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Jan. 6th, 2009
You can tell that I am taking my own advice and working through the reviews and essays in the online Bookforum.
I shall spare you my observations on William Eggleston, Marcia Tucker, and Seven Days in the Art World, but given the dominant interests of the core readership of the joculum blog (Counterforces is another story) I need to ask a question:
Can someone (and more to the point, will someone) enlighten me as to whether Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials really does end with a scene straight out of German Romanticism? I am startled to find, in the review of Laura Miller’s skeptical adventures in Narnia, a programmatic approach that is borrowed directly from Kleist’s “On the Puppet Theatre”:
“Miller takes as her guide Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, using a triadic structure parallel to the one mapped out for its twelve-year-old protagonist. In Pullman’s work, Lyra Belacqua acquires an instrument known as an alethiometer, a mechanism resembling a compass that yields information about the past, present, and future. Lyra is at first a nimble reader of the device, decoding its symbols and perceiving the truths conveyed in its bursts of beauty. As she matures, however, she can no longer rely on her instincts, and her skills quickly deteriorate. At the end of the story, a divine being tells her that she can regain her initial talent through work, ‘after a lifetime of thought and effort.’
….
“Refusing to give up on her first love, Miller is driven by racing energy and a passion that turns incandescent as she undertakes to “recapture the old enchantment.” She decides to try to reenter paradise by embracing Pullman’s idea of ‘thought and effort’: ‘What if I decided to know even more, to learn more, about how the Chronicles came to be written and all the various ways they have been and can be read? Then I might arrive “somewhere at the back” and find a door open. Not the original one, not the wardrobe itself, but another kind of door, perhaps, with a different version of paradise on the other side.’”
I got myself into all this by following the link from Erik Davis’ review of the collected poems of Jack Spicer, a review that ends with the revelation that Spicer and Robert Duncan were roommates with Philip K. Dick at one point, after which Spicer and Dick seem to have followed the same topics and had structurally similar ideas more or less concurrently but independently.
I shall spare you my observations on William Eggleston, Marcia Tucker, and Seven Days in the Art World, but given the dominant interests of the core readership of the joculum blog (Counterforces is another story) I need to ask a question:
Can someone (and more to the point, will someone) enlighten me as to whether Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials really does end with a scene straight out of German Romanticism? I am startled to find, in the review of Laura Miller’s skeptical adventures in Narnia, a programmatic approach that is borrowed directly from Kleist’s “On the Puppet Theatre”:
“Miller takes as her guide Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, using a triadic structure parallel to the one mapped out for its twelve-year-old protagonist. In Pullman’s work, Lyra Belacqua acquires an instrument known as an alethiometer, a mechanism resembling a compass that yields information about the past, present, and future. Lyra is at first a nimble reader of the device, decoding its symbols and perceiving the truths conveyed in its bursts of beauty. As she matures, however, she can no longer rely on her instincts, and her skills quickly deteriorate. At the end of the story, a divine being tells her that she can regain her initial talent through work, ‘after a lifetime of thought and effort.’
….
“Refusing to give up on her first love, Miller is driven by racing energy and a passion that turns incandescent as she undertakes to “recapture the old enchantment.” She decides to try to reenter paradise by embracing Pullman’s idea of ‘thought and effort’: ‘What if I decided to know even more, to learn more, about how the Chronicles came to be written and all the various ways they have been and can be read? Then I might arrive “somewhere at the back” and find a door open. Not the original one, not the wardrobe itself, but another kind of door, perhaps, with a different version of paradise on the other side.’”
I got myself into all this by following the link from Erik Davis’ review of the collected poems of Jack Spicer, a review that ends with the revelation that Spicer and Robert Duncan were roommates with Philip K. Dick at one point, after which Spicer and Dick seem to have followed the same topics and had structurally similar ideas more or less concurrently but independently.