The essential "Star Wars"Philip Pullman's baroque aesthetics

Jean Perrot

doi:10.26754/ojs_ondina/ond.201934415

Abstract

This essay has a twofold purpose: to consider the issues of contemporary Young Adult literature addressed to “the children of the videosphere” within the context of globalized culture and to assess the importance of postmodern Baroque aesthetics in the “Star Wars” system of modern Letters and mass-media. Writers often resort to such aesthetics with the prospect of commercial hegemony, but some of them find their “distinction” (in Pierre Bourdieu’s delineation) through intertextuality – be it avowed or hidden – with the great masters of the past (William Blake and John Milton). We will investigate the secret workshop of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy and some of his other works, as well as Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World and diverse literary productions. With their arresting butterflies as significant baroque emblems, these works provide a new and spellbounding vision of the Western hero and offer a new “reterritorialization” of Letters. More particularly, Philip Pullman’s literary gesture has been to extract the baroque message from the vulgarised versions of popular mass media and to give it a new distinction.Key words: Postmodern baroque, William Blake, picaresque, humour, parody, Philip Pullman, Jostein Gaarder.

Highlights

Secret workshop of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy and some of his other works, as well as Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World and diverse literary productions
The series is based upon Pullman’s Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass and deals with the characters of Lyra and Will, whose fates are entangled as they cross parallel universes filled with all the paraphernalias of baroque aesthetics
The image recurs just before the ending, when the Angel addresses Cecilia with the following comparison: “You look like a splendid butterfly that has flown from the hand of God” (p, 154). We will keep this butterfly in mind and, for the present, establish a first link with the tattoed butterfly that Chris Marshall, the young adolescent of Philip Pullman’s The Butterfly Tattoo (1998), ISSNe

Summary

Contemporary Identities

In a seminal paper, “ Children’s and Young Adult’s Literature in the Age of the Millennium: Towards New Concepts” published by Ulf Boëthius in Modernity, Modernism and Children’s Literature in 1998, Steinar Bjork Larsen notes that “The logic should be that when childhood and adulthood are left and dismantled, youth will be submitted to parallel kinds of change” (p, 105). The image recurs just before the ending, when the Angel addresses Cecilia with the following comparison: “You look like a splendid butterfly that has flown from the hand of God” (p, 154) We will keep this butterfly in mind and, for the present, establish a first link with the tattoed butterfly that Chris Marshall, the young adolescent of Philip Pullman’s The Butterfly Tattoo (1998), discovers after making love to Jenny, the innocent young girl he has met and saved at the beginning of the story : “a small, perfect butterfly, tattoed at the top of her left breast” (Pullman, 1998, p, 72). His epic trilogy enabled him to deal with larger issues linked with the status of the “alien” (the Mulefa in The Amber Spyglass) and to widen his philosophical outlook through a finely polished and luminous literary ‘glass’

Cultural War: a competition between Literature and the Mass-media

Conclusion