The Power of Narrative: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy and Postmodern Cultural Discourse
Faculty Mentor Doryjane Birrer and Student Melissa Glasscock
Project Background
Our project began with the assumption that narrative is central to human experience and culture. As Simon Malpas puts it, “our understanding of the world is made up of the numerous different ways in which we discuss and experience it” (37). Narratives arising, for example, from the discourses of philosophy, religion, and science can support and sustain us while we imbue the stories of our lives with meaning; such narratives can also “overwrite” our thoughts and behaviors, constraining our critical thinking and compromising our human agency—our ability to make choices and act independently as responsible citizens. Our project was fundamentally involved with the study of narrative in these contexts through the lens of English novelist Philip Pullman’s subversive postmodern fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000). Overall, we were interested in analyzing how Pullman’s fictional narratives draw on, critique, and/or revise particular literary and cultural narratives in order to explore the power of narrative—for good and for ill—in shaping human experience.
Summer Research and Objectives
Throughout the summer, we synthesized a substantial body of primary and secondary materials that helped us to establish the ways in which Pullman’s trilogy can be read in the context of postmodern narrative theory: that is, in the context of Pullman’s explorations of the power of literary and cultural narratives and the discourses through which they are structured. Pullman encompasses in his postmodern narrative engagements a startling number of literary and cultural discourses and intertexts (texts Pullman alludes to, incorporates directly, or revises), ranging from John Keats’ concept of Negative Capability, to Christian theology related to the Fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden, to Chinese cosmology associated with the I-Ching, to the metaphysical essays of Heinrich von Kleist, to philosophical determinism(s), to quantum physics, to abnormal psychology. As a result, our research had a strong interdisciplinary component (typical of postmodern narrative theory) and allowed us to flesh out a number of productive contexts within which to analyze, via Pullman’s texts, the positive and negative functions of an ostensibly disparate, but intriguingly interrelated range of discourses, narratives, and metanarratives within culture.
Our project presupposed that insights developed through the analysis of literary narratives and discourses can be usefully extended to the analysis of the cultural narratives and discourses shaping the “real” world: a fundamental assumption and objective of postmodern narrative theory, and an idea central to the valuation of literary study more broadly. A corollary objective of our project was therefore that the synthesis of our research would inform not only fresh scholarly readings of Pullman’s trilogy from a “literary” standpoint, but would also contribute to the critically/politically oriented postmodern civic discourse and critiques of culture promoted by postmodern narrative theory from a real-world standpoint. In short, just as Pullman explores the power of narrative to support and sustain, as well as to constrain and overwrite individual lives, we explored the power of Pullman’s narrative to inquire into and/or challenge the grounds of real-world cultural discourses and their associated mythologies and practices in the service of promoting newly imagined possibilities for human agency and experience.
We also strove to connect our analysis to the work of an increasing number of scholars directing sustained theoretical scholarly attention toward the literary fantastic and children’s and young adult literature, genres within which Pullman’s work has been situated, and which have often been perceived as outliers of literary and academic canons. “Now we can look at the fantastic,” argues Lucie Armitt, “as a form of writing which is about opening up subversive spaces within the mainstream rather than ghettoizing fantasy by encasing it within genres” (3). Of particular interest is the aptitude of fantasy “for the literary exploration of socio-political subversions” (Armitt 2), in part because fantasy narratives have a relationship with “the unsaid and the unseen . . . that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over . . . ” (Jackson 4). Our work on Pullman in the context of postmodern narrative theory was directly in line with this latter interest. The trilogy also made for a particularly interesting case study with regard to audience and genre, as the final book in Pullman’s trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, won England’s prestigious Whitbread Award for fiction in both the children’s and adult categories—the first book in the history of the award to do so.
Future Plans
See Melissa Glasscock's Power of Narrative website for more about the project and for wide-ranging resources on Pullman's work, including the its use in the classroom. |