These resources often deal with issues of genre (typically HDM is categorized as young adult fantasy) and critical interpretation. Several of them deal with the many intertexts that Pullman incorporates in his series, including the poetry of William Blake, John Keats, and John Milton; the works of Heinrich von Kleist and C.S. Lewis; and the Bible and the Apocrypha (particularly Gnostic texts)
Attebury, Brian. "Fantasy and the Narrative Transaction." State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film. Ed. Nicholas Ruddick. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992. 15-28.
In this essay Attebury characterizes fantasy literature as a genre and establishes some of its common characteristics. Attebury notes the tendency of fantasy literature to include marginalized characters or protagonists (e.g. children) and to share roots in myths, legends, and superstition. Fantasy also has a unique feedback system between reader and writer, Attebury says. Perhaps most importantly, "in a fantasy, all our assumptions about natural processes and human behavior are open to question" (17).
Doyle, Tom. “Anti-apocalyptic Fiction.” Strange Horizons May
2002.
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20020527/anti-apocalyptic.shtml
This article defines anti-apocalyptic fiction as using “Christian end times imagery to question the terms of the Christian end-of-the-world vision," and cites HDM as an example.
"First, anti-apocalyptic fiction stresses the undesirability, avoidability or downright silliness of the apocalyptic conflict from a human perspective. The happy ending isn’t winning the final battle, it’s avoiding the final battle altogether. Second, the victor, or at least the protagonist, of the anti-apocalyptic genre is neither of the cosmic forces, but humanity, thus subverting the Christian idea of the triumph of Good without resorting to a simple inversion (the triumph of Evil).’"
Fried, Kerry. "Darkness Visible: An Interview with Philip Pullman." Amazon.com.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=94589
Fried asks Pullman about his favorite characters and the overall development of the trilogy over seven years. Pullman talks specifically about the inspiration he drew from Heinrich von Kleist’s "On the Marionette Theater" on the subject of grace, and goes on to touch upon a number of other subjects. Pullman reiterates why he is not a fan of fantasy:
"I can’t read fantasy either. And I discovered that the reason I don’t is because it doesn’t tell me anything interesting about being a human being. In the world-of-the-dead passage in The Amber Spyglass , Lyra’s fantasy doesn’t satisfy the harpies. They’re only satisfied when she tells them the truth. And I mean that. That’s something which I can put my hand on my heart and say: I believe passionately that that is true and that books which satisfy us and feed us and nourish us have to have this substratum of genuine truth in them. And I don’t see much of that in most fantasy.
I’m not trying to preach in the book, Heaven forbid, all I’m trying to do is tell a story. But if the story does resonate and reverberate in people’s minds and makes them feel certain things, then perhaps that’s to the good."
Lane, Harriet. "Pullman’s progress." The
Observer 10 October 2004.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/childrenandteens/story/0,6000,1323626,00.html
In this short article, Pullman bemoans the poor status of books like HDM:
"But you see,’ he says, ’genre books and books for children are not very well thought of by literary people. It’s as if there’s the literary novels and all the rest are fluff under the bed. Since Modernism, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, we suspect stories. We’re all clever people now, rather too sophisticated to believe in an omniscient narrator any more."
Pullman also talks candidly about his voice as narrator in HDM:
"I’d never written in that tone before. It was sombre, it was cold, and there was a sense of spaciousness. I much prefer to be the omniscient narrator, which is part of the old fairytale tradition and the 19th-century novel tradition: the thing Modernism got away from. Suddenly I had enormous freedom. I didn’t expect that. You see, I’m not a fantasy fan. I’m uneasy to think I write fantasy."
Matthews, Susan. "Rouzing the Faculties to Act: Pullman’s Blake for Children." Lenz, Millicent and Carole Scott. _His Dark Materials_ Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 125-134.
Matthews compares and contrasts Blake with Pullman in great detail, in their use of language and their personal ideology. Pullman “maps the move from innocence to experience onto the process of growing up,” and uses a Lacanian language of separation and loss reminiscent of Blake’s Book of Urizen (134). Most interestingly, Matthews criticizes some of Pullman’s cultural references within HDM (e.g. the Tartars), noting that these references "often seem to invoke cultural stereotype of the darkness and savagery of other cultures" (128). (This is an observation Dr. Birrer and I had made on our own, and the first time I’ve seen another person note it.) Matthews goes on to say that Pullman’s conclusion that we must stay in our own worlds - and that other worlds are sometimes to be feared - doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of his progressive, humanist ideology.
Pullman, Philip. “2005 Hay Festival.” Inteview by Joe Westhorpe. BBC. 2005.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/mid/sites/hay/pages/bp_philippullman.shtml
In this very brief interview, Pullman says that he and his writing are influenced by everything around him, and that he never writes with the audience in mind.
"I never consider the audience at all. I think it’s a great mistake. You might as well set up a focus group and ask them what sort of story they want. They’ll say "One just like the last one we enjoyed." In other words, they haven’t a clue. They can’t think of anything new. It’s the storyteller’s job to think of something new: the audience can’t do it. Think of something new and write it as well as you possibly can, and then write THE END; then pick up another piece of paper, and write CHAPTER ONE."
Pullman, Philip. “Belief: Philip Pullman.” Interview by Joan
Bakewell. BBC Belief Program 2001.
http://darkadamant.betterversion.org/BBC_Belief_Philip_Pullman.txt
Pullman discusses in detail his debt to Paradise Lost, his atheism/agonosticism, his beliefs about religion, and the importance of creating stories and myth as a part of human civilization. Pullman also talks about the responsibilities of the story-teller: “The story is the boss, so the story-teller has to serve the story, no matter how crazy it is.” In regards to writing for young people:
“And when you have a young audience, or an audience which includes young people - I think you have a duty to remember the wisest thing, that Dr Johnson said which is, the only end to writing is to enable the reader better to endure life, or better to enjoy it... The young reader will follow it if the story’s strong enough.”
Pullman, Philip. “His Dark Materials Webchat.” BBC UK.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/hisdarkmaterials/pullman_webchat.shtml
In this webchat Pullman answers a wide variety of questions from fans. He credits William Blake, Colin Wilson and David Lindsay as literary influences, and discusses his inspiration for the alethiometer (and learns from a fan about the Ars Combinatoria).
In explaining how Mary acted as the tempter of Lyra, he says:
“This is the moment when the two children begin to leave their childhood behind and this to my mind is what the story of Adam and Eve is all about. It’s the moment we left our childhood behind and began to grow up.”
Pullman, Philip. “Lexicon Interview.” August 2000.
http://www.avnet.co.uk/amaranth/Critic/ivpullman.htm
(Note: The third book had not been published yet at the time of this
interview.)
Pullman is quizzed about many of his books before finally being asked about HDM. He responds to questions about daemons, the parallel worlds of HDM, the Church, the influence of Paradise Lost, Lyra as the Child of Destiny and Harry Potter (he’s not a huge fan). Pullman also admits his disconnect from fantasy literature:
“In the book that—I suppose it’s fantasy—Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, and in The Amber Spyglass which is coming out in November—what I’ve tried to do there is use the apparatus of fantasy to say something that I think is true about human psychology and about the way we grow up and about the difference between innocence and experience and so on.“
Pullman also discloses that he wrote a “creation myth” for the world of HDM:
“What I did do, though, for the sake of—the one thing I did think important—rather than drawing up a constitution of all the different countries and all the rest of it, and thinking of a detailed economic history, and all that sort of stuff, I did think it was important to have a coherent … I suppose you could call it a myth … an underpinning central creation story for the whole of the trilogy.”
Pullman, Philip. “Talking to Philip Pullman: An Interview by
Wendy Parsons and Catriona Nicholson.” Interview by Wendy Parsons and Catriona
Nicholson. The Lion and the Unicorn 23.1 (1999): 116-134
Link:
Talking to Philip Pullman: An Interview...
(Note: This interview was conducted before Book Three was
finished and published.)
In this interview Pullman describes the influence of Heinrich von Kleist’s essay "On the Marionette Theater" on HDM in great detail:
"[Kleist’s vision of grace] is in contrast to C. S. Lewis’s idea, for example, the Christian idea, that the Fall is a terrible thing; that we are all children of sin, and there’s no hope of doing any good unless we believe in God and then only if he chooses to bless us with his grace. I think that’s a pessimistic and defeatist view, and I don’t like it at all. I much prefer Kleist’s view. This is the theme of the book, of my trilogy. Lyra as the Eve figure."
Pullman addresses the nature of daemons (revealing one’s essence), his anti-sentimental view of childhood, his views on C.S. Lewis (great writer with pernicious influence!), meeting Tolkien and his habits as a writer. He talks more in depth about marketing the trilogy differently (for children or for adults) in different countries and the difference between writing for children and adults:
"The real structural difference between writing for children and writing for adults is that when you’re writing for children, you cannot expect them simply to know as much. That’s all. You expect them to be just as intelligent, just as curious, just as alive to all the story offers, just as capable of being moved by the same sort of things. But they just don’t know as much about the world and about things in general; about human behavior, so you just explain a little more."
Smith, Karen Patricia. "Tradition, Transformation, and the Bold Emergence: Fantastic Legacy and Pullman’s His Dark Materials." Lenz, Millicent and Carole Scott. _His Dark Materials_ Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 135-159.
In this essay, Smith defines high fantasy as containing mythic overtones, battles of good vs. evil, and critical tasks or obstacles to tackle (136). While Pullman dislikes the ideologies of his British fantasy predecessors (like Lewis and Tolkien), he uses many of the same conventions of high fantasy: young protagonists journeying into another world on a dangerous mission, guided by helpful adults to eventually return to their world with new insight or abilities (136). Pullman’s trilogy is unique in some ways, however; compared to other young adult fantasy, Smith argues, Pullman’s main characters (Lyra and Will), face worse danger or threat of injury. The repercussions of traveling to new worlds is depicted, rather than glossed over. To Smith these elements show that Pullman “expects his readers to make a leap in understanding and acquire emotional strength…just as his protagonists do” (145).
“But regardless of individual comfort level, Pullman demands that the reader think, digest, and consider the possibilities and consequences of human behavior in general, and ultimately that which lies within the core of our individual beings” (150).