Peter Pan and Solomon J.: two children between worlds

Solomon J. gives Peter a particular place in the genealogy of Pepilandia. He is the child of Kensington Gardens, the one to whom the fairy tale traces the birth of the first bridges between different worlds.

His story is recalled through the words of J. M. Barrie as 'rather sad', linking the idea of the bridge to the perception of a distance as well.

The reference to Peter Pan takes on meaning above all through the differences between the two children.

Barrie's Peter lives in a suspended condition between nature and humanity, belonging and separation, the desire to reach other children and the difficulty of feeling fully part of their world. His freedom keeps a melancholy quality. He can cross territories that belong to the child's imagination and, at the same time, he remains close to a boundary that separates different worlds.

Solomon J. makes a different movement. He too enters a fantastical geography, meets creatures who inhabit a territory built out of imagination, memory and desire, and discovers the existence of passages between different realities. His path, however, tends towards return.

This difference offers a possible key to reading the relationship between the two works.

Peter can be read as the child who continues to live near the boundary. Solomon J. as the child who learns to cross it and to come back.

In Pepilandia the bridge takes on a further function beyond the literary reference to Barrie. It makes it possible to keep contact with enchantment while the child continues to grow within their own everyday reality. Solomon can go home, to his mother, to school and to his relationships, carrying with him something of what he has encountered. The marvellous then enters ordinary life as a different way of reading what surrounds him.

The scene of the wheel makes this passage visible. Solomon looks for bridges made of matter and finds games, objects and memories. A paper boat, a rope, a kite, a diary, a piece of cloth become tools of connection between worlds.

The Pepifante explains to him that 'bridges are games that light children up', and Solomon begins to understand that the passage to Pepilandia can open when imagination, relationship and creative freedom manage to meet.

The dialogue with Barrie becomes particularly interesting here. Peter Pan keeps childhood alive through a form of suspended time. Solomon J. seems to keep it alive through continuity.

The difference changes the meaning of growing up.

Solomon can grow while keeping access to the part of himself able to see a Pepileno. His journey suggests a possibility: to mature while keeping a relationship with one's own imagination, continuing to build passages between concrete experience, memory and fantasy.

At the end of the chapter, the Pepifante hands Solomon J. a sentence that gathers up this meaning: 'Children must still be able to say: "Mummy, Mummy, I saw a Pepileno!"'

Around this possibility, Peter and Solomon seem to meet. Both of them keep a passage open towards a dimension that, as one grows, requires a more attentive gaze. Peter stays close to that door. Solomon crosses it and returns.

In Barrie's world the boundary carries a strong sense of loss and longing. In Pepilandia that same boundary can turn into a bridge, something that allows one to go and come back while keeping both worlds safe.

Solomon J. takes up a central theme from the Peter Pan tradition: the child able to inhabit reality and imagination at the same time. The fairy tale of the Pepileni develops that theme by introducing a further possibility. One can come back from the journey keeping a trace of the place one has crossed.

One can grow up while continuing, at least sometimes, to see.

In the possibility of keeping that passage open, enchantment may find one of its most lasting forms.

Anusha Bhama Gukhool is the author of Solomon J. in the village of the Pepileni.