Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie’s story of The Boy who Wouldn’t Grow Up, has enchanted generations of children and adults and found its way into popular culture through various literary, theatrical and film adaptations.The novel, originally published as Peter and Wendy in 1911, is accompanied by various illustrations by F. D. Bedford that depict Peter and the Darling children on their adventures in Neverland. Peter Pan’s character originates from J.M Barrie’s novel The Little White Bird (1902), and appears as a protagonist later in Barrie’s play adaptation Peter Pan, or The Boy who Wouldn't Grow Up (1904) (Bauer). He is thus as a character inherently intermedial, no wonder that the story’s visual representation also plays a role in its various literary adaptations. In the 2015 edition of J.M Barrie’s novel, the design studio MinaLima provided the imagery and so created ten new interactive illustrations, including fold-out maps, turntables and many more. In this way, the Harper Collins edition of the Darling children’s adventure story allows a different experience of the narrative including not only the text and imagery but also haptic features. By taking a multi- and intermedial approach, this new edition incorporates intertextual and iconographic references to the inherently interdisciplinary representation of Peter Pan the in arts. In this way, the design studio manages to render the original J.M. Barrie text more attractive to modern day children, embracing visual culture to reshape the spatial perception of Peter Pan’s fictional world. This essay will examine how the 2015 edition of J.M. Barrie’s novel Peter Pan extends and incorporates meaning into the reshaped spatial perception of Neverland through its interactive features and intermedial experience.
The fusion of image and text in meaning production is an intensely studied phenomenon, as it produced artistic and scholarly interest, firstly through theater in Greek Antiquity, and later with the emergence of Emblems in the Middle Ages and finally incorporated and perfected in opera and Wagners Gesamtkunstwerken. The Romantic philosopher Gerhard E. Lessing, differentiated all art disciplines based on the simultaneity or successivity of their perception, and thus pointed at an inherent tension between the time-based arts, such as literature or music, and space-based visual arts (Sipe 99). In interdisciplinary artworks, such as illustrated children's books, we can see that image and text interact in a way that makes them interdependent in the creation of meaning. Roland Barthes terms this relaying, claiming that "by limiting each other, words and pictures take on a meaning that neither possesses without the other—perform the completion of each other" (Sipe 98). Lawrence Sipe conceptualises this as the synergy of text and image, in which the effect of the artwork is not only dependent on the fusion of the components but also their transactions, so “the process we engage in when we relate the verbal and visual texts of the picture book to each other” (Sipe 99). The scholar then continues to describe the inherent tension between the illustration attracting the gaze and the text calling us to keep reading in children's picturebooks. This therefore changes our manner of reading to be more reflexive, as our attention constantly goes back and forth between the two media (Sipe 101).
When looking at the above described edition of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan on the basis of this theoretical framework it becomes clear that MinaLimas interactive illustrations are substantial to constructing Neverland spatially. By examining the form and the placement of these features and their interaction with Barrie’s text, this paragraph will focus on the way in with Neverland is created as a spatial entity through which the Darling children move. Barrie maps out Neverland, describing it as “always more or less an island” that exists inside the child's mind and is discovered by Mrs. Darling as she “rummage[s] in their minds and put[s] things straight for the next morning” (Barrie 18). His description of this imaginary place is extensive and detailed, pointing out the effect of individual intersectional experiences on the shape and content of the island. Barrie hints at the “dark” side of this meta-fictional island that becomes real in the “two minutes before you go to sleep”, implying the immorality of human nature (Barrie 20). By making use of Freudian Psychoanalysis to construct Neverland as accessible through the unconscious, dreams and imagination, Barrie creates a complex and flexible storyworld consisting of desires, fears and adventures, while foreshadowing the development of the plot. Looking at the illustration on page 19 (Att. A), MinaLima transmediated this intricate description into a fold-out map of Neverland in a way that is easily accessible to children as it is embedded in form of a medical report card (Att. B). By including visual references to the medical discourse that is invoked in Barrie’s explanation of the mind map, as similar to “maps that doctors sometimes draw [...] of other parts of you” and “zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card” (Barrie 18), the illustrators create a figurative map that evokes the time period of the narrative. “Consisting of freehand drawings and more figurative rather than symbolic elements” this map is primarily used to display “psychological, cultural, physical and topological aspects” of the storyworld (Meunier). Creative choices of parchment brown paper and typewriter font imitate an early 20th century look while attributing empirically measurable qualities to the imaginary island and therefore manifesting it as real, despite its fictionality. The map of Neverland itself is represented as schematic, not focussing on accuracy in distance, but on the perceived distances between the different settings of the narrative, thus creating and fixing the space described by Barrie. We see different points of reference on the map, such as the pirate bay, the lagoon of the mermaids and the Indian camp along with Skull Rock and Peter’s Hideout, which are not directly referenced to at this point in Barries text, however their placement in this depiction directs the reader's attention to the settings of the story as well as giving them spatial connection and coherence. Therefore this illustration becomes a vital tool to define and limit the spatial dimension of Neverland by evoking Barrie’s text visually. In this way the image interacts with the story by foreshadowing and tracing the itinerary of the Darling children’s adventure, and framing the important and recognisable features in the story.
Throughout the book we find ten interactive features and a multitude of illustrations that break up the narrative in smaller sections and so accommodate a young child’s attention span while also creating visual interest, which either simplify and explain Barrie’s words or give additional meaning to the text. The appeal of this edition lies in the clever and visually pleasing design of the MinaLima studio. Although Peter is presented as a rather ambiguous figure in the text, as he employs questionable methods to lead the “Lost Boys”, for instance, solely feeding them off of imaginary meals for multiple days, MinaLima visually represents Peter Pan very positively, in reference to his depiction in the 1953 Disney movie Peter Pan. By including these references to pop culture, adopting Disney’s iconography and Peter’s signature silhouette (Att. C), while employing a historical look, with gold-leaf-framed imagery and golden lettering on the cover of the book (Att. D), MinaLima created illustrations with high recognition value without compromising on the exclusive, nostalgic and historical feeling that fits with J.M. Barrie’s original story of Peter and Wendy. At this point it is also important to mention that this edition’s title was altered to be equivalent to the Disney movie, enforcing its recognition value not in an iconologic but semiotic way.
In conclusion, we can see that the interactive illustrations created by MinaLima for Harper Collins’s reprint of J.M.Barrie’s Peter Pan create a new sense of spatiality in the experience of the storyworld. By including a fold-out map that anchors the relations of locations in the text visually, the designers utilise the book’s peritext in order to underline the original narrative while referencing to elements of pop culture. In this way, a multiplicity of meanings are created through intermediality, so that the reader can immerse themself, going back and forth between image and text, while tracing the transactions between the different media. Not only does this transmedial experience enhance the accessibility of the story but also invites us to explore the book with the same curiosity as the Darling children discover Neverlan
Works Cited
Bauer, Patricia, and Cathy Lowne. “Peter Pan.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 17 Oct. 2018, www.britannica.com/topic/Peter-Pan-play-by-Barrie.
Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan (Illustrated with Interactive Elements). Edited by Minalima Ltd, Harpercollins Publishers Inc, 2015.
Meunier, Christophe. “The Cartographic Eye in Children’s Picturebooks: Between Maps and Narratives.” Children's Literature in Education, vol. 48, no. 1, 2016, pp. 21–38., doi:10.1007/s10583-016-9302-6.
Sipe, Lawrence R. “How Picture Books Work: A Semiotically Framed Theory of Text-Picture Relationships.” SpringerLink, Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers, 1998, link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1022459009182.
