Look, I don’t have anything against Philip Pullman. A lot of people whose reading tastes I share and respect have adored his books; I just have yet to read any of them. The Golden Compass is one of those titles that’s perennially on my “to read” pile, and one day it will fight its way to the top, after which I can decide if I have any bones to pick with C.S. Lewis’s self-proclaimed adversary, or if I want to pick up the next book. Maybe I’ll even do both.
I know it’s not in vogue in these days to grant the validity of a position you don’t share, but I understand Pullman’s critique of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, and I respect the heck out of the fact that his chosen method of rebuttal was to write his own novels (which, again, I have yet to read, but one day will, really). This is how art facilitates great cultural conversations. (Although it is a shame that Lewis (1898-1963) and Pullman (b. 1946) were never contemporary enough to directly exchange a few characteristic, sharp-witted and sharper-penned intellectual ripostes.)
What I just can’t wrap my head around is Pullman’s much more puzzling comments about J.R.R. Tolkien, as expressed in his recent interview in The New Yorker. Here’s the relevant portion, excerpted in full:
[Pullman]: Like everybody else in the sixties, I read “The Lord of the Rings” and was temporarily impressed, but I didn’t read any other fantasy.
Why do you say “temporarily” impressed?
[Pullman]: Because it didn’t take me very long to see through it. The world of J.R.R. Tolkien is a world without sexuality in it. I can’t help comparing it with Wagner’s “Ring,” a much greater work in every conceivable way, which is actually throbbing with sexual understanding and sexual passion and so on.
There’s none of that in “The Lord of the Rings.” It’s as if they had their children by a courier or something: please send a boy child by Federal Express to Mrs. Blah blah blah. And once you’re aware that that’s missing, you can then see the other gaps in it. He doesn’t do any sort of speculative thinking about what’s good and what’s evil. The only interesting character in that way is Gollum, but it’s not interesting enough. It’s nowhere near as interesting as the books of realistic fiction that I was reading. You read “Middlemarch,” that’s a real story about real human beings. It’s about the kind of things that you know when you’re young and you discover when you’re growing up and you’ll learn when you’re old. But, orcs and hobbits, they don’t tell you anything at all. It’s very, very thin stuff. No nourishment in it.
It’s not Pullman’s dislike of Tolkien that’s hard to credit–Tolkien’s not for everybody, I get it–nor is it his preference for more realist literature with plenty of sexual throbbing. These are matters of taste. And sure, Pullman also raises some worthwhile questions here about the relative merits of various kinds of literature and their purposes, all of which are worth debating.
No, the line that puzzles me, the line that belies Pullman’s critique itself as “very, very thin stuff” (a little like butter scraped over too much bread) is this one:
[Tolkien] doesn’t do any sort of speculative thinking about what’s good and what’s evil.
This may be one of the silliest things ever said about literature. Here are a few comparable assertions one might make:
- “The magic in Harry Potter has no whimsy or wonder.”
- “Shakespeare doesn’t do any sort of poetic thinking about language.”
- “Jane Austen can’t turn a sentence to save her life.”
In other words, this particular statement of Pullman’s is less a thesis than an absurd antithesis of one of a literary work’s defining characteristics.
(For a thorough discussion of Tolkien’s “speculative thinking about what’s good and what’s evil,” see Tom Shippey’s Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000), Chapter 3, “The Lord of the Rings: Concepts of Evil.” Or if you’d prefer something more recent and clickable, see Megan N. Fontenot’s “One Ring to Rule Them All,” a detailed examination of Tolkien’s development of the nature and symbolism of the One Ring).
Whether this is willful ignorance, intentional provocation, or careless blathering on Pullman’s part, who knows? Whatever it is, it’s not the kind of thoughtlessness one expects of a person of reputed intellect. Sadly, he doesn’t seem to have done any sort of thinking about it all.
But don’t worry. I do still plan to get around to reading The Golden Compass. One day.