Reviews 2009
Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann
Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann. William Gray. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 215 pages. £50.00 (hardcover).
Despite Philip Pullman’s endearingly inconsistent claims that His Dark Materials is not fantasy, to readers and critics alike the series represents one of the most notable achievements of mythopoeic fantasy to date. William Gray’s Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth is the most ambitious and detailed demonstration of just how deep Pullman’s trilogy is rooted in the fantasy tradition stretching back through C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald and on to German Idealist authors and philosophers such as Novalis and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Gray argues that His Dark Materials “may be seen as in certain respects the culmination of this tradition of mythopoeic fiction infused with [...] a particular kind of Romanticism.” Such fantasy appropriates “older mythologies in a new key” and addresses “some central religious questions that have major cultural implications” (1).
Gray’s argument is developed in five chapters bracketed by the Prelude and the Postscript. Most of the Prelude is devoted to showing how His Dark Materials can be seen as Pullman’s “high [Romantic] argument,” that is as “his attempt to suggest the possibility of a reconciliation of humanity with itself and with nature in which experience re-appropriates the lost vision of innocence, but on a higher plane” (4). Chapter One, “German Roots and Mangel-wurzels,” explores how German Idealist philosophy helped shape the Romantic worldview, and how, in turn, this worldview and its affirmation of the powers of the creative imagination contributed to the emergence of fantastic supernatural fiction such as that by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis and especially Hoffmann. Gray pays special attention to Hoffmann’s novella The Golden Pot and is right to stress the importance for this tradition of the attraction to “what was dark and ambiguous” (13). Chapter Two, “George MacDonald’s Marvellous Medicine,” explores what happened after the masterpieces of this German tradition became available in England through Thomas Carlyle’s translations. Examining MacDonald’s essays on the imagination and all of his major fiction, Gray compellingly demonstrates how MacDonald “stands on the trajectory that [...] runs from Romanticism to Pullman” (46).
The “essentially Romantic core of [Tolkien’s] myth-making” (61) is discussed in Chapter Three, “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Love of Faery.” Most of the chapter is devoted to Tolkien’s fascination with and attempts at creating pseudo-history, an aspect which has not received sufficient attention in Tolkien scholarship, as Gray correctly points out (83). Chapter Four, “C.S. Lewis: Reality and the Radiance of Myth,” traces the development of Romantic and Platonic ideas in Lewis’s fiction and apologetics from The Pilgrim’s Regress to Till We Have Faces. This is the longest chapter in the book (47 pages), and it pays special attention to how all of Lewis’s work was structured on “a particular experience of intense longing [...] which dominated Lewis’s early life, and which he would later call joy” (104). Chapter Five, “Measuring Truth: Lyra’s Story,” returns to Pullman. By far the best chapter of the book, it offers a dense and detailed examination of the various threads of literary-critical opinions, stylistic devices, plot and character constellations which connect Pullman to Lewis and earlier fantasists in the Romantic mythopoeic tradition. The short Postscript, “Harry Potter, Hogwarts and All,” seems like an afterthought addendum unrelated to the rest of the book.
For all its merits – especially in Chapters Four and Five –Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth is also disappointing. Knowledgeable and erudite, Gray is prone to digressions which seriously weaken, sometimes even obscure his main argument. One effect of this highly digressive style is the impression of a seesaw movement in Gray’s argument, as if he covers the same ground time and time again. Another is a distracting blend of authors, with too much Lewis in the chapter on Tolkien, and too much Pullman in the chapter on Hoffmann. I was also frustrated by what seems to be certain nonchalance about the book’s structure. The Prelude does not lay out how the argument will be developed in the subsequent chapters; the Postscript does not attempt to sum up the book; the various chapters, which seem to have been organized chronologically and by author, have no introductions or conclusions and consist of structurally idiosyncratic sections of varying lengths; the transitions between chapters are so weak that their order seems random. In fact, the order of author names in the title completely reverses the sequence of chapters as they appear in the book. This should not, however, discourage potential readers. For all those who seek to understand the relation between Pullman’s His Dark Materials and earlier mythopoeic fantasies, Gray’s sparklingly digressive and romantically (un)structured work offers, on the whole, some of the most compelling arguments to date.
Lydia Kokkola
University of Turku, Finland
Stories, Pictures & Reality: Two children tell by Virgina Lowe. Review by Arundhati Deosthale.
Novi val nedolžnosti v otroški literaturi: kaj sporočata Harry Potter in Lyra Srebrousta? [A New Wave of Innocence in Children’s Literature: Conservative backlash and the significance of Harry Potter and Lyra Silvermouth] by Lilijana Burcar. Review by Neva Šlibar.
The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal by Elizabeth Thiel. Review by Björn Sundmark.
The Family in English Children’s Literature by Ann Alston. Review by Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer.
Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel by Roberta Seelinger Trites. Review by Roxanne Harde.
The Story and the Self. Children’s Literature: Some Psychoanalytic Perspectives edited by Jenny Plastow. Review by Anto Thomas.
Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature edited by Monika Elbert. Review by Sandra Burr.
Divided Worlds: Studies in Children’s Literature edited by Mary Shine Thompson and Valerie Coghlan. Review by Jane Suzanne Carroll.
Reader Development in Practice: Bringing literature to readers edited by Susan Hornby and Bob Glass. Review by Gillian Lathey.
A Victorian Quartet: Four Forgotten Women Writers by Liz Thiel, Elaine Lomax, Bridget Carrington and Mary Sebag-Montefiore. Review by Andrea Peterson.
Astrid Lindgren – Werk und Wirkung. Internationale und interkulturelle Aspekte. [Astrid Lindgren – Works and Effects. International and intercultural aspects] edited by Svenja Blume, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Angelika Nix. Review by Sara Van den Bossche.
Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature by Kathryn James. Review by Lydia Kokkola.
Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann by William Gray. Review by Lydia Kokkola.
Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada edited by Mavis Reimer. Review by Marek Oziewicz.
Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale edited by Stephen Benson. Review by Michelle Ryan-Sautour.
Owner of the means of instruction? Children’s Literature: some Marxist perspectives edited by Jenny Plastow. Review by Ulf Schöne.
Facets of Children’s Literature Research: Collected and Revised Writings by Göte Klingberg. Review by Björn Sundmark.
Barnlitteraturanalyser[Analyses of Children’s Literature] edited by Maria Andersson and Elina Druker. Review by B.J. Epstein.
