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Clockwork: Philip Pullman’s Posthuman Fairy Tale

  • Richard Gooding
Original Paper
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Abstract

This article examines the connections between posthumanism and narrative form in Philip Pullman’s Clockwork. Beginning with an account of Pullman’s materialism, it argues that the novel represents consciousness and agency as emergent properties of matter, a position that manifests itself first in the tale’s figurative language and later in the cybernetic inventions of Dr. Kalmenius. As Pullman effaces the boundaries between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, he generates uncanny effects that are best understood in terms of the posthuman condition and narrative modes that reject liberal humanist models of subjectivity. Clockwork’s uncanny elements, metafictive qualities, and distribution of narrative voice across multiple perspectives thus represent narrative accommodations demanded by the tale’s rejection of the Cartesian mind/body dualism that grounds the liberal humanist subject. Clockwork’s acceptance of the posthuman condition is, however, incomplete and anxiety-laden, and the fairy-tale transformation of Prince Florian at the end of the novel represents a partial recuperation of liberal humanist morality.

Keywords

Philip Pullman Clockwork Posthumanism Fairy tale Narrative form 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Phil Gough and Jaclyn Rea, as well as the journal’s anonymous reviewers, for their careful attention to an earlier version of this paper.

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© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of EnglishUniversity of British ColumbiaVancouverCanada

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