Saturday, November 14, 2020

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.

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Postscript: School's Out

On the still-fairly-new site, Video Game Academy, I'm planning a series of posts on games in literature, have been for some time, and will get around to them soon. There's also a debrief on the Zelda class and the Final Fantasy VI discussions to add to the mix. 

As a coda to this remarkably old blog, though, I thought I'd sum up in a general way some of what's been going on since the spring. 

I had a trove of Spanish books given to me by the organizer of the Friday conversation club which no longer meets at a restaurant whose owners retired. 

I taught that Zelda class on Outschool, the uber of ed, filling section after section and adding more and more to meet the demand, until I've found myself wondering if talking about video games this way could make a living.

Similarly, I had my classes at the community college fill enough to run them for the first time, getting to teach Spanish online, although not the book discussion on Don Quijote

The Twitch channel for Signum University has been the home for Signum Academy for many moons now, and looks like it will continue to be for the foreseeable future. 

When schools reopen this fall, it looks like it will be online, mainly, and so will subbing be. In case jobs become more scarce, however, and in the hopes of having a real job again at a school, whatever that means now, I'm working towards a teaching certificate, more than a decade into teaching. So far, it's all that I imagined it would be. At some point I'll have more to say on that.

Like everyone else, I've been listening to more Black voices, more podcasts and books on tape, participating in more book clubs. My favorites, the hosts of Still Processing, have made me think a lot about color, culture, Shakespeare in the park, Lemonade and Marmalade. 

If I can, I'll try to get going again on my podcasts, incorporating some of what I'm learning into my process. But mostly I have been keeping busy being a dad. 

Friday, February 14, 2020

Gamecool Books: The Amber Spyglass

The Gamecool Books podcast turns to The Amber Spyglass, the concluding volume in His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman. Long-form discussions of the intertextual goodness branching out from the book in all directions, and of the depiction of consciousness at its heart, will be posted on a weekly-or-so basis, along with conversations with other fans and scholars. This page will also be updated with recommended additional reading to accompany our deep dive into Pullman's work. I welcome any questions or comments. Enjoy!

Ep 56: A Novel Answer
Ch 1 The Enchanted Sleeper
Ch 2 Balthamos and Baruch
"The Man Who Walked with God: Philip Pullman's Metatron, the Biblical Enoch, and the Apocrypha," John Haydn Baker. In Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Barfield and Cox ed.


Ch 3 Scavengers
Ch 4 Ama and the Bats
Coleridge, "The Knight's Tomb"
Dickinson, "She lay as if at play"

Ep 58: Conversation with Leanna on BBC/HBO His Dark Materials
Ch 5 The Adamant Tower
Ch 6 Preemptive Absolution
Ch 7 Mary, Alone
from Milton, Paradise Lost bk. I, III, VII
I Ching, Wilhelm trans. and commentary


Ch 8 Vodka


Ch 10 Wheels


Ch 12 The Break
Ch 13 Tialys and Salmakia
Spenser, Faerie Queene I.9 
Blake, The Little Girl Lost

Ch 14 Know What It Is
Ch 15 The Forge


Ch 16 The Intention Craft
Ch 17 Oil and Lacquer


Ch 18 The Suburbs of the Dead
Ch 19 Lyra and Her Death


Ch 20 Climbing
Ch 21 The Harpies
Dickinson, I gained it so 
Byron, Venice letter to John Murray Apr 2, 1817


Ch 22 The Whisperers
Ch 23 No Way Out
Milton, Paradise Lost bk. I





Millicent Lenz - Philip Pullman [essay/chapter in Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction]
As Lyra and Roger read of the scholars in the crypt at Jordan: requiescant in pace

Ch 24 Mrs Coulter in Geneva
Ch 25 Saint-Jean-Les-Eaux
Ezekiel 16