Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Barrie in Love III



Barrie in Love III


This jaunty attitude is qualified by the images that are called forth by the imagination, however: thru the wolfishness of Peter Pan; the ghoulishness Captain Hook and the Pirates.

As well as the Indian totems: faces that are void and terrible in their mindlessness; the primitive games that typify “Lord of the Flies” boyish imaginations.

Barrie sees Peter Pan and the Lost Boys as flowers of dissolution, locked in the death-process. He can’t help but see Captain Hook as Cain, who kills Peter his brother.

Though in some ways Peter Pan is a naturalistic work populated with realistic characters and set in altogether probable environments, in another way it is inflexible and even rather austerely classical.

Hook is Cain from the very first and his fate is settled. Barrie considers the killing of George and the suicide of Michael and wonders if it is proper to think in terms of accident at all.

Has everything that happens a universal significance? Ultimately Barrie does not believe that there is anything accidental in life: it all hangs together, in the deepest sense.


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