Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth, and Beyond His Dark Materials

These two book-length academic studies of Philip Pullman, Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth, by William Gray, and Beyond His Dark Materials, by Susan Redington Bobby, make the case for extending the critical conversation around Pullman's works to encompass more of his writing, and more of his precursors', than any I've yet encountered. To give a sense of their difference of focus, Gray's subtitle runs Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann; while Bobby's study literally moves beyond Pullman's main trilogy to discuss many of his other stories. Her subtitle, Innocence and Experience in the Fiction of Philip Pullman, suggests the through-line of the argument, though Blake's Songs and the other amplifications of Kleist and Milton on Genesis, explicitly referenced by Pullman's postscript, do not come substantially into the analysis of either scholar. Thus, both books break new ground, and yet for all their originality, both end up dancing around the most important places to look for an understanding of Pullman's project. Their value and their limitations are inseparably bound together. Well worth reading, they invite further inquiry along paths they've opened up.

Gray's 2009 book is the more profound and philosophical--and the more densely written--of the two. Building on his study of the "anxiety of influence" between Pullman, Lewis, and MacDonald, he considers these authors as well as Tolkien and the German Romantics. Each gets a chapter to themselves, with JK Rowling brought in for the postscript, as Gray traces the chronological development of their work and its relation to his core themes of truth and fantasy. Through comparisons among the authors, often juxtaposing their commentary about one another against a fair reading of their own stories, Gray draws out the underlying similarities of this seemingly disparate group. In the background, besides Bloom and his obsession with Voyage to Arcturus, there are a number of theoretical paradigms outrunning my firsthand knowledge, such as Abrams on Natural Supernaturalism, Kristeva on Semiotics, and a whole dialectical tradition which Gray brings together in a kind of robust Christian Platonism. His recovery of authors like Novalis and Hoffmann, tracing their influence on and through MacDonald and the others, makes for an invigorating reappraisal of the well-trodden discussion of mythopoesis in modern fantasy. As carried forward by Pullman in HDM, this complex intertextual mythmaking comes full circle, with Lyra connected to, among others, Alice, Tangle, and Eve (183; "a second Eve" as Russell puts it in Lenz and Scott, 220). With all that said, I come away from the book unsure what, if any, central claim Gray would like to get across. The final section on Pullman wraps up in anticlimactic quibbles with the film version of The Golden Compass; the postscript on Rowling makes the modest case for her inclusion in the fantasy canon, essentially, and by extension the book as a whole seems to argue for the fantasy literature of the past hundred years as being an important one worthy of serious study. Is this a claim anyone still disputes? At any rate, Gray's insightful essays promote and enrich the study of their primary texts with admirable force. 

Published in 2012, Bobby's volume was among the first to place many of Pullman's lesser-known works into an academic framework, and to begin to find in them the same key themes of innocence and experience that underlie his epic retelling of the Fall. In her acknowledgments, Bobby notes that though she had earlier investigated Pullman's "dual audience," the book was written in the midst of a personal chaos, which to my mind amply recommends it to us in the present. Framing Lyra's movement from innocence to experience in terms of betrayal, as foreseen by the Master and as executed by her separation from her daemon, Bobby divides Pullman's works into two classes: under the rubric of innocence come chapters on Mossycoat, Puss in Boots, and Aladdin; The Firework-Maker's Daughter and The Scarecrow and His Servant; Count Karlstein; Spring-Heeled Jack and The New Cut Gang books; under experience, The Sally Lockhart books; I Was a Rat! and How to Be Cool; The Broken Bridge and The White Mercedes; and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Plainly, it's a lot of ground to cover! Aside from Clockwork, the only major works missing are Pullman's two early novels, The Haunted Storm and Galatea. While the latter are understandably left out, being all but unread and almost impossible to find, they would arguably tell us as much as anything about Pullman's ambitions and the range of his own movement from beginning author to master storyteller. Clockwork, for its part, is perhaps "the most perfectly constructed" of Pullman's shorter tales, as he himself contends (in this Q&A from The Guardian). Its omission from the book points up an unfortunate flaw in Bobby's ambitious study: her reduction of innocence and experience to more manageable tropes such as "quest, trial, or betrayal," presumably ruling out Clockwork (3). Her choice to treat Pullman's books as if they fit under one or the other heading, grouping them roughly by genre rather than simply going through them each on their own merits, muddles the presentation. Chapters uneven in their cohesion and convincingness draw on a disparate scholarly literature, from Zipes on fairy tales to Campbell on quests. At times the synthesis works beautifully, as when Bobby (engaging with Gray) elucidates the Romantic opera behind Count Karlstein in its various rewritten versions, or when she draws detailed connections between Don Quixote and The Scarecrow. Best of all are the resonances between Sally Lockhart and Lyra, or between the telling of true stories in the land of the dead and discussion of fiction in The Good Man Jesus. But lacking a more nuanced delineation of innocence and experience, such as that rendered by Blake's influential Songs, and contending with the grave betrayal but not as squarely with the visionary resolution of Lyra's story, Beyond HDM falls a little short.