| His Dark Materials Illuminated: Detroit: Wayne State UP, ISBN 0-8143-3207-2 pp. 242 Review
by William Gray, Reader in Literary History and Hermeneutics, For the most part this collection of essays on Philip Pullman's HDM (= His Dark Materials ) lives up to the very high praise given in the blurbs. Unlike some recent collections of essays on the Harry Potter books, the standard of this collection tends to be consistently high (some of the Harry Potter essays are, to be fair, excellent). This book, which was brought to completion by Carole Scott, builds on the work of the late Millicent Lenz, originally begun in her chapter on Pullman in the book she co-wrote with Peter Hunt, Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (Continuum, 2001) . Pullman's work has started so many lines of enquiry (literary-historical, ethical, scientific, metaphysical and theological, to name but a few) that it is arguably beyond the scope of any single scholar to deal with them all. The value of this collection is that scholars with a variety of specialisms (though they seem mostly to work in English departments) have come together to address some of the ‘big' issues which are raised by HDM , and which, as Pullman has suggested, can only be adequately dealt with these days in children's books. Whatever your particular take on the complex phenomenon of HDM (and indeed of “Philip Pullman”), you will almost certainly find something relevant, engaging and insightful in this collection. Millicent Lenz's introduction is ambitious, existentially engaging and even moving in its claims. She asserts that in HDM Pullman has given readers “a myth about a transformation of consciousness” (4) that is in a way analogous to Wagner's Ring cycle. The Wagner analogy may not please everyone, but it does give a sense of the enormous power and scope of a vision that asks to be set alongside (mutatis mutandis) Milton and Blake. We are dealing here with a truly grand narrative – which of course raises the complex issue of Pullman's relation to postmodernism (an issue which Anne-Marie Bird's essay helpfully addresses); and with an imperative that is existential: “human beings must [and not “might”, as Lenz had previously written] evolve towards a higher level of consciousness” (6). The essays have been (fairly roughly) divided into three sections, with helpful introductions; perhaps this reflects the obsession with the number three that Lisa Hopkins claims to find in Pullman's work. The first section (“Reading Fantasy, Figuring Human Nature”) is perhaps more heterogeneous than the other sections. Along with Hopkins's piece “Dyads or Triads? HDM and the Structure of the Human”, it contains: an essay by Maude Hines which uses ideas from Althusser, Bourdieu and Pêcheux to discuss the role of ideology within Pullman's work (though it doesn't really seem to address – in the way that work on “the Harry Potter phenomenon” perhaps has to address – the issue of the ideological positioning of Pullman's work, and of his readers); a piece by Margaret Mackey on the affective element in the experience of reading (I'd like to know more about Gelernter – there are parenthetical page references, but no text in the bibliography to link them to); and a close reading of HDM by Lauren Shohet as dense and subtle as Kirjava's fur, to use an analogy from The Amber Spyglass that Shohet herself refers to (26). Probably Shohet's essay (“Reading Dark Materials”) could have figured equally well in the second section, entitled “Intertextuality and Revamping Traditions”. This is a rather loosely linked group of essays held together by a broadly understood notion of intertextuality. At times there seems to be a slight blurring of focus in terms of the target audience, perhaps inevitably, given the breadth of readership at which this volume is presumably aimed. Sometimes the exposition is rather more descriptive than at other times, and there seems to be a slight uncertainty as to what the writer can take for granted in the reader. A certain fluctuation about what to expect from the reader can even be felt within the same essay, as for example when Burton Hatlen feels compelled not only to fill us in on who Dorothy Sayers and the Inklings were, but also to engage in an interpretation-history of Paradise Lost - relevantly and usefully, though a little more on Stanley Fish might have helped. For my money – doubtless unsurprisingly, given my job description and my fondness for George MacDonald – the most fascinating essay in this section (and perhaps the book as a whole) is Shelley King's “‘Without Lyra we would understand neither the New nor the Old Testament': Exegesis, Allegory, and Reading The Golden Compass ”. Without claiming any conscious intention on Pullman's part, King wants to link Lyra's name to the thirteenth century scholar Nicholas of Lyra, whose interpretation theory seems to fit uncannily well with the interpretation theory implicit in discussions of how to read the alethiometer. There are different levels of meaning accessible to different kinds of interpretation by different sorts of reader (“innocent” child readers versus “experienced” scholars). This applies of course to HDM as a whole, and, according to King, links Pullman to George MacDonald who, in both theory (“The Fantastic Imagination”) and practice, is foremost among those writers “who trust the ability of the child to interpret meaningfully texts beyond simple comprehension” (110). The third section, entitled “Pullman and Theology, Pullman and Science Fiction” seems in fact to be more concerned with the former pairing. Even Andrew Leet's essay on “Rediscovering Faith through Science Fiction” is actually more about theological issues. Anne-Marie Bird's essay ‘Circumventing the Grand Narrative: Dust as an Alternative Theological Vision in HDM ” seeks through a kind of Derridian reading of Dust to clarify Pullman's relation to the postmodern scepticism about grand narratives. Pat Pinsent offers an intriguing overview of the similarities between Pullman's (anti)theological position and feminist theology. I suspect that she may rather underplay the differences between those feminists who reject, and those who wish in some way to recuperate, “the Christian tradition” (I remember once witnessing an encounter between Daphne Hampson and Rosemary Ruether that was far from irenic). Pinsent's conclusion is that Pullman is essentially a “kindred spirit”, if only he could quietly drop the “somewhat debatable” (209) “Republic of Heaven” and learn to “revalue the more profound spiritual insights that are latent already within religious and spiritual sources” (209). The latter phrase is so general (or “broad”) as to sidestep the crucial problem for any dissident theology, whether feminist or “radical”: what to say/do about “the Church”? Pullman may wish to distance himself from historical Gnosticism on account of its “Platonist” (actually “Manichaean”) tendencies to a matter/spirit dualism; the real problem, however, is one of authority, and on that score Pullman shows himself to be clearly Gnostic by seeking such salvation as he can find extra ecclesiam . Mary Harris Russell in “Pullman's Eve Variations”, the final essay in the collection, seems to me to put the matter correctly when she writes: Certainly Blake and the German Romantics whom Pullman knows so well were familiar with these [Gnostic] traditions. … Pullman fits comfortably into the position of a Gnostic outsider, interrogating authority, and he has chosen to retell a myth where this outsider point of view will make for the most dramatic reversals (212). Any retelling of the myth of the Fall, which reverses the traditional positioning of Eve, will have “larger ideological consequences”, Russell claims. After an excursus through non-canonical writings from early Christian and Jewish traditions in order to illustrate how the original Eve figure was downgraded by the likes of Tertullian, Russell tries to show how these early Eve-figures (including, interestingly, Lilith) can be related to the Eve-figures in HDM - Marisa Coulter, Mary Malone and of course Lyra. These Eve variations culminate in a vision that is hard to contain within the confines of any ecclesiastical context, no matter how “broad”: Lyra, the new Eve, is breaking through his [the Authority's] boundaries. Freeing the dead, she breaks out of an enclosed territory instead of being expelled from one, as was the traditional Eve (220). William Gray |