Nir Stern
Modern Israel is dotted with remnants of antiquity, and not only of the biblical kind. From the Hellenistic palace of Herod the Great in the south to the surprising cameo of Helios in the mosaic floor of the Sepphoris synagogue in the north, the influence of the Graeco-Roman culture in the area can be easily recognized. One shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, to come across the site of Caesarea Philippi up on the Golan Heights and the adjacent remains of a temple devoted to the Greek god Pan where once upon a time a spring gushed forth into one of the Jordan river sources.[i] Yet it was surprising to come across a new exhibition at the Israel Museum devoted to the connection between Pan the god and J. M. Barrie’s Pan the eternal adolescent and his numerous adaptations in contemporary popular culture. It would appear that, on my return home to Israel this summer, I brought back with me something of the United Kingdom (pixie dust?).
Peter and Pan is a modest exhibition consisting of one main gallery and five smaller rooms which takes about half an hour to cover.
The main gallery leads you through statues and reliefs (plus one well-preserved fresco and a modern painting by Rubens) tracking the transformation of Pan from his initial image as the wild goat god, through the half-man half-goat phase, to the idealized adolescent of the Hellenistic period whose two small horns are almost completely covered by gracefully-falling locks. This last image is the one we take with us to the smaller rooms, which make the jump from antiquity to nineteenth/twentieth century England and the figure of Peter Pan in literature, theatre, and film.[ii]
If you know nothing about the god Pan, the main gallery offers a solid idea of his myth and cult in antiquity. The different artifacts range in date from the fifth century BCE to the second-century CE, stem from different places around the Mediterranean and are all accompanied by explanations in Hebrew and English. In attempt to create an in situ experience, some of the gallery walls are covered by the work of photographer Laura Lachman, a set of woodland or open field images that creates the illusion of looking at the god in his natural Arcadian abode. This main gallery is also accompanied by the first chapter in the exhibition’s catalogue, a collection of four scholarly articles (112 pp.) written especially for the exhibition.[iii]
In the next room you can watch a video that recaps the transformation of the god and moves on to tell how Barrie invented his Pan and why this reincarnation of this almost forgotten god enjoyed such acclaim in ninteenth century England. It also illustrates ties between some characteristics of Pan the god and Pan the figment of Barrie’s imagination.
This is the most important part of the exhibition and at the same time its weakest point.
This particular visitor (and three others) found the explanation a tad lacking: we are told that Barrie was familiar with the classics and the myth of Pan; that in a rapidly industrializing England, Arcadian Pan provided a refuge of sorts; but the video is too short to cover the issues comprehensively. Importantly, I felt, we do not know why Pan was preferred over any other nature-related god. Nonetheless, for a small exhibition, the video does make the connection in a good enough manner, and for the curious folk, the catalogue will fill in the gaps – both about the wider social and cultural phenomenon of Edwardian England (“the Edwardian Pan cult”), and about Pan as puer-aeternus, a figure Barrie associated with his brother, who, dying at the age of 14, was to remain a child forever.
One more thing touched upon by both the video and the first room (which is engaged with modern literature and theatre) is how the duality of Pan’s nature was also manifested in the duality in the nature of Peter.
For the Victorians and Edwardians, nature was a place of refuge from the dreary industrialized city, yet it was also a dangerous force. Likewise, in antiquity, Pan could have been both a protecting shepherd and a hunter, ‘slayer of beast’ (as in his Homeric hymn).
Fertility and abundance were in his purview, yet he could just as well inflict madness –panika – as the Athenians believed he did in the battle of Marathon and hence adopted him as once of the city’s more important gods. And so was Peter, on the one hand, joyous and merry, calming and soothing when playing his syrinx (the Pan flute adopted from his mythic ancestor as well), brave and protecting of lost children; yet on the other hand, he was the kidnapper of children, killer of pirates, and would maybe even “thin the lines” of his lost boys when they grew too old or too many. Ultimately, the darker tones in Peter’s character have been lost. It has been a while since I watched Disney’s adaptation of the story, yet I do not recall anything too shady in that Peter’s nature. In Hook (directed by Spielberg and featuring Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman), Peter Pan can be callous, but only because he is now a grown man. Later audiences, it seems, are less tolerant of the dual, more complex, nature that stems from the mythic Pan.
Barrie’s Peter shares this lack of duality in one aspect. Mythical Pan had an ambivalent sexual nature – again, like Nature itself, sometimes benevolent, sometimes wild and violent. Peter, however, is sexless and even resentful of adult sexuality (is this because he is himself a child, reflecting the Victorian image of childhood as a pre-fallen state preceding sexual awareness? Or, is it because of Barrie’s unconsummated marriage and childless death? Neither the exhibition nor the catalogue makes any suggestions. This asexuality, however, sets Peter even more so in this liminal space where the different stories locate him (i.e. an island in the Serpentine river in Kensington Gardens or Neverland).
A liminal space, or rather liminality, which he shares with the outsider god Pan, lord of the eschatiai – the liminal spaces outside of our reality.
The Edwardians, it would seem, might have longed for nature and to replace their modern grey surrounding with it, yet they also understood that this Arcadia was now out of reach.
As the title explicitly states, this exhibition is about reception. In a way, even the main gallery, devoted to Pan in antiquity, follows the reception of the god (cult and image) in the different periods and cultures of the ancient world (even though the focus is on transformation here and so, for instance, the first item the visitor encounters is a statue from the second century that simply agrees with the initial image of the god). The final three rooms of the exhibition (and the two final chapters of the catalogue) engage with the modern reception, the incarnations of Pan as Peter Pan in literature, theatre, and cinema, and the transformations of the story and character within these respective fields. Thus we follow on from the illustrations that were sanctioned by Barrie himself for the first two illustrated versions of the story – painted by Arthur Rackham in 1906 and Francis Donkin Bedford in 1911 – and those artists’ approach to the text, to a much later edition from 1980, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, and the changes that occurred in the image of Peter (in general, and in respect to the story’s new status as one meant for adolescents).[iv]
It seems to me that, while the reception of Pan in Barrie’s age, “the Edwardian Pan cult”, was a return of the god, his environment, and what they stood for in a time in need of escapism, the reception of Peter Pan himself, that is the appropriation of Barrie’s own character, is to do more with the sensibilities of the receiving culture.
If the Edwardians looked to Pan as a symbol to go back to (regardless of the fact that inevitably their Pan was changed), late twentieth-century artists of all kinds came to Peter Pan with an intention to change him and to make him appropriate for their own (and their audiences) tastes.
No one manner of reception, though, is better than the other. While one might claim that Barrie’s Peter was on his own more interesting due to his dual nature, we have today not only this version, but many different ones which aim at the sensibilities of different crowds and thus tell the same story in different ways. This is demonstrated nicely in the last room of the exhibition by way of another piece of video art incorporating clips from various film adaptations. Peter Pan may be the one child that never grows up, but his story, from the Arcadian abodes of the Peloponnese, through the backdrop of the greyish Edwardian England, to the modern silver screen of Hollywood, is ever changing.
Peter and Pan: From Ancient Greece to Neverland runs at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem from 11th June to 12th November 2019. Student admission is about £8. Access is by bus or taxi from various places in the city. If Israel is on your itinerary for the summer and you feel a hankering for some more British and Classical culture, this small exhibition (and the museum in general) is money well spent.
[i] In the Hellenistic period the city was called Paneas because of the god’s association with the site. In modern Hebrew and Arabic it is called Banias (Arabic: بانياس الحولة; Hebrew: בניאס; pronounce bun-yas) and it is beautiful place to visit if you find yourself in the area.
[ii] The curators devoted one room to concomitant advancements made in science and technology and its relationship with popular culture, e.g. the use of microscopes in the search for fairies or the well-known story of the Cottingley Fairies caught on camera in 1917.
[iii] The first two chapters were written by the exhibition curator Rachel Caine Kreinin and portray story of Pan in antiquity and his Edwardian metamorphosis, the third chapter, on the illustrations of Peter Pan in books, was written by Orna Granot, Associate Curator of Children’s Illustrated Books, and the fourth chapter, written by screenwriter, director, and researcher Einat Kapach is about the shift of Peter Pan from the theatre stage to the silver screen. The catalogue is available in both Hebrew and English (but unfortunately cannot be ordered online outside of Israel).
[iv] For instance, Peter was not drawn as a young child anymore, since it became the norm for the age of the illustrated characters to agree with that of the target readers.