Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann

by William Gray

This book shows how the fantasy tradition culminating in Pullman's His Dark Materials inherits the Romantic quest to transpose spiritual and moral values, once the prerogrative of organized religion, into new myths. Wary both of escapist fantasy and 'grand narratives', it explores how stories can generate a new vision.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Criticism

215 pages, Hardcover

First published December 15, 2008

About the author

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There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Wesley Schantz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth, by William Gray, makes the case for extending the critical conversation around Pullman's works to encompass more of his precursors (Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann) than any other study I've yet encountered, though Blake's Songs and the other amplifications of Kleist and Milton on Genesis, explicitly referenced by Pullman's postscript to The Amber Spyglass, do not come substantially into the analysis. Thus, the book breaks new ground, and yet for all its originality, it may end up dancing around the most important places to look for an understanding of Pullman's project. Its value and its limitations are inseparably bound together. Well worth reading, it invites further inquiry along the paths it opens up.

Gray's 2009 book is profound and philosophical--and quite densely written. Building on his study of the "anxiety of influence" between Pullman, Lewis, and MacDonald (available on Mythlore), 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 dissertation on Gadamer, representing a fuller elaboration of these ideas, is also available online). 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.

[Jayden King · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful critical analysis of some of the most important authors of fantastic literature (with a postscript on Harry Potter, for good measure). It is very in depth and quite dense, so probably not for casual reading. Anyone interested in a deeper study of the fantastic and faery stories, particularly with regard to the construction of myth, will find a lot of use from this book.