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"Handling" Wonder: Tools, Tasks, and the Enchantment of Materialistic Engagement in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.2022.0022

1080-6563

Siddharth Pandey,

Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

"Handling" Wonder:Tools, Tasks, and the Enchantment of Materialistic Engagement in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy Siddharth Pandey (bio) The centrality of objects to alternative universes can be most palpably surmised from the plethora of titles feeding the fantasy canon. From J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara to Jonathan Stroud's The Amulet of Samarkand, countless fantasies ceaselessly devote special value to nonhuman materiality in thriving, sentient terms. The genre's mobilization of things often takes place in synchronization with human work, the overall effect of which produces a sense of enchantment both within the text as well as in the reader's mind. This article studies the link between human efforts and man-made objects in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000), whose three installments include The Golden Compass (the American title for the British Northern Lights), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. It argues that meticulous expressions of practiced labor in the form of embodied tasks are key to the particular sense of magical wonder being worked out by Pullman. While much critical attention has been paid to the series' human-animal relationships in order to understand its specific variety of enchantment, not to mention the role of philosophical and theological debates therein, a detailed study of human gestures in concert with the titular tools is conspicuously absent. Leaning on fresh theories of materialistic engagement hitherto unused in children's literature research and literary research in general, the article lays bare the intricate mechanisms that undergird the trilogy's tool-based activities. It creatively brings the insights of the British anthropologist Tim Ingold and American sociologist Richard Sennett to bear upon Pullman's [End Page 224] politics of doing, making, and haptic flourishing, in order to account for a highly practiced and performed sense of "wonder." According to Brian Attebery, "wonder" is "key to fantasy's impact" (16); this article argues that the relationship between Pullman's objects and their users is key to eliciting this feeling of wonder. It analyzes all three eponymous instruments by concentrating on their primary human and animal users. In the context of the first instrument, the "golden compass," also known as the "alethiometer," we find that its seemingly "intuitive" deployment by Lyra Belacqua is connected to her rhythmic immersion in realistic, skillful labor. Next, Will Parry's plying of the magical "subtle knife" is shown to comprise synchronized mental attentiveness and hand movements, illustrating the often repeated precept of materialistic engagement theory that the human hand works in concert with the human mind. The depiction of the third instrument, the "amber spyglass" used by Mary Malone, exceeds the complexity of the first two, in that the instrument is not only portrayed in terms of its work but also its making. Such portrayal, however, again emphasizes human technique in the form of an intensely haptic practice, thus generating a sense of enchantment around the practices of the body. But before beginning with a case-by-case assessment, the article briefly establishes a theoretical framework that ties together the various ideas of wonder, practice and tool use to guide the subsequent analysis. Tools of Wonder, Wonder of Tools In his influential critical work Strategies of Fantasy, Brian Attebery provides one of the most useful definitions of wonder, an otherwise slippery and subjective concept to theorize. Arguing that "wonder is key to fantasy's impact," Attebery explains that fantasy operates through the "fantastic mode to produce the impossibilities," which implies the supernatural, "and the mimetic, to reproduce the familiar" (16), which taps into the realistic. With the combination of these two modes, the genre "offers the possibility of generating not merely a meaning but an awareness of and a pattern for meaningfulness. This we call wonder" (16–17). Wonder, in Attebery's terminology, is innately connected to the notion of meaning-making, which chiefly points to the act of gaining and making knowledge. While Attebery is speaking for the...