By Johanna Skibsrud
“Two is the beginning of the end. As in you and me, Peter; we make two and the story, and the story takes on and then” (16).
In this single line, Jenny Boully evokes not only creative and constructive power, but also reveals the catastrophe inherent to any genuine engagement with language—or love. Her remarkable fourth book, Not Merely Because of the Unknown that was Stalking Toward Them, is ultimately a meditation on hybridity. It both celebrates and laments the ongoing temporal tension inherent to narrative: that to conceive of a way to begin any story—including or especially the story of one’s own life—is also to simultaneously conceive of "the end" of that story. Composed, in large part, as a series of imaginary letters or addresses to Peter Pan by Wendy Darling, Boully’s integration of (italicized) threads of J.M. Barrie’s original Peter Pan, guides the narrative (both her own, and Barrie’s) in new and surprising directions. And woven within, alongside, or against—yes, perhaps in direct defiance to—that narrative, is a contrasting temporal, or rather a-temporal, force:poetry. As Boully vividly demonstrates, poetry acts as a powerful “presence-ing” of both thought and experience .... Narrative allows us to understand temporal continuity (not only between moments, but between the body and mind which experiences them), poetry allows for the revelation—in the gaps and interstices of that progression—of “presence,” of truth.
Boully’s “hybrid” text brings these two temporal impulses into conversation. Indeed, with every page we encounter both the temporalized adult voice of Wendy Darling in its address to the past, and an absent or idealized Peter, and—separated by a partial line drawn below the main text—a section titled, “The Home Under Ground.” These “Under Ground” sections take us (literally, as well as metaphorically) beneath the text, interrupting, or rather augmenting, the narrative with glimpses into the stalled temporal landscape of “Neverland,” to which the main text (from the vantage point of the future) also refers. A close reading affords, therefore, a movement between narrative and lyric time, as the reader is encouraged to move between the two texts—sometimes even breaking off from the main text mid-sentence in order to delve into the “Under Ground.” The technique lends a level of elegant uncertainty to the text, emphasizing the reader’s autonomy and the role that chance and “adventure” play in the work as a whole. First expressed in the book’s opening pages, “adventure”—and in particular Wendy’s anxiety over the possibility of being forgotten, or left out of one of Peter’s “adventures”—reflects a deeper anxiety, which will pervade the text:
When he talks in his sleep, he will say a name you have never known; there will be an adventure; there will be an adventure without you. When he talks in his sleep, you will know that one day, one day you will sleep and sleep and never wake, and he will go on. He will go on without you (4).
What is really at stake here for Wendy is the possibility of being left out of the “chance” flow, or “adventure” of time. (Even the word, “adventure,” has its roots in the old French, aventure, for “chance,” as well as from the Latin, adventura: that which is “to come,” or “about to happen.”) But this fear—essentially of being left out of any possible or eventual progression—is complicated by a twin desire to remain rooted in the present (Neverland), or return to the past. A longing, on the one hand, to stall the flow of time in order to remain within the circumscribed limits of the “known,” the already-imagined, and, on the other, to strike off via the imagination toward the “unknown” of desire: toward the “real,” that which has yet to be imagined, soon establishes itself as the main conflict within the book. As in the following example:
To guide her strange craft: that is what the girl Wendy needs to do in order reach safety, if she. Wanted to, which she doesn’t, you see. Ever so much more adventurous now on the island made real, made real (54).
Only two paragraphs later she questions Peter: “Should I speed up the birth and delivery in order to see you, see you?” (55). Wendy’s desire to return to the past—to, indeed, never have had to venture from the realm of the imaginary into the “real”—is inextricably linked with a commitment toward the future, or at least an acknowledgement of its inevitability. It is, after all, as she is shown to recognize here (or at least powerfully hope), only through her own continued progression—through growing up, becoming a “real” mother—that she might be permitted contact with her past. If Peter will not continue to visit her, he will, perhaps, continue to visit her children, and that, at least, will serve to re-establish their connection … even if it is a connection now irreversibly compromised by time.
And haunting the limit of these conflicted desires, is always a shadow of “something” else—the “unknown” that stealthily stalks both character and reader throughout the text.
Do you sense, dear, a certain something? Like a hand that keeps? That keeps on interfering? (26).
It is testament to Boully’s subtlety and skill as a writer that she is able to bring out, and keep in play throughout the entire work, both the terrifying and inspiring aspect of this “unknown”—but it is also testament to her subject. By plunging her readers within a familiar children’s story, so evocative of exactly the split relationship between subjectivity and time that drives her own explorations, Boully immediately establishes herself within a difficult and ambiguous terrain. It is from this point that she begins—with remarkable deftness—to pick at the incoherent knot we tend to make, in adulthood, of the “unknown,” recovering and reclaiming as equally distinct and vital, its various, often seemingly contradictory, strands. We experience, along with Wendy Darling, both a deep fear and an intense desire for what lies beyond the limits of self-hood, both intense trepidation and tremendous impatience for a moment in which it might become possible to consider that the future has actually arrived… As J.M. Barrie captured so vividly in his original text, the simultaneity of these experiences of—and reactions to—the “unknown” is quite natural and imminent to childhood perceptions of identity and time. In adulthood, however, we may find them increasingly polarized. Boully asks us to read past and between these established lines; to retrieve for ourselves a sense of ultimate connectivity between the “known” (the limits of personal experience, the chance events and circumstances of our own lives) and “the unknown” (what lies beyond that experience, in the realm of fear, desire, and Chance itself).
And what persists more urgently at the heart of this relation than love? Not Merely Because of the Unknown…is also, and fundamentally, a love story. A story about an intricate and, perhaps, ultimately impossible balance between reality and the imagination; about desire and the (perhaps ultimately impossible) fulfillment of desire. Food acts as an important metaphor throughout the text for both these aspects of the experience of love—and here again Boully manages to bring out the complexity of her subject. Food is, at once, both nourishing and delightful, both idealized (as we fantasize with the lost boys over delicately frosted birthday cakes), and frightening—connected all too persuasively with the “real.” The sharks, for example, are “quite real” (47), and will presumably not think twice before devouring you. But after a while even the appeal of the purely “imaginary” food contains a threatening edge: can it possibly sustain one? If so, for how long? Along with Wendy, we begin to wonder if, “come autumn,” we shouldn’t, perhaps, “plant a grove of peaches and pears and red delicious?” If, “[p]erhaps, perhaps the food could be less non-existent?” (15).
And finally, along with Wendy, we realize that the imagination alone cannot sustain us at all: “Surely the cake done baked by now,” remarks Hook from an “Under Ground” section. “By now, the chicken has surely been de-feathered, all the shrimp neatly deveined. Wendy, you see, I will give you real food to eat…” (25).
This tension between the real and the imagined is also explored throughout the text through the idea of writing. Peter (as some of us may remember from Barrie’s book) can neither read nor write, and though he and the others delight in Wendy’s storytelling, she is urged never to write her stories down: “I say, Wendy, you shan’t write; you shan’t write a thing. We shall just carry on like this—with a storytelling of things that may or may not be” (38). It is precisely this “Betwixt-and-Between” space that Boully’s work occupies as a whole: “present-ing” us with the complexity of human experience, which—no matter how we come to understand it through the linear constructs of language and history—continues to be “stalked” by the unknown. Within this extraordinary book, we encounter (at once, and almost simultaneously) both “beginning” and “end”; we experience both the “and then” of storytelling and the “revelation” of the poem.
Works Cited:
Agamben, Giorgio. The Man Without Content. Trans. Giorgia Albert. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999.
Boully, Jenny. Not Merely Because of the Unknown that was Stalking Toward Them. Grafton, VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011.