Philip Pullman picked up a pitcher and poured some water into a glass. The prolific children’s author then spent the next hour discussing what he had just done, in a far-from-dry lecture that united physics and fiction.
Fundamental particles of matter, from atoms to electrons, neutrinos, and quarks, are constantly redefined as new discoveries break through. Pullman is more concerned with fundamental particles of narrative, which he identified as the smallest events we can find— journey and separation, pouring from one vestibule to another.
“There is an overwhelming Niagara Falls of information pouring into our eyes,” he said, and templates, patterns in sensory experience, help us make sense of them.
Pullman presented a series of visual art that, unlike language, don’t have the advantage of sequential displacement to evoke a story’s temporal action.
From New Yorker cartoons to Rembrandts, from a rotund Prohibition- era man tipping homemade moonshine into his coffee to a haunted figure pouring lamp oil to bring light, the action of pouring held a piece of the narrative puzzle.
Children used to be considered empty vessels into which knowledge was poured, like plants that had to be watered in order to grow, said Pullman, moving from literal actions to symbolic significance.
Dismissing publishers who clamour for the next “hotter than Potter” children’s book, Pullman advised young writers to write what they want.
Technology for the comic strip existed by the fifteenth century, but not until the nineteenth century did they appear, said Pullman, illustrating his point that invention is based on prior ideas as well as new territory.
Positing himself as the literary Muhammad Ali, the author took a line from the boxing great: “I read like a butterfly and write like a bee.”
