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His Controversial Materials: Philip Pullman and Religious Narrative Identity

2011; University of California, Los Angeles; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

0160-2764

Jessica Garrahy,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Introduction Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a popular fantasy trilogy following the adventures of an adolescent protagonist through parallel worlds, has garnered both fierce praise and ardent opposition in recent years. Pullman’s literary achievements were recognised in 1996 when he was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Medal for the first novel in the trilogy Northern Lights. He concluded his acceptance speech with the declaration: All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions... We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts: we need books, time and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever. This paper will focus on the popular criticism of Pullman’s trilogy and examine the claim that lies at the heart of the controversy, that reading the novels is somehow dangerous to a reader’s religious identity. Through the examination of the popular controversy surrounding His Dark Materials, this work will explore the relationship between stories and religious identity by constructing the concept of religious narrative identity; a framework developed through the application of Ricoeur’s mimetic narrative identity to narratives with religious implications, and will subsequently argue that a narrative has the power to alter an individual’s religious narrative identity. Written over seven years, Pullman’s His Dark Materials is approximately thirteen-hundred pages long and is comprised of the novels Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. The trilogy draws on wide ranging and disparate sources including ancient Greek philosophical concepts, the Bible, John Milton, a Finnish telephone directory, quantum physics, and superstring theory. His Dark Materials follows orphaned Lyra Belacqua as she traverses fantastic worlds in a quest to overthrow the