adorn the collection of a long passed down anthology book of folklore, most of it stemming from the Northern European culture in which they were born and raised.  Beyond that bare collective of acknowledged fact, however, it's almost like those guys just never really existed.  History has a way of slipping through the cracks like that.  If we have only the vaguest knowledge of who the Grimm Brothers were, then the peasants, farmers, tale tellers, and Old Wives who passed on all these survivals of ancient mythological lore to them are as good as lost to time.  After all, how many of us even knew that the Grimm's were editors and compilers more than the actual authors of their collection of fairy tales?  It's the sort of pattern that you can find repeated just about everywhere else.  For every J.R.R. Tolkien that becomes a household icon you've got a mislaid and overlooked predecessor like E.R. Eddison, who was one of the first authors to try and tackle a complete and total fantasy novel set in a secondary world.  Eddison just takes the world of Arthurian Romance and sets it on the planet Mercury.

That might sound like a fun (albeit kinda goofy) notion.  If such a book like that exists, however, how come no one else is talking about it?  Exactly!  That's the way with pop culture.  Sometimes it bestows a sort of artistic immortality on some names (Tolkien), while allowing others (not just Eddison, but also forgotten luminaries such as Lord Dunsany, Abraham Merritt, James Branch Cabell, and Sir Walter Scott) to fade away.  Turns out there are a lot of names out there who are or were responsible for molding the modern fantasy genre into the shape and form that it enjoys now.  Guys like Tolkien don't just happen out of the clear blue overnight.  Nor is the whole truth to claim that they are of such levels of creative genius as to be able to conjure their flights of fantasy up without at least some measure of help from the fantasists who came before.  It's true that Middle Earth is, in the last resort, the result of Tolkien's gift for tapping into the psychological well-spring that is the human Imagination.  The trick is that I don't even someone with his set of talent skills would have been able to pull it off quite so well if her wasn't as avid a reader of fairy tales both old and modern.  Everything I've read or know about the author of LOTR points to him being self-aware as an Individual Talent at work within the confines of a Literary Tradition.

Odds are even that Tradition includes a whole catalogue of names or author bylines that probably made up his entire enthusiasm from the nursery on up for the once upon a time genre.  The point is even the best names of the business stand on the shoulders of giants.  The irony being that's a whole catalogue of forgotten titans right there, and it's difficult to say if we'll ever be able to get all of them back.  I have no way of knowing whether or not the lost name I want to talk about today was ever a favorite of Tolkien's. I just know that I found a short story of his in a collection by Douglas Anderson called Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy.  Anderson states in the introduction to this anthology that his major goal was to try and suggest a picture to modern readers of what the artistry and atmosphere of Tolkien's chosen literary genre was like in the years before he arrived on the scene and more or less reshaped the format's entire parameters ever since.  It was there that I came upon the name of Frank Stockton for the very second time.  At first I didn't know who this individual was.  I had to look him up in order to realize that we had met once before (sorta) way back in high school.  Somewhere close to maybe the 9th or 10th grade, my class was assigned to read a story called "The Lady and the Tiger".

It's sort of funny because of all the works of short fiction I was ever assigned for my English Lit classes back then, it is the story of a prisoner who is condemned to either fall in love and marry or else be torn apart by the other King of the Jungle which has stayed with me the most.  I think it's one of those brief narratives that manages to find a way of sticking around in your memory long after you've put the book aside.  You'll be going along just doing your thing, like always, and then maybe these final snippets of narrative description will occur to you right out of the blue.  "And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door - the lady, or the tiger".  I think it's got to be one of the main reasons that particular bit of protoplasmic Magical Realism has stuck around for as long as it has.  It's an entire narrative account based around an unanswered question.  It reminds me of something director Walter Hill once said in an interview.  He claimed that ambiguity can sometimes be the hallmark strength of a well told story.  He wasn't trying to set up an iron-clad rule, or anything.  It's just that you can tell this literary sleight-of-hand has done its work when you're able to still recall it many years later.

The one bit I'm sure most of us have trouble remembering is who even wrote the damn thing?  For the longest time, I've been able to remember the setup, the cast, and most of all the denouement (or lack thereof?).  I suppose that means the perfect capping irony is realizing you couldn't recall for the life of ya whose name it was on the author byline to the piece.  In that sense, deciding to pick up Doug Anderson's Tolkien oriented collection was a moment of almost perfect serendipity.  "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" were the words that managed to jump out at me from the table of contents for whatever reason.  It got me curious enough leap to the story's place in the book and start reading.  Somewhere in the middle of it all I got curious enough to go and see if I could look up who Frank R. Stockton was.  Discovering he was the artist responsible for "The Lady or the Tiger" was kind of like those experiences where you'd swear time was sort of doubling back on itself.  I don't think any of us can ever foresee those moments that are able to bring our pasts back to us with a surprising amount of clarity.  Like I can still see a clear enough image of the classroom where I first read that story.

It was a pleasant enough surprise is what I guess I'm trying to say.  One of the results of that discovery is that it made me curious to find out more about the kind of artistic mindset that was able to conjure the kind of images or visions that would have that level of staying power.  So I did some more digging, and here are the results I was able to come up with.  Let's take a look now at another work by the author of "The Lady and the Tiger", and see what Stockton's tale of a priest and a mythic beast can tell us.