Review of Death and Fantasy: Essays on Phillip Pullman, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and R.L. Stevenson PDF Free Download
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Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal
Volume 4 Issue 1 Article 34
2010
Review of Death and Fantasy: Essays on Phillip Pullman, C.S. Review of Death and Fantasy: Essays on Phillip Pullman, C.S.
Lewis, George MacDonald, and R.L. Stevenson Lewis, George MacDonald, and R.L. Stevenson
Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson
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Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons
Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Johnson, Kirstin Jeffrey (2010) "Review of Death and Fantasy: Essays on Phillip Pullman, C.S. Lewis,
George MacDonald, and R.L. Stevenson,"
Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal
: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article 34.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55221/1940-5537.1078
Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/cslewisjournal/vol4/iss1/34
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Book Reviews
197
William Gray, Death and Fantasy: Essays on Philip Pullman, C. S. Lewis, George
MacDonald, and R. L. Stevenson (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2008). 136 pages.
$24.99. ISBN 9781847188717.
he majority of critical reviews of William Gray’s Death and Fantasy are
highly laudatory. A number concede that the collection is lacking in cohesion,
the essays on Stevenson do not really fit, there are repetitive passages and quota-
tions, and the copyediting could have been tighter. Nonetheless, most reviewers
praise the work and voice appreciation for Gray’s “magnificent” theology. A jour-
nal that deals extensively with the fantasy genre states that Gray’s collection
proffers a “tantalizing glimpse at how psychoanalytic criticism can be applied to
the analysis of fantasy literature,” giving “new approaches to the study of these
authors.” I am clearly in the minority.
Gray does have some laudable insights and thought-provoking comments.
Perhaps part of my overriding frustration is due to misplaced expectation. The title
and the striking Doré cover indicated a literary study of the titular authors, ad-
dressing the propitious subject of “Death and Fantasy.” However, the introduction
intimates that Gray’s work is not primarily one of literary criticism, but of psy-
choanalysis. A significant portion of the book might be collated under the more
indicative title Reading Fantasy in Light of Kristeva’s ‘Semiotic’ and ‘Pre-
oedipal’ Theories; or perhaps, Psychoanalyzing the Effects of Death Upon Key
Fantasy Authors. Yet my disappointment stems largely from the fact that, al-
though Gray is a scholar of myth and folklore, and although the authors with
whom he engages positively delight in myth and folklore, Gray instead proffers
Freudian psychology.
The claim that this psychoanalytic approach to fantasy is “new” seems noth-
ing less than baffling. It is at least as old as Bettleheim’s Uses of Enchantment
(1976) and has been the dominant approach to MacDonald criticism for almost
four decades. Indeed, Gray seems to have turned back the clock: Wolff’s exces-
sive Freudian readings of MacDonald were eschewed in the 1970s for a long ep-
och dominated by Jungians. Only in recent years are more literary approaches be-
coming prominent as critics begin to consider MacDonald as a literature scholar
and literary mythmaker in constant interplay with mythology, Scripture, Shake-
speare, Dante, Coleridge, and Milton—the last of particular significance in light of
Gray’s collection. MacDonald, Lewis, and Pullman are all forthright in their en-
gagement with Milton: an early fantasist who dealt in depth with the concept of
death. Yet, while acknowledging the latter two as “those great Miltonians” (108),
Gray forgoes the promising venture. Instead, he explains how Lewis’ witch repre-
sents “the Bad Mother (or ‘Breast’)” and Aslan the “Good Mother (or ‘Breast’);”
that MacDonald’s Ash has “admittedly rather phallic fingers;” and that Lilith begs
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“to be symbolically castrated” (77, 12, 33). Moreover, he declares that the works
of these authors proliferate with “oedipal father-figures” and suicidal impulses
(13). Gray does give some attention to MacDonald’s engagement with Romantic
literature, German in particular—but again, this is not new territory; rather, it is
the one area of literary engagement into which few MacDonald critics have not
already ventured.
If there is a common literary thread in this collection, it is the work and influ-
ence of MacDonald. The chapter on Stevenson’s debt to MacDonald is certainly
worthy of Gray’s position as a professor of literary history, but would have fit
more readily had he presented Stevenson as a Scots fantasist (or referenced that
defense made by his colleague, Colin Manlove). While he proffers some thought-
provoking comparisons between Pullman and MacDonald, and reiterates
Knoepflmacher on Lewis’ unintentional undermining of MacDonald, there persists
an underlying weakness in Gray’s later and more literary essays incurred by his
misunderstanding of MacDonald’s theology—and thus, of MacDonald’s concept
of death. His claim that MacDonald has “Gnostic sympathies” (akin to those of
Pullman) indicates a lack of familiarity with the wider corpus (86). It is surprising
that Gray has not considered Dearborn’s treatise on MacDonald’s theology, espe-
cially its section on death. Referencing Lewis’ comment on how reading Mac-
Donald “baptized” his imagination, Gray argues: “for what else is baptism but the
symbolic use of death for a Christian end?” (2) Distracted by psychoanalysis, he
does not recognize that, for Lewis and MacDonald, the “death” of baptism is very
much a herald of life: all death is a passage into “more life.” MacDonald reiterates
this throughout the fantasies Gray studies, but also in The Golden Key (1867)—a
story Gray acknowledges only in passing, despite its journey of death: “‘You have
tasted of death now,’ said the Old Man. ‘Is it good?’ ‘It is good,’ said Mossy. ‘It is
better than life.’ ‘No,’ said the Old Man, ‘it is only more life.’”1 Had Gray been
more familiar with MacDonald’s driving conviction that “it is for the sake of the
resurrection that death exists,”2 he might have also been forced to qualify his
claim that “Lewis’ imaginative writing is all about death” (53). For while illus-
trating from a few Narnia scenes repeatedly, Gray overlooks many others relevant
to his study—not the least that of Caspian’s “death into more life.” That scene is
redolent with MacDonald; it also begs Pullman’s Lyra back to the table.
Gray does allude to the many literary parallels between Pullman and Lewis
but does not elaborate further, though this would have enriched his interesting in-
vestigation of Pullman’s “theological” response to Lewis. An ardent admirer of
1 George MacDonald, The Golden Key (New York, 1967), 71.
2 George MacDonald, The Seaboard Parish (Whitethorn, California, 1995), 252.
Book Reviews
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Pullman’s work, Gray’s contention with Pullman’s aggressive attitude towards
Lewis is voiced without defensiveness. Yet Gray’s analysis of the Pullman/
Lewis/MacDonald interplay remains hampered by his misreading of MacDonald’s
concept of death, and this is perhaps the irony of his study: he carefully explains
that in order to understand Pullman’s response to Lewis, and Lewis’ response to
MacDonald, he applies “Bloom’s general idea that a writer must necessarily mis-
read a significant precursor to achieve his own identity as a writer” (87).
Gray’s work has merit and has delighted numerous critics. To be atypically
candid and unprofessionally colloquial, this reviewer is tired of psychoanalytic
readings preceding literary analysis, of pervasive phallus- and matricide-hunting.
Please, Professor Gray, give us more of Goethe and Faust; please explain how
MacDonald, Lewis, and Pullman “stand and wait” with Milton; make us delight in
their danse macabre with Dante. Convince us that when these writers evoke fan-
tastical portraitures of death from Shakespeare through Spenser, they are not de-
luded in supposing Shakespeare and Spenser relevant. Show us how to engage
with the literary and folkloric interplay that has resulted in such compelling and
enduring fantasy about a subject that will never die.
Bring on the literary revolution. This reader is tired of titillation: she wants to
learn.
Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson
Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Nancy M. Tischler, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Fiction: From C. S.
Lewis to Left Behind (Santa Barbara, 2009). 352 pages. $96. ISBN
9780313345685.
his work is “designed for the novel reader who wants a quick way to find in-
formation on a contemporary Christian writer’s life, faith, works and influ-
ence” (ix). The author hopes that readers will also use it to discover new authors
worth exploring. She succeeds admirably. Professor Tischler explains in the pref-
ace how she selected successful and acclaimed novelists with a broadly Christian
worldview writing in English since World War II. Most are evidently Christian,
although some display pagan, anti-clerical or pronounced feminist views. The se-
lection is broad enough to include authors who have “uneasy relationships with
the churches to which they belong” (xi). Curiously, though Dan Brown is included
in view of the impact and content of The Da Vinci Code, the chronological limit
excludes J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams. Ninety
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