Paradise Denied
Philip Pullman & the Uses & Abuses of Enchantment
by Leonie Caldecott
Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, his analysis of the role of fairy tales in nourishing a child’s searchfor meaning, described their importance thus: “More can be learned from them about the inner problems of human beings, and of the right solutions to their predicaments in any society, than from any other type of story within a child’s comprehension. Since the child at every moment of his life is exposed to the society in which he lives, he will certainly learn to cope with its conditions, provided his inner resources permit him to do so.” The child, he wrote a little further on,
needs ideas on how to bring his inner house into order, and on that basis be able to create order in his life. He needs—and this hardly requires emphasis at this moment in our history—a moral education which subtly, and by implication only, conveys to him the advantages of moral behaviour, not through abstract ethical concepts but through that which seems tangibly right and therefore meaningful to him.
Children find “this kind of meaning through fairy tales. Like many other modern psychological insights, this was anticipated long ago by poets. The German poet Schiller wrote: ‘Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.’”
The Anti-Inkling
A case can be made for measuring the fantasy novels of this last decade against those of half a century earlier, produced by a group of writers close to me both geographically (I live near Oxford) and imaginatively. For Oxford is the home of the Inklings, that group of writers whose fictional output during the first half of the twentieth century created a standard for fantasy writing against which every new effort in the field can arguably be measured.
C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams—and behind them the great George MacDonald—all sought to enchant the imagination with new fairy tales built firmly on the foundations of the old stories. But now, curiously, Oxford has also become the home of the first Anti-Inkling.
In January 2002, it was announced that Philip Pullman had won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, one of the most important of English book awards, for The Amber Spyglass. The third novel in the fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, it was the first “children’s novel” to win the award outright.
Previously Pullman had been awarded the prize in the children’s section of the Whitbread, but no children’s novel, under the rules governing the award, had ever been able to win the overall prize among the categories competing. For Pullman, the rules were bent, or broken, and the great accolade was, for the first time in the history of the prize, awarded to a piece of fiction marketed as being for children (though Pullman has recently started to claim that he did not write it as children’s fiction at all).
The novels in the Dark Materials trilogy have enjoyed a popularity second only to that of the Harry Potter series, selling in the hundreds of thousands both in England and the United States, not to mention in countries such as Germany, where they have enjoyed particular success. However, it happens that the novel which has proved such a “first” in the process of taking children’s literature seriously as a genre, contains one of the most distorted and ignorant depictions of Christianity in the history of literature.
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more from the online archives
18.4—May 2005
The Idylls, Idols & Devils That Corrupt the Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian
32.5—September/October 2019
Some Trivial Thoughts on the Study of Philosophy by Graeme Hunter
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