Dualistic Rethinking of the Christian Myth by Philip Pullman

Abstract

Referring to a part of the Canongate project Myth, Ph. Pullman’s book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010), this article examines the correlation of myth and literature, specific to twenty-first-century culture, mediated by the influence of postmodernism and mass culture. Pullman’s book is considered within a more general framework of using myth as a tool of the author’s polemic with the influential ideological trends of our time (cf. The Penelopiad by M. Atwood and her polemic with feminism). Together with the author’s essays, the novel is not only perceived as an instance of apocryphal literature, so characteristic of twentieth-century authors when referring to Christianity, but also as a document of the main ideological stance — Pullman’s anti-clericalism and atheism. The ardent polemic message, bordering on blasphemy, finds its most original expression in the character reduplication (the person of Jesus Christ is split in two). This article aims to explore the ideological and socio-cultural roots of this device, the degree of its intellectual and artistic originality, its individual author’s premises. Pullman’s work with canonical and non-canonical gospels leads him to problematise their fictionality, genre nature, and narrative structure. Onomastic statistical analysis leads the writer to put forward an artistic hypothesis about the possible reduplication of a historical character, thus modelling a counterfactual situation, by means of which not only does he question religious dogma, but also makes each of his readers feel responsible for the shape that the history of the God-man has assumed. Using the methodology of historical-literary, comparative-typological, narratological and intermedial analysis, the author of the article concludes that the dualism of the image of Jesus Christ can be traced to the problematic nature of his anthroponym, and is undoubtedly associated with the state of postmodern knowledge, with the erosion of religious dogmas within intellectual and ethical pluralism, as well as with the influence of Gnosticism and mass culture (films, comics).