"All Wound Up": Pullman's Marvelous/Uncanny Clockwork

British novelist Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy has garnered high praise from young readers and critics alike; its final volume, The Amber Spyglass, earned Pullman Britain's Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year in 2002 (the first children's book so honored). Pullman's debt to the British literary tradition, especially the works of William Blake and John Milton, has received extensive comment, as has his interest in Heinrich von Kleist's "Essay on the Marionette Theatre."¹ The emphasis on His Dark Materials, however, has overshadowed the author's earlier textually ambitious engagement with German Romanticism in Clockwork–or All Wound Up (1996), his brief tale for younger children. Indeed, if the trilogy can be regarded as Pullman's contemporary dialogue with Western myth and the epic traditions of Blake and Milton, Clockwork holds the same relationship to the more contained genres of the fairy tale and the short story. This essay examines Pullman's blending of the traditional fairy tale with the later novella of the German Romantics to construct a complex literary experience for a wide range of readers. Clockwork captures both the wonder and transformative power of the fairy tale and the dark psychological and narrative complexity of post-Enlightenment Romanticism. The resulting narrative combines elements of the fantastic, the marvelous, and the uncanny to produce a darkly optimistic contemporary fairy tale that suggests the potential of compassion, courage, and love to transform human relations in the face of the threat posed by a culture of radical self-interest.

In an interview with Amazon.com, Pullman celebrates the connection between Clockwork and the Romantic movement, commenting, "Glad you saw the Hoffmann influence! Yes, I love that whole German romantic thing—love it to death" ("It's No Fantasy"). If Clockwork is anything to judge by, what Pullman loves about Hoffmann is his ability to revise the fairy tale tradition, to combine elements of fantasy and realism, and to offer self-aware narratives filled with references to their own fictionality. Pullman stands out among contemporary children's authors as a writer committed not only to telling a good story (as he so frequently reminds critics), but also to fostering a textual awareness and facility with narrative that develops only with exposure to books that exemplify the complex set of thematic, stylistic, and structural elements that constitute the literary experience. As Dudley Jones has noted, "Pullman's Clockwork . . . familiarize[s] young readers with narrative techniques more usually associated with experimental fiction for adult readers" (87). Jones connects this practice with the metafictional strategies of contemporary postmodernism, but many of these techniques are rooted in the textual practice of German Romantic writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann.² "Der Sandmann," for example, features a narrator who asks the reader directly to sympathize with his struggle to choose a genre through which to present the protagonist's experiences: "I tormented myself to devise a way to begin Nathanael's story in a manner at once creative and stirring: 'Once upon a time,' the nicest way to begin a story, seemed too prosaic. 'In the small provincial town of S_____, there lived'–was somewhat better, at least providing an opportunity for development towards the climax" (Hoffmann 149). Pullman similarly engages the reader in the authorial struggle to produce the fictional construct. In Clockwork the narrator comments directly concerning the difficulty of writing a story: "Fritz had had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily—as we shall see with Fritz's own story in a page or two" (11). Even the persona of Pullman's narrator is reminiscent of the teller of "Der Sandmann," described by Kent and Knight as "alternately sensitive and sympathetic, and critical and even sardonic" (Selected Writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann 30). This self-conscious narration serves an important function for the reader. Birgit Röder comments,

If we assume that Hoffmann's works are about more than simply highlighting the impossibility of constructing...