Philip Pullman 9781350363724, 9781137336767

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Dedication CB: For my brother, Martin Butler TH: For my shining star Cat, and my grandparents Irene and Norbert.

Series Editor’s Preface Welcome to the latest series of New Casebooks. Each volume now presents brand new essays specially written for university and other students. Like the original series, the new-look New Casebooks embrace a range of recent critical approaches to the debates and issues that characterize the current discussion of literature. Each editor has been asked to commission a sequence of original essays which will introduce the reader to the innovative critical approaches to the text or texts being discussed in the collection. The intention is to illuminate the rich interchange between critical theory and critical practice that today underpins so much writing about literature. Editors have also been asked to supply an introduction to each volume that sets the scene for the essays that follow, together with a list of further reading which will enable readers to follow up issues raised by the essays in the collection. The purpose of this new-look series, then, is to provide students with fresh thinking about key texts and writers while encouraging them to extend their own ideas and responses to the texts they are studying. Martin Coyle

Notes on Contributors Susan Redington Bobby is Associate Professor of English at Wesley College in Dover, DE. She is the author of Beyond His Dark Materials: Innocence and Experience in the Fiction of Philip Pullman (McFarland, 2012) and the editor of and contributor to Fairy Tales Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings (McFarland 2009). She is currently co-editing a volume of essays with Dr Eileen M. Harney on the Artemis archetype in fiction, film, and television, scheduled to be published by McFarland and Company in 2015. Andrew M. Butler is the author of ‘The Republic of Heaven: The Betrayal of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy’ (Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Debates for the twenty first century, Nickianne Moody and Clare Horrocks (eds.), Liverpool: ARPF/Liverpool JMU, 2005) and ‘Non-Linear Narrative(s) in Philip Pullman’s Penny Dreadfuls.’ Foundation 88 (Summer 2003). He has edited books on Terry Pratchett, Christopher Priest, Ken MacLeod and science fiction and is the author of Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s and Pocket Essentials on Philip K. Dick, Cyberpunk, Terry Pratchett, Film Studies and Postmodernism. He teaches cultural studies and film at Canterbury Christ Church University and is chair of judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Catherine Butler is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Her critical books include Teaching Children’s Fiction (edited, Palgrave, 2006), Four British Fantasists (Scarecrow/ChLA, 2006), Reading History in Children’s Books (with Hallie O’Donovan; Palgrave, 2012) and Roald Dahl: A New Casebook (co-edited with Ann Alston; Palgrave, 2012). Her critical work has been honored with a ChLA Article Honor Award and a Mythopoeic Scholarship Award (for Four British Fantasists (Scarecrow/ChLA, 2006)). Catherine has so far produced six novels for children and teenagers, as well as some shorter works. She is an Associate Editor of Children’s Literature in Education. Tommy Halsdorf currently teaches children’s fantasy fiction, and Romantic and gothic literature, at the University of Luxembourg, as well as being a secondary school teacher at the Athénée de Luxembourg. His academic work focuses on fantasy and children’s ix

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literature. Previously he studied and taught English literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he completed his PhD in 2010 entitled ‘Temptation and the Fall in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.’ Publications include a contribution to a Pullman collection, Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (2011). Rosemary Ross Johnston is Head of Education at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and Director of the Australian Centre for Child and Youth Culture and Wellbeing. She is currently editing a book on David Almond and is widely published in the field of children’s literature. Keith O’Sullivan lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin (an Associated College of the University of Dublin) and is a founder member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature. He recently co-edited Irish Children’s Literature: New Perspectives on Contemporary Writing (Routledge, 2011) and is currently co-editing Children’s Literature and New York City (Routledge, 2013). He was a recipient of an inaugural David Almond Fellowship for Research in Children’s Literature, awarded by Newcastle University and Seven Stories, the national centre for children’s books in the United Kingdom. Pat Pinsent is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton, specializing in Children’s Literature, the subject matter of most of her 15 books. She is involved with the MA in Children’s Literature at Roehampton and also with the supervision of PhD students there. Her main research interests lie in the diverse ways in which children’s literature is currently developing, and the relationship between it and spirituality/religion. She also edits three journals. Alison Waller is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, London, where she convenes the MA in Children’s Literature by distance learning. She has written a number of articles on adolescence and young adult authors, and published Constructions of Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (Routledge in 2008/2011). She is also editor of the Palgrave New Casebook on Melvin Burgess (2013). Her other research interests include forms of fantasy, literary space/place, and portrayals of consciousness and memory in children’s and young adult literature. She is currently investigating the practice and processes of

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adults remembering and rereading childhood books, and is co-organiser of the interdisciplinary Memory Network. Naomi Wood is an associate professor of English at Kansas State University, where she serves as director of undergraduate studies for the department of English. She has written a number of articles on the work of Philip Pullman and co-edits the academic journal of children’s literature criticism The Lion and the Unicorn.

Acknowledgements CB: I should like to acknowledge the generosity of the University of the West of England for providing access to the facilities and resources necessary to pursue this project. Family, friends, and colleagues have all provided much-needed encouragement. TH: I would like to thank Nancy and Gilles from the Athénée de Luxembourg for helping me with some tricky editing, as well as my student from the University of Luxembourg, Natalia Slioutova, for coming up with an inspirational question for the interview with Philip Pullman. Furthermore, my gratitude goes out to family, friends and my girlfriend for the necessary support. We are grateful to Sonya Barker of Palgrave Macmillan, both for proposing this volume and for her patience and good humour during the period of its gestation. Special thanks go to Philip Pullman for his interest in this book and his kindness in taking time to respond to our questions. We should also like to thank him for writing His Dark Materials.

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List of Abbreviations NL Philip Pullman. Northern Lights (London: Point Scholastic, 1995). SK Philip Pullman. The Subtle Knife (London: Point Scholastic, 1998). AS Philip Pullman. The Amber Spyglass (London: Point Scholastic, 2000).

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Introduction Tommy Halsdorf and Catherine Butler From the time its first volume, Northern Lights, was published in 1995, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials opened up new territory for children’s literature. A trilogy eventually totalling some 1,300 pages, His Dark Materials was recognized not only as a superbly entertaining and imaginative story, filled with engaging characters, but as one dealing with events on a truly cosmic scale, with a boldness and intellectual ambition that few literary novels being published at the time could match. If children’s literature had been looked on with patronizing disdain by some in the literary establishment, and if advocates of children’s books had suffered in turn from something of a ‘cultural cringe’, Pullman’s epic trilogy might have been designed to remedy that situation. Here was a work that was eloquent and sophisticated, displaying a casual breadth of literary reference and taking on controversial and complex issues in theology, politics, philosophy and morality with an assurance that demanded to be taken seriously in return. In the light of Pullman’s achievement, many who had hitherto been dismissive or simply ignorant of children’s literature began to look at the field with fresh eyes, and to acknowledge that books for children were capable of challenging and engrossing readers of any age. In addition, His Dark Materials was controversial. It made headlines in both the tabloid and broadsheet press, and was lauded and denounced from leader columns and pulpits. Its author was sought out as a spokesman for his own brand of secular morality, even debating with the Archbishop of Canterbury on two occasions.1 For all its revolutionary impact, His Dark Materials is in many ways a traditional work—which may be one reason for the breadth of its appeal. Solid storytelling and craftsmanship are its engine. It is not as formally experimental as some earlier novels, such as Aidan Chambers’ Breaktime (1978), Geraldine McCaughrean’s A Pack of Lies (1988) or even Pullman’s own Clockwork (1996), published between the trilogy’s first and second volumes. Nor is it the first book to deal directly with theological or philosophical concepts. From Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863) to Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World (1991), and indeed C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56)—a 1

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series with which Pullman’s trilogy has a close if antagonistic relationship—earlier children’s writers have addressed ‘big’ subjects. His Dark Materials is politically radical, but its radicalism belongs to a recognizable, even venerable, English tradition of dissent, tracing its lineage back to Milton and Blake, and coexists with a positive representation of old-fashioned humanist values. While the trilogy is undoubtedly iconoclastic, it is far from nihilistic: on the contrary, it is freighted with a moral seriousness that arguably threatens to capsize it at times. Few works of children’s literature have established themselves as ‘classics’ quite as instantaneously as His Dark Materials. When Northern Lights (or The Golden Compass, as it was titled in the United States) was published it met immediate and near-universal acclaim. Within a year, Scholastic was able to release a paperback edition with the imprint of the Carnegie Medal and the words ‘Guardian Children’s Fiction Award’ blazoned on the cover. The prefatory pages boasted not just the customary two or three laudatory quotations from reviews, but 14—drawn from journals as diverse as Books for Keeps and the Detroit Free Press, and including recommendations by such children’s book luminaries as Jan Mark and Nina Bawden (in the United Kingdom) and Lloyd Alexander and Lois Lowry (in the United States). At the last count, the book has been translated into more than 40 languages.2 The second and third volumes of the trilogy, The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000), were equally successful, both critically and commercially. In particular, The Amber Spyglass became, in 2001, the first children’s book ever to win the overall Whitbread Book Award, against competition from books in the four adult categories—an achievement widely seen as signalling a recognition that children’s books needed to be regarded with the same literary seriousness as any other form of literature. Nor has the perspective of time notably diminished Pullman’s achievement. In 2003 his trilogy came third in the BBC’s ‘Big Read’ poll to find the nation’s favourite novel, being beaten only by The Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice. In 2005 Pullman (along with the Japanese illustrator Ryoji Arai) was awarded the world’s most prestigious international children’s book prize, the Astrid Lindgren Award, and two years later Northern Lights was voted the Carnegie of Carnegies, winning a poll to choose the most popular winner of the award in its 70-year history. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the ‘50 greatest British writers since 1945’, and in 2013 he was elected President of the Society of Authors, a remarkable honour from his fellow professional writers.3

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By the time of the trilogy’s completion, children’s literature was beginning to be dominated by the Harry Potter series. With Pullman and J. K. Rowling being by some distance the two most famous contemporary children’s fantasy writers in the world, comparisons were inevitable. If Rowling’s fans tended to view Pullman as their heroine’s John the Baptist, preparing the ground for Harry Potter’s coming by raising the profile of children’s literature among adult readers, Pullman’s admirers used Rowling’s hyper-popularity as a means to bring into relief the literary qualities they admired in their author. The originality of his imagination, his books’ stylistic variety and accomplishment, the range of his literary references and the intellectual ambition of his engagement with theological and philosophical questions, were all set off by what some saw as Rowling’s derivative use of fantasy and school-story tropes, increasing tendency to under-editing, and petit-bourgeois sensibility. Many of these comparisons were undoubtedly unfair, but given the coincidence of the cultural moment at which the two authors’ fame and popularity reached its apogee, they were to be expected. Fourteen years later, we hope in this volume to provide a measured re-assessment and evaluation of Pullman’s achievement. Pullman’s career before His Dark Materials His Dark Materials was far from being a debut novel for Philip Pullman, and in many ways constitutes the culmination of his previous work. Certainly many features of his earlier books anticipate his magnum opus and, without denying them validity in their own right, these earlier books can also be said to have served as an apprenticeship to the trilogy. In addition, aspects of Pullman’s background, his literary inspirations and his personal ambitions as a writer contributed to its creation. The seeds of His Dark Materials can be traced back to Pullman’s upbringing and formative years. His vocation began at an early age, when he used to tell bedtime stories to his younger brother. After his father, an RAF fighter pilot, was killed in action in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), Pullman lived with his grandparents in England. This was an influential period in his life because his grandfather, a clergyman, introduced him to the narratives of the Bible.4 The grandeur and awe-inspiring imagery of these stories profoundly marked the boy and contribute to some of the atmosphere of His Dark Materials.5 Furthermore, his interest in illustration was awakened by US comics and graphic novels such as Batman and Superman.6 He has

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since illustrated some of his own works, including the little pictures beside the chapter headings in Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife. At secondary school, in beautiful Harlech, North Wales, Pullman experimented with writing poetry, which he considers to have had a major impact on his prose style as it made him aware of poetic rhythm and structure.7 Apart from poetry and the stunning countryside,8 a further crucial influence marked Pullman’s school experience. He was introduced to Paradise Lost by Enid Jones, his teacher, whom he acknowledges at the end of the trilogy. The plot of John Milton’s epic poem forms the backdrop to His Dark Materials. Part of Pullman’s ambition in writing it was to tell ‘Paradise Lost in 1,200 pages’9 for teenagers, and Milton is one of the main sources for much of his religious imagery and especially his portrayal of Lord Asriel as a Satan figure. In 1965 Pullman enrolled at the University of Oxford to study English.While the course was not really to his liking, his college, Exeter, and the city of Oxford inspired him greatly, and would be converted (and expanded) into the Jordan College and Lyra’s Oxford of Northern Lights.10 Pullman says of himself that he has stolen ideas from every book he has ever read, and his philosophy is to ‘read like a butterfly and write like a bee’,11 but he acknowledges three main authors who stand out as inspiration for His Dark Materials. Next to Milton, whom we mentioned above, there is William Blake, whose poetry feeds Pullman’s ideas about innocence and experience, his picture of the Authority and his interpretation of Paradise Lost. The third influence is Heinrich von Kleist, particularly his essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, which explores a metaphor for the Fall of man.12 These works are structurally embedded in Pullman’s trilogy and permeate the entire story, its plot and mythology.The Bible is obviously another such influence, even though the scenes that Pullman forms his story around are inspired by dissident interpretations rather than by the Bible itself. Apart from these three sources, which Pullman himself has identified, many other texts have contributed to the formation of His Dark Materials, a deeply intertextual work. It includes elements of folk and fairy tale, magic, realism, Romantic poetry, Greek mythology (the harpies and the Land of the Dead feature in the trilogy), references taken from Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism, traditional tropes of children’s literature, the Bildungsroman, comics and any other source Pullman could get his hands on (the surname of the witch queen Serafina Pekkala is taken from a Finnish telephone directory). He also borrows ideas from contemporary quantum physics to create his alternative worlds and multiple universes, as well as for one

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of his main concepts, Dust, which constitutes the ‘Dark Materials’ of the title.13 Pullman started out as an adult novelist, but even his early works contain features and themes which found their way into His Dark Materials. His first published book was The Haunted Storm (1972), a strange tale of (im)morality, murder, perversion, and religion—although the treatment of the latter is influenced by Gnosticism, an approach he rejects in His Dark Materials. His next novel, Galatea (1978), is a fantasy or magic realist quest featuring many different non-human characters including electric whores, a werewolf, zombies, ghosts and the robot angel Galatea, which the protagonist, Mark Browning, falls in love with. This work contains numerous elements that reappear in the trilogy, such as the sublime imagery, a plot revolving around ideas of sexuality, science and religion, and above all the unity of matter and spirit. The Electric Whores echo the angels of His Dark Materials as they inform Browning that they are ‘Spirits […] produced by matter’ and that ‘Matter loves itself ’,14 leading Browning to wonder whether ‘spirit and matter are the same thing’.15 Furthermore, Galatea’s angels, messengers who ‘have elements of both sexes in them’ and copulate with humans, are described as ‘finer than us’ with ‘purer’ flesh,16 again very similar to their description by Joachim Lorenz in The Subtle Knife. Pullman subsequently concentrated chiefly on children’s literature, and in practically all of his work we can find hints of what was to come. Numerous books, such as the Sally Lockhart novels (The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North, The Tiger in the Well and The Tin Princess (1985–94)), the New Cut Gang stories (Thunderbolt’s Waxwork (1994) and The Gas-Fitters’ Ball (1995)) and Spring-Heeled Jack (1989), have a Victorian setting that is echoed in Lyra’s world. Count Karlstein (1982) shows an interest in German Romanticism and the Gothic, as does Clockwork or All Wound Up, a sinister ghostly tale where belief in the power of self-determination, finding one’s own path and facing the consequences of choices and actions are central. We can also find prototypes of Pullman’s most famous invention, the dæmon, in previous novels. In Spring-Heeled Jack, the villain Filthy has ‘an odd bedraggled little creature like a mournful moth, or like a second-hand angel’,17 which sits on his shoulder and acts as his conscience. Ah Ling, Sally Lockhart’s nemesis, owns a malevolent monkey-servant in The Tiger in the Well described as ‘an evil spirit. A demon’,18 which is a precursor of Mrs Coulter’s monkey dæmon. A panoply of strong, courageous, independent and often teenage female characters figure as predecessors to Lyra, confronting their society, fighting evil and helping the disempowered. These range

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from Sally Lockhart to Ginny from The Broken Bridge (1990) and Lila in The Firework-maker’s Daughter (1995). In addition, The Butterfly Tattoo (1998) and the first novel of the Lockhart quartet, The Ruby in the Smoke, feature romances that are intense but short-lived and tragic, anticipating Lyra and Will’s heart-breaking separation in The Amber Spyglass. Other common features in Pullman’s pre-His Dark Materials work that are present in the trilogy include broken families and orphans—possibly a reflection of Pullman’s own childhood— complex characters, mystery and protagonists who grow and mature. Loss of innocence is generally accompanied by the beginning of wisdom, and the stories are full of hope and optimism, as well as a fierce enjoyment of the here and now. Pullman has always been a self-conscious artist, deeply interested in the art of storytelling from the point of view of a craftsman. Commenting on the genesis of his metafictional novel Clockwork, for example, he has written: I was looking at one of the old clocks in the Science Museum in London one day, and I thought it would be fun to try and write a story in which one part turning this way connected to another part and made it turn that way, like the cogwheels of a clock. And when it was all fitted closely together, I could wind it up and set it going.19

Clockwork was thus conceived at least in part as a technical challenge. We may think of that book, an intricately crafted novel about intricate craftsmanship, as a masterpiece in one old sense of the word—an object designed to display its maker’s skill and ingenuity and to justify his right to be considered a master of his trade. His Dark Materials, which has been widely seen as Pullman’s masterpiece in the more usual sense, exploits the skills developed in his earlier work to full effect. Its engagement with philosophical and scientific ideas has rightly attracted a good deal of critical attention, but this is also a rare piece of storytelling: in its control of pace and suspense, its ability to conjure innumerable vivid locations, its cast of memorable characters and creatures, and its linguistic versatility, the trilogy is (in the words of Christina Hardyment) a ‘rich casket of wonders’.20 Pullman’s text provides us with a traditional omniscient narrator, but his is far from being a monotone voice: he adopts a wide variety of styles, ranging from the Homeric similes that add a brutal grandeur to the epic combat of Iorek Byrnison and Iofur Raknison (NL, pp. 349–54), to the invocation of classic Western writers such as Zane Grey in the affecting death of Lee Scoresby (SK, pp. 304–19), as well as more obvious literary exemplars such as Blake, Milton and the Brothers Grimm.

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His Dark Materials and polemic His Dark Materials must also be considered as a religious or philosophical novel. It inverts the morality of the Fall and justifies Satan’s rebellion and Eve’s actions while ‘redeeming’ sexuality and the emancipatory passage from innocence to experience. However, its exact stance concerning religion is more complicated and delicate than appears at a first glance, as Pat Pinsent and Naomi Wood (among others) argue in this volume. The attack on the Church should be scrutinized carefully: the corrupt Authority is not the creator-God but an impostor like Blake’s Urizen, and although Christianity seems to be Pullman’s primary target, according to Nicholas Tucker this is only because ‘he knows the Christian religion best’.21 Pullman’s quarrel, as he told Robert Butler, lies with any ‘way of organising society which refer[s] to absolutes for its justification rather than to ordinary human experience’,22 so we have an explicit condemnation of all organized monotheistic religions, not just Christianity, and beyond that any other authoritarian system of thought. Pullman is above all a humanist: he advocates life in the here and now. His Dark Materials is a text celebrating humanism and the power of important stories: they, not religion, renew our human faith.23 The trilogy proposes a concise idea of faith in a nearreligious sense, although it does not have any organized rituals or a specific system of belief in the traditional sense of religion. It includes elements of Christianity and Pullman’s own mythology and spiritual philosophy, founded on the union of spirit and matter, of body and mind and of humanity and nature, and points to a higher order of a collective human consciousness, love and imagination. Though it remains mysterious and cannot be fully captured, which is part of its numinous appeal and intended purpose, it is nevertheless a fully-formed, new and modernized suggestion of spiritual and physical fulfilment offering the human as a spiritual symbol, an alternative to Christianity and its obsolete idea of God, and it cannot therefore be characterized as atheistic. This is the central idea about which His Dark Materials revolves, with the crucial factor being that this approach, whilst spiritual, does not neglect the material world but sees a symbiosis that can be defined as spiritual materialism.24 Somewhat pantheistic in character, spiritual materialism is epitomized in Dust, which is material and visible as well as being a metaphor for human consciousness. It is both physical and indicative of a mystical sacred reverence for the entire universe. Dust works on the well-being and development of conscious life, and thrives on love

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and wisdom, all the positive things in human existence—forming the unity of the human and the divine. In addition, His Dark Materials is strongly imbued with alternative systems of belief to Christianity (Gnosticism, Buddhist and Eastern philosophy, as well as pre-Christian faiths such as Pantheism, among others). Values such as altruism, determination and bravery, and above all love, which are of course celebrated by religion too, are here presented as intrinsically human. Pullman thus borrows from many traditions and views, and mingles these elements with his own vision to form an original outlook. Pullman’s mythopoeia uses Christianity in order to undermine it and in doing so reveals something of his own creed. This marks him out as a religious writer despite his claims to the contrary, but one valorizing love, feeling, sexuality and humanity more than the intolerance he considers the established Churches to be propagating. He denies the Christian God and heaven but still addresses fundamental human questions about the soul, destiny and free will, the purpose of life and the afterlife. Nicholas Wright sees the trilogy as strongly anti-clerical, but it celebrates the numinous and is not anti-religious at the core, recognizing and respecting people’s need for symbols in life.25 On his personal website Pullman writes: [t]he religious impulse – which includes the sense of awe and mystery we feel when we look at the universe, the urge to find a meaning and a purpose in our lives, our sense of moral kinship with other human beings – is part of being human, and I value it. I’d be a damn fool not to.26

The word ‘atheist’ denotes a person who rejects the existence of God, and this cannot be said with certitude about Philip Pullman. He does question God’s existence, but his overall attitude to the issue seems to be rather equivocal: I’ve got no evidence whatever for believing in a God. But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don’t know. So maybe there is a God out there.27

In his trilogy a false God holds mankind in subjection. A true God is not mentioned, although the possibility is not excluded, but if such a being exists it dwells far beyond the realms of human comprehension. In other words he fails to be an atheist but fits the definition of agnosticism. Another appropriate epithet for Pullman might be Bernard Schweitzer’s, that of misotheist or god-hater.28 This, however, conflicts with Pullman’s attraction to a different type of divinity in the

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concept of Dust, so it is not an absolute misotheism but one aimed at a specific image of God. Dust and the republic of heaven offer us alternatives to the false promises of the Church and God and his Kingdom, but they are religious too, or at least spiritual. The idea of heaven representing the ultimate bliss for mankind is not questioned. However, this perfect future will be in the here and now as well as in the afterlife, immediately accessible to all who live their lives accordingly (although it is only hinted at what this future will actually look like). Love remains the ultimate value, the ‘divine’ value, but now it comes from within the human. Although the return to Dust after death is described as an enraptured reunion with the dæmon and the collective cosmic consciousness (AS, pp. 335, 382 & 440), it is by no means better than the physical life and existence itself. The idea of the prophecy of the child redeemer heralding a new beginning in Pullman’s story can also be found in the Norse Ragnarök, where all will perish except two human children, Lif and Lifthrasil, male and female but equals, who emerge from hiding to find a new, empty and lush world at their beck and call,29 an outcome that bears parallels to Will and Lyra starting a new world order. Although their world is neither empty nor idyllic, here too there is hope of a new dawn, and a new kind of life. Humanity is redeemed, original sin wiped out, and salvation is accomplished by the love of a new Adam and Eve, which also re-establishes the balance in the male–female relationship that was destroyed when Eve received most of the blame for the Fall. Pullman’s position as an atheist with an instinctively ‘religious’ outlook and a deep aesthetic and moral appreciation of religious faith makes his work particularly vulnerable to misreading by those who look to him for a simple and univocal ‘message’. His intellectual and emotional loyalties are subject to complex tensions, many of which play themselves out in his fiction without necessarily finding resolution there. Although he writes against Christian indoctrination, he is insistent that Bible stories are an essential part of children’s education.30 Pullman’s are in many ways traditional liberal humanist values, but as Richard Gooding has argued with regard to Clockwork (in terms that have implications too for His Dark Materials), his analysis of consciousness as an emergent quality of matter tends to efface the differences between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, on which humanist values partly rest.31 Pullman mocks the naïve Rousseauian view of childhood (‘Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming?’),32 but he retains from

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both Rousseau and the Church the sense that growing up, and the onset of puberty in particular, is the life-defining event. In doing so he not only seems to limit the possibilities for self-development in adults, whose nature is ‘fixed’ by the settling of their dæmons, but entrenches the Romantic image of childhood as a time reserved from the rest of life, a time moreover in which the child is (like Lyra) blessed with a unique redemptive potential. Sequels, prequels and adaptations His Dark Materials has grown beyond the initial trilogy. Three years after the publication of The Amber Spyglass, Pullman produced a short book, Lyra’s Oxford (2003), which constitutes the beginning of a new adventure set two years after the conclusion of His Dark Materials. Pullman has described it as a ‘stepping-stone between the trilogy and the book that’s coming next’,33 referring to The Book of Dust. This did not quite happen though, as in 2008 another novella appeared, entitled Once Upon a Time in the North. It forms a prequel to His Dark Materials, focusing on the first meeting and ensuing friendship of the aëronaut Lee Scoresby and the armoured bear Iorek Byrnison. Pullman has even hinted at a third such work: ‘Lyra’s Oxford was a dark red book. Once Upon a Time in the North [is] a dark blue book. There still remains a green book. And that will be Will’s book. Eventually...’.34 Both these little companion books are beautifully crafted and artistic works, with engravings and cloth-bound covers and memorabilia from the world of His Dark Materials (Once Upon a Time contains a board game mentioned in the novella, for example). A cynical observer might suspect a ploy to cash in on the previous success. Nonetheless, the two short works certainly fulfil their task of whetting the reader’s appetite for more, and forming a bridge to the eagerly anticipated but, to the frustration of fans, ever-receding Book of Dust. Pullman announced the creation of this sequel as early as 2003, before Lyra’s Oxford was on the market.35 Four years later, he confirmed that he was working on it and suggested that it might be released in 2009. However, that year Pullman addressed the question by stating: ‘The appropriate adverb would be “eventually”. It’s growing, but I’m encountering complexities that seem to be making it longer than I thought it would be.’36 In 2011, Pullman announced that he was thinking about dividing The Book of Dust into two volumes, one forming a prequel, and the other a sequel to His Dark Materials.37 This comment raises questions as to how advanced the work really was at that point, or how far

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Pullman had actually decided on exactly what shape it would assume. His initial intention was to explore the lives of various characters who appear in the previous novels in a series of short stories, rather than write a continuation of Lyra and Will’s adventures, as well as to supply additional information about Dust, dæmons, the subtle knife, the alethiometer and some of the unresolved theological issues raised in the trilogy.38 In response to critics who argued that he focused only on the evil side of religion in His Dark Materials and ignored all the good, he answered that ‘[t]his is a big subject and I’m writing a big, big book in order to deal precisely with that question’.39 Pullman claimed recently that ‘it will be a while yet but it is growing’, and that it was now his main focus after having released a retelling of Grimm’s fairy tales in 2012.40 In the meantime, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010), which does not deal with Lyra’s world, can be said to fill ‘a Christ-shaped hole’ (18) in His Dark Materials, as Pat Pinsent puts it in her essay in this collection. The book is a kind of fictional biography offering a retelling of Jesus’s life, with Jesus and Christ being twins, one idealistic and honest, the other shrewd and pragmatic. The success of His Dark Materials has inevitably led to a number of adaptations and spin-off productions. The BBC aired a radio play of the trilogy in January 2003, consisting of three two-and-a-half hour programmes. Adapted by Lavinia Murray and with music by Bill Cowies, it featured a number of changes to the books’ plots. The angel Balthamos became the general narrator of the story, and Mrs Coulter’s golden monkey dæmon, unnamed in the trilogy, was called Ozymandias, alluding to Shelley’s poem.41 A year later, the BBC produced audiobooks, unabridged and narrated by the author, with a full cast to play the characters. Probably the most successful adaptation to date was the National Theatre’s stage version, despite fears that the story might be unstageable. The original production ran from December 2003 to April 2004. It consisted of two plays because a single performance would have been too long, and adopting the trilogy form of the books would have demanded too great a commitment from theatre goers.42 Other major stage productions of His Dark Materials include those by the Playbox Theatre Company in April 2006 at The Dream Factory,Warwick, which used a more ‘abstract, almost futuristic stage installation’ and divided the stage into different levels to compensate for the lack of a revolving drum as at the National’s Olivier theatre.43 In 2007 productions were mounted by the Scottish Youth theatre at the Scottish Summer Festival, and by the Belvedere College Dramatic Society at Dublin’s O’Reilly

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theatre, using the National’s music and some of the original costumes; while in April 2008 the Young People’s theatre of Bath performed it at the Bath Theatre Royal, creating their own puppets. All these productions used Wright’s script,44 which made some significant changes to the story. Mary Malone and the mulefa episodes are cut, for example (her temptress role being assumed by Serafina Pekkala), and there is only one lovemaking scene in the play, compared to two in the novels (the ‘red fruit’ and ‘dæmon caress’ scenes); however, it is more explicit, with Serafina Pekkala commenting: ‘two children are making love in an unknown world’.45 The visual performance and narrative, as well as the setting and props, had to make up for the lack of description and the obvious constraints of space and time, so cuts, and textual and scenic rearrangements were numerous. The play solved these difficulties well and maintained the life force of the story, whilst being a valid interpretation in its own right rather than simply a pale copy of the novels.46 Reviews and reactions were as a result overwhelmingly positive, with Nicholas de Jongh from the Evening Standard calling it an ‘astonishing epic of narrative and theatrical invention’,47 and Philip Pullman declaring himself ‘thrilled with what they’ve done’.48 In 2007, a hungrily awaited film based on Northern Lights and entitled The Golden Compass, was released by New Line Cinema. Directed by Chris Weitz and starring such Hollywood luminaries as Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, as well as boasting a huge 180 million dollar budget,49 it flattered to deceive. Although it made $372 million at the box office,50 was a big international hit and won a BAFTA and an Oscar for its Visual Effects,51 it was considered only a moderate success, since its figures disappointed in North America.52 This put paid to the plans to realize the remaining two books of the trilogy. The production itself encountered a number of difficulties. Amid fears that an anti-Christian stance would harm the film’s prospects in the United States, religion and God were not directly referenced, in contrast to the books,53 although various Catholic organizations still denounced it and called for a boycott.54 The actor Sam Elliott, who played Lee Scoresby, even suspects this is the reason for the abandonment of parts two and three.55 In addition, significant changes were made to the plot, with the chronology altered and scenes cut, presumably in order to shorten the film.56 From the outset problems arose with the script and screenplay, as well as technical difficulties, which led to Weitz temporarily resigning from the project.57 After being coaxed back, he faced considerable changes in postproduction, which he describes as a ‘terrible experience’.58

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Tom Stoppard’s script was rejected by New Line for being too dark; however, Weitz’s end product was severely criticized by fans and anti-censorship groups as a diluted ‘Disney’ version, notably because the religious nature of the story had been seriously downplayed.59 Reviews were mixed at best, and further appraisals deplored the poor character development, one of the novels’ fortes, and complained about the rushed and therefore somewhat confusing plot, meaning that the viewers lost out on the magic of the books.60 In an interview with Rosa Silverman from the Times in March 2008, Pullman’s response to the film was seen as ‘guarded’ and ‘ambivalent.’ He stated that ‘A lot of things about it were good ... Nothing’s perfect. Nothing can bring out all that’s in the book. There are always compromises’.61 In parallel with the film, Sega and Shiny Entertainment released an action-adventure video game based on both The Golden Compass and Northern Lights. Players assume Lyra’s role and, accompanied by Pan and Iorek, have to travel through Svalbard to rescue Roger from the Gobblers and bring Lord Asriel the alethiometer.The plot actually seems closer to the novel than the film manages at times, and Lyra’s voice is that of Dakota Blue Richards, the same as in the film.62 The essays in this casebook This book aims to provide a multifaceted, though not exhaustive, discussion of many of the issues raised in this introduction. Pat Pinsent’s consideration of Pullman as an anti-religious writer (Chapter 1) whose imagination and morality is nevertheless deeply imbued with a religious—and specifically Anglican—sensibility picks up the discussion here and extends it into a more detailed investigation of the extent to which His Dark Materials can been viewed as offering an alternative ‘mythology’ to that of Christianity. This theme is explored from a different angle by Rosemary Ross Johnston (Chapter 2), who examines the imagery of Northern Lights and (by contrast) the film The Golden Compass in order to illuminate the contours of Pullman’s imagination and his ability to conjure a mental landscape through which his readers can journey, arguing that the book is suffused with a Christian sensibility. Alison Waller’s consideration of science and scientists in the trilogy (Chapter 3) traces Pullman’s relationship with a different kind of belief system and a different approach to knowledge, one informed by the scientific method and by the rational beliefs of the Enlightenment. The grand narratives of the Enlightenment and of science offer an alternative mode of understanding the world and our place in it to that of religion, but are themselves not immune to

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critique. Naomi Wood, in her analysis of the controversies surrounding the book (Chapter 4), places Pullman’s rationalist humanism in complex tension not just with religion but also with postmodern approaches to the nature of human knowledge and experience. By contrast, in Chapter 5, Andrew M. Butler uses a Derridean reading of Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ as a means of deconstructing Pullman’s model of the human–dæmon dyad, and the borderlines between the human, animal and divine. Kleist’s essay constitutes a key point of reference for Keith O’Sullivan’s discussion of innocence and experience in Pullman (Chapter 6), standing alongside the poems of Blake as part of the complex Romantic inheritance that O’Sullivan argues Pullman has sought to secularize in His Dark Materials. Tommy Halsdorf ’s and Susan Redington Bobby’s contributions (Chapters 7 and 8 respectively) complement each other in their treatment of another key factor within the trilogy—that of gender. Pullman’s dæmons are almost always the opposite sex of the person to whom they ‘belong’, suggesting that within Lyra’s universe binary concepts of gender are fundamental, even while acknowledging that people participate in both genders. Halsdorf looks at the ways in which this state of affairs interacts with socially-constructed notions of gender, and indeed with the conventions of children’s narrative, as evinced particularly in Pullman’s two protagonists, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry. Bobby explores gender from a different perspective, viewing Lyra and the other major female characters as archetypal figures of female heroism and divinity in a way that offers a corrective to the male-centred ‘hero’s journey’ described by Joseph Campbell. Finally, in Chapter 9 we are fortunate to have had the opportunity to put some of the issues raised in this volume (and elsewhere) to Philip Pullman himself, and this interview brings the substantive part of the volume to a close. As the variety of responses represented in this book attests, His Dark Materials is a complex and challenging work. But while its challenge is partly intellectual (for readers who wish to follow its implications in those terms), we should not forget that the trilogy is also a hugely popular set of books, a monumental feat of storytelling that makes its readers feel as well as think, and a tale that is set to keep innocent and experienced readers alike enthralled for many years to come. Notes 1. ‘Conversations with Rowan Williams – The End of Childhood’ (Channel 4, 9 October 2003); and at the National Theatre, 15 March (2004).

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2. Susan Joy Rennison, ‘His Dark Materials’, 9 October (2012), (http:// www.susanrennison.com/His_Dark_Materials_bookreview.php). 3. Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (http://www.alma.se/en/Awardwinners/2005-Philip-Pullman/); Michelle Pauli, ‘Pullman wins “Carnegie of Carnegies”’, The Guardian 21 June (2007), (http:// www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jun/21/car negiemedal2007. awardsandprizes); ‘The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945’, The Times, 5 January (2009); ‘New President’, The Society of Authors website (http://www.societyofauthors.net/soa-news/new-president). 4. Claire Squires, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy: A Reader’s Guide (New York and London: Continuum, 2003): 10. 5. Hugh Rayment-Pickard, The Devil’s Account: Philip Pullman and Christianity (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004): 18. 6. Nicholas Tucker, Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman (Cambridge: Wizard Books, 2003): 11. 7. Squires, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy: 10–11. 8. Tucker, Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman: 12. 9. Julia Eccleshare, ‘Northern Lights and Christmas Miracles’ in Books for Keeps, (http://booksforkeeps.co.uk/issue/100/childrens-books/articles/ awards/northern-lights-and-christmas-miracles). 10. Philip Pullman, ‘Dreaming of Spires’, Guardian (Lives and Letters), 27 July (2002): 28–9. 11. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London: Point Scholastic, 2000): 549. 12. Email to Tommy Halsdorf, 9 March (2006). 13. For more about this see Mary and John Gribbin, The Science of His Dark Materials (London: Hodder, 2003). 14. Philip Pullman, Galatea (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979): 125. 15. Pullman, Galatea: 267. 16. Pullman, Galatea: 191. 17. Philip Pullman, Spring-Heeled Hack: A Story of Bravery and Evil (London: Corgi Yearling, 1998): 38. 18. Philip Pullman, The Tiger in the Well (London: Point Scholastic, 1999): 92. 19. See ‘Clockwork, or All Wound Up’, http://www.philip-pullman.com/ pages/content/index.asp?PageID=103. 20. Christina Hardyment, ‘Grown-up Talent in the Juvenile World; The Top Prize in Children’s Books is Announced Next Week’, The Independent, 6 July (1996). 21. Tucker, Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman: 128. 22. Philip Pullman in Lyn Haill, Darkness Illuminated (London: National Theatre/Oberon Books, 2004): 57. 23. Tucker, Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman: 167. 24. Thomas Halsdorf, ‘Temptation and the Fall in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy’, PhD, Bristol: University of the West of England (2010): 275–8. 25. Nicholas Wright in Robert Butler, The Art of Darkness: Staging the Philip Pullman Trilogy (London: National Theatre/Oberon Books, 2003): 42.

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26. Philip Pullman, ‘Other Writing: Religion’, (http://www.philip-pullman. com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=110). 27. Susan Roberts, ‘A Dark Agenda’, (http://www.surefish.co.uk/culture/ features/pullman_interview.htm). 28. Bernard Schweizer, ‘“And He’s A-Going to Destroy Him”: Religious Subversion in Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, in Millicent Lenz with Carole Scott (eds.), His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005): 167. 29. Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings (London: Penguin Books, 1993): 173–6. 30. Kaya Burgess, ‘The Bible is a Must for Children, says Atheist Pullman’, The Times, 18 March (2013) (http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/ education/article3716083.ece?CMP=OTH-gnws-standard-2013_ 03_17). 31. Richard Gooding, ‘Clockwork: Philip Pullman’s Posthuman Fairy Tale’, Children’s Literature in Education (2011) 42: 308–24. See also Chapter 4, this volume. 32. Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (London: Scholastic, 1996): 36. 33. Philip Pullman, ‘Lyra’s Oxford’, (http://www.philip-pullman.com/ pages/content/index.asp?PageID=66). 34. Philip Pullman, interview. ‘Once Upon a Time ... In Oxford.’ 25 August (2007) (http://www.cittagazze.com/livre/rencontre-pullman. php?version=en). 35. Vanessa Thorpe and Jonathan Heawood, ‘Pullman brings back Lyra for Oxford Mystery’, 6 April (2003) (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/ 2003/apr/06/books.booksnews). 36. ‘The Book of Dust’, (http://www.bridgetothestars.net/index.php?d= companions&p=bookofdust). 37. Helen Brown, ‘Page in the Life: Philip Pullman’, 17 October (2011) (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/ 8824867/Page-in-the-Life-Philip-Pullman.html). 38. ‘The Book of Dust’, (http://www.bridgetothestars.net/index.php?d= companions&p=bookofdust). 39. Fleming, Tom. ‘A Very Grown-up Children’s Author’, 3 August (2007). (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/aug/03/avery grownupchildrensautho). 40. Emma Saunders, ‘Philip Pullman turns to Grimm Task.’ 24 September (2012) (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19624841). 41. Bridge to the Stars, ‘Other Adaptations’, (http://www.bridgetothestars. net/index.php?d=adaptations&p=radio). 42. A revised and slightly shorter version appeared at Christmas 2004, with a different cast but likewise adapted by Nicholas Wright and directed by Nicholas Hytner. 43. Peter Lathan, ‘Playbox to Present His Dark Materials’, 10 March (2006) (http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/news/playboxHDM.htm).

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44. Tommy Halsdorf, ‘Walking into Mortal Sin: Lyra, the Fall, and Sexuality in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy’, in Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox (eds.). Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions (Jefferson, NC & London: McFarland, 2011): 172–86 (185). 45. Nicholas Wright and Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (London: Nick Hern, 2003): 230. 46. Tommy Halsdorf, ‘Walking into Mortal Sin: Lyra, the Fall, and Sexuality in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy’: 179. 47. Nicholas De Jongh, Evening Standard. 5 January (2004), (http://antshive. 0catch.com/addressbook/theatre/hdm1run.htm). 48. In Robert Butler, The Art of Darkness: Staging the Philip Pullman trilogy (London: NT/Oberon, 2003): 50. 49. ‘The Golden Compass’, (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id= goldencompass.htm). 50. Ibid. 51. ‘Awards for The Golden Compass’, (http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0385752/awards?ref_=tt_awd). 52. Dean Goodman, ‘“Golden Compass” Loses its Way at U.S. Box Office’, 9 December (2007), (http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/12/09/ boxoffice-idUSN0933149320071209). 53. Lewis Hannam, ‘Philip Pullman Film Stripped of Religious Themes.’ The Daily Telegraph, 14 October (2007), (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/uknews/1566131/Philip-Pullman-film-stripped-of-religiousthemes.html). 54. ‘Film Sells Atheism to Kids; Major Protest Launched’, Catalyst Online, 29 October (2007) (http://www.catholicleague.org/ film-sells-atheism-to-kids-major-protest-launched/). 55. Ben Child, ‘Philip Pullman Disappointed over Film Prospects of His Dark Materials’, 16 December (2009), (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ film/2009/dec/16/philippullman-christianity). 56. ‘Where Did ‘The Golden Compass’ Go Astray? And Was Tom Stoppard’s Original Script a Masterpiece?’, New York Magazine, 7 December (2007), (http://www.vulture.com/2007/12/golden_compass_scripts. html). 57. ‘The Movie: Director and Crew’, (http://www.bridgetothestars.net/ index.php?d=movie&p=crew). 58. Josh Tyler, ‘Comic con: Chris Weitz calls Golden Compass a Terrible Experience’, 23 July (2009), (http://www.cinemablend.com/new/ Comic-Con-Chr is-Weitz-Calls-Golden-Compass-A-Ter r ibleExperience-14059.html). 59. Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Religion Row Hits Pullman Epic’, The Observer, 14 October (2007). 60. James Berardinelli, ‘Golden Compass, The’, December (2007). (http:// www.reelviews.net/movies/g/golden_compass.html).

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61. See http://www.thefullwiki.org/The_Golden_Compass_(film)#cite_ ref-65; Rosa Silverman, ‘Exclusive Interview with Philip Pullman’, The Times, 22 March (2008), (http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/ fiction/article2458009.ece). 62. ‘The Golden Compass Review’ (http://uk.gamespot.com/the-goldencompass/reviews/the-golden-compass-review-6183906/); ‘The Golden Compass Review’, (http://www.ign.com/games/the-golden-compass/ ps2-889066).

1 Philip Pullman’s ‘Religious Reaction against Religion’ in His Dark Materials Pat Pinsent If religion is defined as ‘the virtue which deals with giving to God the honour which is His due’,1 Philip Pullman’s hostility towards it is well known, not to say notorious. It is probable that the negative reactions of many religious groups, notably Catholics and Evangelicals, especially in the United States, led to the fact that only the first of the three films of His Dark Materials that had been planned was in fact made: Pullman has been quoted as saying, ‘When religion gets its hands on the levers of power … that is when it is dangerous.’2 As this remark suggests, it is simplistic to describe Pullman as adhering to an atheistic position similar to that of, for instance, Richard Dawkins, whose combative zeal against religion seems unrelated to the degree of power it may still possess. A broad definition of religion is offered by the BBC website: ‘Religion can be explained as a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature and purpose of the universe … [it] often contains a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.’3 Since Pullman is both a seeker after meaning and someone to whom behaving according to a moral code is an intrinsic part of being human, it does not seem inappropriate to describe him as someone with a strong interest in religion. As he reveals in an article published not long after the final book in the trilogy, there is certainly a religious aspect to his lack of belief in the faith in which he was brought up by his grandfather, an Anglican clergyman: ‘It seems to me that the children’s books I love4 are saying something important about the most important subject I know, which is the death of God and its consequences.’5 If Pullman’s preoccupation with religion had not already been apparent from its pervasive presence in His Dark Materials, his own 19

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words in the article quoted above would have been sufficient to reveal its centrality in his writing. In that article, he talks about how belief in Christianity once gave to people’s lives a sense of meaning: ‘we were part of a huge cosmic drama’; from this he claims that it follows that ‘one of the most deadly and oppressive consequences of the death of God is this sense of meaningless[ness] or alienation that so many of us have felt’.6 Pullman indicates that though Gnosticism ‘seems to speak very directly to this psychological (or spiritual) condition’,7 its story is even less credible than that of Christianity, and has ‘the terrible defect’ of denigrating the physical universe. Since to Pullman both Christianity and Gnosticism have to be rejected in the human search for meaning, it is his objective to generate in other ways ‘a passionate love of the physical world’, an appreciation of the fact that we are ‘free citizens of the republic of Heaven’,8 a republic ‘which exists nowhere but on this earth, in the physical universe we know’.9 Pullman sees as an important endeavour the creation of a myth to explain the true human purpose, which he sees as understanding which things are good and which bad, nourishing the imagination, and generating some sort of hope in the face of the inescapable fact of death. Hugh Rayment-Pickard describes this quest as Pullman’s ‘religious reaction against religion’ (italics original),10 and claims that ‘Pullman offers a humanistic religion of life and love in place of the Christian myth of fall and redemption’.11 Bernard Schweitzer suggests that rather than atheism or antitheism, Pullman’s religious attitude is more accurately termed ‘misotheism’ (literally hatred of God); Schweitzer, however, suggests that unlike most God-haters, Pullman appears open to a different kind of deity, arguing from the portrayal of Xaphania that ‘it is possible to identify Pullman’s anti-religious animus with a feminist rejection of patriarchal theological doctrines’.12 In the analysis that follows, the intention is to show on the one hand how Pullman reveals what he sees as the evils of organized religion, particularly its tendency to be life-denying when it teaches about an afterlife in ‘the kingdom of heaven’, and on the other to look at his attempted creation of a positive myth. Intrinsic to this discussion is the suggestion that the character who comes nearest to Pullman’s own position here is Mary Malone, who voices her anguish at her loss of faith.13 Whether or not Pullman succeeds in creating a positive myth remains open to question, but he certainly contributes in an effective manner to the debate about religion. This debate has become more vociferous in the early years of the twenty-first century: on the one hand Christians of all shades of belief have felt the need to respond to attacks of militant atheism, and on the other, increasingly

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conspicuous in society are Muslims and other religious groups who quite obviously do not subscribe to the view that ‘God is dead’. Pullman’s negative portrayal of organized religion Pullman’s hostility towards established religious bodies is evident from early on in his trilogy. In order to provide the reader with essential background information about the role of the Oblation Board, he has to provide an account of the role of the Church in Lyra’s world. In this description, Pullman’s use of language ensures that the reader’s perception of it will be unfavourable: ‘Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva […] the Church’s power over every aspect of life had been absolute’.14 The conflation of the theocracy presided over by the historical reformer Calvin, and the absolute power once claimed by the See of Rome, is likely to generate an immediate hostile response in a reader familiar with church history and the assumption of power by leaders from different versions of Christianity. For a young reader without such knowledge, by contrast, the association between absolutist behaviour and the Church creates an immediate distaste for the representatives of established religion. Pullman goes on to portray these representatives in a manner that does nothing to counter initial expectations. For instance, the apparent benevolence of Father Heyst (NL, p. 53), who encounters Lyra and Roger in the Oxford catacombs, strikes the reader as slightly sinister, partly because of Lyra’s suspicious attitude towards him. Later, the priest Otyets Semyon, whom Will meets in his quest for his father (AS, p. 102), seems to bear the hallmarks of a child abuser. Women are not immune from Pullman’s negative portrayal: the title of the order of nuns with whom the infant Lyra was initially placed, ‘The Sisters of Obedience’ (NL, p. 124), is certainly unattractive to modern sensibilities. On the one hand it reinforces the concept of the authoritarian nature of religion, especially as far as women are concerned, but it can also be seen as prefiguring the unquestioning compliance of all the Church representatives depicted in the books towards commands of dubious morality. Many references to religious figures are more explicitly hostile, from the cruelty that a Cardinal considers to be normal in the Church’s treatment of the witches15 to the Church meeting that commissions the murder of Lyra (AS, pp. 69–81). The description of clerical individuals often verges on the stereotypical: the characteristic that they most evidently have in common is that of being life denying, the quality that Pullman most loathes in the work of C. S. Lewis.16 Perhaps the most extreme such character

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is Father Hugh MacPhail, President of the Consistorial Court. With his brutal self-discipline—he consumes only bread and water (AS, p. 73)—he is an appropriate leader for an organization that preaches the value of ‘pre-emptive penance’: scourging and flagellation in order to expiate the guilt of sins not yet committed. His follower, Fr Gomez, ‘blazing-eyed’ (AS, p. 74), ‘weeping with pride’ (AS, p. 75) at his mission to kill Lyra, bears all the signs of the fanatic.17 The most extreme instance of Pullman’s attack on religion is surely the scene in which ‘the Ancient of Days’ is exposed as a powerless old angel, blowing away in a wisp as the chariot in which he had been riding is opened by Will and Lyra (AS, p. 432). Interestingly this scene is prefigured by an earlier one in which Mrs Coulter, having become antagonistic to the Church as ‘a body of men with a feverish obsession with sexuality’ (AS, p. 343), goes on to question where God is: ‘Is he still alive, at some inconceivable age, decrepit and demented, unable to think or act or speak, and unable to die, a rotten hulk?’ (AS, pp. 344–5). The merciful release she imagines for this decrepit God is soon facilitated by the young people, reminding us that throughout the trilogy Pullman claims to be attacking not so much a God in whom he does not himself believe, as the enduring faith in God’s power which is still current today. Religious themes and language In spite of Pullman’s very strong hostility towards established religion and its trappings, it is clear that his own imagination is suffused with religious images, perhaps partly because such images afford the most easily available and comprehensible way to convey his own vision, but also, it would seem, out of a sense of nostalgia for his Anglican upbringing and the time spent with his clergyman grandfather. As indicated by Andrew Leet, ‘Pullman continues to love “the language and atmosphere of the Bible and the prayer book”’ as he imbibed them in his upbringing.18 Pullman’s very frequent borrowings from religious sources—the Bible, religious tradition, as well of course as Milton’s Paradise Lost—is sometimes particularly evident in his language, which at solemn times tends to echo that of the Authorized Version of the Bible (‘King James’, 1611). Nowhere is this more evident than when Pullman uses the Genesis narrative (3: 2–7) for his reprise in Lyra’s universe of the Fall of humanity, where he chooses the seventeenth-century version as the basis for his adaptation, rather than any of the more modern translations available, a choice consistent with his feelings about traditional Biblical language.

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An example of this closeness can be seen in verse four, which in both the Authorized Version and Northern Lights reads: ‘And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die.’ By contrast, the ‘Good News’ (1976) version, the aim of which, as stated in its Foreword, is ‘to give today’s readers maximum understanding of the content of the original text’, reads: ‘The snake replied, “That’s not true; you will not die.”’ It is evident that Pullman prefers to use archaic language in the attempt to create the sense that this is a sacred text; it is also likely that his choice is governed by his own recollections, which have generated in him a sense of nostalgia for the traditional language. Within this narrative framework he substitutes some salient words: ‘to make one wise’ (verse five) becomes ‘to reveal the form of one’s dæmon’, while phrases are inserted that relate to the subject of how the knowledge gained from the action leads the man and woman to recognise the distinction between them and all other creatures’ (NL, p. 371). It is also interesting that the moment of Lyra’s action as the new Eve in the reversed version of the Fall, a moment which on one level echoes the eating of the fruit in Genesis, can also be seen as involving a sacramental aspect. Mary Malone has packed a lunch for Lyra and Will, consisting of ‘bread and cheese and some sweet thirst-quenching red fruits’ (AS, p. 481). After they have picnicked on the bread and cheese, Lyra places one of these fruits in Will’s mouth, in a gesture that recalls a priest placing the Host in the mouth of a communicant. Both the young people recognize that this action symbolizes something deeper; it leads to their mutual confession of love, as Will ‘drink[s] in with adoration the scent of her body and her warm fragrant hair and her sweet moist mouth that tasted of the little red fruit’ (AS, p. 492). It would not be inappropriate to term this mutual recognition of the presence of their love as ‘eucharistic’. A similar recognition of the sacredness of shared food occurs later when, at Mary Malone’s invitation, ‘the people of three worlds [the mulefa, Lyra and the gyptians, and Mary and Will from “our” world] sat down together and shared bread and meat and fruit and wine’ (AS, p. 531)—a spread that includes the traditional eucharistic elements of bread and wine.This meal occurs just before the assorted company are taken by the mulefa to the spot where their world converges with the land of the dead, a place they recognize as holy, and which they plan to maintain by planting a grove around it (AS, p. 531). Scenes such as this suggest that Pullman, however anti-religious he may appear to be, presents sacred ritual as worthy of respect. One of the most evident of Pullman’s religious borrowings is the abundant presence in His Dark Materials of angels, of one variety or

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another.19 While in most instances Pullman’s angels lack some of the powers traditionally associated with them, they retain ethereal qualities and the ability to travel vast distances in a moment—features they possess in both the Bible and the work of Milton. Notable among them are Balthamos, who is eventually responsible for the death of Fr Gomez, Lyra’s potential assassin (AS, p. 495), and Xaphania. The latter has many of the divine attributes to be found in the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew scriptures, notably the Books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus.20 In spite of the fact that in these scriptures such attributes are credited to the divine, the female pronoun is consistently used in the personification of Wisdom, as is also the case in the Gnostic stories, elements of which Pullman admits he finds attractive. He talks of ‘the important role the Gnostic story assigns to the figure of the Sophia, or Wisdom’,21 and it is evident that Xaphania, who near the end of the saga discloses to Will and Lyra the nature of their future roles and the fact that they can never be together in the same universe, is both far more powerful than the decrepit ‘Ancient’ and far more attractive. She is ‘austere and compassionate’ (AS, p. 519), displays an understanding of the nature of Dust and of the grace needed to read the alethiometer, and talks to them about the kind of behaviour that will be needed in their future lives (AS, p. 520). When Will says, ‘Whatever I do, I will choose to do it, no one else’, she tells him, ‘You have already taken the first steps towards Wisdom’ (AS, p. 525). In the context of Pullman’s rejection of Christian attitudes toward sin and the Fall, the similarity here between Will’s words and those traditionally attributed to Lucifer, ‘I will not serve’ (Jeremiah 2: 20 in some translations, including the 1609 Douay-Rheims version), seems more than coincidental. It appears that Pullman is indicating the importance of autonomy (which may of course involve the choice to serve humanity) rather than passive obedience; this message is reinforced by approval from the positively portrayed figure of Xaphania. As well as Christianity and to some extent Gnosticism, Pullman draws on beliefs from both Paganism and some quasi-religious traditions, notably in the portrayal of characters such as the witches (often instrumental in the adventures of Will and Lyra) and the shaman John Parry, Will’s father. The somewhat eclectic use he makes of such characters differs little from the part played for instance by the armoured bears, the miniature Gallivespians or indeed the harpies. All reveal both the fertility of Pullman’s imagination and the way he enlists existing folklore and fantasy into his vast panoply. None of these characters is treated in the more systematic way used with figures deriving from specifically Judaeo-Christian sources. Nor is there evidence of

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Pullman wishing to engage with other world religions: his argument (in both senses of the word) is with Christianity, so that his success depends on the creation of a myth that uses Judaeo-Christian machinery and scriptures, but is nevertheless a free-standing alternative to the religious tradition in which he himself grew up. Mary Malone: convert to atheism It could be argued that one of the most important instruments used by Pullman in his attempt to create a positive myth is the character of Mary Malone. That she is not essential to the development of the plot of His Dark Materials is attested by her omission from the acclaimed National Theatre production of Nicholas Wright’s adaptation of the three books into two stage plays (2003/4). Rayment-Pickard argues that her character ‘provides Pullman with the opportunity to include speeches and conversations about the errors of Christianity’,22 and this is an aspect that will be discussed more fully. Perhaps equally important is that the scenes involving the experiences of this Oxford academic in the world of the mulefa are among the work’s most visually appealing and certainly add to the positive feelings generated by the text: it can be seen as ‘a second Eden’.23 The fact that Mary’s background has involved research into the ‘Shadow Particles’ alerts her to their parallel with the ‘sraf ’, described by the mulefa as being ‘like the light on water … at sunset’ (AS, p. 234, italics original). The ensuing conversation reveals to Mary that the mulefa have a Fall myth very similar to that in Genesis, though different in that it lacks the Bible’s negative interpretation of the action. At a similar date to that of the evolution of human consciousness, a female mulefa, encouraged by a snake, inserts her foot into a seed pod and thus attains consciousness, a quality inherited by her children and subsequently by the rest of the mulefa race. In this narrative we can see that the knowledge thus acquired by the mulefa means that her action, rather than being described as ‘original sin’ could better be seen as ‘original blessing’. This term is used by the evolutionary theologian Matthew Fox as the title of an influential book (1983); in it he argues that the goodness of creation should take precedence over any element of sin.24 Here, as in many other places, Pullman’s mythmaking places him in the company of radical Christians. The story also provides a means for Pullman to deal with the question of forms of life in other universes, and their access to spiritual knowledge. Certainly the mulefa appreciation of sacredness, noted above, indicates that they are to be seen as something of a model of what humans might have been without the intervention of a controlling Church.

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Highlighting the central issue, the provision of meaning to people for whom ‘the death of God’ is axiomatic, is probably Mary’s most important function in the trilogy. In the article quoted above, Pullman talks of the sense of ‘connectedness to the universe’ that Christianity had provided in the past and his desire to engender in readers ‘a sense of wider meaningfulness’.25 Mary’s experience of a loss of connectedness, and her subsequent regaining of a sense of purpose, is surely one of the most significant aspects of His Dark Materials: she is there because Pullman wants to show something about the ‘conversion’ of a religious person, in the first instance to atheism, and then to a recognition that meaning and connectedness are possible without belief in God—a process in which both her sojourn among the mulefa, and her interaction with Will and Lyra, have parts to play. We first see Dr Malone through Lyra’s eyes during the visit to Will’s Oxford: to Lyra’s surprise, the alethiometer discloses that she used to be a nun, but stopped believing in ‘church things’ (SK, p. 95).We learn much more about her religious background towards the end of the final volume of the trilogy when she tells Will and Lyra her story. She recalls how she had combined the religious and academic aspects of her life by dedicating her work in Physics to the glory of God (AS, p. 464) until, seven years previously, she experienced physical attraction to another delegate at a conference, a sensation that reminded her of similar feelings many years previously.The later epiphany led to her decision to allow herself to recognize the value of sensual experience instead of the ascetic life she had previously espoused. She tells how she found herself asking whether anyone would be better off if she resisted this temptation, and concluding that no one would in fact be hurt if she gave in to it. As a result, she narrates: ‘I took the crucifix from my neck and I threw it in the sea’ (AS, p. 469). In the light of Pullman’s dislike of what he sees as the life-denying aspects of Christianity, the symbolism of Mary’s throwing away her crucifix, the emblem of suffering and death, is inescapable. But despite her satisfaction at having made this decision, she goes on to admit that life without God seems empty, leaving her lacking any sense of connection to the rest of the universe (AS, p. 471). Thus Mary’s plight is representative of that of anyone for whom the sense of divine presence has vanished. Like Pullman, she remains convinced of the importance of good and evil, but also of the lack of any absolute divine command that would provide support for the moral code.26 After telling this story to the young protagonists, Mary finds it impossible to sleep; she goes out into a moonlit night (as described in a significantly named chapter, ‘There is now’). She is overwhelmed by

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the sense of the universe being alive and interconnected, but herself being separated from it. As she perceives that Dust is flowing out of all the worlds into ‘some ultimate emptiness’ (AS, p. 475), she comes to the realization firstly that some Dust is flowing through holes cut by the Subtle Knife and that these must therefore be plugged. More significant is a new and catastrophic flood, which needs to be stopped or all conscious life will end. She realizes that all nature, ‘wind, moon, clouds, leaves, grass, all those lovely things were crying out and hurling themselves into the struggle to keep the Shadow particles in this universe, which they so enriched’ (AS, p. 476). In the light of this almost mystical experience, Mary understands what her purpose now is—to do all within her power to support conscious life in the universe. Although Mary’s means of attaining this purpose are in no way spelled out, her subsequent actions are clearly informed by it, so that, for instance, her provision of the little red fruits, which are so significant in sealing the love relationship between Lyra and Will, is clearly central to their union. After the crucial scene between Will and Lyra, Mary sees that the catastrophic flow of Dust has ceased, and then notices how the young people are returning in a glow, which makes them seem to be ‘made of living gold. They would seem the true image of what human beings always could be’ (AS, p. 497). Their love is the cause of the Dust no longer being lost to the universes. Pullman seems to be using Mary Malone’s renewed sense of purpose as an epitome of what should be felt by humanity, and representative of his own quest for a purpose in his own life and writing. He needs to have a positive mythology to support his belief that what really matters is ‘to be … cheerful and kind and curious and brave and patient’ (AS, p. 548). It is, however, open to question whether the symbolism used in this chapter, despite its considerable attraction, is adequate to the function to which Pullman is putting it, and this question really relates to how far Pullman has indeed succeeded in His Dark Materials in creating a positive myth to rival the still-powerful one that Christianity presents. A positive vision? Much of the success of Pullman’s polemical endeavour in writing his trilogy (as distinct from its irrefutable success as literature) hinges on whether the myth he creates is as attractive as the ones he considers no longer valid. In his trilogy, Pullman is certainly using material often incorporated in myth, and in each case he presents his own alternative vision, which sometimes echoes that of religion or philosophy. While

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such visions are in no way presented as factual, he would presumably claim that they have the merits of neither demanding to be believed, nor possessing the false elements that mar the more traditional versions. In looking at the effectiveness of Pullman’s myth-making, it is relevant to note what Pullman himself said about myth in an interview with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.27 He assumes, with Williams’s agreement, that mythology is ‘something … to be lived and lived and lived again … something whose truth is not historical truth only but has a truth that also sort of lives on’. In this context, it is appropriate to look at some of his most original creations: Daemons, Dust, and his alternative vision of the afterlife; referring to all of these, Pullman uses terms from a religious context in a way that changes their connotations from negative to positive. Perhaps Pullman’s most attractive reversal of traditional Christian mythology is his creation of the dæmons. From a word frequently associated with the diabolical, ‘dæmon’ comes to refer to a person’s closest companion. At the beginning of Northern Lights, Lyra is accompanied by Pantalaimon, and we soon learn about a dæmon’s characteristics: being of opposite gender; frequently changing shape; becoming fixed in form at adolescence; being so close that even a touch, if unpermitted, is felt to be equivalent to abuse, while to be ‘severed’ causes intense anguish and even death; ceasing to exist when the person to whom it had been attached dies. The variety of animal forms provides an extra visual dimension to the text, while the fixed shapes of the dæmons of adults give a great deal of information about their characters. Pullman says that the possession of a dæmon means that ‘in Lyra’s world … everyone has a visual reminder of the basic approach that their nature makes to the world … but what they do with that knowledge is a matter for their other qualities, such as courage, imagination, sympathy, and so on’.28 Critics have tended to respond positively to this element of Pullman’s mythology—from the scope given to puppeteers in the National Theatre’s production,29 to the way in which Rayment-Pickard views them as offering the potential for presenting the ‘cosmic feeling’, a sense that we are part of the Meaning of the universe.30 The link that Pullman establishes between the age when the dæmon becomes fixed in form and the onset of sexual maturity also offers an interesting alternative mode for viewing this important universal transition. Another distinctive image in His Dark Materials, signified to some extent by the very title of the saga, is that of Dust. In traditional Christian usage, Dust is seen as a symbol of our frail flesh and its

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liability to temptation, a substance to which on Ash Wednesday we are reminded in the words of Genesis (3: 19), that we shall inevitably return. In Pullman’s work, however, it is seen as an element essential to the well-being of humanity. It is allied with the Shadows perused on her computer by Dr Mary Malone, and with the mulefas’ sraf. Anne-Marie Bird has analysed at some length Pullman’s diverse uses of this image, showing how Pullman transforms it ‘from a biblical statement of human mortality into a comprehensive metaphor’. She concludes that rather than being seen negatively, Dust in Pullman’s universe marks ‘the first independent action taken by Adam and Eve [the Fall], which is extended into the first independent step towards maturity for the generations that follow them’.31 Perhaps Pullman’s most vivid evocation of the importance of Dust is in Mary Malone’s two-fold vision as described above: firstly she sees it streaming away to the detriment of human life and realizes that if it vanishes away, all that makes conscious life valuable will ‘flicker out like a candle’ (AS, pp. 475–6). As Bird suggests, ‘Dust functions as a new focus for people’s spirituality, without which, according to Pullman, humanity not only lacks purpose or meaning, but equally as important, a sense of wonder and mystery.’32 Later, Mary observes how the union between Lyra and Will causes the disastrous flow to cease: ‘these children-no-longerchildren, saturated with love, were the cause of it all’ (AS, p. 497). It is arguable, however, that the powerful image of Dust, especially in the vivid picture of its flowing away (AS, pp. 474–7), is more convincing than the final reversal of this calamitous situation, which is presented in about half the length (AS, pp. 496–7). The love between Lyra and Will, and the self-sacrificial action that they have to take in order to close up all the holes in the universes through which Dust could escape, is the basis for their appreciation of what is right behaviour, a subject of considerable importance to Pullman. The sacrifice of never being able totally to fulfil their love relationship, needed from them in order to save the world, gives them some degree of heroism—reinforced by the approval of the magisterial figure of Wisdom, Xaphania. Mary amplifies her vision of Dust when she shows Serafina the reversal of the Dust flow and suggests that the change in quality of their mutual feeling has worked in the same way as when a single stone diverts a river (AS, p. 506). Serafina responds by recalling her encounter with Xaphania, who is ‘old and young together’; Xaphania has explained how because of the Authority and his churches, she ‘has had to work in secret, whispering her words, moving like a spy through the humble places of the world while the courts and palaces

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are occupied by her enemies’ (AS, p. 506). Thus, the secret action of Wisdom is aligned with the positive power of Dust. A third area in which Pullman works on material from myth is the afterlife. Lyra’s visit to the underworld echoes many such katabases, notably those of Orpheus, and of course Jesus, which had a salvific function. Here Pullman very effectively conveys the bleakness of the world of the dead through the words of a girl who had been martyred because of her belief that she would go to a place of reward. Instead she has found herself in ‘a place of nothing … all of us languish in this gloom for ever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep or rest or peace’ (AS, p. 336). Unlike a monk, ‘thin, and pale… with dark zealous eyes’, who insists on seeing this bleak place as a blessed paradise, the girl and others follow Lyra and are released into a world in which they will be ‘part of everything … the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all living things’ (AS, p. 335)—the mulefa world that has been so vividly described earlier. Here again, however, it is arguable that Pullman has built up the picture of the ‘nothing’ world of the dead more convincingly, and certainly at greater length, than any sense that the dissolving into nature, into which they escape, actually provides them personally with any sentient experience. He reverts to this in the perception of John Faa, who rejoices in the knowledge that ‘after a spell in the dark we’ll come out again to a sweet land like this, to be free of the sky like the birds’ (AS, p. 532). Pullman is of course unable to depict anything more substantial than this pastoral idyll without creating far too solid an otherworldly ‘heaven’.33 To have done this would be inconsistent with his view that it is in our world that we need to build the Republic of Heaven. As these three aspects reveal, Pullman certainly creates vivid images relating to his alternative myth. It would also be difficult to dissent from the code of behaviour that they support. Perhaps paradoxically, he often arrives at positions not dissimilar to those of many radical theologians, especially feminists.34 Pullman’s later contribution to the debate Any discussion of religion in His Dark Materials is bound to take into account what could be termed ‘a Christ-shaped hole’: the absence from the trilogy of any kind of Jesus Christ figure. Obviously Lyra and Will act heroically, and their deliverance of the dead from their bleak existence has parallels with ‘the harrowing of hell’—so important a theme in the medieval mystery plays. But the very fact that in Pullman’s universes the Fall is viewed as a positive development

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of the human race towards an autonomy that would not have been achieved without Eve’s action means that the traditional theology of redemption is irrelevant to the worlds Pullman has created; consequently there is no need for the figure of a redeemer. Nor is there any place for the kind of moral exemplars who are central to the world religions: rather than preaching, Lyra and Will are learning about their future roles, in which they have to display the virtues that make for happiness in this world (AS, p. 548), but they are not, for most of the text, put forward as role models of these virtues. These very qualities are, however, exemplified by the character of Jesus in Pullman’s other major assault on traditional Christianity, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which was published 10 years after The Amber Spyglass.35 In inventing twin figures, Jesus the preacher and miracle worker who was crucified, and Christ, his brother, who preserves his story and separates the ‘truth’ from mere history, Pullman is in effect fictionalizing a dichotomy often highlighted by scripture scholars and theologians, many of whom tend to attribute to St Paul the establishment of a church and the beginnings of the institution of Christianity. By making Christ the storyteller, labelling him as a ‘scoundrel’, and showing the very mixed motives from which he has acted, Pullman would appear to be objectifying his own ambivalence about Christianity. For, as he makes evident through this character, there is no way that the teachings of the inspiring figure of Jesus of Nazareth could have been preserved without the gospels, together with their dissemination by a body powerful enough to transcend the limitations of space and time on a single human life. But the disadvantage of the existence of this body is that it inevitably becomes corrupted by its own power, as well as by what Pullman sees as its subsequent fabrication of the story of Jesus’s divinity. Pullman dramatizes this dilemma in the chapter entitled ‘Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane’. In a long prayer, Jesus pours out his anguish at God’s silence. He recalls his joy in the beauty of nature but concludes that God is absent from it. He goes on to foresee what would happen if the Kingdom he has been preaching actually came about: ‘As soon as men who believe they’re doing God’s will get hold of power … the devil enters into them … they start drawing up lists of punishments for all kinds of innocent activities … they’ll torture and kill anyone who wants to make the word of God clear and plain to all’ (The Good Man Jesus, p. 197). He goes on to imagine the consequences of priests indulging their secret appetites, in what is probably an allusion to recent scandals about child abuse by clerics. He finishes with an avowal of his love for the world of which he is

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part, and looks towards a time when the memory of belief in God would be only a distant story. This long soliloquy is the final significant statement by Jesus before his crucifixion and death; these events are a prelude to Christ posing as Jesus in order to deceive people into believing in Jesus’s resurrection, in an attempt to further his brother’s teaching. Christ then retires from the scene (just as the gospels talk of Jesus’s appearances ceasing as he ascended to heaven), but from a seaside hideout where he is married to Martha he views the development of doctrine that Jesus never taught, as well as himself adding details about Jesus’s miraculous birth. As he does so, he foresees how the Church will do good, ‘yet I fear it’ll do terrible things as well in its zeal and self-righteousness […] Under its authority, Jesus will be distorted and lied about and compromised and betrayed over and over again […] But this is the tragedy: without the story, there will be no church, and without the church, Jesus will be forgotten’ (pp. 244–5). The Church, as presciently imagined by Christ, is very much the body portrayed in His Dark Materials, where in fact it would appear that the authoritarian aspect has predominated over any attempt to teach the kind of virtues that Jesus (both in Pullman’s book and in the gospels) had held to be important. It would in fact appear that Pullman recognizes that in the past, Christianity has given a great deal to the human race, despite its focus on the divinity of Christ rather than the person of Jesus of Nazareth; he seems, however, to be suggesting that in the interests of truth, it should now be superseded by a clearer appreciation of the need to practice the kind of virtues Jesus preached, without any suggestion that he was of divine origin. In a Times interview with Erica Wagner, Pullman mentions that he would be delighted if his book encouraged people ‘to go back to the gospels and see how contradictory, how confused they are’.36 Conclusion In the interview with Wagner, Pullman describes myth as ‘a story that belongs to us all and we’re all allowed to tell it’. It is evident that Pullman would like his trilogy to be regarded as myth, but how far it has achieved this remains debatable. Those few authorially invented stories, which have over the years attained such a status, deal with such perennial themes as everlasting youth or the regenerative effect of nature.37 It could certainly be argued that, for those for whom the myths of religion are no longer relevant, other myths are needed, but any decision as to whether or not Pullman’s His Dark Materials provides them must be for the individual. The success or otherwise

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of his alternative myth depends on the fictional characters of Lyra and Will. They could be seen as too ordinary, although alternatively this very quality could be regarded as a strength, given the need for identification by the ordinary person, while to some extent the myth of Jesus gains much of its enduring appeal the more the relative ordinariness of his humanity is appreciated. Equally, the very fact of the fictionality of Pullman’s characters may mean that the question of belief, as distinct from imaginative effect, is irrelevant. What seems evident is that, despite Pullman’s destructive intentions as far as religion is concerned, he has created a structure that has many elements already put forward by radical religious thinkers, such as a near-divine female Wisdom figure, a questioning of the kind of language often used about God without adequate consideration of its appropriateness to believers today, a challenge to facile descriptions of the afterlife that could lead to complacency about conditions in this world, and a re-interpretation of traditional views about the Fall and redemption. As suggested elsewhere,38 there are many Christians who feel a good deal of affinity with both the concepts and the endeavour of His Dark Materials. Notes 1. W. E. Addis et al., A Catholic Dictionary (London:Virtue & Co., 1950): 692. 2. ‘Atheist author Philip Pullman “disgusted” over claim Catholics blocked films’ The Telegraph 16 Dec (2009), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ religion/6827334/Atheist-author-Philip-Pullman-disgusted-overclaim-Catholics-blocked-films.html (Editors’ note: see also Pullman’s remarks in Chapter 9). 3. The words omitted here suggest that this often, though not necessarily, involves belief in a creating force (http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/ religions/). 4. Among the authors whose work Pullman reveals he loves are Erich Kästner, Edward Ardizzone, Jan Mark and D. J.Watkins-Pitchford (‘B. B.’). 5. Philip Pullman, ‘The Republic of Heaven’, The Horn Book Magazine, November/December (2001): 655–67 (655). 6. Ibid.: 656. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid.: 658. 9. Ibid.: 661. 10. Hugh Rayment-Pickard, The Devil’s Account: Philip Pullman and Christianity (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 2004): 89. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 11. Ibid.

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12. Bernard Schweitzer, ‘“And he’s a-going to destroy him”: Religious Subversion in Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, in Millicent Lenz with Carole Scott (eds.), His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005): 167–8. 13. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic, 2000): 471. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text (AS). 14. Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (London: Scholastic, 1995): 31. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text (NL). 15. Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (London: Scholastic, 1997): 36–7. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text (SK). 16. Philip Pullman, ‘The Republic of Heaven’: 657–9. 17. His portrayal recalls the ascetic fanatic priests to be found in the nineteenth-century historical novels of such writers as Scott and Kingsley. 18. Andrew Leet, ‘Rediscovering Faith Through Science Fiction: Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, in Lenz and Scott (eds.), His Dark Materials Illuminated: 177. 19. Belief in angels is of course by no means confined to Christianity, which, together with Islam, has built here on the foundation given by the Hebrew scriptures. 20. Although these Books are not to be found in the Authorized version, they appear in the Vulgate and subsequently in Roman Catholic translations of the scriptures. 21. Philip Pullman, ‘The Republic of Heaven’: 657. 22. Rayment-Pickard, The Devil’s Account: 52. 23. Anthony Pavlik, ‘The Not so Green Republic: the Ecology of His Dark Materials’, The Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, 7.1 (March 2010): 54–73 (54). 24. Matthew Fox, Original Blessing: a Primer in Creation Spirituality (Santa Fe, NM and London: Bear, 1983). 25. Pullman, ‘The Republic of Heaven’: 656, 664. 26. Pullman, The Amber Spyglass: 470–1; ‘The Republic of Heaven’: 665–6. 27. See ‘The Dark Materials debate: life, God, the universe...’, The Telegraph, 17 March 2004, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3613962/The-DarkMaterials- debate-life-God-the-universe....html. 28. Email communication to [email protected], 20 January (2004). 29. ‘[T]he dæmons – puppet figures skilfully manipulated … [are] a convention we immediately accept’, Robert Hewison, ‘Dæmons have a Dream Debut at the National’, The Guardian, 5 January (2004). 30. Rayment-Pickard, The Devil’s Account: 60–1. 31. Anne-Marie Bird, ‘“Without Contraries is no Progression”: Dust as an All-Inclusive, Multifunctional Metaphor in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, Children’s Literature in Education, 32. 2 (2001): 111–23 (113, 122).

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32. Anne-Marie Bird, ‘Circumventing the Grand Narrative: Dust as an Alternative Theological Vision in Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, in Lenz and Scott: 188-98 (197). 33. Cf. Lucy Cuthew, ‘Loving the World in Which We Live: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia as approaches to sublunary existence’, in The Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, 7.1 (March 2010): 87–98 (96). 34. As discussed at greater length in Pat Pinsent, ‘Unexpected Allies? Pullman and the Feminist Theologians’, in Lenz and Scott (eds.), His Dark Materials Illuminated: 199–211. 35. Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010). 36. ‘The Greatest Story Ever Retold’, The Review, The Times, 3 April (2010): 3. 37. Perhaps Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan among children’s books have approached this status. 38. Pinsent, ‘Unexpected Allies?’

2 Pullman, the Idea of Soul, and Multimodal ‘Seeability’ in Northern Lights and the film The Golden Compass Rosemary Ross Johnston Oh, the wicked liar, oh, the shameless untruths she was telling. And even if Lyra hadn’t known them to be lies […] she would have hated it with a furious passion. Her dear soul, the darling companion of her heart, to be cut away and reduced to a little trotting pet? (NL, pp. 284–5)

This excerpt from Northern Lights explicitly equates Pullman’s intriguing imagery of the dæmon with the idea of ‘soul’. He writes: ‘A human being with no dæmon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their hearts torn out’ (NL, p. 215). This chapter will explore the portrayal of dæmon/soul, both in the text of Pullman’s first novel of the His Dark Materials trilogy and then in the visual translation of that novel into the film The Golden Compass, directed by Chris Weitz and starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig.1 In doing so, I will claim that the multimodal expression of soul, as well as Pullman’s imagery and thematic concerns, constitute a rich intertextual referencing to Western religious writings—most particularly the Bible and John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). I will also note the significance of the work of William Blake, especially that work concerned with paradoxical contrasts (‘Did He who made the lamb make thee?’).2 This is nothing new—Pullman, the grandson of an Anglican clergyman and very publicly an anti-Church ‘agnostic atheist’,3 himself acknowledges this literary indebtedness (he describes Blake as ‘one of the greatest writers and indeed artists who ever lived’, whom he reads ‘constantly and never cease[s] to be amazed’),4 and notes that because he was 36

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brought up in the Christian faith its traditions and imageries are deep in his consciousness. What perhaps pushes the argument of this chapter into more controversial areas is the suggestion that Pullman’s antiChurch agenda, in an increasingly secular world, is actually re-creating in new contexts not only traditional Christian stories but some of the ultimate Christian concerns: the significance of soul, the Fall and loss of innocence, the revelation of the great battle between good and evil, the (sacrificial) love for others that overcomes fears for personal safety (Lyra searching for Roger, or going to Iofur Raknison in order to try to save Iorek), and the idea of grace. Further, and leaving aside for the moment any issues about the quality of the subsequent film, it is argued here that in recreating the book as a film, the director, Chris Weitz, either unwittingly or deliberately, has referenced visual imageries that, perhaps because of their Oxford college backgrounds, are reminiscent of the Harry Potter films, and that, more interestingly in this context, evoke contemporary comparisons with the Narnia films: the wardrobe threshold and the wardrobe in which Lyra hides at the beginning of the story; the icy Winter landscapes and Northern lands; Mrs Coulter and the White Witch; the Great Bear Iorek and the Great Lion Aslan. Pullman has been openly critical of the works of Christian authors such as J. R. R.Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: ‘I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn’t touch it at all.’5 This is on the surface one of Pullman’s milder comments about Tolkien and Lewis (there are more vitriolic ones on record—see, for example, Chapter 4, this volume) but it is I think most interesting in this context, not just because he doesn’t like Lewis’s solutions, not just because he scoffs at Tolkien who ‘doesn’t touch it at all’, but because of what Pullman frames explicitly as ‘the great questions of human life’ and what he reveals more implicitly as his own most important concerns: ‘is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff ’.6 However, although in creating his own story he would not have wanted to reference either Tolkien or Lewis in any way, the film (if not the book—but the wardrobe, ice and Great Bear are just as surely there) makes clear that there are overlaps in artistic thought and overlaps in imagery. It will be claimed that, in translating this first book into one particular and general form of ‘see-ability’—that is, one way of seeing (through the medium of film)—that other, more magic seeability (this will be discussed more fully a little later), its nuances and personal prods to memory and experience, its unique construction in and by each reader’s mind, has become cinematically stylized into an

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almost universal imbrication of established visual symbols and images that herald allegorical and fantasy stories of other worlds and that are already established in Western cultural memory. This is particularly so in children’s films set in Britain, where the early mise-en-scène (that is, the film shot) is likely to include aerials of a clearly identified place, often London, in this case Oxford, set in a vague time (almost mythic or folkloric); with old-world rooftops and multiple chimneys (Peter Pan); swirling clouds and surreal mists (Mary Poppins, Harry Potter); picture book-ish British streets and houses (CherryTree Lane, Privet Drive) or else crowded Dickensian lanes (or both); and landmarks such as ‘the riverbank’ and Oxford spires (Alice in Wonderland ), and the Thames and Tower Bridge (these latter appear very clearly in the latest The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe film, viewed from the aerial perspective of the Battle of Britain). The Golden Compass taps into this ‘collective conscious’ with a portentous and churning starry sky quite suddenly transitioning to the streets of Oxford, both the Radcliffe Camera (significantly home of the Science Library) and St Mary’s Church clearly visible.When the scene clouds over the buildings become hazier and almost reference the ubiquitous Disney fairyland castle. Pullman and ‘soul’ ‘Soul’ is a loaded metaphysical signified (and signifier) that implies the intimate personal as well as relationships to cosmos and creation. ‘I don’t know what the soul is. But I imagine that somehow our bodies surround what has always been’, says one of Anne Michaels’ characters.7 There is no real synonym; ‘soul’ is more than ‘spirit’, more than ‘character’; more than ‘mind’, more than ‘conscience’, although it is part of all these. To some, such as the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 50 bce), author of On the Nature of Things,8 soul was part of body (atomi), a view supported some twenty centuries later by neuroscientists such as Francis Crick: The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.9

To others, the identification of soul and its whereabouts is more ambiguous. In his study of consciousness and the novel, David Lodge pushes beyond ‘soul and software’ and writes: It is of course possible to have a concept of the self – of the unique, autonomous, morally responsible individual human being whose inner

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life is fully known through introspection – without believing in the existence of immortal souls; but many people with no religious belief find the word ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ useful, if not indispensable, to signify some uniquely valuable quality in human life and human awareness.10

The idea of soul is most intrinsically and intimately related to a person’s ‘is-ness.’ In most religions and, as Lodge points out above, also for many people with no religious convictions, soul is a metaphysical concept. Metaphysics transcends experience—it is knowledge ‘lying beyond experience’.11 The Macquarie Dictionary defines ‘metaphysics’ as being: concerned with abstract thought or subjects, as existence, causality, truth etc.; concerned with first principles and ultimate grounds, as being, time, substance; concerning the branch of philosophy which treats of first principles, including the sciences of being (ontology) and of the origin and structure of the universe (cosmology).

Metaphysics is always connected with a theory of knowledge (epistemology), and archaic meanings of ‘metaphysical’ given in various dictionaries include ‘supernatural’, and ‘fanciful and imaginary’. Pullman’s His Dark Materials world engages with metaphysical issues in respect of most of these definitions, particularly in the epistemologies of ‘experimental theology’ and ‘celestial geography’ and his conceptions of human geography (person and dæmon). The dæmon is explicitly described as soul in the excerpt quoted at the beginning of this chapter; it is soul given visible life as something beyond body but metaphysically connected to it, expressive of its feelings and emotions and imaginations: Pantalaimon is ‘contemptuous of the limited imaginations of these gyptian dæmons’ (NL, p. 56). As the body draws close to death, the physical appearance of person and soul becomes similar: The Master sighed. In his black suit and black tie he looked as much like his dæmon [a raven] as anyone could, and suddenly Lyra thought that one day, quite soon, he would be buried in the crypt under the Oratory, and an artist would engrave a picture of his dæmon on the brass plate for his coffin, and her name would share the space with his. (NL, pp. 69–70)

Leading Christian scholar Eugene Peterson (author of the modern Biblical paraphrase The Message) notes that: ‘Soul’ in the Hebrew language is ‘a metaphor, nephesh, the word for neck, the narrow part of the anatomy that connects the head, the site of intelligence and the nervous system, with everything else; it literally keeps

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Many indigenous Aboriginal cultures, such as, among many others, those in Australia and Canada, inscribe ideas of soul into the very skin of their everyday lives; indeed, there are some similarities between the indigenous idea of the totem and Pullman’s construction of the dæmon, although totem is a communal as well as a personal symbol. Totem, of course, celebrates human relationship and profound familial connection to the world of nature. In this, we may also discern undertones of late twentieth-century ideas in Christian theological writings, such as ‘ecospirituality’—the spirituality of nature, a metaphysical re-visioning of human beingness in the natural world. Time and space Children’s writers who engage with the idea of soul characteristically carve into their texts a deeper type of time marking. Tolkien does it in The Lord of the Rings, where he immerses the heroic archetypal struggle of good versus evil in what Bakhtin called ‘Great Time’, the perspectives of centuries.13 Lewis does it with a primary world clearly located in Britain during World War II and a secondary world, Narnia, set beyond centuries. David Almond tells stories of ordinary people living in an everyday world, but against and within a sense of the significance of time beyond individual experience of it. Philip Pullman creates a sense of time and space that is beguilingly hard to locate. The first sentence of the story, the Hall, the dæmon, as well as many of the Danish/Nordic names that appear subsequently, are evocative of Beowulf just before the monster Grendel attacks the slumbering warriors, and thus carry an intertextual intimation of impending disaster: ‘Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen’ (NL, p. 3). The imagery of the ‘Hall’ that is ‘darkening’ has a subtle whiff of that other hall visited in Beowulf when ‘the sun was sunken’, just as ‘kitchen’ carries the idea of food and ‘banquet’: When the sun was sunken, he set out to visit The lofty hall-building, how the Ring-Danes had used it For beds and benches when the banquet was over. Then he found there reposing many a noble Asleep after supper …14

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Temporality in this narrative is confounded; like Jordan College, it is ‘past and present overlapping at every spot’ (NL, p. 34). Describing the extent of Jordan’s land ownership, Pullman writes (and this is particularly interesting as we will see when we consider the referentialities in the name of the college) that it ‘owned farms and estates all over Brytain. It was said that you could walk from Oxford to Bristol in one direction and to London in the other, and never leave Jordan land’ (NL, p. 34). Other timing clues relate to the descriptions of the exclusion of women (‘and never females’, (NL, p. 2)); this has been too common too recently, but, despite the fact that this is Lyra’s focalization, it feels particularly dated and stereotyped here: To be exiled from the grandeur of Jordan, the splendour and fame of its scholarship, to a dingy brick boarding house of a college at the northern end of Oxford, with dowdy female Scholars who smelt of cabbage and mothballs like those two at dinner! (NL, p. 71)

The lamps that need trimming, ‘projecting lanterns’, trains ‘in steam’ (NL, p. 20), zeppelins, sailing ships—‘when the tide was right they’d sail out to sea’ (p. 44)—Tartars and coal-spirit and fire-mines (NL, p. 108), ‘wolfskin hoods’, the use of archaic words from different etymologies (‘night-ghast’ (NL, p. 51), ‘Skræling’ [NL, p. 77]), all transport time-space backwards, but the ‘1898 Tokay’ (NL, p. 5) places it at least after that specific date. The geography of a new and/or transplanted and/or time-shifted Europe and New World—New France (Canada), New Denmark, and the ‘uranium mines for atom-craft’ (NL, p. 64)—may imply a dramatic postapocalyptic reshaping, but Oxford with its Colleges and Dons and ‘Brytain’ (NL, p. 34) remain. The idea of multiple universes, dark matter, and Lapland witches, creates a fascinating other-world heterocosm with multiple relationships to science, science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, this world appears to be very scientifically and mathematically oriented. Mrs Coulter tells Lyra: ‘You’ll have to learn mathematics, and navigation, and celestial geography’ (NL, p. 72). Some aspects of time space defy placement and simply create a sense of otherness (alterity); for example, the truth-diving alethiometer (the compass) and descriptions of certain practices: ‘Food poppy was always served after a feast: it clarified the mind and stimulated the tongue, and made for rich conversation’ (NL, p. 19). This creates a vague mythic or folkloric chronotope—the relationship of people and events on the one hand to time and place on the other is complex and profound, and taps into a time beyond

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centuries. ‘We come with a load of New Danish smokeleaf and we was buying furs,’ explains Lyra (NL, p. 244). There is a pervasively diverse sense of time otherness throughout. Oxford feels relatively familiar (compounded by the Morse and Lewis television series— and as an aside I wonder if the name of the College Housekeeper Mrs Lonsdale was inspired consciously or unconsciously by the name of Colin Dexter’s fictional Lonsdale College) but Bolvangar and Svalbard (although the latter is a real archipelago in the Arctic Ocean) are unknown parallel universes. We are insecure readers in such a world; it is story that leads us on. Commentary on religion Pullman sets his story in an overtly religious and theological context; religion and its practices provide the substantive structure, themes, and indeed vocabulary of the book, shaping character and constructing place, usually if not always negatively—as in the ‘musty-smelling dimness’ of the Oratory (NL, p. 52), which is ‘only distinguished from a warehouse by the crucifix outside’ (NL, p. 102), and the ‘plump elderly intercessor’ (NL, p. 51) who mouths class platitudes. ‘The Church’, as the establishment of religion and religious practices, is the focus, indeed target, of explicit and sometimes bitter negative commentary (which becomes even more evident in the two later books). This is a sociological and perhaps anthropological view of religion rather than a theological or philosophical one, although, like John Milton, Pullman uses the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, particularly in relation to the idea of temptation, as a pervasive intertext. Pullman quotes this Biblical story quite extensively (NL, pp. 371–3) and creates his story around it, most obviously in two telling episodes, both involving dæmons, which he adds as part of his own version of the story of the Fall. The first is when Lyra has ‘inveigled’ Roger into the wine cellars, with ‘a single question growing more urgent’ in her mind—‘what did the wine taste like?’ (NL, p. 17). The second occurs when Mrs Coulter takes Lyra into her bathroom and makes Pantalaimon notice Lyra’s nakedness (‘and they realised that they were naked’ (Genesis 3: 7)). This episode is also a significant foil to the earlier washing Lyra had endured at the hands of Mrs Lonsdale: She dragged the dress over her head and dropped it on the narrow bed, and began to wash desultorily while Pantalaimon, a canary now, hopped closer and closer to Mrs Lonsdale’s dæmon, a solid retriever, trying in vain to annoy him. (NL, p. 64)

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But later, when Lyra is bathed by Mrs Coulter in her luxury flat, we find Pantalaimon ‘averting his eyes modestly from these feminine mysteries as the golden monkey (Mrs Coulter’s dæmon) was doing. He had never had to look away from Lyra before’ (NL, p. 78). Pullman begins his criticism of the Church early in the book. After the failed attempt on Lord Asriel’s life, the Master and Librarian of Jordan College begin to discuss the Consistorial Court of Discipline and the Oblation Board. As an aside, the name ‘Jordan’ itself evokes in this context the River Jordan, which includes the Sea of Galilee and is mentioned throughout the Bible, from early in Genesis to the New Testament; Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist in the River Jordan. In the sort of philosophical antithesis that is reminscent of Blake, Pullman creates Jordan College as Lyra’s home and the place of her baptism into the world of knowledge, but it is also a place that is antiquated and old, even dead; the River Jordan runs into the Dead Sea. ‘Oblation’ derives from the Latin offerre, oblatum = ‘to offer’, and in Church usage means gifts of bread and wine representing or in some beliefs becoming (through transubstantiation), the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharistic meal. In the Roman Catholic Church, oblates were an Order placed under the control of the Bishop, and sometimes referred to persons or children given or dedicated to monastic life. Pullman no doubt had all these meanings in his mind and perhaps conflated them as he set about depicting the ecclesiastical orders of the His Dark Materials world. Some parts are particularly ironic, even sardonic, as I am sure he meant them to be and as is demonstrated in the following paragraph. Note that the ‘Pope’ is the Head of the Roman Catholic Church, and ‘John Calvin’ (1509–1564) was an eminent French theologian who led, from Geneva, part of the Protestant Reformation (against the Roman Catholic Church); his teachings were integral to the foundation of the Presbyterian Church (later led by John Knox), the Congregational Church and the Reformed Church. Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva and set up the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Church’s power over every aspect of life had been absolute. The Papacy itself had been abolished after Calvin’s death, and a tangle of courts, colleges and councils, collectively known as the Magisterium, had grown up in its place. (NL, p. 31)

Jordan College is the centre for what Pullman calls ‘experimental theology’ (NL, p. 35); the young Lyra thinks this ‘was concerned with magic, with the movements of the stars and planets, with tiny

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particles of matter …’ (NL, p. 35); later she expands this to learning about ‘atoms and elementary particles, and anbaromagnetic charges and the four fundamental forces … [and] the solar system’ (NL, p. 83). Knowledge can be very dangerous—and Pullman expresses ‘knowing’ and ‘knowledge’ as a danger to the Church. In the world of Northern Lights, the two renegade theologians, Barnard and Stokes, were silenced when they claimed the existence of other worlds. In our world, this was one of the main charges brought by the Roman Inquisition against the Italian friar Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600. Dæmons, seeability and grace The dæmons are complicated metaphysical expressions of soul and subjectivity, without any prospect of life after death. The idea of the dæmon goes back to early Greece. The Greek philosopher Socrates (c. 470–390 bce) described his dæmon as a quiet voice inside his head that helped him discern right from wrong, as his student Plato (c. 427–347 bce) tells us in the Apology (31c–d). For Socrates the dæmon was similar to conscience; it is for Lyra as well: pondering what to do about what she has just seen happen to Asriel’s drink, she snaps at Pantalaimon: ‘You’re supposed to know about conscience, aren’t you?’ (NL, p. 9). Pullman’s twentieth-century conception of the dæmon is as a creature in animal or bird form, separately visible and able to shape shift until it settles into one form at puberty. It is a ‘dear companion’ of the heart that reflects the mind and emotions of its collaborating ‘owner’; in Pullman’s words: ‘You have to remember that you and your dæmon are not separate beings – you are one being in two bodies’.15 Separating child and dæmon in the deadly practice of intercision is separating body from soul, as is made clear in Chapter 16, ‘The Silver Guillotine’, when Pantalaimon is torn from Lyra and put into a mesh cage: ‘There was a mesh barrier between them, but he was still part of her, they were still joined. For a second or so more, he was still her own dear soul’ (NL, pp. 278–9). Pullman’s dæmon is not inside the head, it is soul given creature-shape. It is seen—constructed as visible in the literary art of book, as actually visible in the cinematic art of the film. It is soul made see-able. Ernst Cassirer, referring to the claim of the nineteenth-century writer on aesthetics Konrad Fiedler that art is an object that is looked at, developed a concept of seeability as the discursive thinking of language: ‘the “intuitive” activity of artistic seeing and creating interact so as

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together to weave the cloak of “reality”’.16 ‘Things attain a look’, writes Cassirer, because the mind lends it to them through a particular kind of direction or activity.’17 In making the dæmon a separate entity, Pullman gives artistic seeability to a metaphysical idea that is part of his construction of a literary heterocosm, the other-world of His Dark Materials that posits new territories of reality. In this new territory, soul is reflective of its ‘owner’, dependent on it; intimately connected in some way; when the children get drunk the daemons get even more drunk. Pullman is creating an ‘essence of being’ which ‘is not drawn from experience and which can be neither proven nor refuted through experience’; metaphysics is not a turning away from experience—historically indeed, it relates to a sense of an absolute (being, becoming, nature, God, soul, mind, unity, plurality) that screens out what is not relevant to itself.18 In Northern Lights, Pullman makes explicit reference to the Biblical Fall—Eve tempted by the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, eating it and persuading Adam to eat of it, both subsequently becoming aware of their nakedness, and excluded from the Paradise of the Garden of Eden. Indeed, in Northern Lights he extensively quotes Genesis (3: 2–7), which of course constitutes the fundamental narrative intertext of Paradise Lost. In the Introduction to a special Folio edition of his work, he cites as his thematic inspiration an essay by Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ (1810), which also refers to the Fall and touches on associated Christian beliefs pertaining to innocence and grace. Kleist’s essay is worth reading; in it he somewhat ironically claims that human consciousness is an impediment to natural grace—in this case, the grace of a dancer—and that an inanimate puppet controlled by a puppet master pulling properly attached strings will move more gracefully (by implication, come closer to perfection, exhibit more grace). Thinking and fear upset the soul and make the human dancer less fluid and less graceful. But this cannot be avoided, Kleist’s speaker goes on to say, ‘now that we’ve eaten of the tree of knowledge’. Because of that, humans cannot get back into Paradise, cannot recover that perfection, and can only ‘go on and make the journey round the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back’. He continues: ‘where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect’.19 Kleist’s essay also describes the ‘Paradise of innocence’ (shades of Blake), and tells a story, which I think indents the concept of soul with the idea of decision making and as the site of personal truth.

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The story is about a bear (Pullman acknowledges the source)20 that, although chained to a post, is able to discern human intent and not respond to the feints of a fencer: ‘his eye fixed on mine as if he could read my soul there’. The storyteller goes on to explain: ‘We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.’ ‘Does that mean’, I said in some bewilderment, ‘that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?’ ‘Of course’, he said, ‘but that’s the final chapter in the history of the world.’

I have quoted at length from Kleist’s essay because of the influence Pullman attributes to it in the formulation of his own thematic intentions—the difference between children and adults, and the complexities of their transition from innocence to experience. Pullman comments that Kleist’s essay became ‘part of the way I thought about everything’21 and makes some particularly interesting remarks on grace, which he says is a paradise we can no longer enter. However, he derides so-called golden age children’s literature which at its worst, he says, ‘wallows in a sort of sickly nostalgia for nursery teas, and teddy bears, and bathtime, and wishes it had never grown up.’ He goes on to say that Kleist’s essay is optimistic: We can’t go back, he says; as with the original Paradise, an angel with a flaming sword guards the way; if we want to return we have to go all the way around the world, and re-enter Paradise through the back gate, as it were. In other words, since we cannot dwell forever in the paradise of childhood, we have to go forward, through the disappointments and compromises and betrayals of experience, towards the fully conscious kind of grace that we call wisdom. Innocence is not wise, and wisdom cannot be innocent.

This idea of grace engages semantically and metaphorically with aspects of the Old Testament Fall but ignores the New Testament teachings on grace. These theologically relate directly to the Fall,

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which is only one part of the story: the coming of Jesus reframed the story and brought with it the idea of grace as the unearned gift of God for the soul’s salvation: ‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no-one can boast’ (Ephesians 2: 8–9). Pullman’s description thus depicts a particularly selective clip of Biblical story, equating grace with pre-Fall innocence; Christian scholars emphasize grace as post-Fall redemption. However, this also carries, intriguingly, and either wittingly or unwittingly, a philosophical kinship with the theology of grace as that which survives and indeed transforms ‘disappointments and compromises and betrayals of experience’. Seeability and visuality (book and film modes) Northern Lights has a sharp and likeable ‘half-wild’ (NL, p. 19) female protagonist and a very clever story that is at once obviously part classical quest/odyssey, allegory, Bildungsroman, fantasy, science fiction, detective story, and theological and eschatological tale. There are other familiar elements: Lyra is street-smart and apparently-parentless, superficially being looked after by the College but basically self-reliant; like Harry Potter, she also has a special destiny (The Master tells the Librarian, ‘Yes, Lyra has a part to play in all this, and a major one’ (NL, p. 32)). There are lost/gobbled children reminiscent of Dickens and Barrie; abusive adults with a grotesquerie of purposes; the unremarkable communication between animals and humans that is so much part of the fantasy genre; children outwitting adults and operating for much of the time without them (a long tradition in children’s literature and thus, arguably, also reminiscent of, among many others, the Blyton adventures); the icy other-worlds of myth and saga; and a Tolkienesque concern with the fight between good and evil, and the representation of light and dark powers (here also part of dæmon/ soul). There is also a radically subverted ‘happy ending’—the parents are revealed and reunite, but then split not only from each other but from their daughter, whose soul/dæmon then comes to the critical and damning conclusion that: ‘If they [Lyra’s parents] all think Dust is bad, it must be good’ (NL, p. 397). And finally, there is the trenchant social commentary about the Church and its institutions, which in a mix of substitution and allegory is presented as a power that tries to prevent knowledge and thinking, and/or presents its own versions. This Church is a soul-less (or more accurately, frozen-soul) Magisterium, with a General Oblation Board (Gobblers) that steals

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children and, in a process likened to castration (NL, p. 374), severs them from their dæmons, thus taming them by removing their souls (intercision). The relationship of person and dæmon is life-giving; Roger dies when his dæmon/soul is cut away; a loss mirrored for the bear Iorek when his armour, akin to his soul, is stolen and he is condemned to bound servitude. In the secular world at least, the success of Northern Lights is unquestioned (and the book has attracted much critical admiration); the His Dark Materials trilogy has been mostly accepted as being in the tradition of fantasy and in the spirit of, say, the Wizard of Oz (with its good and bad witches and irascible wizard and no particular religious stance), or, at the other end of the creative spectrum, in the darkly historical spirit of Macbeth, with its evil witchery of fortune-tellers and pot-stirrers, and total disruption of the God-ordained order of the Jacobean world. However, the success of The Golden Compass, the film, despite huge box office excitement at its release, has been problematical. New Line Cinema spared no expense in publicity, high profile stars, complicated sets and production. Pullman himself maintained a distance from the filming.Yet the film did not bring the expected returns and New Line subsequently suffered some financial difficulties, forcing a restructure. It is particularly regrettable that the film did not actually cover all the events in the first book; the cinematic reworking of the plot confused those who knew the story and detracted from the narrative impact, a source of much viewer frustration. Because the ending was cut so seemingly abruptly, Roger’s death and Asriel’s bridge to the stars are completely missing, and the impact and sense of ongoingness and challenge that is so much a part of the book’s conclusion is lost. The last scene of Lyra speaking is platitudinous and anticlimactic, and gives no sense of either the narrative or philosophical complexities of the novel. Further, whilst the producers watered down the anti-Church stance, thus perhaps alienating Pullman’s fans, they did not do so sufficiently to appease and calm those in opposition. The main reason for comparatively small audiences, especially in the United States, is commonly considered to be Pullman’s vocal anti-Church position, which becomes more explicit in the two following books. This made the trilogy unacceptable to many Church schools and communities, and the film more so. There are, however, other reasons why the film struggles in a way the book does not and these invite critical comment because of what they reveal about different modalities. These pertain to the different affordances of each for the telling of the complexities and subtleties of

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Pullman’s story, especially his idea of dæmon as soul. They thus relate to the nature of the imaginative transaction of each mode, and to the idea of artistic seeability previously discussed, alongside an associated idea of the visuality of the film mode. In other words, at their deepest level, they have something to do with the nature of reading and the nature of viewing. Film is a wonderful artistic medium, but in this particular instance of page and screen text, there are differences that are important. Both the titles of the book (Northern Lights and The Golden Compass), and the title of the film (The Golden Compass) immediately produce a rich palimpsest—or in the case of the film, pentimento—of associations. The very words ‘Northern lights’ convey a tumble of intertextual associations: the magical sight of the frozen Northern lands of myth and legend; the Aurora Borealis (Lyra’s ‘Roarer’, (NL, p. 121)), its colours and transforming power to light up dark skies, the ephemerality of display, the heavens; the ‘golden’ of the golden compass brings to mind gold as colour, as value and light, while ‘compass’, as well as a way-finding device, in this context evokes complex spatio-temporal images of navigation and those medieval paintings such as ‘God’s Compass’, as well, of course, as the lines from Milton’s epic: He took the golden compasses, prepared In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe This universe, and all created things:22

As the story unfolds the book is able to privilege semantic nuance in a way the film cannot, despite its visuality and pace. In the film the attempt to poison Lord Asriel (played by Daniel Craig), the discussion about Dust, the bitterness about the Magisterium and the inference that its days are numbered, the idea about a co-existing universe, the tutor of metaphysics, the ice bears, are all introduced quite rapidly. Indeed, the beginning of the film is a voice-over that immediately states the idea of multiple universes, dæmons, dust, the Gobblers, the aletheiometer. This and later events (zeppelins, uranium mines, Magisterium plotting, intercision) makes for, in our twenty-first century moment, a feeling of a sort of backdated steampunk—blending into what perhaps could be called sciencepunk: not quite ‘steampunk’, not quite ‘cyberpunk’, but something in between that shares certain characteristics with these sub-genres. They are dystopian and science fiction related, they deal with conflict, often with large and powerful organizations, and they are concerned with the collapse of social order. Yet the story of Lyra and her quest for identity,

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belonging and parents does not quite fit; and, as mentioned earlier, the visual imageries are the familiar ones of children’s fantasy, and British children’s fantasy at that. There is a sudden contrast in the early part of the film between the star-filled black skies and swirling eddies of the spoken introduction filmscape (presaging a type of The Lord of the Rings) and the sudden switch to a pastel, briefly rural idyl riverside world, which becomes (as we get closer to the College) an increasingly dark, Dickensian world of ragamuffin children playing gobblers. Again, time is confounded: the children are clearly from their accents (which Lyra rather surprisingly shares, seeing she has been brought up in Jordan College) street urchins, ‘gyptians’, and ‘servant kids’, dressed in a sort of no time but absolutely not in the present fashion; they are familiar from every Dickens film or series, Mary Poppins, Peter Pan and countless others. The Golden Compass film obviously wants to backdate or perhaps more accurately un-date further and more ambiguously than the book; it turns the ‘1898 Tokay’ into a more nebulous ‘99’. The entrance of Kidman in a golden sheath as Mrs Coulter through the dining hall (again oh so familiar in the British tradition, but again oh so impressive), is a very different introduction from that of the book (and she is different in appearance: ‘Her sleek black hair framed her cheeks’ (NL, p. 66)) but it works; the shimmer of gold and expensive but again relatively undated clothing—sometimes 1930s or 1940ish, mostly again ambiguous—evokes the idea of richness and value, played up by Kidman as cunning feminine wiles, intent on manipulative purpose and possibly deceit. This sits rather uncomfortably with the memory of the voice-over introduction (presumably also by Kidman?), which has in a few sentences told us everything— that there are ‘many universes’, that they are ‘parallel’, that ‘souls live outside bodies’, that they walk beside us ‘as animal spirits we call dæmons’, that there is ‘Dust’, ‘the alethiometer’, ‘ruling power’, ‘gobblers’, and that ‘one compass remains and only one who can read it’. Mrs Coulter and her sweetening seductions are very much those of Lewis’s White Witch, and this is compounded in the film by Kidman’s ensuing outfits of creams and whites. Again, in scenes such as the zeppelin ones, there are glimpses of that picture-perfect English landscape that we know so well from so many films in the British children’s tradition; here that landscape is sometimes subverted into surreal buildings that speak of the future rather than the past, but, like the spires of Oxford, it is still there. Indeed, there are some elements of fairytale in the depiction of coaches, whilst in the depiction of the Magisterium plotters I at least had twinges of recognition of historical dramas such as The Tudors (2007–2010). One part where the

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film worked brilliantly was in the visual representation of the golden compass itself, and the way its layering images of truth were revealed. However, this combination of factors somehow does not congeal; there is a sense of ‘not quiteness’ and ‘in betweenness’, which is unsatisfactory. This is compounded by the relentless musical score, which does not have a discernible theme and (like the film depiction of Mrs Coulter) never seems to resolve; the song at the end felt tacked on. Pullman’s story is a philosophical one and its complexities have better artistic seeability in the book, which is altogether more subtle and more powerful. Its literariness makes us aware of the exact moment of understanding for Lyra when the word ‘Dust’, heard by her as ‘dust’ (NL, p. 248), becomes the capital-letter word ‘Dust’ (NL, p. 283). The book tells—but it tells in ways that readers can personally help to construct; the film shows—dramatically and with great cinematic impact. The film of this particular story allows the action and movement and noise of outer worlds to supersede the thoughts of inner worlds. Film is a lovely medium, and of course we can and do reconstruct imaginatively and personally extrapolate its images into our private inner audience, but the beginning point is a universal image not of our making. Film is concerned with the construction of visuality, a more liminal construction of mindscape, more concerned with outer vision and outer voices. Reading is concerned with the construction of seeability, is subliminal in its creation of inner mindscapes, more concerned with inner vision and inner voices. Intertextual links, including the icy North, create a subliminal literary hypertextuality in the book; in the film the visual hypertextuality is more conscious, and for this particular story less satisfactory. The implied viewer is more passive than the implied reader: the nature of reading is intensely creative and personal; the nature of viewing is more corporate and communal. In the book we start from scratch, we are part of the creation of image, part of creating what Mrs Coulter looks like, part of creating what Lyra’s voice sounds like. Pullman is a powerful author and he captures the reader into the flow of the text, and particularly into the relationship between child and dæmon, which was sometimes confusing on screen. I have discussed, previously and often, the mystery and magic of the reading process, of how different arrangements of only 26 black marks on a white page can somehow create and make graphically seeable places, people and events.23 When that story is turned into the visuality of film, whole crews of people are needed—some to make the pictures, some to make the sounds, some to construct the sets and some to play the characters. When we read, we do all of that, on our own, within our

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own heads. Reading is a cryptic process of imaginative metonymy, intellectual leaps, releasing of data compression, interpretive figuring and refiguring: a phenomenological montage beyond the visual, beyond the aural, beyond the sensual. One reader, meeting the words of one writer, constructs/reconstructs/negotiates/imagines/creates narrative event, character, appearance, sound of voice, intonation, time and space, a sense of ‘beforeness’, ‘the being-in-the-world proposed by the text’24 as well as the world that is glimpsed around the edges, or implied beyond the text.25 There are other differences between the seeability of page text and the visuality of screen. There is, for example, a very powerful episodic narrative in the written text that is inserted quite suddenly, changing from the past tense of the previous narration to present continuous and in the last clause, future. It comes immediately after the sentence: ‘For no reason that anyone could imagine, children were beginning to disappear.’ From this past tense, the narrative shifts to the conditional ‘it would happen like this’, and then to an eerie present, taking us through an accumulating and detailed landscape: East along the great highway of the Isis, thronged with slow-moving brick-barges and corn-tankers, way down past Henley and Maidenhead to Teddington, where the tide from the German Ocean reaches …, and further down still; to Mortlake, past the house of the great magician Dr Dee; past Falkeshall, where the pleasure-gardens spread out bright with fountains and banners by day, with tree-lamps and fireworks by night; past Whitehall Palace where the king holds his weekly Council of State, past the Shot Tower, dropping its endless drizzle of molten lead into vats of murky water; further down, still, to where the river, wide and filthy now, swings in a great curve to the south. This is Limehouse, and here is the child who is going to disappear. (NL, pp. 40-1)

This description is both threatening and provocative, not only because of the horror of what is about to happen, which is frightening, but also because of the way in which, in creating a very specific description of the place of the story, Pullman reiterates the vagaries of its location in time. The visuality of the film could not contain all the subtleties of this paragraph, nor the jolt that the changes in tense provoke. The film concentrates more on the exterior/external excitement of the actual adventures; the book is not so much a more interior medium as, strangely enough perhaps, a more flexible one. This excerpt is a wonderful example of artistic seeability, and ‘objectifying and grasping the world as configured whole’.26

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Conclusion So, where does all this lead? Plotwise, the Lyra narrative continues into The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Northern Lights is clearly unresolved; the journey for Lyra and Pantalaimon is just beginning: ‘So Lyra and her dæmon moved away from the world they were born in, and looked towards the sun, and walked into the sky’ (NL, pp. 198–9). This literary description creates a powerful artistic seeability through imageries of both before, present, and future, picturesin-words that paint an inner and outer landscape that still carry both the bleakness of the ‘frozen sea’ as well as the brilliance of the Aurora ‘swaying above’ (NL, p. 302). The ‘vault of wonders’ (NL, p. 397) is not only the sky, the worlds, the lights of the Aurora and the rays of sunlight, but is also an inner vault; indeed, is Lyra herself. The words are inflected with disappointment but also with resolve; innocence has grown through experience into knowledge, yet that knowledge is now inspiring not despair but meaningful action. There has been for this child an ultimate betrayal—that of her parents. But in the lines quoted above there is hope; indeed, there is also a sense of grace. And that brings us back to Pullman himself, and his fight against the Church. The artistic seeability discussed here provides a lens for looking deeply into places where authors themselves may not see— perhaps even into their own unconscious as revealed through their artistic creativity. It is easy to discern this in books from earlier times when ideologies that were unnoticed at the time—say in relation to race and class—are now glaringly obvious. Pullman, of course, is of our own time, and we are seeing the here and now. However, as noted earlier, he refers to himself as an ‘agnostic atheist’ and I think he has written this particular book more as an agnostic than as an atheist. I even wonder if his is a case of protesting too much? The core structure of this book—its theme, its motif, its imagery—pertains to the significance and primacy of the soul in human lives; even the usurper Bear King, Iofur Raknison, wants a soul (NL, p. 28). The idea of sacrifice and the redeeming power of love, so familiar in Christian theology, can also be seen in Lyra’s attempt to save Iorek Byrnison, and in her ongoing search for Roger, whose dead body she later holds against her in a seeable, pietà-like image. To extrapolate: Pullman’s concerns are Christian concerns. There are not many Christians who would deny that the Church as an institution has indeed sometimes engaged in horrifying practices. There are many dark episodes, past and present. There are also many

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horrifying past and present dark episodes in Governments across the world, in the histories of the medical and legal professions, in schools and educational practices. The repression of ideological differences, the potential for corruption in bureaucracies and other evils have thrived in too many cultural climates: the dreams of humanity are too often too desperate. Pullman has overtly created His Dark Materials around negative views of religious institutions. One of his later works (as Pinsent notes in this volume) has specifically attacked ‘Christ’ as a fraud, but acknowledges the ‘goodness’ of ‘Jesus’. This reflects a deep dichotomy (and to be honest, a confusion), which I think threads as a leit-motif through Pullman’s thinking and the construction of the His Dark Materials world—a dichotomy that we see reflected so often in the works of Blake. Literature has a long tradition of moral questioning, making known, and seeking to redress wrongs, of being a place for ‘ethical reflection’.27 On the surface, it seems perhaps that whilst Pullman’s books may be offering a place for reflection, they are not really engaged in moral questioning. They are didactic; there is no gap for any consideration of the great good—in giving, and working with disadvantaged groups, for example—that religions at their best may do, and do do. Going beyond Northern Lights into the others of the trilogy, we may well wonder if the aim is to destroy Christianity, and whether other religions such as Judaism and Islam will be similarly targeted. The narrative of Northern Lights relies on pivotal Biblical stories as part of its structure, but there are other references. The way Dust falls (‘a fountain of glowing particles’ (NL, p. 21)) is not unlike the manna that fell from the heavens as the people of Israel wandered through the wilderness: Then the Lord said to Moses, I will rain down bread from heaven for you.… [In] the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. (Exodus 16:4, 13–14)

There is the episode where Lyra uses guile to trick Iofur Raknison, becoming Lyra Silvertongue in the process (‘The great bear was helpless. Lyra found her power over him almost intoxicating’ (NL, p. 343)). This has similarities to the story of Esther in the book of that name in the Old Testament: Mordecai the Jew exhorts Esther to save her people, saying ‘And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?’ (Esther 4: 14b). She confronts the

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King on his throne, as Lyra does, and thereby saves her people (the Jews). The story of Judith in the Apocrypha is an even closer parallel. And there are more fleeting but ironic ‘coincidences’ of thought—for example, the hypertextual association in the reference to the youth who laughed and sang with his victims ‘so that they followed him like sheep’ (NL, p. 45); Jesus was, of course, often described as the Good Shepherd, but here the ‘like sheep’ tag also carries the popular idiomatic meaning of mindlessness. The upshot is that Pullman is actually educating a secular society about the Bible.The number of web and media-based discussions of the Fall and other Christian precepts provoked by the trilogy has generated new encounters and certainly new debate. And Pullman’s multiverse, with its glimpse through the Aurora of a new city, a new land, is not incompatible with—indeed, evokes—the revelation of John: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away … And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Revelation 21: 1–2) As [Lyra] gazed, her wonder grew, because there in the sky was the unmistakeable outline of a city, towers, domes, walls … buildings and streets, suspended in the air. She nearly gasped with wonder. (NL, p. 24)

This parallel highlights the most important point of all in this context, a point that is at one with the book’s concern with parallel universes. The whole message that Jesus brought to the world was about another world—this was presaged by the prophets of the Old Testament (‘Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth’ (Isaiah 65: 17)) and compounded most powerfully by both the life and the dying words of Jesus to the thief on the cross: ‘I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23: 43). This is the ‘Father’s House’, where there are ‘many rooms’ (John 14: 2); this is the parallel world at the core of Christianity that some call heaven. So, there is a philosophical and literary dichotomy of thinking that somehow creates a consonance in the very obvious dissonances. Pullman acknowledges his Christian imageries, and seeks to write the book within an overtly Christian (anti-Christian) paradigm. But there are glimpses in his literary vision of something akin to Rudolf Otto’s phenomenology of the holy, that mysterious ‘wholly-other’ that draws us towards it, the mysterium fascinans et tremendum that is, at once, awe and fear, attraction and fascination.28 The film, with its focus on action, could not capture this delicacy of thought. The soul

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is a mysterious idea and Pullman’s literary conceptualization of soul as dæmon is provocative, and tantalizes and intrigues. Faith itself is mystical and mysterious. His very emphasis on the importance of soul, of souls as reflective of the ‘real’ person, and of the impossibility of life without a soul is in this context significant. I think that, perhaps despite himself, Pullman is drawn to that Bakhtinian idea of some ‘Not-I in me; something larger than me in me’,29 and that perhaps he, like Lyra and Pantalaimon (and note that why they are ‘not alone’ is unclear and part of the ‘consonant dissonance’) will continue to ‘go on’. Behind them lay pain and death and fear; ahead of them lay doubt, and danger, and fathomless mysteries. But they weren’t alone. (NL, pp. 398–9)

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

The Golden Compass. Dir. Chris Weitz. New Line Cinema (2007). William Blake, ‘The Tyger’, Songs of Experience (1794). Andrew Zak Williams, ‘Faith No More’, New Statesman, 25 July (2011). ‘Philip Pullman webchat’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/ hisdarkmaterials/pullman_webchat.shtml). Ibid. Robert Butler, ‘Philip Pullman’s Dark Arts’, Intelligent Life, December (2007), (http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/aninterview-with-philip-pullman). Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (New York: Vintage, 1998): 176. Lucretius, De rerum natura. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis; The Scientific Search for the Soul (Westport: Touchstone, 1993): 3. David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (London: Penguin, 2002): 5. Immanuel Kant, Prologomena to any Future Metaphysics [1783], Gary Hatfield (trans. and ed., 2nd edn) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 15. Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2005): 36–7. Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds.) Vern W. McGee (Trans.) (Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986): 1–9. Beowulf III, ll. 1–5, John Lesslie Hall (Trans.). ‘Philip Pullman webchat’. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1996): 83–4. Ibid.: 83. Ibid.: 153-7.

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19. Heinrich von Kleist, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ (http://southerncross review.org/9/kleist.htm). 20. ‘Folio Society Edition of His Dark Materials’,(http://www.philip- pullman. com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=119). 21. Pullman, ‘Folio Society Edition of His Dark Materials’. 22. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 7, lines 225–7. 23. Rosemary R. Johnston, in G. Winch, R. R. Johnston, M. Holliday, L. Ljungdahl and P. March, Literacy: Reading,Writing and Children’s Literature, (4th edn.) (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2010): 541. 24. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985): 100–1. 25. Rosemary R. Johnston, ‘Thisness and Everydayness in Children’s Literature: the “being-in-the-world proposed by the text.”’ Papers 8, 1: 25–35. 26. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: 83. 27. Simon Haines, ‘Deepening the Self: the Language of Ethics and the Language of Literature’, in Jane Adamson, Richard Freedman and David Parker (eds.), Renegotiating Ethics in Literature: Philosophy and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 21–38 (34). 28. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, John W. Harvey (Trans) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923; 2nd edn, 1950 [Das Heilige, 1917]). 29. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays: 146.

3 The Pursuit of Knowledge: Scientific Enquiry in His Dark Materials Alison Waller Introduction In the closing pages of Northern Lights, Lord Asriel appears in a classic image of the mad, overreaching scientist, standing on the summit of a snow-capped peak surrounded by instruments and apparatus, and harnessing tremendous natural phenomena in a ‘long finger of blinding power’ (NL, p. 392). He is like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, or Dr Frankenstein reversing the spark of life from a living being back into the material world of matter. He has forged a pathway to a new world beyond the Aurora and is testing his hypothesis that this is where ‘all the Dust in this universe comes from’ (NL, p. 377). He has sacrificed a child in his scientific efforts, severing Lyra’s companion Roger from his dæmon, thereby killing him and releasing powerful energy that bridges the universes. Lyra’s response to her father at the site of his successful experiment is ambivalent, swinging from passionate admiration to terrible anger; and similarly, readers may be uncertain about how they should respond to the character and the deeds he undertakes in the name of scientific understanding. For while there are complex and questionable forces directing his actions, his thirst for knowledge is hard to condemn outright, since throughout the trilogy knowledge is valued above ignorance. This chapter will explore the pursuit of knowledge in Pullman’s His Dark Materials, with a particular focus on scientific enquiry. This form of understanding represents a key epistemology in the series, although by no means the only one: other forms of knowledge— philosophical, poetic, sexual and so on—are also crucial to the narrative and often add nuance to the portrayals of science that readers encounter. For instance, the self-knowledge and understanding of the workings of the universes that Lyra gains through her loving 58

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sexual encounter with Will towards the end of the trilogy might be considered as more instinctual than rational, and its importance for the reader is framed by the narrative of the ‘Fall’ of humankind. By scientific enquiry I mean the creation of generalizable theories about natural phenomena through repeated experiment and systematic recording of observation. The best ‘scientists’ in this empirical tradition are Mary Malone and John Parry. Unlike Asriel’s ‘mad, bad, dangerous scientist’, Malone and Parry might be described as ‘noble scientists’, using categories identified as commonly occurring in Western literature by critic Roslynn Haynes.1 The influence of these two figures on the growth and ultimate destinies of Lyra and Will helps bolster the idea that scientific enquiry offers an authoritative worldview and a potentially valuable model for young people reading the series. However, Pullman’s is not a wholly science-based ideology. Indeed, in the introduction to Mary and John Gribbin’s The Science of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Pullman claims he ‘wasn’t writing about science’ at all but tried to get a bit of science in, ‘as a background, as a sort of stage set’.2 Elsewhere, he explains that ‘[w]e don’t demand or require scientific proof of everything we need to know about, not only because it would be impossible to provide, but because in a lot of cases it isn’t necessary or appropriate’.3 The alternative epistemological frameworks he sets up—humanist understanding, a Keatsian admission that knowledge can only be partial and is to be found via ‘negative capability’, and even some dabblings in Augustinian theology—reveal a developing stance towards knowledge that is much more complicated than bare scientism. In her discussion of the phenomenon of Dust, Anne-Marie Bird articulates this stance, stating that ‘[t]he desire to connect everything with everything else manifests itself in every level in the texts’.4 In this chapter, then, I will explore the shifting ground Pullman covers, firstly by surveying the world of science in His Dark Materials; then by considering the key scientist figures (professional and amateur) in the trilogy and finally, by analyzing the characterization of Lyra and Will as natural enquirers. I will suggest that the increasing importance of ‘connectedness’ can usefully be related to recent moves by some scientists to attempt a ‘theory of everything’. Science in the worlds of His Dark Materials Lord Asriel’s end is tragic and epic.Towards the close of the final book, The Amber Spyglass, he and Lyra’s mother, Mrs Coulter, tumble into a chasm to their eternal oblivion in the process of killing the dictator

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angel, Metatron. Their fate is not wholly terrible, however, because it succeeds in the definitive aim to destroy the Authority and his regime. The believers and followers of ‘the Authority’ represent a dangerous passivity of thought that can be set against Asriel’s ambitious enquiry and judged wanting. During the climax of The Amber Spyglass, Pullman makes an explicit commentary on how the Kingdom of Heaven created by the Authority stifles free thinking and the text offers an anti-climatic vision of this God-figure as a wizened and exhausted aged entity, encased in a crystal carriage but enfeebled and incapable, and finally dissolving into nothingness. Critic Mary Harris Russell may describe this death as ‘not murder but a transition’,5 but the evaporation of the Authority is emblematic of the phony nature of the Creation myth and Christian knowledge across the trilogy. Outright mocking of the Authority is matched by scathing representations of the power-hungry and violent Magisterium (the powerful arm of the Church that appears in Lyra’s world). Similar satiric moves are not made directly against the world of science and scientists.6 True science, unlike religion, is a field of action and heroism. Thus, Pullman provides many intertextual hints that the fate of Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter is an admirable revolutionary act to cap their relentless pursuit of knowledge: the chapter’s epigraph comes from William Blake’s America: A Prophecy, which draws on events in eighteenth century revolutionary France and America, while the trilogy famously opens with an extract from Paradise Lost and features John Milton’s rebellious Satan, who stands on the brink of hell looking into another chasm, or ‘wild abyss’. Readers are invited to respect serious and ambitious enquiry into the nature of things as an exciting valiant endeavour (although as I explore later, they are also expected to question the ethics of such activity). At the same time, unthinking acceptance is often rendered suspicious. For example, the nurses and functionaries at Bolvangar display an alarming lack of curiosity about their work as part of a research facility. If Lyra’s dæmon, Pantalaimon, is an emblem of Lyra’s lively and imaginative interest in the world around her, shifting from moth to ermine to bird to dolphin, then the unquestioning ignorance of those serving a project they do not understand is symbolized by their docile and severed dog dæmons, which Lyra finds uncanny and abhorrent. Although Roderick McGillis suggests that the celebration of Enlightenment rationality can be contrasted with irrational religious thought—‘superstition and the fantastic as opposed to scientific knowledge’, as he puts it7—it is not always necessary to formulate the difference in terms of such direct opposition. It is possible to identify

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a clear critique of the theocracy that has developed in Lyra’s world, where the Reformation and subsequent explosion of Enlightenment ideas never took place and the Church is darkly in control of research institutions, but this does not mean that ‘the universe we know’ is portrayed as an epistemological utopia, just because of its historical trajectory towards secularism and a scientific knowledge base. Such a binary understanding of superstitious and scientific knowledge also denies the complexity of Pullman’s multiple worlds. Pullman is in fact heavily influenced by biblical imagery and goes out of his way to weave a new pattern out of the conventional mythic elements of the Judeo-Christian discourse. At times, moreover, unquestioning acceptance and an adherence to authority beyond oneself is allowed a positive foothold in the narrative; for example, when the spirit of aëronaut Lee Scoresby travels in the form of a bird and follows an eagle queen with the pleasure of ‘offering eager obedience to a stronger power that was wholly right’ (SK, p. 307). The manner in which Pullman twines together different types of enquiry and knowledge in his narrative is evident from the very beginning of Northern Lights. In the first few pages we learn that Lyra’s home, Jordan College in Oxford, houses a special centre for research in ‘experimental theology’.This discipline is still related to the Church as it comes under the broad remit of the Magisterium, but later in the trilogy Will suggests that experimental theologians have more in common with the physicists of his world (specifically quantum physicists) than with anyone concerned with religious enquiry. In The Subtle Knife, Lyra and Will meet physicist Mary Malone from the ‘Dark Matter Research Unit’ in Will’s Oxford (which is part of ‘the universe we know’).8 Mary tells Lyra how her team is using electromagnetic fields to detect shadow particles and Lyra notices similarities to the elementary particles, fundamental forces and anbaromagnetic charges she has learned about from the experimental theologians at Jordan College. The science may be nearly identical, but Pullman’s portrayal of the scientist figures and the research methods in the two worlds is quite distinct. Lyra notes Mary’s unglamorous appearance and the stark institutional environment in which she works: a certain kind of reader might recognize the cramped conditions, instant coffee and ever-lurking grimy computer common in many contemporary university departments. In Lyra’s world, Jordan scholars offer an alternative cliché of ivory-tower academia, out of touch with reality and thrilled by Asriel’s evidence of other worlds as if, ‘having written treatises on the existence of the unicorn without ever having seen one, they’d been presented with a living example newly captured’

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(NL, p. 24). However, dynamic researchers in the field of experimental theology—such as Asriel and Dr Stanislaus Grumman—also exist and are much more compelling than fusty scholars or Mary’s career-scientist colleague, Oliver Payne. Instead, they come closer to resembling ‘Victorian adventurer-explorer-scientist’ heroes, as Steven Barfield and Martyn Colebrook put it.9 Grumman—or John Parry, to give him his name as Will’s father—explains to Lee Scoresby that he was a soldier and explorer before becoming a scientist, but that this applied knowledge helped him exceed the understanding of the purely theoretical Academicians at the German Academy (SK, p. 223). There is a whiff of romanticism in this representation that not only provokes interest in scientific activity often considered to be ‘geeky’ and dull, but also allows some insight into the ways that academic disciplines can branch off from one another and form rigid conventions and institutional strictures. Although regular theology still informs the ideology of Lyra’s world, experimental theology has shifted enquiry from spirit towards matter and asks that new discoveries are revealed through actively testing theory rather than through faith.10 For example, the concept of original sin can be explained through biblical teachings as the curse God pronounces on Adam for eating the fruit of knowledge, but according to the Magisterium it also has a tangible manifestation that can be examined (and exorcised) in the (meta)physical phenomenon of Dust. The world Pullman has created thus unifies disciplines that have become disparate and often contradictory in the reader’s own experience. While on one hand he draws attention to the potential problems inherent in a Church-funded model of research, on the other, by tying together empirical experiment and the study of divinity, he indicates an alternative path that the Church might have taken if the scientific method that was worked out in Europe during the seventeenth century had not emerged from the broader domain of natural philosophy. As Claire Squires points out, it is a ‘heady mix of science and religion’11 and it is one that may help to introduce young readers to some of the recent and ongoing debates about science and religion, or science and the arts.12 One of Pullman’s achievements in creating such a rich set of parallel universes—and one marker of the ‘realism’ of his work—is his construction of complex social and intellectual institutions, especially in the first two books of the series (indeed, it is the lack of political complexity and absence of methodological and theoretical plurality that renders the third book, and particularly its world of the mulefa, unfortunately bland at times).13 Lyra and Will hear about scholarly

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organizations with mysterious structures and multiple objectives: the Royal Arctic Institute, the Imperial Muscovite Academy and the Oblation Board in Lyra’s world; research groups in Geneva and the Ministry of Defence in Will’s; and the Guild of the Torre degli Angeli in Cittàgazze. They also encounter researchers working alone and together who have distinct ambitions and agendas. The diversity of approaches is important, and Pullman nearly always emphasizes multiplicity in fields of scientific enquiry, particularly in the form of debates about validity of evidence and the ethics of research. For example, in the opening scenes at Jordan College, readers learn about the ‘renegade’ theologians Barnard and Stokes who posited a theory about the existence of multiple, parallel universes, a theory that the Magisterium has denounced as heretical but which Jordan’s Cassington Scholar states is sound.The fact that a scientific thesis might be deemed wrong because it is theologically suspect is pernicious in itself, and of course recalls many pronouncements by the Church over the centuries,14 but vehement disagreements over scientific knowledge are hardly uncommon in our own world and to a degree they indicate a healthy environment of scholarly exchange. Asriel’s photogram of the city beyond the Aurora seems to offer empirical evidence that such worlds do indeed exist to support the Barnard-Stokes theory, but a thoughtful reader might question the nature of proof based on observation when it becomes clear later in the series that the other piece of evidence Asriel presents to the Jordan scholars to support his claims—a scalped head supposed to be Grumman’s—is bogus. It is not just the question of veracity in scientific evidence that leads to an indeterminate stance in Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, but also ethical questions about how forms of enquiry have the potential to bring forth potentially dangerous knowledge, and, of course, how that knowledge will be employed. In Northern Lights, the research facility Bolvangar is the setting for systematic recording of observations that in a different context would appear benign. When Lyra is taken there she is examined, weighed, looked at and put ‘under a little nozzle that hissed and gave off a smell like fresh air’ (257). The sterile nature of this examination may represent good experimental practice but is also marked as ominous by the allusion to gas, and when Lyra is later in danger of being severed from Pantalaimon in the procedure known as ‘intercision’ there is a further chilling description of a ‘brilliantly-lit chamber with dazzling white tiles and stainless steel’ (NL, p. 278). As Patrick Duggan has pointed out, this scene has uncomfortable overtones of the experimentation in Nazi concentration camps, particularly the work of Dr Mengele on

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identical twins.15 The scientific work here is obviously also tainted by its association with the Magisterium’s ultimate aim to use the process of intercision in order to stifle children’s growing urge to learn and understand. Having been led to question and then reject the work of the Bolvangar scientists, however far their individual responsibility must be balanced against the dictates of Mrs Coulter and the General Oblation Board, readers are provided with an emphatic judgement on unethical practice by any researcher in the closing scenes of this first volume. When Asriel explains Mrs Coulter’s aims to destroy Dust and indicates his own interest in understanding the phenomenon, Lyra’s reaction is passionate: ‘They were too cruel. No matter how important it was to find out about original sin, it was too cruel to do what they’d done to Tony Makarios and all the others. Nothing justified that’ (NL, p. 376).Very few readers considering the fate of vulnerable children in the novel are likely to disagree at this point. As with the indeterminate reliability of evidence in His Dark Materials, the ethics of enquiry are not always clear-cut in Pullman’s fiction. Asriel’s interest in Dust is what serves him in journeying to the parallel universes, and his ambivalent status as scientist has already been noted. Readers later learn that one of the experimental theologians working at Bolvangar had been undertaking similar experiments to Asriel’s, and one of his surviving colleagues is co-opted by the Magisterium’s newest body of power, the Consistorial Court of Discipline, to continue the research. In a disturbing vignette early in The Amber Spyglass, which nicely illustrates Haynes’s figure of the ‘helpless scientist’, Dr Cooper is charged by Father MacPhail to recall and rediscover everything about the experiment and related theory: ‘It is a great task, Dr Cooper! You are blessed to be entrusted with it! Give thanks to the Authority’ (AS, p. 78). His task is to discover how to harness the immensely powerful energy that is dissipated when child and dæmon are severed, so that the Consistorial Court can create a bomb specifically designed to kill Lyra. Scientific discoveries that emerged from Asriel’s unquenchable desire for knowledge are thus redirected as research and development for state weaponry. It is significant that when offered a similar challenge by Sir Charles Latrom (known as Lord Boreal in Lyra’s world), albeit with less violent coercion, Mary Malone—whose idealized portrayal I will explore—turns down the offer of funding to direct her own research lab’s work towards ‘new ways of killing people’ and manipulating consciousness (SK, p. 255). What is unknown by the members of the Magisterium or Asriel, and only revealed to readers as the trilogy draws to a close, is that

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the whole branch of experimental theology that extracts power from intercision using many-worlds theory, has fatal side-effects, releasing soul-sucking spectres each time a window is opened between universes, and allowing the life force of the universes, Dust, to drain away and become irrevocably lost in the abyss of nothingness. There is obviously a correlation between the perils of interfering with Dust and the dangers of particle physics in the shape of the atom bomb, and it is easy to suggest that Pullman’s message is that simple thirst for knowledge should always be tempered by an ethical consideration of the likely uses of that knowledge. Nevertheless, the very bomb created to destroy Lyra is also responsible for creating the chasm where Asriel and Mrs Coulter are able to destroy Metatron, while the possibility of opening windows between universes may release spectres but also allows the trapped and unhappy ghosts to escape the world of the dead and dissolve back into atoms, thus rejoining the circle of life. Nuclear weapons may have been the cause of the most phenomenal destruction in the twentieth century, but in the twenty-first century, research into ‘dark matter’ undertaken with the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) in the United States, and the Large Hadron Collider at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) in Europe, once again provoke excitement and interest. Pullman’s sophisticated mapping of enquiry and knowledge, cause and effect, discovery and action, makes difficult demands on any reader searching for certainties. Nevertheless, there are two figures who play an important role in the narrative as models of the ‘good scientist’ and who can offer ways of negotiating the ambiguities surrounding the pursuit of knowledge in His Dark Materials. These characters are worth exploring in some detail, particularly since Pullman constructs them to some degree in opposition to the figures of Asriel and Mrs Coulter. Mary Malone and John Parry: noble scientists I have already shown how Asriel’s admirable appetite for knowledge is partially diminished by his arrogant and unscientific methodology. Despite her many impressive qualities, Mrs Coulter is also limited in her value as a scientific enquirer. Although connected to St Sophia’s College, Oxford, she is not first and foremost a scholar. She directs research into intercision, and Asriel seems to value her work as, at the end of Northern Lights, he invites her to join him in the new world to ‘take the universe to pieces and put it together again’ (NL, p. 396), but crucially she refuses him and later appears to have little aptitude

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for experimental theology (she can see ‘no principle’ behind the design of the bomb, for example (AS, p. 363)). The team at Bolvangar query the rigour of her methods, noting that her attitude towards the experiments there are ‘not philosophical’ but personal and rather ‘ghoulish’ (NL, p. 275), and even before Lyra becomes disenchanted with the woman she learns is her mother she recognizes that her style of enquiry is not quite scientific. Pullman’s portrayal of Marisa Coulter has been critiqued from a gendered perspective as offering a ‘wicked [step]mother’ role, according to Amelia Rutledge, and a version of Lilith in Russell’s discussion.16 She is a blend of politic social-striving and impassioned, misguided ideological belief, and plays a role, not in educating Lyra in academic terms, but in teaching her the methods of feminine persuasion as well as more pragmatic lessons in what kind of animal liver to eat in the North. Susan Matthews has suggested that she recalls Blake’s Vala, ‘a socially constructed femininity that is alluring, entrapping yet destructive’.17 She certainly provides an interesting contrast to the other major adult female characters in the series, particularly Mary Malone, who is one of the most prominent women scientists in contemporary children’s literature. Unlike Mrs Coulter, Mary is not glamorous or alluring (she has ‘short black hair and red cheeks’ and wears jeans in the lab (SK, p. 87)), and unlike Lord Asriel she is not an obvious Promethean figure (instead of conjuring with gothic apparatus on a mountaintop, she runs computer programmes). On the other hand, her role in the series is fundamental: instrumentally, as she identifies warning signs in the movement of Dust and leads Lyra and Will towards an understanding of their love for each other; and symbolically, as surrogate mother of Eve, serpent tempter and mystic visionary. Set against Asriel and Coulter’s sublime but tragic ambitions, Mary’s systematic approach to gaining knowledge is recognized as more viable by the end of The Amber Spyglass. Although her research deals with theoretical physics of the most transcendent sort, her methods of enquiry exemplify the rigorous efforts required by proper earth-bound science, and it is this rigour that is celebrated. In her own world, the specialized work she undertakes with detectors and computers in the lab is denoted as meticulous and difficult by the everyday imagery of boring technology and the detritus of coffee cups and papers. However, when she travels to the world of the mulefa the concepts of observation and repeated experiment are made more explicit and develop their own kind of romance. If Asriel is a version of the ‘Victorian adventurer-explorer-scientist’, then Mary emerges as a kind of neo-Victorian female traveller-anthropologist in the

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tradition of Mary Kingsley. Kingsley was an amateur, but her Travels in West Africa, published in 1897, is a testament to her boldness in journeying through difficult terrain and her fierce interest in documenting small life forms.18 In the world of the mulefa, Mary is botanist, zoologist and anthropologist (she realizes very soon in her studies of them that the mulefa are a conscious people of individual zalifs rather than beasts).19 Moreover, she immerses herself in this study, employing ethnographic methods of participation and interview, alongside observation, recording, and holistic theorizing. She scrutinizes the material and cultural relationship between her ‘tribe’ of mulefa and the giant seed-pod trees using these methods: by examining the seeds themselves and watching how the tribe gather them; by asking individuals about the oil and what it means to them; by observing an adolescent zalif attempting to come of age by fitting a seed-pod to his wheel hole; and by making hypotheses about ‘which had come first: wheel or claw? Rider or tree?’ (AS, p. 133). Mary’s most important enquiry in the context of the main themes of His Dark Materials is into the nature of Dust, or ‘sraf ’ as it is known to the mulefa. She extends her lab-based research with fieldwork observations, since in the world of the mulefa sraf is visible with the right tool for polarizing light. Pullman presents a very long description of Mary’s careful construction of such a tool in which laborious preparation and experimental play are of equal importance, and this attention to method is important. After all, Mary is not a stereotypical ‘boffin,’ a scientist so caught up with her instruments and results that she cannot understand or contribute to issues beyond her particular research project. The mulefa can perceive ‘universal cosmic consciousness’ as Lauren Shohet puts it, 20 but when faced by global catastrophe they need Mary to use her problem-solving skills, honed in scientific training, in order to see ‘connections and possibilities and alternatives’ (AS, p. 247). Therefore, although she is excited by her amber spyglass and the discovery of ‘sparkles of light, floating and drifting and sometimes moving in a current of purpose’ (AS, p. 243), Mary accepts the task given her by Zalif Sattamax to use her new knowledge to save the mulefa rather than to pursue pure enquiries along the lines of her dark matter research. Millicent Lenz has suggested that Mary is ‘a physicist of the Fritjof Capra variety—a scientist-mystic’,21 and certainly Eastern mysticism in the form of the I Ching, along with Roman Catholic theology learnt during her time as a nun, not to mention the shamanistic abilities she develops with the help of the witch Serafina Pekkala, inform Mary’s thinking as much as scientific discourse. In practice, her potency as a

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scientific enquirer, the flexibility and rigour of her approach, rely on a more general philosophy than these specific religious and spiritual traditions imply. When Lyra first meets her in The Subtle Knife, Mary quotes Keats’s famous lines on negative capability: that urge to suspend certainty, defer fact and reason, and embrace mystery in order to reach full understanding.22 Keats rejects models of preconceived or absolute truths in favour of meaningful ‘half knowledge.’ It is this concept that allows Mary to move beyond the conventional ideas of science that she often feels trapped by, a frustration symbolized by the awful funding application she is working on which, as she points out to Lyra, would reject anything that seems impossible, or irrelevant, or plain embarrassing (like concepts of good and evil, she notes wryly) (SK, p. 93, p. 100). Mary employs negative capability as part of her methodology throughout the series, firstly in creatively reading data from the shadow particles in her lab, and later in falling into a trance while observing sraf by merging her own consciousness with the particles around her and discovering their sorrow: feeling rather than knowing. Readers are likely to recognize this state of mind in other characters who seek knowledge, including Lyra herself who is expert in allowing ideas to shimmer ‘like a soap bubble’ while she looks away, ‘thinking of something else’ (NL, p. 334). It is partly Lyra’s ability to read and direct the data on Mary’s computer using her own form of negative capability that encourages the expert adult scientist to confide in her and explain her unpublished research, and there is little doubt that the collapse of professional boundaries has fruitful outcomes for both of them. As she develops her expertise in fields other than her own, widening her ‘scientific horizons’ (AS, p. 91), Mary can begin to ‘see the connection between the mulefa and the question which had occupied the last few years of her life’ (AS, p. 135). In becoming a generalist, she finds a balance between the potential narrowness of both spiritual and scientific enquiry. Mary’s positive qualities as an instinctive scientist move her away from the strictures of professional disciplinarity and towards a more holistic pursuit of ‘consilience’, which is the idea that synthesis of knowledge across the sciences and humanities will result in our best understandings of the universe and our place within it.23 Pullman offers a complementary model of the noble scientist in John Parry (or Dr Grumman or Jopari), who moves from the amateur generalist position he holds in his own world (‘the bluff soldier, old Arctic hand’ (SK, p. 117)) to professional scholar in Lyra’s, and who finally becomes a shaman among the Yenisei tribe. He is less important than Mary to the structure of the trilogy and more

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tenuously attached to the scientific institutions discussed above, but he reflects many of Mary’s qualities: the rigorous methods of experiment and observation; the mental flexibility characterized by negative capability; and the sympathy for consilience. Unlike Mary, whom readers meet in The Subtle Knife and travel with in The Amber Spyglass, Parry is initially constructed at a distance, through indirect reports, rumours, news articles and extracts from his correspondence. Although some of the information in these descriptions of the man is unreliable, his interest in acquiring knowledge is a consistent theme. For instance, among the tall tales and gossip shared in the bar of the Samirsky Hotel, readers learn alongside Lee Scoresby that Parry/ Grumman’s curiosity is ‘as powerful as a wolf ’s jaws’ (SK, p. 123). Like Mary, Parry learns from immersing himself in an environment and participating in tribal life, while his initiation into the ‘skull-cult’ (SK, p. 224) of shamanism also indicates his openness to being in Keatsian ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts’.24 Moreover, even while painfully injured he displays the inquisitiveness and meticulousness of a good scientist, observing and making notes on the effects of bloodmoss on his own wound. If anything, Parry is too curious, since his quest for knowledge has led him into other worlds where he becomes physically weaker over time. However, by experiencing otherness in the same way that Mary does in her interactions with the mulefa, Parry gains a comprehensive understanding of the universes that exceeds any specialist knowledge. Pullman might be charged with idealizing both Mary Malone (whom Matthews describes as having a ‘Mary Poppinsish blandness’)25 and John Parry/Stanislaus Grumman, whose reflections on the liberal approach he has taken to the pursuit of knowledge read somewhat like a mystical self-help guide: ‘I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it’ (SK, p. 293). However, these scientist characters act as admirable, if earnest, role-models for Will and Lyra. They are living manifestations of the philosophy of enquiry that is agreed upon by No-Name the Harpy in the land of the dead (who is later renamed ‘Gracious Wings’), and which readers might recognize as an underlying precept for the series as a whole: ‘If they live in the world, they should see and touch and hear and love and learn things’ (AS, p. 334). Compared with the other pair of knowledge-seeking parental figures, Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter, Mary Malone and John Parry temper their desire for knowledge with rigour, openness and breadth of understanding, as well as an ethical intention for their work to do good. In the final part of this chapter, I want to explore how far Lyra and Will adopt similar forms

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of enquiry, and how their fate offers a new message about the pursuit of knowledge. Lyra and Will and the pursuit of knowledge As noted earlier, Lyra naturally grasps the concept of negative capability when Mary Malone introduces it to her in The Subtle Knife, since it partly expresses her own state of mind when she reads the alethiometer. This practice requires her to enquire seriously but not to reach desperately after meaning. Her thoughts move down a series of symbolic ideas like a ladder, while simultaneously retaining multiple interpretations of those symbols. It is the same kind of state of mind that Will has to be in to use ‘Æsahættr’, the subtle knife, to cut between different worlds, and he too can be aware of multiple realities in one moment through this action. Lyra’s specialist adeptness with the alethiometer is matched by the urgency of her desire for knowledge more generally, especially in the first book of the series. When readers are first introduced to her in Northern Lights Pullman’s heroine is as wolfishly curious as Stanislaus Grumman. From observing Asriel talking to the Jordan scholars, to exploring the rooftops and crypt of the college and tenaciously questioning gyptian children about their experience of the Gobblers (she ensures that she gets her evidence from eye witnesses rather than hearsay), she is an expert enquirer from the very beginning.26 Her lively curiosity might be expressed as the natural inquisitiveness of youth, except that it is contrasted with the indifference of another child, Roger, who admits to Lyra that for his own comfort there are many things he would rather not know. Lyra is more than simply curious, though: she aims to actively investigate the world around her. At the end of Northern Lights, the realization that what adults have told her about Dust may not be true inspires her to follow in her father’s footsteps and investigate it empirically. Like her father, Lyra is remarkable in her urge to discover and her ability to theorize, but like her mother she is hardly scientific in her approach to begin with. Her talent lies not in patient experiment and observation of phenomena but in her intuitive understanding of other people. Nevertheless, this humanistic quality allows her to access knowledge in unique ways, particularly in the first volume of the trilogy before she meets Will. For instance, when she is apprenticed to Mrs Coulter she uses her new found social skills to convince the influential Lord Boreal that she understands all about Dust, thus managing to extract crucial details about her mother’s experiments. In a similar way, by understanding imprisoned scholar Jotham Santelia’s academic

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vanity and flattering him by saying what a good teacher he is, Lyra can obtain valuable information about weaknesses of the usurping bear king Iofur Raknison that will help her bring ally Iorek Byrnison back to power. It is possible to argue, as Russell does, that throughout The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass Lyra begins to ‘accumulate knowledge just as Stanislaus Grumman had, broadly acquisitive yet evaluative’,27 but it is Will’s approach to the pursuit of knowledge that seems more methodical and less reliant on building bonds with other people. He uses traditional forms of scholarship: visiting the central library in Oxford to find out about John Parry’s original expedition to the north; reading documents from his father’s correspondence; and employing more scientific methods of observation and experiment in scoping out places to cut windows into other worlds and move between them. The children are not specialized in their approach to enquiry in the way that scientists like Lord Asriel or Mary Malone are, but Pullman ensures that they are initially very active generalists. Yet in some instances he also tempers individual agency with respect for existing authority. In the same way that Lee Scoresby enjoys being free from the responsibility of individual thought in his spirit dream of the eagle queen, Lyra and Will occasionally value the option of turning to other experts as a form of instantaneous knowledge. They never question the wisdom of Farder Coram, the witches or the angels, or the semi-religious dictates of the alethiometer. Readers too are expected to accept authority rather than work at meaning sometimes, it seems. The witches’ prophesy that Lyra will bring an end to destiny as a second Eve provides a guiding structure for the third volume and allows Pullman to draw on increasingly explicit mythic symbolism, especially as a guide for how to read Lyra and Will’s romantic epiphany as a momentous form of coming into knowledge. In this way, pure scientism is softened. In accordance with the workings of fate, the trilogy’s closure surprisingly swerves towards shutting down those forms of scientific enquiry celebrated in the earlier volumes. It is not the only closure effected by The Amber Spyglass, as several critics have pointed out. Susan Matthews laments the monologic tone in its climatic scenes (suggesting, however, that this may be the most appropriate tone for children’s literature), while Andrew M. Butler goes so far as accusing Pullman of betraying Lyra and the whole genre of fantasy.28 Where Mary Malone and John Parry gain their understanding through exploration, observation and participation, at the end of the series Lyra is encouraged by the angel Xaphania to make a lifetime project of learning how to read the alethiometer and then provided with a

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blueprint for doing so by the scholars at Jordan College, who set out a conventional academic pathway from girls’ school to undergraduate study. She also commits to remaining in her own world and helping others to ‘learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works’ (AS, p. 520). Will’s fate is not as clearly outlined as Lyra’s, but the influence of the noble scientists is perhaps stronger. He refuses to be told by the angels what his work on earth should be, preferring to be able to choose his own way, whether that is ‘fighting, or healing, or exploring’ (AS, p. 525). These are, significantly, John Parry’s occupations and qualities that Will always admired in his father. Even more crucially, Will’s future back in Oxford includes the companionship and guidance of Mary Malone. Pullman does not spell out their intentions, but in uniting these two characters he sets up a rigorous and ethical new ‘research team’ with the potential for seeking consilience in their own world. Where Asriel’s project opens up the many universes, Mary Malone and John Parry begin the work of observing and understanding them, an endeavour that in different ways is continued by Lyra and Will. It is not surprising that in the 10th anniversary editions of His Dark Materials, papers from the collections of Malone and Parry feature in the added appendix material of The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. The documentary fragments are scientific in nature, including observational notes, equations and draft theories, and they provide detailed technical commentary on aspects of the plot and further ‘evidence’ of the significance of certain discoveries within the stories. Lord Asriel’s papers offer a similar gloss to Northern Lights, perhaps indicating a more positive and unsullied side to his work than we see in the main text: certainly the appendixes highlight the importance of the scientific methods of these key characters. However, these paratextual scraps also lead the way to another supplementary text published in 2008, Once Upon a Time in the North, which is a prequel to the (main) trilogy and tells the story of how Lee Scoresby and Iorek Byrnison meet. Two letters written by an older Lyra Silvertongue form part of the end matter of this text, and from these readers learn that she is undertaking postgraduate study at St Hilda’s and hopes to become a teacher there. She is still studying the alethiometer, but privately, and her main discipline has become economic history, based on documentary sources and personal knowledge. In shifting Lyra’s mode of research away from science and towards book learning and teaching, Pullman is of course valuing his own field of enquiry: that of aesthetic and humanistic knowledge, or what Shohet describes as ‘the rich labour of reading’.29

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Literary and cultural study, that which produces what F. R. Leavis famously referred to as the ‘third realm’ of knowledge, is therefore given a privileged status beyond the canonical body of His Dark Materials. Leavis notes that this kind of knowledge is of great humanistic value even if it ‘can’t be weighed or tripped over or brought into the laboratory or pointed to’. However, since imaginative works provide a way of directly and intimately examining the intentional activity of other humans, this understanding is also not limited by being ‘merely private and personal’.30 Within the trilogy, the space of enquiry between these two positions, and the connectedness this promises, is what is valued most highly. Notes 1. Roslynn Haynes, ‘From Alchemy to Artificial Intelligence: Stereotypes of the Scientist in Western Literature’, Public Understanding of Science, 12 (2003): 243–53. 2. Philip Pullman, ‘Introduction’ in Mary and John Gribbin, The Science of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (New York: Knopf, 2005). 3. Philip Pullman, ‘Dawkins, Fairy Tales and Evidence’, Talk given at the Liverpool Literary Festival (2008), (http://www.philip-pullman.com/ assets_cm/files/PDF/fairy_tales_and_evidence.pdf). 4. Anne Marie Bird, ‘“Without Contraries is no Progression”: Dust as an All-Inclusive, Multifunctional Metaphor in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials”’, Children’s Literature in Education, 32:2 (2001): 111–23 (113). 5. Mary Harris Russell, ‘Eve, Again! Mother Eve!: Pullman’s Eve Variations’, in Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott (eds.), His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005): 212–22 (220). 6. The closest we come to satire in the realm of scientific enquiry is in the treatment of minor characters: Jotham Santelia, Regius Professor of Cosmology at the University of Gloucester, who is imprisoned on Svalbard with Asriel in the first book but still obsessed with plagiarism, intellectual rivals and internal academic politics; and also Dr Oliver Payne, who appears in The Subtle Knife as an ambitious career researcher, easily corrupted by suspect funding, and foolishly asking for ‘structure’. See also Chantal Oliver’s ‘Mocking God and Celebrating Satan: Parodies and Profanities in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, Children’s Literature in Education 43:4 (Dec 2012): 293–302. 7. Roderick McGillis, Children’s Literature and the Fin de Siecle (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003): 55. 8. As noted in the front matter of each volume in the trilogy. 9. Steven Barfield and Martyn Colebrook, ‘Revitalizing the Old Machines of a Neo-Victorian London: Reading the Cultural Transformations of

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10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Alison Waller Steampunk and Victoriana’, in Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox (eds.), Critical Perspectives on His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011): 75-92 (82). Editors’ note: for more on the practice and status of organized religion within the trilogy, see Chapter 1 in this volume. Claire Squires, Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller (London & New York: Continuum, 2006): 64. The ‘two cultures’ debate can be traced to the controversy surrounding C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede lecture ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ and F. R. Leavis’s riposte. See Patricia Waugh’s account of the history of this debate: ‘Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value’, in David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (eds.), The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 33–59. The debate pitted scientific knowledge against cultural and literary tradition, and forms of this discussion persist in evoking strong feelings. An interesting example of the fraught feelings between different forms of knowledge can be found in The Observer newspaper’s debate feature, ‘Philosophy v Science’ (Sunday 9 September 2012: http://www.guard ian.co.uk/science/2012/sep/09/science-philosophy-debate-julian-bag gini-lawrence-krauss). The readers’ comments section indicates the veracity and complexity of a continuing controversy. Not only is the social uniformity and ideological consensus among the mulefa rather tedious, not allowing the kind of narrative intrigue that makes Lyra’s world sparkle with complexity, it also represents a form of secondary-world writing that Pullman generally attacks. By making the mulefa a simple and non-political people, Pullman is in danger of offering a two-dimensional vision of an indigenous race that comes dangerously close to Tolkien’s fantasy. For an alternative view, see Burton Hatlen, ‘Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a Challenge to the Fantasies of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, with an Epilogue on Pullman’s Neo-Romantic Reading of Paradise Lost’, in Lenz and Scott (eds.), His Dark Materials Illuminated: 75–94. In the seventeenth century Galileo was persecuted and kept under house arrest by the Catholic Church for the publication of his planetary observations. His work supported Copernican theory, which directly countered the Catholic Church’s position that all celestial bodies moved around the Earth. See Patrick Duggan, ‘Staging the Impossible: Severance and Separation in the National Theatre’s Adaptation’, in Barfield and Cox (eds.), Critical Perspectives on His Dark Materials: 219–38; and Millicent Lenz, ‘Philip Pullman’, in Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz (eds.) Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (London & New York: Continuum, 2004): 122–69. Amelia A. Rutledge, ‘Reconfiguring Nurture in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 33:2 (Summer 2008): 119-34 (127); Russell, ‘Eve, Again! Mother Eve!’.

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17. Susan Matthews, ‘“Rouzing the Faculties to Act”: Pullman’s Blake for Children’, in Lenz and Scott (eds.), His Dark Materials Illuminated: 125–34 (131). 18. See Mary Louise Pratt on the travels of Mary Kingsley who, unlike Mary Malone perhaps, Pratt describes as having a ‘comic and self-ironic persona’, Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York, Routledge, 1992): 209. 19. While there is an intertextual link to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in the mulefa’s resemblance to the noble houyhnhnms, again, satiric humour is absent, I think. 20. Lauren Shohet, ‘Reading Dark Materials’, in Lenz and Scott (eds.), His Dark Materials Illuminated: 22–36 (32). 21. Lenz, ‘Philip Pullman’: 150. 22. See ‘Letter to George and Thomas Keats,’ December 21, 1817, in Lionel Trilling (ed.), The Selected Letters of John Keats (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956): 103–4. 23. Biologist E. O. Wilson’s book on the subject of consilience has played a part in the recent resurgence of ‘two cultures’ debates among academics. Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge (London: Vintage, 1998). 24. John Keats, ‘Letter to George and Thomas Keats’. 25. Matthews, ‘“Rouzing the Faculties to Act”’: 133. 26. Interestingly and just as convincingly, Maria Nikolajeva classifies these same qualities in terms of the unethical behaviour of a trickster figure, rather than the skills of an enquirer. See ‘Guilt, empathy and the ethical potential of children’s literature’, Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research, 35 (2012), (http://www.barnboken.net/index.php/clr/article/ view/18081). 27. Russell, ‘Eve, Again! Mother Eve!’: 219. 28. Matthews, ‘“Rouzing the Faculties to Act”’; Andrew Butler, ‘The Republic of Heaven: the Betrayal of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy’, in Nickianne Moody and Clare Horrocks (eds.), Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Debates for the Twenty First Century (Liverpool: Association for Research in Popular Fictions, 2005): 288–98. 29. Shohet, ‘Reading Dark Materials’: 23. 30. F. R. Leavis, ‘Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow’ (1972) cited in Waugh, ‘Revising the Two Cultures Debate’: 35.

4 The Controversialist Philip Pullman’s Secular Humanism and Responses to His Dark Materials Naomi Wood Introduction Philip Pullman’s criticism of organized religion has made the trilogy His Dark Materials something of a lightning rod for culture wars in the twenty-first century. In interviews, Pullman’s characterization of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia as ‘tainted with sado-masochistic relish’1 and Lewis’s Christian views about the afterlife as a ‘cheat’2 represent a small part of Pullman’s incendiary statements about religion in general and Christianity in particular. Believers have responded by organizing boycotts and challenges. Pullman’s calculated provocation has not been limited to religious matters: he has also mocked contemporary adult fiction, decried the National Curriculum, and made trenchant and quotable comments on an array of controversial topics. These clashes suggest a larger conflict, simultaneously progressive and conservative, with pre-Enlightenment views of religion and society on the one hand and postmodernism on the other. Pullman, in short, is an old-fashioned secular humanist. This chapter argues that although Pullman’s secular humanism advocates liberation from the shackles of superstition and religion, it does not engage with the challenges posed by postmodern criticism of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous individual. Far from it: His Dark Materials enshrines the liberal assumption that all humans can be understood as independent subjects over and above their place, time, gender, race and class. Pullman’s revolutionary mythmaking, therefore, remains in tension with the anti-Enlightenment project of postmodernism. The series’ oppositional values, however, may inspire 76

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critical readers to go beyond the limits of its narrative universe in pursuit, perhaps, of a democratic Republic of Heaven.

Pullman as humanist and educator Pullman’s humanism is continuous with his education and context as a middle-class white British male. Pullman’s wide reading and teaching of canonical works by Homer, Aeschylus, the metaphysical poets, John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, the Brontës, George Eliot and others connect him to the humanist literary tradition. 3 Codified into a discipline by educators such as F. R. Leavis, literary humanism, according to the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, is ‘concerned ... with the unique value of the individual and the creative realm of the interpersonal’.4 Though Pullman acknowledges roots in the language and imagery of the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer,5 the Romantic revolutionary works of William Blake and others, with their emphasis upon imagination and idealism, are central. Pullman’s political and ideological convictions further derive from his coming of age during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. As Bernice Martin has noted, Pullman’s themes share much with the counterculture’s rejection of authority and the establishment, its desire to liberate sexuality from the shackles of repression, and its embrace of higher consciousness through meditation and drugs.6 Even the ‘Death of God’ so concretely rendered in The Amber Spyglass has roots in 1960s theology.7 Pullman is a card-carrying humanist8 who credits the great rebels and republicans of the Enlightenment with inspiring him. When he pitched His Dark Materials to publisher David Fickling as ‘Paradise Lost for teenagers in three volumes’, Pullman’s reliance on John Milton was clear.9 Milton’s influence may be traced in political as well as literary activities, for the poet was also a pamphleteer who worked on behalf of the short-lived English Republic under Oliver Cromwell and advocated freedom of conscience and of the press. His Dark Materials also bears the imprint of William Blake, who rejected Milton’s God and celebrated Satan’s tragic heroism. Though fantasy, Pullman’s trilogy shares the teleology of the Enlightenment: the notion that humanity as a species ‘matures’ as scientific knowledge advances, that previous human epistemologies and technologies are inevitably more ‘primitive’ or childish, and that religion is therefore an evolutionary stage to be outgrown as the human race ‘advances’.10

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The first Humanist Manifesto (1933) affirms that humanism ‘regard[s] the universe as self-existing and not created’, that ‘religious culture and civilization … are the product of a gradual development due to [man’s] interaction with his natural environment’, and that ‘the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values’.11 These humanist premises permeate His Dark Materials, which recapitulates the Bildungsroman structure on an individual, a societal and a cosmic basis. Pullman’s outspokenness about religion as a predominantly negative influence upon human history and society aligns him with the New Atheists of the first decade of the twenty-first century. New Atheists comprise an unofficial group of scientists and novelists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis (with a fellow traveller in Salman Rushdie).12 Radicalized by the events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent religiously charged war between the United States, its allies and Muslim militants, New Atheists charge that religious belief is responsible for most of the ills besetting humanity.13 They assert ‘humanity’s capacity to transcend its genetic origins and obtain rational self-mastery: the origin of species is turned into the Bildungsroman of the human race’ using elements of evolutionary biology; their resulting fictions have been called secular myths.14 Though Pullman completed His Dark Materials before the attack on the World Trade Center, his New Atheist humanism registers in his condemnation of religious abuses of power and his use of biology and theoretical physics in His Dark Materials, where he translates the wonder of recent scientific discovery into myth. Laura Miller avers that ‘“His Dark Materials” may be the first fantasy series founded upon the ideals of the Enlightenment rather than upon tribal and mythic yearnings for kings, gods, and supermen.’15 Pullman’s prominent advocacy garnered him an International Humanist Award from the World Humanist Congress in 2008.16 The press release quotes Pullman’s condemnation of organized religion’s ‘terrible damage’ to individuals ‘burned, hanged, tortured, maimed, robbed, violated, and enslaved’ to serve ‘some invisible god (and they’re all invisible, because they don’t exist)’.17 Enlightenment humanism’s developmental metaphor is not simply an abstraction for Pullman: he has witnessed its dynamics in the flesh, so to speak. If secular society contributes to humanity’s ‘coming of age’, teachers oversee the maturation of individual children. Pullman taught for almost two decades before turning to writing full time in 1996. His sharp observations of children between the ages of nine and thirteen add specificity to the characterization of Lyra, Will, and their peers in His Dark Materials. As a teacher, Pullman lacks sentimentality

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about children as a group and advocates maturity over innocence. The passage from innocence to experience may be awkward, but, Pullman maintains, paraphrasing Heinrich von Kleist’s essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, ‘this is not something to lament. … At one end, there is the inanimate grace of the puppet; at the other end ... is the fully conscious, fully animate grace of the god’.18 In his premise that children’s innocence is merely puppetlike and that adults’ maturity is superior, Pullman aligns with humanism’s theory of progress. Maturity embraces knowledge wherever it leads, and does not seek permission from authorities, sacred or secular. As a teacher in the 1970s Pullman took full advantage of the comparative flexibility of the middle-school curriculum. He emphasized what he liked best himself, and learned that storytelling—especially the classics from Homer onward—was what he was good at.19 Students recall him as an inspiring teacher, as ‘exceptional and exciting’.20 Greta Stoddart, who became a poet, recalls Pullman’s ‘extraordinary energy. And he didn’t read books. He would come in and just launch into some story’.21 Pullman left the middle-school classroom before the more prescriptive National Curriculum took effect with the Education Act of 1988, but he continues to take an interest in schools and often laments the prescriptive and test-oriented guidelines he associates with the new educational standards.22 Pullman’s website evinces his reflective but engaged relationship with his former profession: ‘I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools … My main concern is that an over-emphasis on testing and league tables has led to a lack of time and freedom for a true, imaginative and humane engagement with literature’.23 Moreover, Pullman is unapologetically didactic in his writing; he takes seriously the challenges facing children as they move into adulthood and the milieux that help or hinder them; like his Victorian predecessors, Pullman asserts that good—in the sense of well-written, complex—books teach good values.24 Pullman’s teaching career overlapped slightly with shifts in in public policy in the late 1980s under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, and later comments suggest his response to the climate of the period. Although religious instruction and daily worship had been mandated by the Education Act of 1944, in the 1960s and 1970s compulsory religious education (RE) was directed by the preferences of the local community, a particular school, or even an individual teacher.25 In 1988 under Thatcher’s government, however, the Education Reform Act dismantled this pluralist approach to religious education and

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instead ‘reinforce[d] the religious education and worship provisions of the 1944 Education act’.26 The act thus ‘dovetailed with the overall Thatcherite project to reinforce Christian values at the level of personal morality’.27 British re-assertion of state oversight of RE occurred alongside an even more dramatic instance of theocratic efforts to control artistic expression on 14 February 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against London resident Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses. In the United States, President Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolutionaries targeted so-called ‘secular humanism’ by name.28 In this context, humanism indeed seemed under attack. As yet, however, Pullman himself was not a target of sectarian ire. Pullman as humanist critic, writer, and lightning rod Pullman’s transition from donnish writer to controversialist occurred as he became a public figure associated with liberal views about literary value, childhood and religion. An academic by training and vocation, Pullman is primed to argue about values and truth; as a humanist educator, he emphasizes freedom of inquiry. In interviews and editorials Pullman often goads his interlocutor, as when he responds to a reporter’s query about grouping art and religion with drugs, ‘Oh yes, he says airily, all societies have drugs. Nothing wrong with drugs. Drugs are all right. They control pain and alter consciousness. They should be legalised. Definitely’.29 Pullman’s Carnegie Medal acceptance speech in 1996, he recalls, ‘was deliberately provocative’ and ‘insulted all the grown-up novelists’ so that newspapers picked up the tale and testified to the power of the irreverent opinion.30 At the time, Pullman was much more concerned about the lack of respect accorded writers of children’s books and the barriers the label raised against a wider readership, mentioning with approval the more fluid relationship between children and adult book marketing in the United States.31 David Lister observed, ‘Mr Pullman’s win highlights the problem many British authors feel, of books being pigeonholed into the children’s market, and then being ignored by adults’.32 Pullman castigated award-winning adult fiction33 as pretentiously averse to fundamental pleasures of the text such as plot. Asserting that ‘there are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book’ (Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech), Pullman inverted the conventional hierarchy, arguing for the former’s superiority in terms of themes, entertainment and not least ‘social benefit’. This first foray into controversy

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was well received. In the mid-to-late 1990s, Pullman wrote book reviews for the Guardian and provided quotable material about children, books, and contemporary education. He defended Melvin Burgess’ award-winning young adult novel Junk when it was decried in 1997 for its representation of drug addiction and teenage depravity, and praised Blake Morrison’s As If for seeking to understand the juvenile killers of toddler James Bulger. Calling Prime Minister John Major’s ‘statement that “we must condemn a little more, and understand a little less” . . . the most wicked thing any British politician has said in my lifetime’, Pullman advocated ‘go[ing] forward into deeper knowledge, painful though that is’.34 Though some might reject his views, Pullman’s reviews and editorials did not provoke outrage. Journalists began to move from characterizing Pullman as ‘provocative’ to calling him ‘controversial’ and even ‘dangerous’ when he deplored the centenary observances of C. S. Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia in an opinion piece, ‘The Dark Side of Narnia’, published in The Guardian on 1 October 1998. Criticism of the Narnia series was nothing new—Penelope Lively long ago expressed her reservations about Lewis’s ‘Christianity of violence, the Christianity of the middle ages, the Christianity of the Crusades’ that permeate the Chronicles, an ‘underlying savagery that, to me, makes the books so sinister’.35 John Goldthwaite, whose The Natural History of Make-Believe was favourably reviewed by Pullman in 1996, describes Lewis as ‘either the most obtuse children’s author who ever lived or the most fatuous. If the latter, the word evil springs to mind, and, if not evil, then certainly the word shame’.36 No matter. Within days, The Guardian printed seven letters to the editor under the heading ‘No Racists, Sexists or Fascists Lurking among Lions and Witches in Lewis’s Wardrobe’. In interviews about children’s books, Pullman had not limited his criticism of children’s classics to Lewis—he also disparaged A. A. Milne’s Winnie-thePooh and described Ernest Shepard’s illustrations as ‘nauseating’ and bordering on pedophilia.37 But given Lewis’s iconic status and in the context of the Religious Right’s attacks on the Harry Potter series in late 1999, Pullman’s directness increasingly caused his name to be coupled with the adjective ‘controversial’. ACHUKA’s relatively mild observation that Pullman’s ‘outspokenness’ about the Narnia books ‘took the children’s book world aback’38 in the space of two years gave way to the far more sensational characterization in The Times of Pullman as a ‘subversive author’ ‘rant[ing]’ about ‘his real bête noire’ in C. S. Lewis.39 Interviewers in search of eye-catching headlines challenged Pullman to elaborate and explain. Before The Amber Spyglass was published in 2000, Pullman told Wendy Parsons and Catriona

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Nicholson that American Christians seemed most concerned about his unfolding storyline, anticipating that his conclusion would elicit at most ‘a bit of a fuss’: ‘I don’t think there will be any fuss, because I don’t think that anybody thinks children’s books are worth fussing about. People don’t think it matters. People don’t take children’s books seriously unless you’re in an Islamic country’.40 As it turned out, particularly in the United States where parents and church goers were already mobilized against the Harry Potter series, Pullman and His Dark Materials engendered more than a ‘fuss’. Such religious objections to the trilogy seemed to embolden rather than intimidate the author. Pullman begins his essay on ‘The Republic of Heaven’ in the US children’s literature journal The Horn Book Magazine with the questions, ‘What happens to the Kingdom of Heaven when the King dies? And what has this to do with children’s literature?’41 Pullman explains that religion and myth appeal to the common feeling of being out of place in the world. Pullman’s alternative to pie in the sky is a Republic of Heaven that promotes connection in this world:‘In the republic, we’re connected in a moral way to one another, to other human beings. We have responsibilities to them, and they to us’.42 Pullman’s ideal ‘republicans’ (not to be confused with the US GOP) recall several items in the third Humanist Manifesto, such as that ‘Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals’, that ‘Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships’ and that ‘Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness’. In the Horn Book essay, Pullman also lauds inclusiveness, care for the earth and other progressive values. A flurry of letters to the Horn Book’s editor ensued, which cite Lewis, Tolkien and Narnia as rebuttals to Pullman’s religious views: David Moody calls Pullman’s essay ‘arrogant, beautiful garbage’ and asserts that ‘People love Tolkien and C. S. Lewis for their truth, not their dragons’, concluding that ‘he [Pullman] sounds more and more like the golden voice of Saruman, or Wormtongue’.43 Carol McKnight resolves to ‘stand with Puddleglum in the Queen of the Underworld’s castle (in The Silver Chair)’.44 Such disputes were overshadowed in the United States by the much greater focus on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In the years 2000 to 2009, according to the American Library Association, Harry Potter topped the most banned book list, while His Dark Materials came in at number eight.45 Perhaps the focus on Harry Potter (books and films) delayed awareness of Pullman’s far more subversive treatment of organized religion in general and Christianity in particular.

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Pullman’s name did not even appear in the most challenged author category until 2007, coinciding with the release of the film The Golden Compass.46 By contrast, in the United Kingdom Pullman’s work received measured and moderate responses from Church leaders such as Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. Williams not only praised the series but also urged children to read and discuss it—it ‘would help to counter the “inadequacies” of some religious education’.47 In a joint interview with Pullman on the set of the National Theatre production of His Dark Materials in March 2004, Williams talked cordially with the author. Frequently the two agreed as they conversed about the fantasy’s representation of Christianity— most notably about the series’ elision of Christ and the incarnation. This tolerant attitude towards His Dark Materials’ anti-religious stance has been extended to stage versions. The National Theatre ran a six-hour adaptation by Nicholas Wright for two very successful seasons in 2003 and 2004. Reviewers occasionally criticized the show’s stridency, though they praised the spectacle and its stimulus to thought, as did Rachel Halliburton of The New Statesman, who concluded that the work’s ‘intelligent complexity’ offered ‘an important gift’ to children: ‘The requirement that they use their imaginations to gain access to a more intricate and rewarding vision of life’.48 Even the most caustic, such as Benedict Nightingale’s ‘It’s Like the Wicked Witch Snacking on Dwarf Stew’, concluded that though the ‘cheap satire and theological mumbo-jumbo’ might be regrettable, ‘that’s modern Christmases for you’.49 Others in the United Kingdom have successfully performed the drama with large casts of children and adults.50 Noteworthy by their absence have been death threats, picketing, boycotting initiatives and other efforts to shut the series down. Instead, the Guardian’s education section, anticipating the film’s release in 2007, offered suggestions for studying the issues in RE and citizenship classes, such as: The Archbishop of Canterbury welcomes Pullman’s stories, seeing them as a useful catalyst in RE lessons for exploring the nature of religion. … The US-based Catholic League advocates a boycott of the film. … Ask students to read and listen to both, before expressing their own response on how religion should figure in children’s books.51

His Dark Materials builds more gently to its anti-theistic conclusion than Pullman’s reputation and interviews might suggest. The world of Northern Lights understands theological questions as subject to a version of the scientific method not only in the hideously applied ‘experimental

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theology’ of intercision, but also in the marvellous solar gadgets used in worship, the multiple-world theory of Barnard-Stokes, and of course the wondrous alethiometer. The Subtle Knife too combines religion and the paranormal with science in the eponymous knife, a supernatural object with dark ‘intentions’, as Iorek Byrnison later warns, in the shamanistic feats of John Parry, and in the uncanny activities of the witches and their allies. Finally, in The Amber Spyglass, Mary Malone’s glass enables her to see and experience Dust not only as phenomenon but also mystically, as intention and consciousness, as when, in Chapter 27, she leaves her body to join and communicate with the particles. Such marvels are not readily reduced to the strictures of the Humanist Manifesto that life ‘without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity’.52 True, Pullman’s trilogy ends with a similar resolve. But the mythic themes of the trilogy cause many readers to protest that, after all, Pullman’s fantasy achieves another, more spiritual agenda. As Cathy Young points out, ‘the world of Pullman’s sacrilegious epic is not a conventionally materialistic one. It includes all the basic elements of Christian theology’.53 Hugh Rayment-Pickard notes the paradox that in contesting the myths of the Bible, of C. S. Lewis and of other Christians, Pullman does not use rational arguments: ‘he tries to “out-narrate” Christianity … with a myth that is simply more appealing, more powerful, and more convincing than the Christian narrative’.54 Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate concur: many Christians ... have observed that His Dark Materials remains aesthetically and ethically rooted in the texts against which it writes . ... For Pullman, then, the New Atheist novel thus becomes a self-consciously heretical re-narration of such pivotal biblical events as the fall and the war in heaven which consistently appeals to Christian concepts of grace, redemption and personal sacrifice.55

Pullman’s choice of fantasy as his mode, Elisabeth Gruner argues, actually makes the old stories more compelling: ‘While Pullman’s plot discredits religion, his method ironically revitalizes the very myths the series overtly works to discredit’.56 Pullman against the Fundamentalists Notwithstanding this consensus about Pullman’s Christian foundations, his notoriety has increased. Challenges to the series soared in the United States and Canada in anticipation of the release of the film The Golden Compass in 2007. In October 2007, the US-based Catholic

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League announced a two-month protest of the film and books, calling them ‘pernicious’ and ‘despicable’. A booklet, ‘The Golden Compass’: Agenda Unmasked, promised to ‘tear […] the mask off the movie’.57 The charge that His Dark Materials was specifically anti-Catholic was repeated and developed in book-length form.58 Emails circulated widely and hysterically enough to appear on the rumour-busting site Snopes.com, where the claim ‘The 2007 film The Golden Compass is based on a series of books with anti-religious themes’ was rated true. Focus on the Family also called for a boycott. References to Pullman in world news sources rose from 1,790 (2003–2005) to 2,636 (2006–2008), and references coupling his name with ‘controversy’ or ‘controversial’ more than doubled (from 93 to 221). Despite efforts on the part of the film producers, the actors, and Pullman himself to mute or reduce the more obviously anti-religious dimensions of the film, The Golden Compass did not triumph at the box office. In the compromises the film made to avoid controversy, it ended up displeasing fans without appeasing the organized religious opposition. Though the film’s global sales were strong (it was number one in the world by 18 December 2007, according to the Guardian), its ‘lacklustre performance Stateside’ virtually guaranteed that the projected sequels would not be filmed.59 Newspapers quoted the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue: ‘I’m boasting and I’m wearing it on my sleeve because it’s nice to beat someone like him, who is introducing kids to the wonders of atheism by the back door’.60 As Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today wrote even before the film opened, ‘Rarely can one movie annoy stalwart defenders of Christianity and atheists alike’ (29 November 2007). While newspapers and other media savoured the culture wars combat between Christians and atheists, critics delved into His Dark Materials. The work’s strata of allusions to Western literary tradition, philosophy, religion and folklore have provided fertile ground. Pullman’s provocative Carnegie Medal speech was vindicated by the increasing respectability of children’s literature as an academic field. Not only were children’s literature journals publishing work on His Dark Materials, Pullman was being taken seriously by cultural theorists, philosophers, theologians and their readers.61 When The Amber Spyglass won the Whitbread Award in January 2002, the first children’s book to do so, clichés about children’s books had to be revised. Inevitably, metaphors were developmental: ‘Children’s Books Come of Age’, announced The Sunday Age (Melbourne); ‘The Children’s Book Has Finally Grown Up’, offered the Mirror, and the New York Times, associating fantasy with children, called Pullman’s series ‘Harry Potter for Grown-Ups’.62 Others

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claimed that age didn’t matter: ‘Courageous and Dangerous: A Writer for All Ages’ from The Times and ‘The Whitbread Judges Made the Right Choice: Philip Pullman’s Extraordinary Novels Are Not Just for Children’ from The Guardian.63 As uncomplimentary as these plaudits might be, they did suggest that adults were prepared to lay aside their condescending attitudes, provided the work was ‘dark and complex’ (The Independent, 23 January 2002), ‘visionary’ (Evening Standard, 23 January 2002), or ‘original and dangerous’ (Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2002). Backhanded accolades aside, Pullman’s position was enviable. Pullman as humanist fundamentalist? Still, Pullman’s humanist epic has not been entirely uncritically received by left-leaning readers. Ever ready to attack religious tyranny, Pullman underplays the less salubrious aspects of the Enlightenment, omitting references to oppressive secular institutions. Since Lyra’s world conjoins scientific and religious study in the discipline of ‘experimental theology’, Pullman avoids the difficulty presented by European and global history, that some of the most efficient and devastating genocides were accomplished under the auspices of atheist regimes such as Stalin’s or Pol Pot’s. Practices of the prison and the madhouse, as Michel Foucault has shown in Discipline and Punish (1975), are just as totalitarian. Modern and enlightened thought has at times arrogantly infringed upon others’ autonomy through such things as vivisection, sterilization or experimentation on non-consenting subjects.64 But when asked, Pullman collapses distinctions between religious and political dictatorships, calling them all theocratic.65 His Dark Materials criticizes determinism and conformity to a religion, but what of conformity to an ahistorical, asocial notion of a self-determining human subject? Postcolonial, feminist, and queer critics, among others, have amply demonstrated the injustices that arise when humanity is defined using only European, white, male, heterosexual subjects. Stories of coming of age vary greatly from culture to culture. His Dark Materials is so thoroughly rooted in the story of the Fall that the possibility of other models for coming of age is not even raised. The consequence might be called mythic imperialism, defining not only this world but also all other worlds by a single story, drawn from the Christian tradition. Even Pullman’s use of the grand narrative might be a weak point if his goal is to invent a ‘Republic of Heaven’. Pullman’s Carnegie Medal speech privileges the hegemonic hero plot over more experimental forms of representing consciousness and reality. As Malcolm

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Bradbury counters, Pullman’s nostalgia for epic does not negate the rationale for ‘experimental literary expression’. 66 Pullman might even be called needlessly restrictive in making ‘one of the oldest arguments about the function and prospects of that loose baggy monster we call the novel’.67 Citing the same scientific revolutionaries that inform His Dark Materials, Bradbury points out that ‘Freud and Einstein, the unconscious and relativity, the loss of faith and the collapse of confidence in social realities, did much to dissolve [the Victorian] world of storytelling,’68 requiring fundamental re-consideration of narrative form and subjectivity. Stephen Thomson addresses the problems with Pullman’s adoption of the hero plot by showing how the trilogy, far from promoting critical awareness, actually encourages acceptance of social hierarchies through its uncontested structures (of plot, of family). That families must be the same in every universe (father, mother, child), or that a single story about temptation and knowledge may define not only ‘our’ world but also Lyra’s and even the world of the mulefa, are verities not seriously questioned.69 Lyra’s destiny to establish a Republic of Heaven offers a ‘liberal and democratic’ message, yet Lyra is elite, a child of destiny, daughter of exceptional parents (Lord Asriel, Marisa Coulter), partaking of their power and glamour as her birthright.70 As Thomson notes, although Lyra’s self-aggrandizing fantasies are ‘dismisse[d] as nonsense; … yet it [the family romance] is part of [the trilogy’s] own story, and a structurally important part too’.71 Finally, though Pullman concludes Lyra’s development as a storyteller (in the Land of the Dead) with a paean to ‘The right story … [that] eschews the romance of high parentage’,72 in fact the series as a whole ‘nevertheless leans rather heavily’ on this romance structure.73 This humanist Bildungsroman, as it turns out, is a mutation of heroic romance and re-inscribes the kingdom it seeks to erase. Even the ‘moral’ of His Dark Materials is not particularly revolutionary. The list of virtues that Lyra and Pan determine to pursue after they’ve lost Will and Kirjava forever ‘is so entirely uncontentious that no doubt secular humanists, liberal humanists and Christian humanists can all be comfortable with it’, writes David Gooderham.74 More ironically, given Pullman’s take on Lewis’s The Last Battle, the series offers a version of eternal life—Lee Scoresby’s ghost anticipates reunion with his dæmon Hester in Chapter 31 of The Amber Spyglass.75 Thus, Pullman’s Enlightenment assumptions about truth, reason and the subject are vulnerable to poststructuralist criticism. If Kant defined Enlightenment as adulthood, Foucault (and many others) have questioned the possibility of adult autonomy by showing how

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knowledge, bodies and identities are framed and constrained.76 Foucault inspires questions about these frames, asking: Not ‘What can I know?,’ but rather; ‘How have my questions been produced? How has the path of my knowing been determined?’ Not ‘What ought I to do,’ but rather; ‘How have I been situated to experience the real?’ How have exclusions operated in delineating the realm of obligation for me?’ Not ‘What may I hope for?,’ but rather, ‘What are the struggles in which I am engaged? How have the parameters for my aspirations been defined?’77

Asking these questions of His Dark Materials provides ways of dissecting the ideology of Lyra’s world and our own. Even the delightful conceit of the dæmon as half of the self suggests determinism and ‘realms of obligation’ at odds with notions of a free subject. Dæmons may express what kind of person you are, as the old sailor tells Lyra in Northern Lights,78 but how, then, is that ‘kind’ determined by class status, as it is? What of the depiction of servants’ dæmons as almost invariably dogs (NL, p. 7) or other domesticated animals (the maidservant’s ‘clucking hen’ of a dæmon in chapter 11 of Northern Lights (p. 198))? Such characterization, as Cathy Young notes, borders on class snobbery, intentionally or not: ‘The illegitimate but aristocratic-born Lyra is vastly superior in intelligence and initiative to the lower-class children she befriends’ and Will’s status as an officer’s son also elevates him above his peers.79 Lyra’s heredity, her ‘concealed nobility’ in the mode of romance, naturalizes social hierarchies, writes Stephen Thomson.80 And if one goal of the series is to challenge abusive power structures, the superiority of adult knowledge over child inexperience and ignorance is not seriously queried, as Kristine Moruzi points out.81 Troublingly, the series is by no means immune to the irrationalism, intolerance and determinism it abhors in its opponents.82 Even though the conceit of a human–dæmon pair might lend itself to understanding the multiple, fragmented aspects of subjectivity theorized by Freud and his successors, the heroic romance structure collapses such uncertainties into coherence, more akin to Jung’s essentialist archetypes than to the tragically split subject of Civilization and its Discontents. Dæmons and ‘their’ humans embody cissexual normativity (with ‘rare’ exceptions)—male aligns with female, and sexual experience defines the transition from childhood to adulthood, turning what was variable and polymorphous to fixed and finished, as though growth ceases with pubescence and identity is established by one’s first sexual experience. Essentialist gender categories—such as the glamour of Mrs Coulter and the machismo of Lord Asriel—are

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rarely questioned. Lyra may be a strong female protagonist, but she is also constrained into femininity as she accepts her role as ‘Eve, Again! Mother Eve’ (SK, p. 328). As Claire Squires observes, once Will enters the narrative, Lyra becomes subordinate, and even succumbs to the passivity of a sleeping beauty by the start of The Amber Spyglass.83 Mrs Coulter’s abrupt transformation from calculating manipulator in The Subtle Knife to loving and self-sacrificing mother in The Amber Spyglass is explained primarily by the cliché of motherly instinct. Moreover, in a book that decries religious constraints on children’s sexual identities, sexual fulfillment is ultimately denied. Sublimation replaces libidinal delight according to the austere dictates of Fate.84 The consolation prize is to be unaware of what destiny holds, as when Will resolves not to learn what his fate is in order that he maintain a fantasy of self-determination (AS, p. 524–5). In fairness, Pullman does acknowledge the constraints of human embeddedness in the body and in the world by demanding that Lyra and Will embrace their destinies in their own worlds. But the series does not acknowledge the drawbacks of knowing who and what you are at the onset of puberty, without further opportunity to grow or change. These objections to the hegemonic aspects of the series notwithstanding, His Dark Materials is not scripture but a story about how Western Christian culture has defined maturity. The text is not obliged, in other words, to provide an approved postmodern map (even if such a thing were possible) any more than it is required to adhere to a given interpretation of Genesis. If anything, it challenges readers to think about constraint and freedom and the responsibility that accompanies any action. His Dark Materials is complex enough to receive and then confound criticism. Santiago Colás, for example, recognizes in the subtle knife a metaphor for Enlightenment science. The philosophers of Cittàgazze, like their Enlightenment counterparts, see technological-magical advances as unlimited freedom, yet this freedom ‘carries the ultimate ethical cost’ in that using the knife without regard to consequences renders ‘the world as lifeless and inert as mechanical clockwork’.85 The characterization of the guild philosophers implicitly references the abuses of modern science uncoupled from ethics: they are ‘guided by a kind of very narrow instrumental, technological reason: one concerned with short term, local efficiency and not with the larger temporal or spatial webs of cause and effect’.86 As in the beginning of the twenty-first century we contemplate our own ‘spectre’ of global climate change brought on by such ‘narrowly instrumental, technological’ pursuits, the freedoms promised by unlimited technology begin to appear dearly bought.

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By provoking controversy from right and left, and in challenging the sanctity of tradition and the pretensions of the avant-garde, Pullman does both sides a service. In his reliance on the humanist canon, Pullman vividly renders its power and value. In his advocacy for reason and human dignity, he dares his readers to take responsibility, to become mature. In his valorization of maturity, Pullman promises that loss of innocence does not mean loss of hope or of a future. And in the gaps and inconsistencies, the outrages and the affronts, readers are goaded to argue, contest and interrogate. An important accomplishment of His Dark Materials is to provoke the controversies, to cause the debates to take place. Notes 1. Philip Pullman, ‘Dark Side of Narnia’, The Guardian, 1 October (1998), (http://www.crlamppost.org/darkside.htm). 2. Alix Sharkey, ‘Heaven, Hell, and the Hut at the Bottom of the Garden’, Independent on Sunday, 6 December (1998), (http://www.indepen dent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books-heaven-hell-and-the-hut-at-thebottom-of-the-garden-1189628.html). 3. Nicholas Tucker, Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman (Wizard: Duxford, 2004): 9–10 (21); Claire Squires, Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: A Guide to the Worlds of His Dark Materials (New York: Continuum, 2006): 22–3. See also the many epigraphs to The Amber Spyglass. On Pullman’s enthusiasm for super-hero comics see Tucker: 11; Squires: 20. 4. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983): 42. 5. Kathleen Odean, ‘The Story Master’, School Library Journal 46.10 (October 2000): 50. 6. Bernice Martin, ‘Dark Materials? Philip Pullman and Children’s Literature’, in Jane Garnett, Matthew Grimley, Alana Harris, William Whyte, Sarah Williams (eds.), Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives (London: SCM Press, 2007): 178–89 (186). For references to drugs, see Sally Vincent, ‘Driven by Daemons’, The Guardian, 10 November (2001). 7. Via William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche. See, for example, Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). 8. Pullman is both ‘a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association’ and ‘an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society (UK)’. ‘Humanist Profile: Philip Pullman (1946–Present) International Humanist 2008’, The Humanist 68.1 (Jan/Feb 2008): 2. 9. Wendy Parsons and Catriona Nicholson, ‘Talking to Philip Pullman: An Interview’, The Lion and the Unicorn 23.1 (1999), 116–34 (126).

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10. The American Humanist Association website provides the text for the Humanist Manifesto I (1933), II (1973), and III (2003). With each iteration, humanism is more emphatically distinguished from religion: in 1933, humanism was a ‘vital, fearless, and frank religion capable of furnishing adequate social goals and personal satisfaction’; by 2003, it has become ‘a progressive philosophy of life’. 11. Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism, 7th edn (New York: Continuum, 1990): 286. 12. Alice Gribben, ‘The Four Horsemen of New Atheism Reunited’, The New Statesman 22 December (2011). For a more lengthy treatment, see Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11 (London: Continuum, 2010). 13. Bradley and Tate, The New Atheist Novel: 2–3. 14. Bradley and Tate, The New Atheist Novel: 9. 15. Laura Miller, ‘Far from Narnia: Philip Pullman’s Secular Fantasy for Children’, The New Yorker, 26 December (2005). Miller does not observe other exceptions, such as Suzanne Collins’ Underland series or Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus books. For Collins, see Sarah Fiona Winters, ‘Religious Faith and Secular Hope in the Underland Chronicles’, The Lion and the Unicorn 36.1 (January 2012): 1–19. 16. ‘Humanist Profile: Philip Pullman (1946–Present) International Humanist 2008’. 17. Ibid., quoting Pullman’s website. 18. Parsons and Nicholson, ‘Talking to Philip Pullman: An Interview’: 118. 19. Squires, Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: 24-25. 20. Amanda Mitchison, ‘The Art of Darkness’, The Daily Telegraph, 3 November (2003), (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3605857/The-art-of-darkness.html). 21. Ibid. 22. Tucker, Darkness Visible: 15; Squires, Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: 27. 23. Quoted in Squires, Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: 27. 24. Philip Pullman, ‘The Moral’s in the Story, Not the Stern Lecture; We Should Remember that “Thou Shalt Not” Might Reach the Head, but It Takes “Once Upon a Time” to reach the Heart’, The Independent 18 July (1996): 13, (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/ education-news/opinion-the-morals-in-the-story-not-the-stern-lecture-1329231.html). 25. Ashley Rogers Berner, ‘Is English Education Secular?’, in Garnett et al. (eds.), Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives: 222–32; (226–7). 26. Garnett et al. ‘Introduction to “The Good Life”’, in Garnett et al. (eds.) Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives: 201–5; (204). 27. Ibid. 28. Wayne Riddle, ‘The Concept of “Secular Humanism” in the Context of Elementary and Secondary Education: Discussion of the Variety of Meanings, and References in Federal Education Legislation’,

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29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

Naomi Wood Congressional Research Service, The Library of Congress. 31 January (1986), no. 86–545 EPW (microfilm). Sally Vincent, ‘Driven by Daemons’, The Guardian 10 November (2001), (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/ opinion-the-morals-in-the-story-not-the-stern-lecture-1329231.html). Parsons and Nicholson, ‘Talking to Philip Pullman: An Interview’: 123. For an indication of how much of a change this was for Pullman’s national profile, according to Lexis-Nexis there were 20 mentions of Pullman between January 1995 and June 1996 in major world publications, mostly in the form of short notices of Northern Lights; between Pullman’s speech 17 July and August 1996, he was featured prominently—and mostly approvingly—in 17 newspaper stories. LexisNexis Academic (http://www.lexisnexis.com). Parsons and Nicholson, ‘Talking to Philip Pullman: An Interview’: 122–3. This failure to give children’s literature respect was lamented by other British writers and critics of children’s literature, for example in Peter Hunt’s opening chapter in Criticism,Theory, and Children’s Literature (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 1991). David Lister, ‘Children’s Author Accuses Novelists of Losing the Plot’, The Independent, Arts News, 18 July (1996): 7 (http://www.independent. co.uk/arts-entertainment/childrens-author-accuses-novelists-of-los ing-the-plot-1329206.html). Later reports identify his target as A. S. Byatt’s Babel Tower. Lister, ‘Children’s Author Accuses Novelists of Losing the Plot’: 7. According to a Lexis-Nexis search in major world publications, there were 58 citations of Pullman or his books in 1996, and, of those, 17 articles and letters to the editor referenced his Carnegie medal speech. No US publications ran a story about it. Pullman was quoted twice in support of Melvin Burgess. His review of Blake Morrison’s book on the Bulger case, As If, was published in The Independent, 1 February 1997. Lexis-Nexis Academic (http://www.lexisnexis.com). Penelope Lively, ‘The Wrath of God: An Opinion of the “Narnia” Books’, The Use of English (Winter 1968): 126–9 (128–9). Quoted in Philip Pullman, ‘Books: Good Fairy, Bad Hobbit’, Review of The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe and America by John Goldthwaite, The Guardian, 30 August 1996: T17, in Lexis-Nexis Academic (http://www.lexisnexis.com. er.lib.k-state.edu/). Stuart Wavell, ‘Our Obliterated Children: A Subversive Author Rants about How We Underestimate Kids’, The Times, report. The Ottawa Citizen 9 December (2001): C14. ACHUKA Interview: Philip Pullman. ACHUKA, Question 2, December (1998), (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/ aug/23/philip-pullman-dark-materials-children). Wavell, ‘Our Obliterated Children’: C14. Parsons and Nicholson, ‘Talking to Philip Pullman: An Interview’: 133.

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41. Philip Pullman, ‘The Republic of Heaven’, Horn Book Magazine, 77.6 (November/December 2001): 655–67. 42. Pullman, ‘The Republic of Heaven’: 664. 43. David Moody, ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Horn Book Magazine 78.2 (March–April 2002): 131. 44. Carol McKnight, ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Horn Book Magazine 78.2 (March–April 2002): 131. 45. American Library Association,‘Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books 2000– 2009’, (http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/ challengedbydecade/2000_2009/). 46. American Library Association, ‘Most Frequently Challenged Authors of the 21st Century’, (http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequently challenged/challengedauthors/). 47. Ruth Gledhill, ‘Archbishop Wants Pupils to Be Taught Tale of Wicked Priests and a Dying God’, The Times, 10 March (2004): 11, (http://www. thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article1903777.ece). 48. Rachel Halliburton, ‘Just Imagine’, New Statesman 17.836/828 (13–20 December 2004): 63–4. 49. The Times, 10 December (2004). 50. Dramatizing the play with lower budgets and amateur actors is discussed in Karian Schuitema, ‘Staging and Performing His Dark Materials: From the National Theatre Productions to Subsequent Productions’, in Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox (eds.), Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2011): 239–66. 51. Judith Kneen,‘Education: Learn: Curriculum links: Know your Daemons: The Golden Compass Provides a Focus for RE and Citizenship, as Well as Being a Fantastical Film’, Guardian Education Pages, 11 December (2007): 7 (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/dec/11/ learnlessonplans.secondaryschools). 52. Humanist Manifesto III. 53. Cathy Young, ‘A Secular Fantasy’, Reason 39.10 (March 2008) 36-41: 38 (http://reason.com/archives/2008/02/26/a-secular-fantasy). 54. Hugh Rayment-Pickard, The Devil’s Account: Philip Pullman & Christianity (London: Longman and Todd, 2004): 16. 55. Bradley and Tate, The New Atheist Novel: 13. 56. Similar points are made by Elisabeth Rose Gruner, ‘Wrestling with Religion: Pullman, Pratchett, and the Uses of Story’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 36.3 (Fall 2011): 276–95 (278); Rayment-Pickard, The Devil’s Account: Philip Pullman & Christianity; Donna Freitas & Jason King, Killing the Imposter God: Philip Pullman’s Spiritual Imagination in His Dark Materials (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007). 57. ‘“The Golden Compass” Sparks Protest’, The Catholic League, 9 October (2007), (http://www.catholicleague.org/the-goldencompass-sparks-protest).

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58. Pete Vere and Sandra Miesel, Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children’s Fantasy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007). 59. Cathy Lynn Grossman, ‘“Golden Compass” Criticism Already Swinging Wildly; Religious, Atheists Equally Incensed by Unseen Film’, USA Today (29 November 2007), Life: 3D, in Lexis-Nexis Academic (http:// www.lexisnexis.com.er.lib.k-state.edu). 60. Quoted in Darren Devine, ‘Atheist Author Tells of Disgust after America’s Religious Right Halts Compass Movie Follow-ups’, The Western Mail 16 December (2009): 3, (http://www.walesonline.co.uk/ news/wales-news/atheist-author-tells-disgust-after-2065496). 61. Examples of non-children’s literature critical interest include: Santiago Colás. ‘Telling True Stories, or The Immanent Ethics of Material Spirit (and Spiritual Matter) in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, Discourse 27.1 (Winter 2005): 4–66; Amanda M. Greenwell, ‘The Language of Pictures’: Visual Representation and Spectatorship in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, Studies in the Novel 42.1–2 (Spring-Summer 2010): 99–120; Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Jonardon Ganeri, ‘The Geography of Shadows: Souls and Cities in P. Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, Philosophy & Literature 35.2 (October 2011): 269–81. 62. Jane Sullivan, ‘Children’s Books Come of Age’, Sunday Age (Melbourne), 3 February (2002); Henry Sutton, ‘The Children’s Book Has Finally Grown Up’, The Mirror, 24 January (2002): 6; Margo Jefferson, ‘On Writers and Writing: Harry Potter for Grown-Ups’, The New York Times, 20 January (2002), Sunday Section 7: 23. 63. John Ezard, ‘Whitbread Judges . . .’, The Guardian, 24 January (2002); Erica Wagner, ‘Courageous . . .’ The Times, 23 January (2002). 64. Examples of scientific overreach include Mengele’s experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the United States Public Health Department’s infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. 65. Huw Spanner, ‘Heat and Dust: Interview with Philip Pullman’, Third Way 25.2 (April 2002): 23. 66. Malcolm Bradbury ‘Have Today’s Writers Really Lost the Plot?’ Evening Standard (London) 18 July 1996. p. 28, in Lexis-Nexis Academic (http:// www.lexisnexis.com). 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Stephen Thomson, ‘The Child, the Family, the Relationship. Familiar Stories: Family, Storytelling, and Ideology in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, in Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children’s Literature: New Approaches (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): 144–67. 70. Ibid.: 153. 71. Ibid.: 154. 72. Ibid.: 158. 73. Ibid. 74. David Gooderham, ‘Fantasizing It As It Is: Religious Language in Philip Pullman’s Trilogy, His Dark Materials’, Children’s Literature 31 (2003): 155–75 (173).

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75. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic, 2000): 240. 76. Mark Olssen, ‘Foucault and Critique: Kant, Humanism, and the Human Sciences’, in Michael Peters, Mark Olssen, and Colin Lankshear (eds.), Futures of Critical Theory, Dreams of Difference (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003): 73–102 (75). 77. James Bernauer, The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991), quoted in Olssen, ‘Foucault and Critique: Kant, Humanism, and the Human Sciences’: 82. 78. Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (London: Scholastic, 1995): 167. 79. Young, ‘A Secular Fantasy’: 41. 80. Thomson, ‘The Child, the Family, the Relationship. Familiar Stories’: 164. 81. Kristine Moruzi, ‘Missed Opportunities: the Subordination of Children in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, Children’s Literature in Education 36.1 (2005): 55–68. 82. Young, ‘A Secular Fantasy’: 41; Bradley and Tate, The New Atheist Novel: 111. 83. Squires, Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: 40–1. 84. Gooderham, ‘Fantasizing It As It Is’: 172. 85. Colás, ‘Telling True Stories’: 59. 86. Ibid.

5 Bearly Conscious? Deconstructing Pullman’s Postmodern Marionettes Andrew M. Butler Introduction: Blows Against Humanity There is a moment in a lecture by Sigmund Freud when he declares that ‘the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science’.1 The first blow was the demolition of the geocentric view of the universe that alleged that the Earth was orbited by the Moon, the Sun and five planets. The observations of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler and others in the sixteenth century revealed the Earth to be one of several planets orbiting the Sun, itself one star among millions in a seemingly infinite universe. The second blow was ‘when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature’.2 In Genesis, man was in a state of grace in the Garden of Eden and given dominance over the animals. Sin entered into the world with the event known as the Fall, when Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and gave some of the fruit to Adam. The two—and thus humanity—were expelled from paradise. Freud points here to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace that push the origin of the world much further back than the Biblical account. He goes on in his lecture to note the third and greatest blow, the impact of ‘psychological research [...] which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind’.3 In this chapter I wish to consider the implications of these three blows, along with a more recent one, for a deconstructive reading of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. This will be within the realm of a post1960 area of thought—postmodernity. I will pay particular attention 96

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to one of Pullman’s acknowledged influences, Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ (1810).4 This story describes a brief encounter between the narrator and a dancer, Herr C., in the town of M. in 1801. The two see a performance of string puppets and Herr C. claims the marionettes have a grace that dancers could learn from. The puppets, being artificial, ‘would never be affected’5 because they are not self-conscious. Selfconsciousness for humans is ‘inevitable because we have eaten of the tree of knowledge. And Paradise is bolted, with the cherub behind us; we must journey around the world and determine if perhaps at the end somewhere there is an opening to be discovered again’.6 The narrator responds with a story of a graceful young man who pulled a thorn out of his foot; seeing himself in a mirror, the young man recognized his likeness to a similarly-posed statue. Afterwards he became self-conscious and narcissistic. Herr C. then tells a further story, about how he fenced with a Russian family and then fought a tethered bear. Try as he might, Herr C. was unable to defeat the bear. The human’s self-conscious actions were unable to defeat the animal’s unconscious actions. Herr C. concludes that humanity’s grace can be eventually regained: ‘grace returns after knowledge has gone through the world of the infinite, in that it appears to best advantage in that human bodily structure that has no consciousness at all—or has infinite consciousness—that is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God’.7 Grace can be regained by eating for a second time from the Tree of Knowledge. I wish to examine the implications of these parables for understanding the dæmons, the panserbjørne and the mulefa in His Dark Materials. My reading is indebted to the work of the French philosophers Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida on Kleist, as well as the latter’s unpicking of the human/animal distinction, to Donna Haraway’s critique of Derrida and her notion of the Companion Species and finally to the Freudian uncanny. But before we can return to notions of grace and consciousness, it would be helpful to have a clearer understanding of a fourth challenge to humanity’s self-love—postmodernity—which Haraway has described as an informatic or cyborgian blow.8 Postmodernity and uncertainty Postmodernity is a much-contested term that every critic seems to invent. I will focus here mainly on the ideas of Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida, returning to Donna Haraway later in the chapter. The French sociologist Lyotard defines

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postmodernity as a rejection of modernity.9 The Reformation in the sixteenth century challenged the power of the Church, in particular the intervention of the priest between an individual and God, and such questioning continued into the following centuries. In the Enlightenment period, across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers, intellectuals and writers such as John Locke, Isaac Newton and Voltaire asserted the ability of humanity to explain and interpret the world, with less recourse to the concept of a soul. The world became increasingly secular, with a shift from the acceptance of a ruling monarch as God’s representative on Earth to elected officials limited by written constitutions. This was the era of modernity. The period also saw the rise of capitalism and then, through scientific and technological advances, industrial capitalism, guided by a belief in a notion of human progress toward utopia. Human cultures and experience were rationally mapped, with anthropology, for example, locating recurrent structures in human behaviours across societies. Even literary criticism aspired to the condition of a science, notably in various schools of structuralism that attempted to reduce literary writing—texts—to a few basic narrative structures and explorations of binary oppositions such as good/evil, male/female, city/country and so forth. This reached its zenith in the 1960s. By the 1970s, modernity’s project was being critiqued by a number of thinkers. As industrial capitalism had given way to postindustrial or late capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, the downsides to progress had become painfully apparent. Lyotard suggests that the postmodern condition was defined by a suspicion of metanarratives, of grand narratives, the totalizing ideological systems such as capitalism, Marxism, science, psychoanalysis and Christianity.10 The progress of the project of modernity, Lyotard argues, had led to trench warfare, industrial exploitation, the concentration camp and the totalitarian regimes of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Only local micronarratives could enable individuals to comprehend the world. Lyotard also argues in The Postmodern Condition (1979) that the scientific method is being challenged. Science needs repeatable experiments and empirical observations. As equipment becomes more expensive—think of the Large Hadron Collider—so fewer institutions can check results. Physicists working on the nature of light had not agreed whether it was wave or particle; Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr hypothesized in the 1920s that the act of observing determined which of those two possible states was observed. Hugh Everett in 1957 and Bryce Seligman DeWitt in the 1960s and 1970s theorized that each of the possible states occurs in its own universe.

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Freud’s first blow is extended: not only are we not the centre of the universe, we are not even the only universe.This many-worlds theorem underlies Pullman’s cosmology in the His Dark Materials trilogy. In Lyra’s universe, the church controls research into Dust (which seems to be some form of particle) and access to the other worlds. The universities—in particular the colleges of the University of Oxford— act as quasi-medieval storehouses of knowledge rather than the markets for information exchange that late capitalism exploits. In Will Parry’s universe, Dr Mary Malone is investigating dark matter, the theorized but as-yet-unobserved material that makes up 85 per cent of the universe. In our universe she is a theoretical physicist, in Lyra’s she would be an experimental theologian. Jameson’s account of postmodernity is more an attempt to describe the aesthetics of the period after about 1960s than an engagement with the ideas of Lyotard, although he did provide an introduction to the English translation of The Postmodern Condition.11 He suggests that postmodern texts are characterized by their interest in surfaces and style, by a sense of nostalgia, by the increasing fracturing of the human subject and by the use of pastiche, collage and bricolage.12 For Jameson, the postmodern text is a compilation of things that people have already said. Of course, writers, artists, composers and philosophers have always been influenced by those who went before them—but this was taken to new extremes. The Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva coined the term ‘intertextuality’ in 1966 to refer to the sense that a text is read and defined in relation to a range of other texts, sometimes by authorial intention, sometimes because of readerly knowledge being brought to a text. The distinct boundaries of the text are blurred. In traditional literary criticism there had been an appeal to the figure of the author as the creator, father and owner of a text, the arbiter of its meaning. However, in 1967 the French cultural critic Roland Barthes diagnosed the Death of the Author,13 with the emergence of readers who were creating their own meanings for texts. Meanwhile, in works such as Of Grammatology (1967), Dissemination (1972) and The Beast & the Sovereign:Volume 1 (2008),14 Jacques Derrida questioned the ways in which society appears to privilege one side of certain binary oppositions and ‘deconstructed’ oppositions such as speech/writing, poison/cure, presence/absence and human/animal, noting the ways in which apparently distinct categories blur. It is not that Derrida rejects the notion of authorial intention or meaning, but rather he argues that a fixed meaning cannot be located. It is tempting to take the uncertainty of literary criticism—a particle vs. wave-like, either/or hesitation between interpretations, a critique of appeals outside of an ordered

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system—and compare it to the scientific notions of uncertainty.15 Although there is a precision to scientific terminology that is lost in its appropriation by literary or cultural studies, there is the sense in postmodern analyses that texts simultaneously mean both this and that, where those are polar opposites. Three intertexts explicitly cited by Pullman for His Dark Materials are John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), the works of William Blake and Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’. Milton’s epic account of the war in heaven and the Fall of Adam and Eve has many parallels in the trilogy, with its refighting of that war and its positioning of Will and Lyra as a new Adam and Eve, but Milton’s republican sympathies in the English Civil War and his role in the Commonwealth also bear thinking about. If Milton might be thought of as broadly sympathetic to the Enlightenment cause—his attempt to ‘justify the ways of God to Men’16—then Blake was distinctly hostile, with his dismissal of rationalist figures such as Newton and Locke. Among Blake’s best-known works are the Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789, 1794), a collection of poems that contrast the innocent—the pre-Fall state of grace characterized by the Romantic-period image of the child—with the experienced—the post-Fall, sexualized, cynical, adult world. (One of these poems, ‘Little Girl Lost’, features a sleeping girl, Lyca, who is one source for Lyra’s name and whose sleep prefigures the enforced coma Lyra endures in The Amber Spyglass.) Between writing the two parts of Songs, Blake produced The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), a text combining a peculiar vision of the cosmos and a list of the proverbs of hell. While at first it might be thought that such maxims should be distrusted, Blake insists that: in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan [...] The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.17

This deconstruction of the Messiah/Satan binary is visible in His Dark Materials in the ongoing ambiguities of the representations of Lord Asriel, Mrs Coulter, the Authority (the self-proclaimed God) and Metatron his regent in the trilogy. ‘On the Marionette Theatre’: Grace vs. Self-consciousness However, as I have already indicated, it is Kleist’s text on which I wish to focus. Heinrich von Kleist was born in 1777 in Frankfurt an

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der Oder into a military family, and joined the army at the age of 15, fighting against the French. Having studied various subjects at university, he joined the Prussian civil service, only to leave it to go travelling with a friend. A child of the Enlightenment, he evolved a life plan for himself that would lead to personal happiness, but his progress was destroyed by a reading of Immanuel Kant that ‘revealed to him that absolute knowledge was unattainable by the conscious application of reason and that the knowledge obtained by such means was at the best relative and transitory, conditioned by standpoint and subjectivity’.18 Indeed, in a letter to his fiancée dated 2 March 1801—the year in which he set ‘On the Marionette Theatre’—he wrote: We cannot decide whether what we call truth is truly truth or whether it only seems so to us. If the latter, then the truth we gather here is nothing after death—and all our striving to acquire something of our own that will go with us even into the grave, is in vain.19

Kleist seems to be postmodern, a century and a half early. He travelled around Europe and began to write plays, poetry and fiction, before settling in Berlin. There he published the Berliner Abendblätter, in which ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ appeared in daily instalments from 12-15 December 1810. Less than a year later, on 21 November 1811, Kleist shot his terminally-ill lover Henriette Vogel and then himself dead. The Belgian literary theorist Paul de Man describes ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ as ‘curiously unread and enigmatic,’20 and yet it has been an influence upon a number of writers. De Man writes of its central notion: The idea of innocence recovered at the far side and by way of experience, of paradise consciously regained after the fall into consciousness, the idea, in other words, of a teleological and apocalyptic history of consciousness is, of course, one of the most seductive, powerful, and deluded topoi of the idealist and romantic period.21

Erich Heller notes that this narrative is: not unlike the Fall as it is narrated in Genesis. The Fall was the consequence and punishment of man’s free will that for the first time had asserted itself against the universal God and rejoiced in a consciousness and pleasure entirely its own [...] The reward for this betrayal was the embarrassment and shame of self-consciousness, the hard labor of maintaining himself in his state of separation.22

The loss of innocence led to exile from paradise. Grace wavers between two meanings here, the sense of being without sin (innocent,

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in William Blake’s terms) and being pleasingly aesthetic in movement. Kleist may not have known Blake’s poetry, of course, but Paradise Lost includes a retelling of the third chapter of Genesis alluded to by Kleist. While the works of John Milton and Blake have obvious connections to the trilogy, Kleist’s influence is less apparent—but it offers us an insight into Pullman’s dæmons, his armoured bears, a beautiful young man (in the person of Will Parry) and the mulefa. In The Beast & the Sovereign: Volume 1, Jacques Derrida discusses Kleist’s marionettes, pointing us in one possible direction: ‘the association of the name [marionette] goes more spontaneously, from the start to the figure or figurine of a girl, of a virgin, since the name marionette comes first from a miniature representative of the Virgin Mary, of “mariolette,” a diminutive of “mariole”.’23 The name of Dr Mary Malone might distract us for a moment, but the virginal young girl— at least until her Fall in a sequence in The Amber Spyglass—is surely Lyra. As a pawn of two warring, absentee parents, as the centre of the witches’ prophecy, as intended to play a vital role—the new Eve who will indeed fall—Lyra has limited agency. Indeed, she moves from headstrong agent in the first book, via deferential assistant to Will in the second, to the comatose prisoner of Mrs Coulter in the third. She is increasingly subject to the agency of others. Another version of marionettes might be seen in the dæmons— Pullman’s endlessly fascinating creation of an animal-like companion for each human being, which were in fact represented by puppeteers in the Royal National Theatre adaptation premiered in 2003. Dæmons are connected to their human as if by some form of invisible, emotional cord—there is a limit to the distance by which they can be separated. Lord Asriel’s assistants are attempting to generate some form of energy to crack open the connections between universes by splicing the connection between child and dæmon, and the Magisterium is staffed by the intercised at Bolvangar. The Oblation Board is experimenting with severing children and dæmons to prevent them from attracting Dust—Dust being associated by the Church with original sin. This is another variant on the innocence-and-experience binary. For children, the dæmon remains mutable, shifting from form to form, apparently at will, although whose will is not clear; the metamorphoses are linked to the child’s state of mind. The unconscious—perhaps non-conscious—aspect of this might lead dæmons to be explained in Freudian terms as the id, the deepest, darkest and most sexual part of the psyche, a dramatization of Sigmund Freud’s third blow to humanity’s narcissism. On the other hand, this then suggests a fallen marionette when for Kleist it has

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grace. As counsel and advisor, the dæmon may be closer to Freud’s notion of the superego, the part of the psyche that forbids or permits the operation of desire, linking back to Heinrich von Kleist’s peculiar description of how ‘the puppeteer placed himself in the center of gravity of the marionette’24 and undermining any clear divide between puppet and puppeteer. The superego is also that which the ego aspires to become, again potentially casting doubt on whether the human forms through the nature of the dæmon or the dæmon reflects the nature of the human. In another essay, ‘On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking’, Kleist observes, ‘it is not we who know things but pre-eminently a certain condition of ours which knows’,25 anticipating the divided self proposed in Freudian psychoanalysis. Given Kleist’s narrator’s parable of the handsome young man losing his natural grace through self-consciousness, it is better that children do not consciously decide their nature. Indeed, sometimes the wrong form of dæmon may be fixed upon. In Chapter 10 of Northern Lights, an old Able Seaman, Jerry, tells Lyra that he is defined by his gull-like dæmon, Belisaria. This enables him to be a sailor, but Jerry notes that some people believe themselves to be lion-like but end up with a poodle. The fixing comes at puberty, at the moment of sexual awakening, and therefore at a potential moment of transition from innocence to experience, and seems to be marked by knowing one’s place in the social order. The dæmon is also sexed—most males have female dæmons, most females have male ones—which points toward a more Jungian model of the anthropomorphic archetypes of anima/animus and the individuation or balancing out of the different aspects of the psyche. The Jungian psyche also includes but rejects the Shadow archetype, Carl Jung’s broad equivalent to the unconscious or id; in Pullman’s work Shadows is another name for Dust or dark matter, a form of particle that is conscious. It is this Dust that Dr Mary Malone communicates with through her computer and the I Ching, and that powers the alethiometer read by Lyra. Lyra’s ability to decode the various symbols on this device—which itself feels a little puppet-like—is a function of her innocent state and something that she can instinctively do: unconsciously communicating with another consciousness. She loses this ability when she Falls, and will have to relearn it, at precisely the kind of tedious blue-stocking establishment she had dismissed at the start of the trilogy. Lyra, of course, has not read ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, and would also not know Paul de Man’s observation that ‘anyone still

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willing to engage a bear in a fencing match after having read [it] ... should have his head examined.’26 Herr C. has been unable to defeat the bear: Not only was the bear able to parry all my blows like some world champion fencer, but all the feints I attempted—and this no fencer in the world could duplicate—went unnoticed by the bear. Eye to eye, as if he could see into my very soul, he stood there, his paw raised ready for combat, and whenever thrusts were not intended as strikes, he did not move.27

On the other hand, Herr C. has escaped with his life, unbelievable as that may seem, even to himself: ‘Do you believe this story?’28 he asks, as if the story itself might be feigned. The assertion is that the bear lacks consciousness and therefore has grace. Denys Dyer argues that ‘Without reflection, unconsciously, it does much better what the man is consciously striving to do’.29 Bianca Theisen is more sceptical than Dyer, noting how the narrative-within-narrative format might undercut the certainty of Heinrich von Kleist’s or his characters’ intentions: ‘What is presented as the bear’s grace, the innocent and infallible certainty with which he is able to distinguish between deception and non-deception in his opponent, is nothing but the blind-spot of the dancer’s self-observations’.30 Herr C. may be imposing his narrative upon the bear. It is this insistent assertion of being (self-)conscious or having (self-) knowledge that Pullman most obviously takes from this parable, but Kleist’s narrative also had an impact on the depiction of the panserbjørne or armoured bears, Pullman’s variant on polar bears.These bears are skilled in metallurgy, and it seems as if their manufactured armour, built with ore from meteorites, has become the equivalent for them of their dæmons or their souls. His bears are difficult to deceive, with the exception of the two most prominent examples in the trilogy, neither of whom is true to his bear nature. Iorek Byrnison had been drugged prior to a fight before a mating ritual and sent into exile for breaking a taboo. He was later plied with spirits by humans and had his armour stolen, being forced to work until liberated by Lyra. Iofur Raknison, the bear who usurped Byrnison’s right to sovereignty over the other bears, has started to ape human behaviour rather too closely and encourages his people to do the same. Raknison is deceived by Lyra’s assertion that she can get him a dæmon, his deepest desire, and this leads to her being given the name Silvertongue by Byrnison. Byrnison reappears in The Amber Spyglass, restoring the shattered subtle knife that broke when Will was not properly paying attention

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to its use. Millicent Lenz suggests that Byrnison’s ‘“conscience” seems purer than any human’s’,31 and that this is because he is recovering from his Fall(s) and is redeeming himself through his actions. Derrida’s ideas in The Beast & the Sovereign:Volume 1 also bear upon the political and personal dramas of the panserbjørne. He argues that the ruler or sovereign is the origin and embodiment of the law, but not necessarily inside or subject to the law, being at times outside or above the law—as is indeed is Pullman’s representation of the Authority.The opposition of inside/outside is unsettled—deconstructed—which would also unsettle the opposition law-abiding/outlaw32 (inside the law/outside the law). Derrida goes on to note that the beast is also outside the law. Playing on the identical sounds in French of ‘and’ and ‘is’, Derrida argues that the ostensibly opposite categories of the sovereign and the beast collapse into each other: The beast and [et] the sovereign, the beast is [est] the sovereign, that’s how our couple seems first to show up, a couple, a duo or even a duel, but also an alliance [...] the one becoming the other, being the other [...] the beast being the sovereign, the sovereign being the beast, the one and the other being each engaged, in truth changed or even exchanged [...] both share that very singular position of being outlaws, above or at a distance from the law, the beast ignorant of right and the sovereign having the right to suspend right, to place himself above the law that he is, that he makes, that he institutes, as to which he decides, sovereignly.33

Distinguishing humans from animals is as much a political as scientific act—a legacy of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace that constitute Sigmund Freud’s second blow. If the panserbjørne may manufacture dæmons or souls, then the special nature of humans as those who lose and regain grace may be undercut. Derrida notes the assumption that humans can choose to break the Law, but that the animal cannot. In Freudian terms, this would also involve disobeying the superego and yielding to the id. I have already associated the dæmon with the superego; humans (in Lyra’s world) have dæmons, but animals do not. Derrida also notes the assumption that the animal can feign (a bird can pretend to have a broken wing to lead predators away from the nest), but cannot feign feigning. ‘Honor and nobility [...] are precisely what the animal cannot do; an animal doesn’t give its word, and one doesn’t give one’s word to an animal [...] One doesn’t lie to an animal either.’34 The assumption is that the animal cannot respond, it can only react, like a machine—like the tethered fighting bear, it cannot be conscious. Except that Lyra both gives her word and lies to the conscious panserbjørne.

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At some point in Lyra’s world—presumably 33,000 years earlier— there has been a moment of change that connects to the first appearance of Dust. Dæmons are not the product of evolution. Humans, in Lyra’s world, are special, because they have dæmons—or dæmons are special, because they have humans. It is our anthropocentric view that sees it the first way round. In addition to the example of the panserbjørne, it would seem that the distinction between the human and the animal is more complex on this fictional planet than ours. This is where the mulefa become significant. Donna Haraway notes that ‘“The species” often means the human race, unless one is attuned to science fiction, where species abound.’35 The human ‘species’ is itself subdivided, problematically, into ‘races’, a term which in biology is often used to refer to a portion of a species that might be a separate or detachable species—as in the various races of, say, Yellow Wagtails. Any encounter with an alien species poses ethical questions and such labelling is always a hostile act. Invading nations tend to regard indigenous people as savage, uncultured and unworthy, assume that such inhabitants cannot respond or believe their response is not worthy of note. Haraway notes that in the nature/society and non-human/human binaries, Western culture elides ‘gods, machines, animals, monsters, creepy crawlies, women, servants and slaves, and noncitizens in general’36 together as being outside the law or outlaws (or werewolves). For the most part, those on the wrong side of the divide are there as resources to be exploited by (male) humans. The mulefa in The Amber Spyglass have prehensile trunks, four legs, a spineless skeleton and use seedpods for locomotion. They are in a symbiotic relation with the trees that provide the seeds and oil from the pods allows them to see Dust. This world is dying, because the Dust is leaking out of this universe. Claire Squires suggests that the mulefa are ‘a metaphor for humanity; they are sentient beings with language, history and culture, who have their own founding myth that occurred around thirty-three thousand years ago’.37 Their close relationship with their ecosystem is a utopian vision, and they represent an alternative course of evolution from that of the biped.They are also beings with grace and are to be regarded as equal to humans. Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the human/animal binary has its limits. In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006), Derrida writes of his embarrassment at realizing that he is naked in front of his cat and feels ashamed: it is ‘a lapsus, a fall, a failing, a fault, a symptom’,38 terms that seem reminiscent of the Fall in the Garden of Eden and the embarrassment of the naked Adam and Eve. Derrida suggests

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that animals cannot be naked, and suspects that they cannot have the primary narcissism of humans—the feigning bear would not become conscious by looking in a mirror. Donna Haraway argues that Derrida failed to engage with his cat properly in his embarrassment: ‘Derrida knew he was in the presence of someone, not of a machine reacting [...] he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning.’39 It was, in fact, a failure of empathy. The cat may have been conscious—indeed the cat may have an unconscious. Haraway came to prominence with her positing of a fourth blow, as noted in the introduction to this essay: ‘the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well’,40 which she explored in her ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (1985).41 However, in When Species Meet (2007) she examines an interaction of the second and third blow, discussing ‘companion species’. Noting the origin of the word ‘companion’ in ‘cum panis’, breaking (and sharing) bread, she argues that these are the animals who are messmates, who look at and look back at humans and who are part of our lives.42 For Haraway, the prime companion species is the dog, who touches her and who is touched in turn: touch ramifies and shapes accountability. Accountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions; these mundane, prosaic things are the result of having truck with each other. [...] Touch, regard, looking back, becoming with – all these make us responsible in unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape.43

Dæmons must, surely, be a companion species. Humans and their dæmons touch and have regard for each other. It is also taboo to touch another human’s dæmon. The panserbjørne might also be regarded as a companion species. But it is generally considered, in anthropocentric speciesism, that animals do not have a consciousness or conscience, and therefore, no ego/id division. The uncanny: marionettes and prostheses In Sigmund Freud’s account of the psychosexual development of the child—a journey we see Lyra and Will undertake through the course of the trilogy—the adult psyche is formed by the emergence of a tripartite structure of the id/ego/superego. Childhood fears and anxieties are repressed but will not disappear altogether. Freud

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labels experiences that lead to the return of the repressed anxiety as ‘unheimlich’ or ‘uncanny’: ‘an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes, which have been repressed, are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs that have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.’44 Among the many phenomena that are associated with the uncanny are corpses, crypts, curses, dolls, doubles, experiences of déjà vu, ghosts, graves, mirrors, secrets and vampires, all things which disrupt a neat division between opposing states of being. In Pullman’s trilogy, the panserbjørne, the dæmons, the alethiometer, the knife, even Will and Lyra themselves, all have their uncanny aspects. Will is a boy at the edge of puberty at the start of The Subtle Knife, with an absent (and then murdered) father and a close relationship to his mother, and is on the verge of sexual awakening, what William Blake would term experience.Will loses some of his fingers in gaining the knife and later breaks its blade. These are symbolic castrations or losses of power. In the asserting of his manhood—his will—Will will have to overcome any anxieties about the loss of the phallus or castration anxieties, and will have to dispose of the over-insistent knife. Margret Schaefer notes the psychoanalytic symbolism of thrusting and failing to thrust in Kleist’s narrative: ‘The portrait of a fencer suddenly incapable of “thrusting” is a thinly disguised expression of a fear of sexual impotence [... This all suggests] a sexualized hyper-awareness, a feeling of deadness in, and lack of control over, a body part which is not fully integrated with the self.’45 Will’s surname, Parry, of course recalls the parries of Herr C.’s bear. Lyra’s uncanniness might be read in the light of Derrida’s association of young girls, the marionette and the phallus; the marionette ‘makes you think of the phallus, even though it’s sometimes still a girl, and the taste, fascination, modes, and genres that cultivate the marionette or the marionette theatre would thus be participating in the cult of the phallus’.46 Derrida insists that the virgin girl is inhabited by phallic law and that ‘the phallus itself is originally a marionette’.47 This needs much more unpicking than is possible in the space here, but Derrida is drawing upon the notion of the phallus as symbolic of patriarchal power. The masculine/feminine binary appears deconstructed, although the feminine itself is largely a masculine construction, as is the notion of marionette as female. Derrida points to ‘the unheimlich, worrying, and undecidable figure of the marionette as life and death, life-death, life death, both the spontaneous and graceful autonomy of the living and the rigid automatism of machine and death, machine death’.48 Another

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uncanny aspect of the marionette is its ambiguous status as ‘prosthesis’, part of Derrida’s ongoing questioning of identity and unity. This turns upon the double meaning of ‘supplement’ as addition (as in a newspaper’s bonus Sunday supplement) or replacement (as in dietary supplements).49 The prosthesis is both a grafting on—‘Have you [Kleist has Herr C. ask] ever heard of those mechanical legs that English craftsmen manufacture for unfortunate people who have lost their own limbs?’50—and a replacement. It is both part of the people and an addition to them, just as the marionettes are both part of the puppeteers and additions and the dæmons are both part of humans and additions. The unity of identity is deconstructed. Conclusion: a Return of Grace? Jacques Derrida says that Heinrich von Kleist (and others) pose the questions: ‘Do marionettes have a soul, as people used to wonder about both women and beasts? Are they merely substitutes and mechanical prostheses? [...] Or can they, on the contrary, lay claim to that grace that grants life or life grants?’51 Lyra’s alethiometer, her golden compass, is also a prosthesis, that she loses control of when she Falls into consciousness and which she can only return to by education. The innate talent and resourcefulness of Lyra that is so appealing to readers—although a staple of children’s fiction, fairy tales, and indeed fiction in general—is insufficient and needs to be supplemented by (added to? replaced by?) book learning and hard work that seems inimical to fantasy.52 The redemption and grace that Lyra may regain in the long term is in part inspired by Kleist’s peculiar story. For all the allegations of atheism against Pullman, it is hard to see how he can maintain a concept of grace without a religious framework of sin. The first Fall remains the one in the Garden of Eden, albeit in Pullman’s rewritten version of Genesis 3; the second Fall should try to evade the misogyny that has attached itself to the narrative of Eve’s disobedience. Lyra should not be punished for her emergent sexuality, however there is surely the sense that she is, as she and Will are sent into exile in different universes. Grace may, in time, return ‘in that human bodily structure that has no consciousness at all—or has infinite consciousness—that is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God’.53 Kleist’s suggestion that grace is to be found in zero or infinite consciousness is a very postmodern conception at the height of modernity. It is hardly surprising that Derrida latched onto this narrative in his exploration of the Law, the behaviour of Sovereigns

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and the nature of the animal. He notes that Kleist argues ‘the return of grace is possible just where it appears to be impossible, when consciousness has passed through an infinity and appears in its purest form in an anatomy without consciousness [...] when there is an allusion to cripples dancing with mechanical prosthetic legs made for them by artists, specifically English artists.’54 Whilst it is tempting to recall that Pullman is an English artist, it is necessary to note that the return of grace is ‘possible’ rather than certain. Naomi Wood argues that ‘The way we regain paradise is to embrace our real world’55—in other words, to leave the fantastic behind. The fantastic, too, is an uncanny prosthesis, a replacement for and an extension of the real. After various blows to the naïve self-love of humanity, we have to look outside ourselves and not focus on our own needs or dreams. Lyra will have to work to produce the Republic of Heaven, but there are no guarantees that she will succeed or return to grace. Notes 1. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1991): 326. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Heinrich von Kleist, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, TDR: The Drama Review, 16 (1972): 22–6. 5. Ibid.: 24. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid.: 26. 8. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007): 12. 9. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 10. Ibid. 11. Fredric Jameson, ‘Foreword’, in Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge: vii–xxv. 12. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 13. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image–Music–Text (London: Fontana, 1977): 142–8. 14. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (London: Athlone, 1981); Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign:Vol. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

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15. For a useful critique of this see Damien Broderick, The Architecture of Babel (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994). 16. John Milton, Paradise Lost (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1989): 5. 17. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 18. Denys Dyer, The Stories of Kleist: A Critical Study (London: Duckworth, 1977): 7. 19. Heinrich von Kleist, ‘Letter to Wilhelmine Von Zenge’, in David Constantine (ed.), Selected Writings (London: Dent, 1997): 421–2 (421). 20. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984): 266. 21. Ibid.: 267. 22. Erich Heller, ‘The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature’, Critical Inquiry, 4 (1978): 417–32 (422). 23. Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign: 188. 24. Kleist, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’: 23. 25. Kleist, ‘On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking’, in David Constantine (ed.), Selected Writings (London: Dent, 1997): 405–9 (408). 26. de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism: 272. 27. Kleist, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’: 26. 28. Ibid. 29. Dyer, The Stories of Kleist: 188. 30. Bianca Theisen, ‘Dancing with Words: Kleist’s “Marionette Theatre”’, MLN 121 (2006): 522–9 (529). 31. Millicent Lenz, ‘Philip Pullman’, in Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz (eds.), Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (London and New York: Continuum, 2001): 122–69 (146). 32. In one example of his serious play, Derrida notes that in his autobiography, Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts that he was a ‘real werewolf ’, loup-garou in the original French, but translated into English as ‘outlaw’ (The Beast & the Sovereign: 11, 63, 64). 33. Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign: 32. 34. Ibid.: 124. 35. Haraway, When Species Meet: 18. 36. Ibid.: 10. 37. Claire Squires, Philip Pullman: Master Storyteller (New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006): 69. 38. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008): 4. 39. Haraway, When Species Meet: 19. 40. Ibid.: 12. 41. Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs – Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 80 (1985): 65–107.

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42. Haraway, When Species Meet: 32. 43. Ibid.: 36. 44. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Albert Dickson (ed.) Art and Literature; Jensen’s “Gradiva”, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1985): 335–76 (372). 45. Margret Schaefer,‘Kleist’s “About the Puppet Theater” and the Narcissism of the Artist’, American Imago, 32 (1975): 365–88, cited in Heller, ‘The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater’. 46. Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign: Volume 1: 221. 47. Ibid.: 222. 48. Ibid.: 256. 49. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 50. Kleist, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’: 23. 51. Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign: 187. 52. Andrew M. Butler, ‘The Republic of Heaven: The Betrayal of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy’, in Nickianne Moody and Clare Horrocks (eds.), Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Debates for the Twenty First Century (Liverpool: ARPF/Liverpool JMU, 2005): 285–98. 53. Kleist, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’: 26. 54. Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign: 189. 55. Naomi Wood, ‘Paradise Lost and Found: Obedience, Disobedience, and Storytelling in C. S. Lewis and Philip Pullman’, Children’s Literature in Education, 32 (2001): 237–59 (256).

6 ‘Without Contraries is No Progression’1 Romantic Constructions of Childhood and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Keith O’Sullivan Philip Pullman’s children’s fantasy His Dark Materials is a work influenced by Romanticism.2 The thematic concern of Pullman’s work with building not a kingdom but a secular humanist republic of heaven where all people are free and equal citizens, and its philosophical concern with the dialectic between innocence and experience, owe much to values and norms held and developed by Romantic writers. Its republican validation of personal liberty, egalitarianism and partnership questions the centrality of Christian mythology, theology and ecclesiasticism in Western culture, as well as oppressive nostalgias for childhood innocence that refuse to say anything positive about growing up.3 The influence of Romanticism on Pullman is evident in the fact that of the 31 chapter epigraphs in The Amber Spyglass, approximately two-thirds (19) are from the works of Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and John Keats. However, according to Pullman, in a section entitled ‘Acknowledgements’ at the end of The Amber Spyglass, his greatest indebtedness is to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)—the Romantics’ prime precursor poem—the works of William Blake, particularly Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789–1794) and Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ (1810).4 This chapter examines the philosophical concern of His Dark Materials with the dialectic between innocence and experience, in relation to the transition that Pullman’s protagonists, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, make from childhood to adulthood. Its Blakean 113

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depiction of its protagonists’ maturation places His Dark Materials in a Romantic tradition that presents childhood as continuous with rather than distinct from adulthood. It is a depiction that runs antithetical to a more culturally reified tradition—which has come to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as the creation of William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and others—where writers developed a life-defining vocational interest in invoking childhood as a ‘fixed’, permanent state of being, separate from adulthood.5 Although, as Judith Plotz shows, poems such as ‘Lucy Gray’ (1798) and ‘Ruth: Or The Influences of Nature’ (1800) destabilize the pervasive clichés of childhood innocence so often associated with his poetry, Wordsworth’s construction of childhood is readily identifiable in much writing and illustration, through children’s literature of the Golden Age to the present day.6 While the central theme of Songs of Innocence and of Experience is that of the child who is lost and found, the predominant archetypal pattern is the dialectic between innocence and experience. The songs present experience as the natural replacement for innocence, rather than as the agent of its inevitable corruption. However, they offer not only a series of evolving understandings of the two contrary states of the human soul but also an ontological synthesis of childhood and adulthood, which suggests the importance of both Edenic innocence and worldly experience if we are to realize our full potential as human beings. Although its speaker is adult, the ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Innocence embodies the integration of contraries the collection strains toward, its viewpoint being informed by a visionary innocence more commonly associated with childhood. To see possibilities in a fallen world is also the unspoken hope, the higher innocence, of the ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Experience. Despite the fact that Experience contrasts formally with Innocence, it still challenges readers to recapture the imaginative freedom of childhood in adult experience and, in so doing, transform both ontological states.7 Like Songs of Innocence and of Experience, His Dark Materials reworks traditional Judeo-Christian patterns of thought—Fall, redemption, and the restoration of paradise8—in a secular context in order to suggest that experience is a natural replacement for innocence rather than an agent of its inevitable corruption. His Dark Materials describes how its two child protagonists, the new Adam and Eve, repeat the original decision of their mythological parents to seek full understanding and consciousness by eating from the Tree of Knowledge and, through their own ‘symbolic re-enactment of this original act of defiance’, defeat a Church establishment intent on condemning their

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determined transition from a state of innocence to one of experience as a sinful rebellion.9 Sex and sexuality While Lyra’s developing sexual awareness in particular, especially in terms of gender identification, coincides with the emergence of a more sophisticated moral sensibility, it is sexual maturation itself— as in a great deal of children’s literature—that marks the transition between ontological states in His Dark Materials.10 By imbuing his child protagonists, and all budding adolescents in fact, with libidos compelling enough to attract Dust (self-conscious matter), Pullman, like Blake in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) or in ‘The Little Girl Lost’, ‘The Little Girl Found’, ‘Nurse’s Song’ and ‘The Garden of Love’ from Songs of Innocence and Experience, places sexual energy at the centre of the quest for knowledge, experience and adulthood.11 Sexual maturity is reified in His Dark Materials through the construct of the dæmon (an animal familiar, the living embodiment of its human counterpart’s soul or personality, with the capability of shape-shifting). From the warning that Lyra’s mother, Mrs Coulter, gives her about the onset of puberty in Northern Lights (NL, p. 285), it is apparent that dæmons are inextricably linked to sexual desire. In The Amber Spyglass (AS, p. 482) it is clear that touching another person’s dæmon is taboo precisely because it constitutes a sexual act. However, in a change that symbolizes movement from childhood innocence to adulthood experience, dæmons lose their ability to shape-shift and settle into one form, which they maintain for life, once their human counterparts gain sexual knowledge. In the chapter titled ‘The Dunes’ in The Amber Spyglass (AS, p. 509–28) Lyra and Will consummate their relationship by touching each other’s dæmon. Although there is some ambiguity regarding the exact nature of the sexual act they engage in, their knowledge of what they are doing, along with the physicality of the act itself and the analogy made to the biblical myth of the Fall in the fruit that Lyra puts to Will’s lips, suggest that it is carnal knowledge that marks their movement from childhood innocence to adult experience. Lyra and Will’s burgeoning sexualities reflect the culmination of Pullman’s objective for his child protagonists to become adult. The fact that he sees the transition from ‘asexual subject to […] sexual one’12 as a positive one is evident in his criticism of C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle. He believes that salvation is denied to Susan, the fourth of the group of siblings who passes into Narnia, because of her

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sexuality. What Pullman finds detestable is not simply the implication in Lewis’s text that individuals must be innocent, or childlike, to enter the Kingdom of God but rather the reason given for Susan’s damnation:13 that she is interested in ‘nylons and lipstick and invitations’ and, therefore, ‘a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up’.14 The fact that one of the corruptions of the biblical myth of the Fall in Northern Lights stresses the sexual immaturity of the prelapsarian Adam and Eve—‘they were naked in the garden, they were like children’ (NL, p. 371)—helps to contextualize Lyra and Will’s acquisition of sexual knowledge not only as a ‘medium for the transcendence of inherited Christian pathology, and the moral prejudices that accompany it’15 but also as the embodiment of Blake’s narrative address in Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Children of the future Age Reading this indignant page, Know that in a former time Love, sweet love, was thought a crime! (‘A Little Girl Lost’, 1–4)16

While the construct of the dæmon is one of the most popularly lauded aspects of His Dark Materials, the portrayal of Lyra and Will’s sexual awakening is problematic in a number of ways. Not only can it be claimed that His Dark Materials develops sexuality in characters that are ‘too childlike for it to be convincing’17 but it can also be argued that it manoeuvres its child protagonists towards the reality of adult sexuality to such an extent that it prevents them from ‘resisting the imposition of […] adult values’.18 In fact, the explicit connection between the settling of Lyra and Will’s dæmons and their newfound adult consciousness conflates knowledge and experience with sexuality to such an extent that it seems to be the only way that children can achieve adulthood. Furthermore, although the settling of dæmons just as children are asserting their independence sees what Pullman described on The South Bank Show as the plasticity of childhood giving way to a more fixed adulthood, it also forces children into a world of compromise. In essence, it entails ‘learning to live with a diminishing of the protean possibilities inherent in the child’.19 Childhood play and children’s agency His Dark Materials is a children’s text that narrates the desirability of ending childhood innocence. However, although it is biased towards what Pullman described on The South Bank Show as the greater

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certainty, strength, authority and power that adults have, His Dark Materials also shows adulthood to be limited and not so changeable, especially when compared to what he also described as the infinite potentiality and plasticity of children. Therefore, while adult experience is presented as a natural replacement for childhood innocence, value is still ascribed to childhood, children and, by extension, innocence. In presenting play, for example, as the medium through which power is negotiated, His Dark Materials validates not only children’s culture but also the ontological importance of childhood in preparing children for the hegemonic and hierarchal world of adulthood. Northern Lights acknowledges the politics of childhood play in describing children’s social relations as a ‘rich, seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties’ (NL, p. 36). While they arguably replicate observed adult behaviour, these children symbolically subvert the power adults have over their lives in creating their own hierarchies and values.20 As well as acknowledging the politics of childhood, His Dark Materials also extols the individual and collective agency of children. Individual agency is evident even in the relative success Will achieves in caring for his invalid mother before he sets outs to find his missing father. Although he is a child,Will bears the responsibilities of an adult, acting as parent, provider and protector to his fragile and emotionally disturbed mother. The Subtle Knife describes how, during the times his mother is lucid, Will is keen to learn ‘how to shop and cook, […] how to remain unnoticed at school, how not to attract attention’ (SK, p. 11). His understanding of the gravity of the situation he and his mother find themselves in challenges the assumption that he is a passive subject adult authority or lacking in metacognition: the text states that ‘what Will himself feared more than anything was that the authorities would find out about her, and take her away, and put him in a home among strangers. Any difficulty was better than that’ (SK, p. 11). With regard to individual agency, perhaps the most significant aspect of Pullman’s treatment of the dialectic between childhood experience and adult experience is the fact that, while are guided and supported by adult figures on their journeys, the key events of His Dark Materials, such as the annihilation of the Authority (a tyrant angel, masquerading as God), are experienced by alone. Furthermore, the responsibility of bearing the instruments that facilitate their quest for knowledge—the alethiometer (a truth-telling instrument of 36 multivalent symbols) and Æsahættr (the knife with the ability to cut through the fabric of the

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Universe)—is also Lyra and Will’s alone; no adult shares this burden, though several request that the children use these instruments for adult purposes. The fact that Will is physically maimed, losing two of his fingers while using Æsahættr, forcefully emphasizes that the consequences of his actions are his to bear alone. The collective agency of children is portrayed as early as the third chapter of Northern Lights with the disappearance of the gyptian child Billy Costa. Despite the fact that they are aware of the dangers involved in mounting a search for Billy, who is suspected of being abducted by a group of ‘Gobblers’ (child snatchers), Lyra and a group of college and gyptian children work together, constructively and symbolically, in an attempt to resolve the situation (NL, p. 58). While ‘half of them didn’t know what they were looking for, and thought it was just a lark’, the ‘real fear and apprehension’ felt by Lyra and the other half of the children imply that they are aware of the consequences of their actions, and their refusal to give in to this fear and accept the passive role of potential victims is a powerful validation of the agency of children (NL, p. 58).21 Negotiating relations The fact that adult figures provide Lyra and Will with assistance as they move from childhood innocence to adult experience is evident in all three volumes of His Dark Materials. In Northern Lights, Lyra’s quest to find and save her childhood friend Roger Parslow is aided by Iorek Byrnison (an armoured bear), who becomes her protector; in The Subtle Knife, the angels Balthamos and Baruch offer to guide Will to Lord Asriel (a revolutionary, and Lyra’s father) so that Æsahættr can be used to wage war on the Authority; while in The Amber Spyglass Lyra and Will are encouraged to act on their sexual feelings for one another by Dr Mary Malone (an ex-nun and scientist). As they journey away from their initial childhood homes, however, Lyra and Will’s relationships with adults become more sophisticated and complicated. In the few days, for example, that Lyra spends in London with her tutor-cum-chaperone, Mrs Coulter (who is also her mother, although Lyra is unaware of the fact at this point), she does not seem to be excluded, as she was previously by the Scholars at Jordan College, from sharing in adult life: ‘Lyra went everywhere with Mrs Coulter […] In the morning there might be a meeting of geographers at the Royal Arctic Institute, and Lyra would sit by and listen; and then Mrs Coulter might meet a politician or a cleric for lunch in a smart restaurant’ (NL, p. 82). Nevertheless, while Mrs Coulter’s

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acceptance of Lyra seems to suggest parity between adult and child, there is also evidence to indicate that it reflects, conversely, a process of socialization.The fact that Lyra is not only encouraged to sit and listen to adult conversation but also included in the graceful, delicate talk of older women betrays a desire on Mrs Coulter’s part to inculcate her daughter with the values and norms required to function successfully in adult London society: ‘Lyra would be dressed up prettily for these occasions, and the ladies would pamper her and include her in their graceful delicate talk, which was all about people: this artist, or that politician, or those lovers’ (NL, p. 82). Over the course of the three volumes, Lyra and Will are depicted increasingly moving beyond the subordinate socio-cultural positions they initially inhabit as children. Although there are hierarchical elements—the products of ‘biological imperatives’22 rather than processes of socialization—to Lyra’s relationship with the gyptians to whom she flees after leaving Mrs Coulter, her status as a child does not subordinate her position in gyptian society to the extent it did in London: ‘Helping Mrs Coulter had been all very well, but Pantalaimon (Lyra’s dæmon) was right: she wasn’t really doing any work there, she was just a pretty pet. On the gyptian boat, there was real work to do’ (NL, p. 111). Will, too, is quick to establish his agency, even in situations where the adult–child power balance seems to be heavily weighed against him. His initial meeting with Iorek Byrnison, for example, emphasizes the extent to which he refuses to be treated as a passive child, as he challenges the armoured-bear king to combat in order to secure passage into Central Asia in search of Lyra. In doing so, he not only silences the mocking adult crowd that derides his challenge but also outfaces Iorek Byrnison. The increasing ability of Lyra and Will to negotiate the shifting currents of power in their relationships with adults develops parallel to their acquisition of knowledge to such an extent that, by the end of The Amber Spyglass, the two most significant adult–child relationships are characterized by partnership—those between Will and Mary Malone, and Lyra and Iorek Byrnison. Given the significance of dæmons in Lyra’s world, the fact that Iorek refers to her as his ‘little dæmon’ (NL, p. 438) after she helps him reclaim his kingdom from the usurper Iofur Raknison points to the mutually dependent nature of their relationship. Not only do these genuine and dialogical adult–child relationships replace the tenuous and iniquitous ones experienced by Lyra and Will earlier, but they also democratize the power between adults and children, showing that ‘adults and children are human, and thus equally flawed. Both have the ability to make

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mistakes and to solve them; therefore, they need each other, and the basis of their relationship should be mutual respect’.23 Missed opportunities? Despite its emphasis on the importance of acquiring knowledge and experience, however, it has been argued by Kristine Moruzi that His Dark Materials ends up both reflecting the reality of the socialization of children and creating that reality: that Pullman’s textually constructed childhood, ultimately and perhaps unintentionally, reinforces adult expectations of appropriate child behaviour, reflects tacit adult ideas about children, and suggests children’s difference from and inferiority to adults.24 In effect, although Lyra and Will become more independent they become so within ‘carefully defined adult parameters—parameters that allow his adult readers to remain secure in their assumed superior positions in the social hierarchy’.25 Moruzi contends that Lyra and Will’s transition from childhood to adulthood in Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife is essentially undermined in The Amber Spyglass when they are reinstated in the roles of dependent children in the final chapters. Lyra and Will’s return to their home worlds sees them, apparently, ensconced in familial environments and under the auspices of mentoring adults: Lyra’s return to her Oxford involves the Master of Jordan College providing funding for her to attend a girl’s school under the auspices of Dame Hannah Relf, a female scholar; while Will’s return to his Oxford entails Mary Malone volunteering to help him with his mother, social services and housing. Their decisions as young adults, therefore, are fundamentally ‘inconsequential’, because ‘neither of them is given alternatives from which to choose’ at the end of His Dark Materials.26 Although she acknowledges that they demonstrably move beyond childhood, Moruzi believes that The Amber Spyglass firmly re-establishes Lyra and Will’s subordinate roles by suggesting that they ‘are, and should be, dependent on […] adults’: that ‘it is acceptable to venture forth to save the world, but afterwards you must return home to the appropriate position in the social hierarchy’—replicating the sort of oppressive nostalgia for childhood that one might associate with Wordsworthian constructions of childhood.27 Dialectical relations While it might have been more radical, and Miltonic, if Lyra and Will had been depicted striking out alone, the fact that they not does not

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necessarily imply that they simply revert to their status as children at the end of His Dark Materials. It is true that Lyra and Will return home to adult environments, and that they have, initially, limited choice about what to do once they return; nevertheless, they return as young adults rather than children. At the end of The Amber Spyglass, the fact that Will not only refers to Dr Mary Malone as ‘a friend’ but also tells Lyra that, whatever he does in the future, ‘he will choose it, no one else’ emphasizes that he does not consider Malone’s support as delimiting or emblematic of social hierarchy (AS, pp. 541, 525). In fact, Malone tells the witch Serafina Pekkala that she ‘need[s] him’ (AS, p. 534) as much as he needs her, because he is the only person she can talk to about all that has happened. For Lyra, too, her return to Jordan College is marked by a clear change in status. Although once barred from the Scholars’ Retiring Room and chased away from the fruit trees in the Garden—a clear and significant reference to the biblical myth of the Fall as told in the Book of Genesis—she is now ‘given her own key to the garden door, so she […can] come and go as she please[s]’ (AS, p. 545). In terms of Lyra’s new adult status, it is also significant that there is no reconciliation between Lyra and her parents in The Amber Spyglass (they both die achieving a kind of redemption in sacrificing their lives for Lyra in a battle with Metatron, the Authority’s Regent).The fact that she does not return to a parental fold is consistent with her efforts to realize her agency over the course of the three volumes. While she might have little choice about attending Hannah Relf ’s boarding school for girls in the, His Dark Materials ends with Lyra dedicating herself to the very adult imperative of building a republic of heaven in the here-and-now real world. In a similar manner to the way in which adult–child interaction comes to offer a model of relations based on shifting perceptions and interdependence, the dialectic between states of innocence and experience in His Dark Materials is not biased toward experience to the extent that Pullman suggested on The South Bank Show, when he argued that innocence isn’t wise, innocence can’t be wise, and if we are to become wise we have to leave our innocence behind. The value attributed to innocence by His Dark Materials is evident in both its treatment of Lyra’s innate ability to read the alethiometer as a child and the subsequent loss of this instinctual skill as she moves toward adulthood. As a child, Lyra read the alethiometer ‘like climbing down a ladder at night’ (NL, p. 152); she did not have to think about it. In describing her initial ability to ‘move up and down the symbol-meanings and step from one to another and make all the connections’, Lyra refers

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to herself as having been ‘like a monkey in the trees’ (AS, p. 543) an analogy that emphasizes both the naturalness of her reading of the alethiometer and also, the idea that it was a more primitive stage in her life—if it were to be given a Darwinian inflection. However, after her fall into sexual knowledge, she is disappointed and confused to realize that she can no longer read the alethiometer without having to think about it. Fallen into experience, Lyra comes to realize that she must learn to reread the alethiometer by cross-referencing the instrument’s multivalent symbols with ‘the books […] in Bodley’s Library’, where ‘the scholarship to study them is alive and well’ (AS, p. 543). More than anything else, Lyra’s facility with the alethiometer affirms the similarity between the visions of innocence upheld by His Dark Materials and Songs of Innocence and of Experience—in fact, in The Subtle Knife it is even stated that ‘without the alethiometer’, Lyra was ‘just a little girl, lost’ (SK, p. 167). In The Amber Spyglass, Fra Pavel explains that ‘the alethiometer does not forecast; it says, “If certain things come about, then the consequences will be”—and so on’ (AS, p. 71). Pavel’s explanation of the workings of the alethiometer links the instrument to moral decision making. As Lyra begins to move into adulthood, her innocent reading of the alethiometer becomes clouded by her experience: her greater knowledge of the world means that the symbols on the alethiometer start to connote rather than denote meanings. Lyra’s desire to relearn ‘consciously what […she] could once do by intuition’ (AS, p. 545) involves a movement from innocence through experience to higher innocence—or the reclamation of the ‘visionary confidence of the child of innocence’28 in the light of knowledge and experience. While she used to think that ‘the serpent was cunning, like a spy ought to be, the crucible could mean knowledge, what you kind of distil, and the beehive was hard work, like bees are always working hard’ (NL, p. 145), by the end of His Dark Materials it is stated that ‘she just didn’t know what the symbols meant’ anymore (AS, p. 518). To be successful, and read the alethiometer in light of the multiplicity of meanings that is her new adult perspective on the world, Lyra must come to an integration of contraries by marrying the visionary innocence of childhood with the knowledge and experience of adulthood. As the angel Xaphania tells Lyra after she loses her ability to read the alethiometer: [In the past] you read it by grace […] and you can regain it by work. […] Your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained

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like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely and, furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you. (AS, p. 520)

While also a trope synonymous with the English Protestant imagination, this assertion of grace, ‘with its religious overtones’, lends a strong ‘Romantic aura to the understanding of innocence’ that underpins the philosophical concern of His Dark Materials.29 In fact, it is strikingly redolent of the philosophical connotations of grace found in ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, where von Kleist suggests that grace is the ability to act naturally, innocent of the knowledge that experience brings. However, it is also suggested in Northern Lights (NL, p. 127), and explicitly stated in The Subtle Knife (SK, p. 92), that learned grace involves ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’, thereby specifically linking Lyra’s reading of the alethiometer and Will’s use of Æsahættr with Keatsian Negative Capability.30 Integrating contraries That the dialectic between childhood innocence and adult experience in His Dark Materials reflects a series of shifting perceptions is evident in the conversations Lyra has with Dame Hannah Relf and Pantalaimon at the end of The Amber Spyglass. The fact that she tells Dame that the thing she wishes for, ‘almost – almost more than anything else’, is that she had not ‘lost the way of reading the alethiometer’ suggests that, at some level, she misses the innocence of childhood (AS, p. 542). However, the emphasis she places on the word ‘almost’ implies that she has also come to value worldly experience. While previously inconceivable to her as the child who had relished her dæmon’s shape shifting, her burgeoning preference for adult knowledge is apparent, significantly, in her delight at the final form Pantalaimon assumes: ‘Pan,’ Lyra said as he flowed up on to her lap, ‘you’re not going to change a lot any more, are you?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘you remember when we were younger and I didn’t want you to stop changing at all … Well, I wouldn’t mind so much now.’ (AS, p. 527)

Even though the ‘biological imperative’31 of adult–child relationships still stands at the end of The Amber Spyglass, His Dark Materials portrays

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children in a positive and empowering manner by recognizing the complexity of children’s social relations, achievements and agency. Nonetheless, the series of experiences that Pullman’s protagonists go through encourages Lyra and Will to experience sex and sexuality as natural, moral decision making as a corollary of the acquisition of knowledge, and adulthood as an empowered ontological state. While His Dark Materials moves towards a more ‘fixed’ adulthood, the relationship between states of innocence and experience, childhood and adulthood, remains dialectical to the very end. Notes 1. From ‘Introduction’, R. B. Kennedy (ed.) Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience and Other Works (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1988): 31. 2. His Dark Materials comprises Northern Lights [1995] (London: Scholastic, 1998), The Subtle Knife [1997] (London: Scholastic, 2001) and The Amber Spyglass [2000] (London: Scholastic, 2001). 3. For the appeal of republicanism for Pullman see ‘“Hopeless but not Serious”: The Gospel according to Philip Pullman’. Interview by Keith O’Sullivan. Inis, the Magazine of Children’s Books Ireland, 34 (2010): 8–10 (10). 4. John Milton, Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For Milton’s influence on the Romantics see Peter J. Kitson, ‘Milton: The Romantics and After’, in T. N. Corns (ed.), A Companion to Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005): 463–80; ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ (I. Parry Trans.), (http://www.southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm). 5. See Judith A. Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001): xiii. 6. Ibid.: 4. 7. While Paul Youngquist contends that it is only ‘sentimental’ readings of Blake’s poetry that are inclined to resolve the tension between innocence and experience into ‘a third and higher state’, Songs of Innocence and of Experience is, in its totality, a striking symbol of Blakean ‘higher innocence’—as are other of Blake’s creations, such as Beulah, the earthly paradise of Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (composed 1804–20). See Paul Youngquist, Madness & Blake’s Myth (Pennsylvania: Penn State University, 1986): 57; see M. D. Paley (ed.), Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Great Albion (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998). 8. For Romantic writers’ re-interpretation of Judeo-Christian patterns of thought see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971).

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9. Nicholas Tucker, Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman (Cambridge: Wizard, 2003): 90. 10. For sexual maturation as a marker for the transition from innocence to experience in children’s literature see Rex Stainton Rogers and Wendy Stainton Rogers, Stories of Childhood: Shifting Agendas of Child Concern (London: Simon & Schuster, 1992). 11. Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience and Other Works: 78–90, 34–5, 36–7, 38, 43. 12. Rex Stainton Rogers and Wendy Stainton Rogers, Stories of Childhood: 196. 13. See Philip Pullman, ‘A dark agenda?’, Interviewer S. Roberts (2002), (http://www.surefish.co.uk/culture/features/pullman_interview.htm); an alternative reading of C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle [1956] (London: Collins, 1997) might suggest that it is an adult Susan who excludes herself from Narnia by dismissing her experiences as childish fantasy. 14. Lewis, The Last Battle: 128. 15. Robert A. Davis, ‘Dust, Dæmons and Deicide: Philip Pullman’s Theologies of Childhood’, in Clare Bradford and Valerie Coghlan (eds.), Expectation and Experiences: Children, Childhood & Children’s Literature (Staffordshire: Pied Piper Publishing, 2007): 122–34. 16. Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience and Other Works: 48–9 (48). 17. Polly Shulman, ‘More dark materials’. Salon, (2000), (http://www.salon. com/2000/10/18/pullman/). 18. Kristine Moruzi, ‘Missed Opportunities: The Subordination of Children in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, Children’s Literature in Education, 36.1 (2005): 55–68 (63). 19. Millicent Lenz, ‘Philip Pullman’, in Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz (eds.), Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (London: Continnum, 2001): 122–69 (140). 20. For the significance of children’s play in His Dark Materials see Natasha Giardina, ‘Kids in the Kitchen?’, in Glen Yeffeth (ed.), Navigating ‘The Golden Compass’: Religion, Science and Dæmonology in ‘His Dark Materials’ (Dallas, Texas: Benbella Books, 2005): 139–50 (143–4). 21. For the collective agency of children in His Dark Materials see Giardina, ‘Kids in the Kitchen’: 144. 22. Ibid.: 148. 23. Ibid. 24. Moruzi, ‘Missed Opportunities’: 55–68. 25. Ibid.: 65. 26. Ibid.: 59. 27. Ibid.: 67, 67. 28. Susan Matthews, ‘Rouzing the Faculties to Act: Pullman’s Blake for Children’, in Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott (eds.), ‘His Dark Materials’ Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press): 125–34 (131).

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29. Carole Scott, ‘Pullman’s Enigmatic Ontology: Revamping Old Traditions in His Dark Materials’, in Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott (eds.): 95–105 (104). 30. John Keats, Selected Letters, R. Gittings (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 41–2. 31. Giardina, ‘Kids in the Kitchen’: 148.

7 Representations of Gender in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy Tommy Halsdorf Introduction The subtitle of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience reads, ‘Shewing the two Contrary States of the Human Soul’. The general title plate displays Adam and Eve just after they have been cast out of the Garden of Eden, their postlapsarian state being illustrated by the vine leaves covering their hips and genitalia. Adam is crouching over Eve, trying to protect himself from the wrath of God with his arms over his head. Eve is prostrate beneath him. Their respective positions and postures reveal their status: Eve is fallen further, Adam is closer to God. More significantly, Adam’s upright body dominates that of Eve, which lies face down on the ground in a position of submission and humility, begging for protection, even expressing adoration. This empowerment of the male while positioning the female as inferior and dependent is characteristic of the dualistic Christian worldview that Philip Pullman contests in His Dark Materials. Pullman, like Blake, advocates a more holistic vision. The Songs are, of course, primarily about state of mind and human consciousness; however, their principle of interdependent contrasts is applicable to the question of gender. Blake saw these ‘Contrary States’ as opposite sides of the same coin, symbiotic and complementary rather than negating each other. He went on to state in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that ‘Without Contraries is no progression’,1 as he ‘sought to transform the energies generated by conflict into creative energies, moving towards mutual acceptance, reconciliation, harmony2 I shall argue that Pullman’s representation of gender in His Dark Materials follows a similar pattern, both in constructing the gendered self and in its treatment of gender duality. The trilogy advances equality and mutual respect by celebrating the different 127

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genders in their own right, and reconciles/unites the male and female aspects of each individual. My analysis will start by focusing upon the gender representations of the two central human characters in the story, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, but will also include Lord Asriel, Mrs Coulter and a number of other individuals, and groups such as the gyptians and witches. I will investigate their gender portrayals and the role of social conditioning in the novels, as well as the purpose of the dæmons and what these reveal about gender duality and about potential difference within the self, and how far Pullman’s narrative voice constructs or deconstructs notions of gender identity and gender boundaries. I shall argue that despite a widespread view of Pullman as an author challenging stereotypes, in the area of gender construction he is not exclusively progressive in outlook but maintains a number of conservative elements in the trilogy. Furthermore, I will suggest that although gender (and sexuality) form a vital part of a character’s identity in His Dark Materials, there is a sense of another, more general and overarching form of identity, transcending gender differences or rather forming a harmonic symbiosis or fusion. This ‘Über-gender’, represented by Dust, can be seen as Pullman’s idealistic culmination of Blake’s progression of states, and rises above the gender conflicts within the individual and between male and female. Lyra and Will: masculinity and femininity Modern female roles in children’s literature often challenge the stereotypes that have commonly burdened female characters in the past, rendered vulnerable by both their youth and their gender. Beauty has ceased to equate to virtue, and women characters have moved beyond passivity and the domestic sphere. No longer merely fairy-tale types such as the princess, the evil stepmother, or the witch, they can feature in a wide array of complex roles. Their fate depends on their own actions, not whether they can be saved by a male protagonist.3 At first glance, Pullman’s Lyra seems the archetypal empowered modern female hero, inverting the traditional fairytale scheme of prince saving princess in what Andrew Butler calls the ‘resexing of the hero’.4 Brazen and courageous, she sets out on a quest, traditionally a male domain, to save her male friend Roger and to find her father. She is strong-willed, fiercely independent, and imbued with a thirst for adventure, although at the beginning of Northern Lights this usually translates into insolence towards the scholars of Jordan College

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and a tendency to disregard rules and make mischief. Described as a ‘coarse and greedy little savage’ (NL, p. 37),5 she disobeys inter alia by getting into fights, stealing from the market, missing her lessons and exploring off-limit areas of Jordan such as the Retiring Room, a trespass that sets the main events of the story in motion. Despite being a girl she is a leader among the children: her best friend Roger follows her devotedly, and it is ‘Lyra’s raiders’ (NL, p. 37) that vandalize the gyptians’ canal-boat. From being a tomboy, her innate sense of initiative develops into true deeds of valour. She repeatedly masters her fear in dangerous situations to perform heroic acts. For example, she wins Iorek Byrnison, the exiled king of the mighty armoured bears, for her cause, and regains the panserbjørn’s throne for him by tricking the usurper Iofur Raknison. She initiates and organizes the escape from Bolvangar, commanding the children who ‘heard her and followed’ (NL, p. 289), and in an episode reminiscent of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell leads the ghosts of the dead from their underworld prison. Her exceptional ability to acquire allies, not only the bears but the aëronaut Lee Scoresby, the witches, the gyptians, the Gallivespians and even the captive ghosts, testifies to her diplomatic powers but also to an aura of strength, leadership and authority uncommon for a little girl, as these are traditionally masculine qualities. In a further reversal of gender norms, Lyra’s friend Will Parry is initially located in the domestic sphere. He has had to care for his mentally ill mother and run the household from a young age, and it is he who cooks for Lyra when they first meet. However, it must be pointed out that Lyra is no ordinary girl. Although she does not manifest class snobbery in her choice of friends in Oxford, playing with Roger the kitchen boy, the outsider gyptian children and urchins, and refuses to be treated as a ‘lady’—protesting vehemently when forced to wash and dress nicely—she is noble born (though initially mistaken about who her real parents are). Lyra has a housekeeper in Mrs Lonsdale, the opportunity of education and prior to her adventures has led a relatively comfortable life, free of subsistence worries and hard labour. This privileged position at first merely manifests itself in her being guilty of grand airs, for example, when boasting of the supremacy of Jordan College, of which she actually understands little. But she knows she is connected to a higher world and this gives her an assurance of character beyond her years, which stands her in good stead on her travels. Though she does not display class arrogance during her adventures, she is the special child of prophecy and unavoidably consorts with the high and mighty, from

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bear kings to witch queens and angels, as this is the political level she is destined to be involved with. In this light, her distinctive position as empowered girl is informed by her social status, which places her in an advantageous position anyway. Despite the fact that Lyra and Will, at least initially, engage in activities and display attributes historically and stereotypically gendered for the opposite sex, they cannot really be coded as masculine and feminine characters respectively. At most, at the start they can be seen as somewhat androgynous figures, but their ambivalent and oscillating position between genders is neither constant nor prominent. Will manifests a number of typically masculine traits. Albeit reluctant to fight, he is a warrior and the bearer of the subtle knife, the enchanted weapon that is the hallmark of the male hero. His strength of character and determination is underlined throughout the story. His old neighbour Mrs Cooper describes him as ‘implacable’ (SK, p. 4),6 Lyra notices the strength in his eyes (AS, p. 380),7 he commands the angels Baruch and Balthamos, and even Iorek admits to Lyra: ‘He outfaced me. I thought no one could ever do that’ (SK, p. 207). Likewise, Lyra undoubtedly displays feminine characteristics as the novel progresses. Her bravery when facing adversity includes compassion, pity and mercy; notably when overcoming her horror and disgust vis-à-vis the hideously mutilated Tony Makarios when others cannot, and even extending kindness to her enemy, the aged Authority. This also hints at an innate protective mother instinct, which is further emphasized as she is, according to the prophecy about her, the new Eve, ‘Mother of all’ (SK, p. 328), though not physically a parent. Another attribute often allocated to femininity is the capacity for deception. Lyra proudly proclaims: ‘I lied. Will doesn’t lie’ (SK, p. 208), thus claiming the lie for herself in distinction to her male counterpart. When Lyra’s name is screamed out by the harpies, it becomes indistinguishable from ‘liar’, so lying seems to be part of her nature. Indeed, she lies frequently and successfully, to begin with for fun and love of invention, to impress her friends or to avoid punishment and as a defence mechanism against the insecurities she manifests due to her lack of parents. Yet, untruth is not always portrayed as negative in the story; it depends on the context. Later, her imagination and rhetorical skills serve her well on her adventures. She uses them for self-protection when she assumes another identity at Bolvangar, and for aiding Iorek, an act that earns her the sobriquet ‘Silvertongue’ (NL, p. 348). Nevertheless, in the end she realizes the importance of truth, so conventional morality is restored. Throughout the story she

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always intuitively discerns whom she should not lie to, such as the gyptian leader John Faa, the Witch-Consul Dr Lanselius, Iorek and Will. She is of course also the bearer of a truth-revealing device, the alethiometer. However, it is fortunate that Lyra is morally benign and does not use the undoubted manipulative qualities she inherited from Mrs Coulter as the latter does, to exploit, deceive and seize power. In short, Lyra and Will revert to type in some respects, but they also represent a certain open-mindedness and fluidity with respect to gender stereotypes rather than rigidity. Bodily awareness and womanhood Lyra’s upbringing and development echoes French feminist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement in The Second Sex that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’.8 Born and raised in an ultra-patriarchal environment, ‘[s]he may be rebellious, but Lyra rebels with no consciousness of her gender, for the models of power and authority to which she aspires are virtually all male’.9 Sarah Gamble’s assertion is certainly true concerning Lyra’s early days as a gamine, and regarding her awe of male figures such as Iorek and above all her father. In addition, she has a condescending attitude toward female scholars whom she regards with a ‘proper Jordan disdain’ (NL, p. 67); clearly a bias she has taken over from her male-controlled environment, not an informed opinion. However, as the novel and her character develop, she finds and acknowledges female mentors, notably the witch queen Serafina Pekkala and the nun-turned-scientist Mary Malone, who initiate her into womanhood through relating their own experiences. Lyra’s ‘emerging identity as a young woman transformed by love, [her] growth towards adulthood and wisdom is evident in her home-coming scene’,10 where she has overcome her prejudice toward female scholars and now sees the venerable Dame Hannah Relf for what she really is, namely a kind, sharp and highly intelligent woman rather than ‘dim and frumpy’ (AS, p. 541). She also recognizes her need for education, which has been haphazard up to that point, to confront cultural and gender boundaries in her world: she can be both a woman and a scholar and is free to choose her destiny. We can surmise that women are now redeemed through Lyra’s actions and that after the collapse of the extremist factions controlling the male-dominated Church, mindsets will begin to change. Education offers a different means of empowerment for women, perhaps here reinforced by the women’s college being called St Sophia’s, a reference to the Greek word for wisdom

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and the gnostic divine mother figure Sophia, an alternative godhead in feminist theology who symbolizes the female religious experience and stands for contemporary feminist ideals, as a counterbalance to the male Authority and Metatron. In the novel Xaphania is portrayed as the wisest angel, and the Hebrew word ‘SephanyAh’, from which the Greek name Sophia is derived, is too similar to be coincidental.11 Millicent Lenz deems Xaphania’s presence necessary for ‘the contemporary need to balance “masculine” and “feminine” archetypes’,12 and indeed part of His Dark Materials’ concern lies precisely in establishing this symmetry, with revalorizing the female so it achieves parity with its male counterpart, as I shall argue in more detail later. De Beauvoir disputes the existence of ‘feminine nature’, and argues that there is no natural hierarchy marking men out as superior to women, because there is no physical or psychological rationale for this. Yet women have been oppressed ‘throughout history and across cultures’, and one reason for this is their childbearing and maternal role, which has come to be seen as their natural raison d’être. Furthermore, it has situated them in the passive domestic sphere and connected them to bodily functions regarded as inferior to intellectual ones.13 Men (despite their own bodily functions and traditional activities such as manual labour) have not been disqualified from intellectual pursuits as they have been largely freed from childraising and could thus practically monopolize the public sphere and the power of decision accompanying it. Humans are beings of both body and spirit, as His Dark Materials emphasizes, but what separates human beings from animals is the reasoning intellect and culture. De Beauvoir sees the intellect as superior to the physique, and herein lies the solution for female emancipation: women need to burst the bonds trapping them within a bodily existence and pursue the intellectual activities that man has been free to do.14 In Pullman’s epic, mind and body are equal, but the ending highlights Lyra’s need for studious and creative pursuits if she is to fulfil herself. De Beauvoir argues that beyond the basic and natural biological sex division into male and female, it is behaviour that constructs sexual difference and thus gender behaviour, through cultural conditioning. However, the danger is that women striving for equality do so by assuming masculine values and are thus absorbed into existing male power structures, including religion, law and science, instead of constructing their own feminine identity.15 Lyra’s world is, as mentioned, extremely patriarchal, dominated by a Church that classifies women as inferior to men, and the

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environment of Jordan in which she is raised reinforces these cultural norms. Her scornful and belittling attitude to female scholars is representative of this society, where women are disempowered, existing as mothers, housekeepers and servants. In any other occupation they are not taken seriously, apart from rare exceptions such as Mrs Coulter, or else they are alienated, seen as the Other, the enemy, like the witches. Ma Costa, the gyptian queen and boat-mother, commands respect and power within the marginalized gyptian community; however, the heads of the gyptian families and their leader, John Faa, are all men. Though the prefix ‘Ma’ in her name appears to be a honorific, it confirms her in her role of mother, placing her firmly within the domestic sphere. Nicola Allen, also discussing de Beauvoir, examines the link between women’s gendered identity and social class. She says that de Beauvoir sees a correlation between the subjection of women and that of the working classes, though they reveal themselves in different ways.16 Allen argues that social class is linked to issues of female body shame and awareness of original sin. Already alluded to at Jordan, this matter emerges clearly in London where Lyra, whose fascination with Mrs Coulter is that with a traditional performance of upper-class femininity previously unknown to her, is forced into convention; her body ‘becomes both less visible and more static and confined’17 and she is a ‘pet’ (NL, p. 86). Once Lyra is conscious of her body, this awareness never really leaves her,18 though she learns to be comfortable with it with Will at the end. By contrast with her decorative role with Mrs Coulter, on the gyptian boat with Ma Costa, ‘there was real work to do’ (NL, p. 111). Though the jobs Lyra has to carry out are mostly traditionally female housework tasks, confirming that this is a prefeminist society regardless of class, the difference lies elsewhere, with body image. The gyptian women are less concerned with shame than with everyday existence, which according to Allen is proven by the fact that Ma Costa’s dæmon still has the ability to change (it is a hawk when we first meet her, and later when Lyra is on the gyptian boat, it is a huge grey dog) (NL, pp. 56, 106). This is because of her unconsciousness of the perverting influence of shame and original sin, compared with the hold it has on Mrs Coulter’s middle- and upperclass social circles.19 However, this might simply be an oversight on Pullman’s part, as the idea sits quite uncomfortably with his otherwise positive depiction of the settling of the dæmon. Marisa Coulter is at first glance the epitome of a new kind of womanhood, ‘one with dangerous powers and qualities such as elegance, charm, and grace’ (NL, p. 82), and her glamour quickly

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entrances Lyra. Clever, resourceful, seductive and beautiful, but utterly ruthless, cold-hearted and immoral, and with a consuming passion for power, she is the ultimate femme fatale, a Lady Macbeth who rather than unsexing herself exploits her sexual radiation to an outrageous and noxious extreme. She is a supreme manipulator who preys on her victims’ ambitions, fears and desires. The fatally infatuated Lord Boreal is totally dominated and then disposed of when he has outlived his usefulness. Mrs Coulter even manages to trick Metatron, who can see into people’s souls. Her entire nature is a twisted maze of lies and deceit that even the angel regent cannot untangle. He succumbs to her flirtations, beguiled by her radiant beauty and flesh. Her enticing voice tempts the children to follow her to Bolvangar to their doom, and Will only barely escapes the same fate, as Balthamos and Iorek notice: ‘You were foolish to go to her. All you want to do now is to see her again’ (AS, p. 151). Lyra experiences how quickly her mother can turn when she first dares contradict her in the apartment. Mrs Coulter’s angelic sweetness becomes a steely cold ruthlessness as her golden monkey dæmon hurts Lyra’s Pantalaimon until the girl is forced to capitulate. In a world where opportunities for women to wield real power are severely limited, Mrs Coulter does incredibly well to gain the independence and authority she holds. She grabs power wherever she can, first through marriage, then by allying herself to the Church. Nevertheless, she is still only a tool of the Consistorial Court, albeit a prominent one, and loses her social and political powers once she crosses her employers, though not her inherent feminine ones as her seduction of Metatron proves. Mrs Coulter further conforms to gender conventions when she discovers her latent maternal instinct, however twisted it is, and ultimately sacrifices herself for her daughter. In addition, when confronted with masculinity at its strongest in Lord Asriel, a dark, predatory figure who seems larger than life and is driven by boundless ambition, even Mrs Coulter appears overwhelmed or subdued; she is certainly not her usual domineering self. When Lyra’s parents embrace at the end of Northern Lights, it is Asriel who is powerful and urgent, dominating the scene. He kisses her, and Mrs Coulter ‘clung to Lord Asriel as if she were dizzy’ (NL, p. 395). Even Ruta Skadi, a queen of witches and no mere mortal woman, repeatedly falls for him, so masculine sexuality at its rawest, most animalistic and elemental, dominates the feminine. As Sarah Gamble puts it, ‘masculinity is here presented as the ultimate state of nature […] a force to be in awe of’.20 Likewise, though Lyra initiates their first kiss with the red fruit, after that Will takes over, kissing

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her with a far more sensual, near-animalistic drive and later stroking her dæmon—a metaphor for their sexual encounter. It should also be mentioned that Lyra changes after Northern Lights, when she meets Will. She becomes more submissive and often follows his lead, while he assumes the dominant role of warrior, protector and decision maker. Whereas in the first book Lyra takes the initiative in saving the children and fights her own battles, subsequently it is she who needs to be rescued from the clutches of Mrs Coulter and from the fury of the harpies. Will gradually turns into the protagonist, with Lyra slipping into a more passive, traditional female position. Crossover literature specialist Rachel Falconer points out that Lyra ‘exercises conventional feminine wiles’21 even earlier, to trick Iofur, and revels in this power over a male figure. Toward Iorek she behaves as a courtly lady would toward her knight, encouraging him and fearing for him in combat. In relation to Will, she behaves quite deferentially.22 So, although Lyra and Mrs Coulter set out as strong and independent they both conform to stereotypical conceptions of their roles, both as lovers and mothers. This said, the story starts and ends with the word ‘Lyra’, supporting her claim as the leading character, and after her heart-wrenching separation from Will she takes responsibility for her life and learning and shows that her determination and resourcefulness have remained and will stand her in good stead as an emancipated woman. Her reversion to stereotype is far from absolute. In the absence of parental role models, Lyra and Will need to find their own way toward self- and worldly knowledge (though they are aided by a number of surrogate parents—and in Will’s case briefly by his father’s ghost). During this process of maturation, the budding adolescents gradually become aware of their own and each other’s bodies, their sexuality and gender roles. The first major moments where these themes are raised occur in Mrs Coulter’s London environment, which initially strikes Lyra with wonder. The pretty, delicate flat itself represents Mrs Coulter; it is femininity pushed to the extreme and in direct contrast to the rough grandeur of Jordan or Asriel’s dark, mighty masculine fortress. Lyra is quickly enchanted by the fashion and cosmetics she is introduced to, and realizes how glamorous women can be. This is a style of womanhood she has never encountered before, and Lyra proudly displays herself at parties, ‘glowing with the sense of her own prettiness’ (NL, p. 86). However this whole sophisticated style only serves to allure and be attractive to men, and thus to exploit female sexuality. Mrs Coulter can turn this to her advantage, but her gender role is still a male-dominated social

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construct, and in her case cold and artificial. It takes Lyra six weeks to realize that she cannot identify with this gender role, as it is contrary to her autonomous, spontaneous and unceremonious nature, and she then escapes to discover and forge her true and natural gender identity. A significant incident, which first introduces the theme of sexuality in the trilogy, is the scene in which Mrs Coulter bathes Lyra. Her dæmon Pantalaimon stares at her with ‘powerful curiosity’ up to the moment where Mrs Coulter’s glance at him makes him understand that he has no business watching these ‘feminine mysteries’ and he turns away, something he never needed to do in the past (NL, p. 78). Though Lyra and Pan are intrinsically part of one another, they are also separate entities, and female and male respectively. As Lyra gradually moves beyond childhood, her relationship to her dæmon changes. He has become aware of her body as female and is shy and inhibited about it. This is a domain he is no longer allowed to share. Both Lyra and Will are experiencing a transitional phase, entering adolescence and developing consciousness of themselves and each other as sexual beings. From the beginning they are ‘intensely aware’ of each other (SK, p. 25), and their sexual innocence starts to shake and crumble well before the ‘fruit scene’ Lyra goes to bathe naked in a river while Will is asleep, and understands that while she swam naked in the Cherwell with her friends back in Oxford, ‘it would be quite different with Will, and she blushed even to think of it’, and she faces the other way while he gets dressed (AS, p. 458). There is definitely bodily awareness here, and her blush is most significant as an impulse to conceal a self-conscious emotion, which betrays embarrassment and guilt in the context of sexual attraction and even arousal. Her epiphanic experience during Mary Malone’s story of her past love adventures, which leaves her ‘half-frightened, half-excited’ (AS, p. 482) also foreshadows the moment where the two teenagers kiss and become lovers. When Will is attempting to cut a window out of the land of the dead he nearly breaks the subtle knife as he lets his thoughts wander, and Lyra tells him to focus on her. He clearly sees her as an erotic young woman, with her ‘candid eyes’, and he inhales the ‘scent of her flesh’ (AS, p. 406). Likewise, his sensual, even lustful reaction to Mrs Coulter at the cave where she is keeping Lyra captive marks him as a budding man rather than a child. Confronted with her beauty, the smell of her perfume and body and graceful movement, he feels ‘disturbed’ (AS, p. 147), which applies to physical as well as mental agitation—the scene for Will is erotically charged. Will is attracted to her despite knowing she is an enemy, as he already was

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earlier in the story: his first impression of her is of a dazzling woman, ‘lovely in the moonlight, her brilliant dark eyes wide with enchantment, her slender shape light and graceful’ (SK, p. 213). The witches: an alternative gender portrayal The quotation above, with its associations to the night, the moon and enchantments, links Mrs Coulter to witchcraft, which is, of course, firmly situated within the female domain. She represents the enchantress, the femme fatale, and is recognized by Lyra as ‘a new sex altogether’, wielding ‘dangerous powers’ (NL, p. 82). Indeed, Mrs Coulter bewitches men through her feminine allure and beguiling manner, and children too, with the help of chocolatl—food to replace sexuality being a common feature in children’s literature. For example, Jadis the White Witch of Narnia tempts Edmund Pevensie in exactly the same way, with magic Turkish Delight—itself an echo of Circe’s cup. It is also hinted on a few occasions that her dæmon can distance himself from her further than normal (possibly following the gyptian sleds, or at her party spying on the alethiometer in another room), a quality attributed to witches in His Dark Materials. Continuing this line of argument, her daughter Lyra, as Falconer establishes, seems to have a suprarational, intuitive understanding of people’s emotions.23 As well as being an astute judge of character, this quality allows her to read the alethiometer instinctively. In this she too demonstrates virtually witchlike powers. In addition, after her trials in the land of the dead she gains the ability to separate from Pantalaimon. Ma Costa notices Lyra’s witch-properties early on when she associates the girl with the element of fire, rather than water like the gyptians, and recognizes that she has ‘witch-oil in [her] soul’ (NL, p. 113), which she means as a compliment. Fire also affirms Lyra’s female sexuality, which will awaken later in the story. The two arguably strongest female characters then display witchlike qualities, so it is necessary to find out how the witches fit into the trilogy’s gender framework. Pullman’s witches are described in overwhelmingly positive: they are inherently natural, beautiful, sensual and sexual beings, as well as excellent warriors. As such, their femininity undermines the social and religious order established by the Church, and indeed they side with the anti-Authority forces. In the Church’s eyes they are unnatural and lead men into sin, and they are therefore persecuted and constructed as Other. Even worse, the witches are pagans,

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worshipping nature and other gods. They cannot be controlled, because they have no connection to the human world of the dead and thus no incentive, be it fear or reward, to be subjected to the Magisterium’s rule. Witches go to their own place, the realm of their goddess of the dead, Yambe-Akka. They embody a ‘female sexual autonomy which the church cannot tolerate’.24 Paradoxically, the deceitful and seductive temptress Mrs Coulter epitomizes all the negative witch-attributes the Church regards as a threat, and she works for them. It is only when she becomes more ‘human’ that she loses her political power. The witches are a different species from humans, with magical powers and long lives, although they are dependent on humans for their progeny as there are no male witches. This makes them ultimately tragic creatures, staying young while watching their male loved ones grow old and die. They have a fundamental connection with the north and an intense emotional bond with nature, which is part of their being and which the story celebrates. The witches represent a wholly non-traditional and positive vision of womanhood in His Dark Materials, a new, freer gender portrayal of women beyond the control of the patriarchal powers in society and religion, which they ultimately help to overthrow. They are liberated, and witch clans are, of course, without men, so they are naturally free from the gender constructions and restrictions with which women in human society grow up in constant contact and within which they are defined. Historian Diane Purkiss portrays the figure of the witch as a ‘woman’s fantasy’, enabling women to construe and validate their own identities.25 Similarly, children’s literature critic Adrienne Gavin associates the phrase ‘women fly while men are not watching’ with mysterious magical powers belonging to womanhood that are concealed from men or go unnoticed and are impenetrable.26 The witches are personifications of this idea, literally capable of flight, mysterious to and independent of the world of men. Even when they love, it is they who choose their human partner, and to scorn a witch’s love is to face her deadly wrath. Gavin goes on to explain that female possession of supernatural powers in literature often ‘distinguishes womanhood from both girlhood and maleness’.27 However, while the difference from maleness remains clear, as Serafina Pekkala talks specifically about men rather than humans in general when explaining witchhood (and their relationships with short-lived human males) to Lyra, in His Dark Materials it is not necessarily the obtention of any mysterious faculty that differentiates girl- and womanhood. Lyra carries her magical self-identity within

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her from the start, as her alethiometer-reading skills testify. On the contrary, her passage to womanhood removes this inherent ability, which can only be regained through diligent study. However, there is still a threshold to be crossed; childhood must die in order for Lyra to be reborn and find herself as a person and a woman. Hence the voyage to the land of the dead, which is a metaphorical rite of passage where Lyra and Will both ‘die’ and are separated from their dæmons. When the youngsters are reunited with them, crucially after they have become lovers, they have received the gift of being able to distance themselves from their dæmons. All girl witches undergo a similar painful ritual to reach adulthood, by crossing a desolate waste devoid of life in the far north and leaving their dæmons behind. Serafina Pekkala confirms that Lyra and Will are now witches in essence, despite not being long lived or able to fly. As Lyra’s gender identity is formed, Will’s becomes uncertain, as he is male but has entered an exclusively female domain. Both adolescents have however achieved a certain independence from conventional gender roles. William Gray, in his book Death and Fantasy, suggests that ‘time is gendered’,28 referring to Julia Kristeva’s 1979 essay ‘Women’s Time’. Kristeva affirms that men and women inhabit different contexts of time: patriarchal societies regularize time into measurable units and construct it as linear, whereas women’s time is cyclical due to their procreative function, which places them in a perpetual cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. Rather than being arbitrarily regularized, it is more subjective and directed by events. She ‘argues that female subjectivity is divided between cyclical, natural time (repetition, gestation, the biological clock) and monumental time (eternity, myths of resurrection, the cult of maternity). These modalities are set off against the time of linear history’.29 As mentioned above, Serafina distinguishes between witches’ and men’s lives, demonstrating the relativity of time perceptions when talking about the witch-goddess Yambe-Akka: ‘She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches’ lives are as brief as men’s are to us’ (NL, p. 314). However, as Gray indicates, she talks about men in particular, thus ‘women’s time’ could be different still from men’s or witches’.30 While all three exist in linear time, witches as females inhabit cyclical and monumental time—however, due to their long lives they are not concerned with petty, brief human affairs, so I think they are placed far deeper within monumental time than human women and disregard linear time. Arguably the witches’ longevity also weakens their relation to cyclical time, in the sense that the final aspect of the cycle of birth, age and death can for them be postponed almost indefinitely—though they

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do experience it through their sons and lovers. Women like Mrs Coulter reject cyclical time (and thus motherhood, as seen by her abandonment of baby Lyra) in order to gain power in a patriarchal society, on patriarchal terms, so they are deviating from their natural role when forging their gender identity. In contrast, Lyra inhabits witch time partially, being subject also to the prophecy and maternity cult that regards her as the new Eve, so she is part of a freer kind of womanhood. By way of these examples, Pullman suggests that women need to take up residence in their own time, on their own terms, rather than deferring to a patriarchal hegemony that will necessarily control and confine the formation and development of their gender identity. The gender role of the dæmon Another essential element giving insight into the formation of gender identity in His Dark Materials is the dæmon, which symbolizes character and body change while growing up, including sexual maturity. Mutable during childhood, it eventually takes up a fixed adult form. The dæmon is nearly always of the opposite sex to its human counterpart. This, according to Nicholas Tucker, corresponds to the psychologist Carl Jung’s idea that all humans have a craving for an other half, also of the opposite sex which, if we could reunite with it, would then mean that we could at last become truly whole individuals. This concept is described in Jungian terms as the lifelong search for the anima, where men are concerned, and the animus in the case of women. But because we can never be joined up to our missing male or female counterparts, Jung believes we must always go through life with the feeling that there is something important missing within us.31

Contrary to Jung, Pullman is implying that the animus/a is already there in each of us, not missing—in other words, we are whole, and our gender identity partakes of both sexes. We all have some more masculine and some more feminine character traits, even in our world where people do not have an external dæmon. John Parry tells Lee Scoresby of his amazement upon perceiving his dæmon Sayan Kötör for the first time in the world he crossed into from ours, and realizing that ‘part of [his] own nature was female […] and beautiful’ (SK, p. 223). Exceptionally, the dæmon can be of the same sex as the human: Bernie Johansen, the male gyptian servant spy at Jordan, has a male dæmon. This of course comments on his gender identity, as

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we can assume he is transgender in some way, so difference represents variation from the cisgender norm. The dæmon is, then, part of the discovery of the self as a gendered being, of knowing your identity, even if it is not necessarily the person you dream of being. The interaction between person and dæmon mirrors that of ‘the intimate alliance of husband and wife—two become one’.32 Furthermore, Pan acts as Lyra’s confidant and conscience, and her mood is reflected in him: for instance he can turn into an inconspicuous brown moth when Lyra needs to be secret, or a spitting wildcat when she feels threatened. Though they are mentally and emotionally joined and their life force is one, they are also partially separate and independent beings with individual consciousness. Lyra can keep secrets from Pan; her ‘feminine mysteries’ for example, that were discussed above, and Pan avoids her for a while in anger after she leaves him behind in the land of the dead. With the latter action, Lyra ignores one part of herself in order to construct another vital part. Despite this gain she remains a fractured being until her reconciliation with Pan later. Once the dæmon loses its ability to shape-shift, a person has reached sexual maturity and knowledge of identity. However, this does not mean that adults are from that point on fixed and incapable of change; the dæmon is not the sole criterion. Indeed, Mrs Coulter’s belated adoption of a maternal role demonstrates that her character undergoes significant change well after the settling of her dæmon. Dust, the ‘über-gender’ Having looked at various constructions of male and female gender roles, we need to analyse one last phenomenon central to His Dark Materials and gender identity, namely Dust. Pullman describes the omniscient narrative voice of the story as: not a human being at all [but] some kind of sprite. Certainly he-she-it is both ancient and youthful, male and female, sceptical and credulous, sophisticated and innocent, wise and foolish, all at once.33

This voice is akin to a dæmon’s, according to Falconer.34 Furthermore, the 2003 BBC radio adaptation of the trilogy is narrated by the angel Balthamos, a creature composed of condensed Dust. Taking this idea one step further, we may see Dust occupying the narrative role, as the narrative provides us with insight into every character, and following Pullman’s words it is not gendered, or rather forms a combination of all genders. These mysterious conscious particles are the source of human

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knowledge and form a collective human consciousness. Dust and the dæmon are linked, as the dæmon becomes fixed when Dust is attracted to people at puberty children only being surrounded by a tiny portion. Clearly, it has something to do with the advent of sexual maturity and affects the formation of sexual identity. The dæmon dissolves into Dust at death, as the human ghost does after its passage through the land of the dead, so everything alive and conscious is ‘subject to dust’ (NL, p. 373). After death, person and dæmon are eventually reunited as Dust particles, but Lyra also suggests her and Will’s particles will ‘cling together so tight’ (AS, p. 526) that they become inseparable. Because Dust continues, and creates new consciousness out of old, any new life stemming from them will be using a new atom, a merger reuniting male and female aspects and thus rejoining with their soulmate, as in the fable of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium.35 Blake suggests this unity and continuation of life force as well, in his annotations to Swedenborg: ‘Essence is not Identity, but from Essence proceeds Identity & from one Essence may proceed many Identities’.36 Gender theorist Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity sees masculinity and femininity as social constructs that support a binary view of relations between genders. These unnatural gender constructions can be deconstructed through subversion, thus opening up manifold possibilities. Though she sees people as already-gendered subjects, they can in this manner nevertheless have some degree of agency in developing their personal gender identity. This could introduce ‘a post-feminist era, when the division between man and woman is finally transcended’.37 In His Dark Materials, the ‘two contrary states’ that are the masculine and the feminine gender emanate from and flow back into the same all-encompassing source of consciousness, Dust. Lyra and Will’s love has heralded a new, liberal world order free of the oppressive Church, and it is conceivable that this also represents a new dawn for gender identities. Serafina Pekkala suggests as much when she recognizes that Will is a male witch, something previously unheard of, and declares that his and Lyra’s love has ‘changed many things’ (AS, p. 500). Dust is natural and now free of social constraints and this mysterious force can be associated with humanity as a whole, surpassing fixed gender roles—or at least, the possibility of this is raised, because, despite the more tolerant atmosphere as we leave Lyra’s world there is still social gender distinction, with separate men’s and women’s colleges for instance. As the discussion of the narrative voice above suggests, Dust represents an über-gender harmoniously uniting within it masculine and feminine traits, a collective gender identity

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within which every individual can develop their personal identity freely to create the republic of heaven. In Blakean terms, innocence needs to work with experience to create a new third view, which is located beyond both terms—the sprite or Dust. The contrary states, the two sections of the Songs, in some editions physically formed one object, one whole, as Blake etched ‘Experience’ poems on the back of the copper plates for ‘Innocence’, rather as he sees opposite poles (such as reason and energy, love and hate, female and male) achieving complementarity.38 The ‘contraries’ need to work together for human ‘progression’ and they not only exist on a mystical level but procreation itself relies on these, male and female, penis and vagina. Blake believes in a kind of ‘sexual religion or sexual magic […] of a Union of Sexes in Man as in God—an androgynous state’.39 Gender roles should then be independent but symbiotic, rather than one subservient to or dominated by the other, in order to function naturally and effectively in a relationship and create a perfect society—Pullman’s republic of heaven. Conclusion Pullman’s epic advocates self-determination but does not break with all gender roles. Lyra’s feminine attributes are both desirable and necessary, as are Will’s masculine ones, and can coexist with a strong character. Mrs Coulter is also a strong woman, however, her feminine characteristics are never liberated from the masculine system; she succeeds in a masculine world, as a ‘man’, not on her own terms. The witches point the way to a liberated gender construction, free from social oppression. Lyra eventually seems to tread this path and, importantly, so does Will. The egalitarian system of gender roles can only be achieved if both male and female are involved. Gender representation in His Dark Materials maintains conservative aspects as a consequence of the patriarchal system in place. However, the overall message is one of gender equality and of the hope that the patriarchal Christian outlook and societal norm will be overturned. With it, these socially constructed restrictive gender roles will disappear in favour of a balanced and free attitude in which the masculine and the feminine are validated in their own right: ‘[Sexuality] isn’t just there “naturally” from the start, but is formed by early experiences and adjustments […] gender roles must be malleable and changeable, not inevitable and unchangeable givens’.40 The presence of the dæmon symbolizes the importance of the Blakean ‘contraries’ without which there is ‘no progression’. There

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need to be aspects of both masculinity and femininity, and they must exist on an equal footing within society for it to evolve healthily. Each individual needs elements of both to be whole, though of course to varying degrees. The ‘two contrary states’ of feminine and masculine genders may remain, but the expected norms of behaviour surrounding them are abolished. Every gender variant between these two theoretical extremes will be validated and celebrated in the republic of heaven. Notes 1. William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ in The Complete Works, Alicia Ostriker (ed.). (London: Penguin, 1977): 180–94 (181). 2. Keith Sagar, ‘Innocence and Experience’ (2002), (http://www.keithsagar. co.uk/Downloads/blake/Innocence.pdf). 3. Victoria Flanagan, ‘Gender studies’ in David Rudd (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2010): 26–38 (27). 4. Andrew M. Butler, ‘The Republic of Heaven: The Betrayal of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy’ in Nickianne Moody and Clare Horrocks (eds.), Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Debates for the Twenty-First Century (Liverpool: John Moores University, 2005): 285–98 (288). 5. Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (London: Point Scholastic, 1995). 6. Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (London: Point Scholastic, 1998). 7. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London: Point Scholastic, 2000). 8. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949) H. M. Parshley (ed. and trans.) (London: Vintage Classics, 1997): 295. 9. Sarah Gamble, ‘Becoming Human: Desire and the Gendered Subject’ in Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox (eds.), Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2011): 187–201 (191). 10. Millicent Lenz, ‘Philip Pullman’, in Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz (eds.), Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction, (London and New York: Continuum, 2001): 122–69 (155–6). 11. Lance Parkin and Mark Jones, Dark Matters (London: Virgin Books, 2005): 256. 12. Lenz, ‘Philip Pullman’: 158. 13. Fiona Tolan, ‘Feminisms’ in Patricia Waugh (ed.), Literary Theory and Criticism – An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): 320–1. 14. Ibid.: 322. 15. Ibid.: 323.

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16. Nicola Allen, ‘Exploring and Challenging the Lapsarian World of Young Adult Literature: Femininity, Shame, the Gyptians, and Social Class’ in Barfield and Cox: 115. 17. Ibid.: 116. 18. Ibid.: 117. 19. Ibid.: 116. 20. Gamble: 191. 21. Rachel Falconer, The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership (New York & Abingdon: Routledge, 2009): 81. 22. Ibid.: 81–2. 23. Ibid.: 85. 24. Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History (London and New York: Routledge, 1996): 19. 25. Ibid.: 93, Preface. 26. Adrienne E. Gavin,‘Apparition and Apprehension: Supernatural Mystery and Emergent Womanhood in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Novels by Margaret Mahy’ in Adrienne E. Gavin and Christopher Routledge (eds.), Mystery in Children’s Literature: From the Rational to the Supernatural (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001): 131. 27. Ibid. 28. William Gray, Death and Fantasy: Essays on Philip Pullman, C. S. Lewis, George Macdonald and R. L. Stevenson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008): 105. 29. Emily Apter, ‘“Women’s Time” in Theory’ in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 21.1 (2010), (http://differences.dukejournals. org/content/21/1/1.full.pdf). 30. Gray, Death and Fantasy: 105. 31. Nicholas Tucker, Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman (Cambridge: Wizard Books, 2003): 141–2. 32. Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware, Shedding Light on His Dark Materials (Carol Stream, IL: SaltRiver, 2007): 17. 33. Quoted in Falconer: 90. 34. Ibid. 35. Plato. The Symposium, 189d–193d. 36. In Hazard Adams, Blake’s Margins: An Interpretative Study of the Annotations (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009): 44. 37. Tolan, ‘Feminisms’: 338. 38. Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London: Vintage, 1996): 143–4. 39. Ibid.: 342. 40. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995): 131.

8 Persephone Ascending Goddess Archetypes and Lyra’s Journey to Wholeness Susan Redington Bobby In his Pathways to Bliss, Joseph Campbell declares: Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth.1

Combining the study of Jungian archetypes with his own hero’s journey, Campbell asserts that we may achieve wholeness by discovering our personal pathway to ‘bliss’.2 When I read Campbell’s book in preparation for writing on goddess archetypes in His Dark Materials, I found myself frequently scribbling ‘Lyra’ in the margin, excited to see the plethora of parallels between Campbell’s hero’s journey and Lyra’s progression.3 Despite Campbell’s predilection for masculine nouns and pronouns, I have always ignored his gender specificity because I have always seen males and females as equally capable of triumph in quest narratives. But Campbell himself gave me pause in the chapter titled ‘Dialogues’ in which a female audience member prods him about the parallel heroine’s journey, which Campbell does not consider in his text. When she asks Campbell if his wife has followed the path of the hero, Campbell sidesteps with, ‘She’s had an elegant career’. The woman presses, ‘Does she think of her career as a hero’s journey? Or a heroine’s journey, for that matter?’ Campbell ends the discussion with ‘Let’s say the mythology’s helped a bit. And she has a husband who was willing to help her see it happen’.4 Campbell’s patriarchal interpretation of the hero’s journey was exacerbated in a talk he had with Maureen Murdock, when she asked about the parallels between the heroine’s and hero’s journeys, 146

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and he countered with ‘women don’t need to make the journey’, an answer that ‘stunned’ Murdock who disagreed wholeheartedly.5 As Murdock indicates, a woman must also follow her own quest to become a ‘fully integrated, balanced, and whole human being’,6 and in His Dark Materials Lyra’s transition on her journey leads to her becoming whole by its conclusion. It seemed to me that proof of Lyra’s progression to wholeness could be found in mythic allusions in the trilogy, so I turned to Randall E. Auxier, who contends that ‘Pullman has Mrs. Coulter and Lyra re-enact the mythic drama of Demeter and Persephone, in which Will, acting the part of Hades, steals Lyra (Persephone) from Mrs Coulter (Demeter) and takes her to the underworld’.7 Yet Auxier argues that Pullman’s portrayal of Mrs Coulter as Demeter is nothing more than ‘a cop-out’, proving only that in the patriarchal world headed by Metatron and Asriel women lack power, and ‘in such a world, the superior woman has no real place’.8 He suggests that Pullman ‘retains the ideas of active masculine virtues and passive feminine virtues’,9 with Mrs Coulter ultimately a failure, degenerating into a saccharine, doting, passive mother while Lyra ceases to think for herself, blindly succumbing to Will’s authority. ‘When she [Lyra] does anything apart from following Will’, Auxier claims, ‘she gets into terrible trouble and messes everything up’.10 Aside from the point that it is only by acting on her own and making mistakes that Lyra sets matters of importance into motion, not to mention Pullman’s career-long attraction to the theme of facing the darkness to discover the light,11 Auxier, perhaps initially more open to the idea of female heroes than Campbell, still finds that myth and patriarchy are inextricably bound, leaving no room for strong, heroic women. Lilijana Burcar concurs: ‘women in the trilogy are […] relegated to secondary roles [… the trilogy] narratively construes all male protagonists as the fulcrum of power and agency, marginaliz[ing] and exclud[ing] women’.12 And yet to me, myth and matriarchy form the very foundation of Lyra’s growth in His Dark Materials. Perhaps Mrs Coulter, limited by her connection to the patriarchal Church and her own propensity for deception and narcissism, cannot triumph in this man’s world (or worlds), but I must disagree with Burcar’s contention that Mrs Coulter is ‘the only truly powerful woman of the trilogy’,13 for other women in His Dark Materials can and do wield an enormous amount of power. Ma Costa as Demeter teaches Lyra to be compassionate, protective and motherly; Serafina Pekkala as Artemis teaches her to be an independent fighter with respect for nature and those in danger; and Dr Mary Malone as Athena teaches her to balance wisdom and

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knowledge with spirituality while discovering then following her true calling. Rather than follow the path of her biological matriarch who is incapable of guiding Lyra to wholeness, Lyra is intuitively drawn to more influential matriarchs, becoming a melding of their traits and her own. Furthermore, in ‘Lyra and the Birds’, the story included in Pullman’s post-His Dark Materials book, Lyra’s Oxford, 15-year old Lyra has chosen to favour two of the three goddess archetypes. In some versions of the Demeter and Persephone myth, Persephone is gathering narcissus flowers in a field with her virgin goddess companions Artemis and Athena when she is abducted.14 Lyra begins her journey influenced primarily by a Demeter archetype; however, she does not choose to follow in Demeter’s footsteps but in those of her companions Artemis and Athena. While Will is a support figure to Lyra, her choice to continue her life severed from him reveals that her pathway to bliss is undertaken on her own, proving that despite Campbell’s claims, the heroine need not have a husband to ‘help her’ succeed on her journey. Just as Pullman breaks new ground in depicting Lyra as the new Eve, he re-imagines the myth of Persephone through the strong mythic matriarchal influences that shape the heroine Lyra becomes. Pullman’s penchant for mythology Those familiar with Pullman’s biography undoubtedly recognize his oft-told story of the time that his son Tom grew so excited at his father’s rendition of the story of Odysseus’s return that he bit a glass.15 Of course, Pullman did not limit his flair for oral storytelling to his family, for he also planned and executed a course in the study of mythology for his students. Pullman explains: ‘I must have told each story [of the Greek gods and goddesses] thirty-six times. The result is that I now have those stories entirely clear in my head, from beginning to end, and I can call them up whenever I want to.’16 While such examples are frequently cited among Pullman’s influences, most readers are unfamiliar with an historical text meant for students that Pullman wrote in 1981, called Ancient Civilizations. In it Pullman combines facts about ancient history with his trademark wit and flair for storytelling. He seems aware that he diverges from fact to myth occasionally; in his chapter on Crete, he moves from presenting geographical information to narrating the story of King Minos and his famous labyrinth. As he describes the way Theseus found his way out of the maze, he concedes, ‘The story goes on from there, but it takes us away from Crete.’17 The importance of ancient Greek story and

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civilization is evoked in his comment, ‘many of the ideas we live by and the words we express them in come to us directly from ancient Greece. In a sense, Greek civilization is still alive’.18 Thus it is no surprise that Pullman’s long-held fascination with Greek mythology surfaces in His Dark Materials, as some critics have noted. Claire Squires points out that Pullman is a master at intertextual references, including many to Greek mythology. She pairs Lyra’s journey to the land of the dead with the epic hero’s trip to the underworld, the boatman who ferries her and Will across the water corresponding to Charon on the river Styx, and the harpies being nods to Homer’s Odyssey.19 Karen Patricia Smith links the scene in The Amber Spyglass with Mary and the old couple at the farmhouse to the story of Baucis and Philemon, who are ‘together a paradigm of hospitality in Greek myth’.20 Lyra and Will, Smith adds, meet parallel characters, Peter and Martha, in the resting place adjacent to the underworld.21 As noted earlier, Auxier associates the relationship between Mrs Coulter and Lyra with the myth of Demeter and Persephone, based on events in The Amber Spyglass. While Auxier is correct in noting Lyra resembles Persephone, Ma Costa is a much more convincing Demeter than Mrs Coulter. In addition, Will cannot represent Hades, for Lyra is not forcibly abducted by him and sent to the underworld; Lyra herself ordains that portion of her journey, signifying the beginning of her change from maiden to woman. What Pullman does here is not a simple revision of the Demeter and Persephone myth, but a re-imagination of Persephone’s progression. Transforming from the Maiden or Kore to a melding of goddess archetypes, she is not a mere substitute, but a new character whose destiny is tied up in her own choices. Through her guilt over Roger’s passing and her desire to set him free, she descends to the underworld. Lyra is also reminiscent of Orpheus who creates enchanting music with his lyre to rescue Eurydice from the underworld, though he ultimately fails when he disobeys and looks back at her, while in Pullman’s gender-reversed allusion, Lyra succeeds on her quest by delivering Roger and others to the world above. After she and Will create a permanent window out of the land of the dead, she chooses to ascend and follow a new path in hopes of building the Republic of Heaven. Mrs Coulter as a failed Demeter Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in Everywoman identifies Demeter and Persephone as ‘the vulnerable goddesses’ who are ‘susceptible

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to victimization’, while Artemis and Athena are the ‘invulnerable goddesses’ who are strong and independent and rarely, if ever, become mothers, although Artemis sometimes assists in childbirth.22 Demeter, the mother goddess, serves by giving birth or offering ‘nourishment’ to her children or another’s children.23 She is ‘nurturing’, ‘generous’, and ‘giving’, often a ‘caretaker’ or ‘provider’, focused on ‘maternal persistence’.24 She becomes tenacious if her child is threatened, and ‘refuse[s] to give up’.25 Sometimes living in fear that her child may be harmed or abducted,26 the Demeter archetype ‘has strong convictions and is difficult to budge when something or someone important to her is involved’.27 When Mrs Coulter saves Lyra from being severed from Pan at the Experimental Station, she appears to be the Demeter archetype. Further, her keeping Lyra drugged yet fed and bathed in the cave may be seen as further evidence that she is looking out for her daughter’s well-being. And yet there is something ultimately troubling about the duplicity of Mrs Coulter’s behaviour. David Colbert cites Pullman, who admits that most readers find Mrs Coulter to be self-serving.28 Colbert also quotes critic Karen S. Coats, who says that Mrs Coulter’s ‘surge of love’ and sudden motherly gestures seem inextricable from her ‘narcissism’,29 which extends to her hopes for Lyra’s future. Psychiatrist Kim Dolgin argues that ‘Mrs. Coulter wants Lyra to become foreclosed, behaving only as her mother wishes and adopting her mother’s values’,30 never learning to think or act independently.31 Additionally, characters in the text find her actions to be plagued by conflict. Lord Asriel refers to her efforts at motherhood as wrapped up in deceit, characterizing her as ‘shameless […] she lied in the very marrow of her bones’ (AS, p. 206).32 Even Metatron, the supernatural villain of the piece, castigates her for her lack of empathy and manipulative tactics, calling her ‘a cesspit of moral filth’ (AS, p. 398).33 With this kind of character assessment, it is no wonder that Mrs Coulter’s gestures of affection are unconvincing. In The Amber Spyglass, Ama witnesses Mrs Coulter smack Lyra across the face while her dæmon pins Pan down so she can drug her by force. The lullaby she sings afterwards is ‘a string of nonsense syllables […] her sweet voice mouthing gibberish’ (AS, p. 52). When Will first spots Lyra’s mother, he thinks she looks ‘domestic’, until the monkey dæmon appears, ‘and suddenly Mrs. Coulter didn’t look domestic at all’ (AS, p. 136). Pullman admits that it was only when he finished writing the trilogy that he discovered Mrs Coulter’s love for Lyra, proven by her final act of self-sacrifice. Pullman feels her emotions are rather complex because she may resent her daughter

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for inadvertently stifling her ambitions while at the same time she desires to protect her at any cost.34 I do not disagree with Pullman. Mrs Coulter’s tragic flaw may be that she realizes far too late the importance of her relationship with her daughter, when Lyra is beyond trusting her or interested in following her influence. Her last ditch attempts at motherhood, while stumbling and inept, may come from what remains of her heart. But Pullman has often said that ‘the best way for a character to grow is to remove the obstacle of the parent […] If you want a child to have adventures, get rid of the people who are going to make it their first business to stop him or her falling into danger’.35 Valerie Frankel, who has written extensively on the particular qualities unique to the heroine’s journey, states: ‘When she awakens, the heroine must give birth to herself. She cannot remain asleep, cannot remain confined to her mother’s tower, under her control’.36 It is precisely Mrs Coulter’s matriarchal failure that leads Lyra to seek role models in other women. Diane M. Duncan proposes that ‘surrogate mother figures are to be found in the witch, Serafina Pekkala, Ma Costa, the gyptian, and Mary Malone, the scientist. These characters […] show the constancy of love and loyalty which […] Lyra lack[s] in [her] family’.37 Through the guidance of Ma Costa, Serafina Pekkala and Dr Mary Malone, Lyra is influenced by both ‘vulnerable’ and ‘invulnerable’ goddess archetypes,38 and her journey to wholeness begins with the influence of Ma Costa rather than Mrs Coulter. Ma Costa as Demeter Valerie Frankel’s essay ‘Of Wands and Spyglasses: Reconciling the Hero’s and Heroine’s Journey’ emphasizes that Each ruling god is a warrior-conqueror, but the goddess creates the world, growing and sustaining nature itself. She is the Supreme Mother, life incarnate. To emulate her, the heroine becomes her own life-giver and family protector, a goal which heroines risk life and health to achieve.39

While Lyra does not become a mother in a literal sense, she becomes a protector, and it is the powerful influence of the matriarch Ma Costa that guides her on this path. Ma Costa closely resembles Demeter in this first description: ‘[Her voice] was a mighty voice, a woman’s voice, but a woman with lungs of brass and leather […] Ma Costa […] had clouted Lyra dizzy on two occasions but given

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her hot gingerbread on three’ (NL, p. 54).40 Bolen points out that Demeter may provide direction and nurturing (which could include punishment for ill behaviour) and offerings of nourishing food to children who are not her own.41 When Lyra learns that Ma Costa, ‘a queen’ in the gyptian clan (NL, p. 56), was her foster mother when she was a baby, she understands why this woman has acted as her surrogate mother all along. In fact, the gyptian mothers are probably all Demeter archetypes, for they instinctively watch over all the children and shower them with love and affection, even those who are not their own (NL, p. 56). Even though Ma Costa hides her connection to Lyra at first, her actions belie a desire to protect the young girl. When Lyra escapes from Mrs Coulter’s flat and is briefly captured by Turk slave traders, the waiting gyptians rescue her, and Ma Costa holds her close and allows her dæmon ‘to lick Pantalaimon’s wildcat-head’ (NL, p. 106). She provides nourishment when one of her ‘own’ is harmed by offering Lyra Billy’s crib and giving her a cup of warm milk, making her breakfast the next morning and warning her to stay out of sight lest harm befall her (NL). Once Lyra is able to see that the formidable Ma Costa is actually quite nurturing, she becomes aware of Ma Costa’s pain over the abduction of her son Billy. Christine Downing indicates that for the Demeter archetype, loss is linked inextricably with motherhood. As Demeter loses her child, she moves from nurturing mother to grieving mother, reflecting ‘the cutting fear of loss, the searing pain of loss’ as her child is taken.42 Ma Costa’s mothering is also bound up in loss. After she hid in a closet with Lyra and Pan, keeping them safe while Lord Asriel fought Mrs Coulter’s husband to the death (NL, p. 123), she was not given the chance to raise Lyra because she was taken to a priory (NL, p. 124). Ma Costa incurs a second loss with Billy’s abduction. Because the Demeter archetype will move mountains to attempt to save her child and the other children for whom she functions as a mother figure, it is natural that she plays a major part in convincing the gyptians to head north to rescue the abducted children. As Demeter, Ma Costa’s influence is evident primarily in the way Lyra handles her interaction with the kidnapped and horribly mutilated/severed child Tony Makarios. When she enters the fish house despite her fear and rescues him, Lyra adopts the role of protectress and nurturer; despite her revulsion, her empathy prevails and she treats him with love and respect (NL, p. 217). Later, Lyra becomes incensed at the men who take the fish Tony had been clutching in place of his dæmon Ratter and she carves a coin to put in his

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mouth in a solemn farewell ceremony. Such acts are evidence of her growth from the disrespectful child who once switched deceased scholars’ dæmon coins to a caring, nurturing mother figure (NL). She retains these qualities when she is woken from her drugged sleep and reunited with Will, at which point she feels happy to know that she can care for him again (AS, p. 170). When she begins to feel affection for the Lady Salmakia, who had ‘a voice that would lap you in safety and warm you with love’, Lyra even reflects on her own desire to become a mother (AS, p. 278). Even though Lyra gains these nurturing qualities, she is not destined to be a mother in the context of the story or immediately after, whereas Persephone in myth did bear a child whom she, too, later lost.43 Rather, when she begins her transition to young adult, Lyra is inspired by the Artemis and Athena archetypes, and the Demeter influence wanes. As Ma Costa predicts, Lyra is not a water person like the gyptians, but a fire person, with ‘witch oil in [her] soul’ (NL, p. 113); therefore, unlike Persephone who followed in Demeter’s footsteps, Lyra must follow an alternative path. The Maiden or Kore form of Persephone is symbolized by the young girl who lacks an identity.44 She is ‘unaware of her desires or strengths’ and her sexuality lies dormant.45 When she matures and grows into a woman, she becomes a guide to others in the underworld into perpetuity, cyclically returning to her mother Demeter for most of the year but descending to the underworld for a time. Auxier claims that ‘Will, acting the part of Hades, steals Lyra (Persephone) from Mrs Coulter (Demeter) and takes her to the underworld to be queen there’,46 yet Will does not ‘steal’ Lyra. Rather, he aids in her rescue and they flee. Later, Lyra makes the decision to go to the land of the dead in fulfilment of her prophetic dream (AS, p. 65). Lyra tells Will she must apologize to Roger: ‘it was my fault he was dead […] I got to go down into the land of the dead and find him, and […] and say sorry’ (AS, p. 165). Lyra also calls her own death to her side when she cries out that she will risk dying to save Roger (AS). Persephone is forced to face death, but Lyra makes the choice to do so. Although Lyra requires the assistance of Will to cut into the underworld with the subtle knife, he is no Hades. On the contrary, he is Hermes, the god who guides others to the land of the dead; the god who can move between worlds. Lyra alters Persephone’s path when she and Will find a way for those trapped to escape, and she does not return cyclically as Persephone does. Instead, No-Name, the harpy, becomes akin to the traditional Persephone figure, because she will thenceforth serve as the guide to others, thereafter known by

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her new name, ‘Gracious Wings’, given by Lyra in recognition of her new role (AS, p. 386). Because Lyra undergoes the trial of separation from Pan, she transforms from maiden to woman. Although Ma Costa’s Demeter qualities have guided Lyra in negotiating the world of the dead and escaping from it, she requires the assistance of two other dominant women, Serafina Pekkala and Mary Malone, to learn the traits of the invulnerable goddesses, qualities that will prepare her to hold power apart from a man and help lead her on her personal path as she re-ascends to the worlds above. Serafina Pekkala as Artemis Downing describes Artemis as ‘not only the hunter but protector of all that is wild and vulnerable [...] Artemis is herself the wilderness, the wild and untamed, and not simply its mistress’.47 In some cases Artemis is a virgin sexually, but in others her virginity is more symbolic, indicating that she does not belong to any man but remains free.48 Her ‘arrows bring a swift and gentle death to women’ if they are dying or facing irreparable harm.49 Bolen describes Artemis with her bow and arrows as ‘the archer with unerring aim’50 who is adept at focused concentration and the ability to remain centred on her goal.51 She is the antidote to the world of patriarchy, a commanding presence and principled independent woman with driving ambition and unshakeable belief in causes she supports.52 Clearly there are many parallels between Serafina Pekkala and Artemis. Serafina fights with a bow and arrow while she uses a branch of cloud pine to fly, and her dæmon Kaisa is a great bird, making her and her counterpart literally and figuratively the winged goddess, a name by which Artemis was known. She is respectful of nature and most at home in areas away from civilization. Farder Coram tells Lyra that the witches live in the forests and the tundra, for ‘their business is with the wild’ (NL, p. 165). Serafina takes lovers, like Farder Coram who once saved her life (NL, p. 164), but she can never commit to them long term because there are no male witches in her world, and she would live for hundreds of years while her male partner would age and die. While she makes the point that witches do not engage in fighting over petty concerns as humans do, she is a great warrior who is highly skilled in battle, calm and intent on success in missions she deems of vital importance (NL, p. 309). Lyra actually meets Serafina’s dæmon Kaisa before she meets the witch herself, when he comes to Lyra’s aid in freeing the

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severed dæmons from their cages (NL). Later Serafina saves Lyra by shooting an arrow at a Tartar who has captured her (NL, p. 299). She is described as ‘young’ and ‘fair’, ‘wearing strips of black silk’ (NL, p. 302). Despite the freezing temperatures, she is impervious to cold and rides her cloud pine with dignity and grace (NL, p. 302). When she explains what being a witch is like to Lyra, she says that flying is as essential to them as breathing, and that they welcome the feeling of cold air because doing so allows them to feel other phenomena that humans cannot, ‘like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the Aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin’ (NL, p. 313). Serafina describes men as servants or lovers, noting that ‘men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies’ (NL, p. 314). This is in keeping with the independence of Artemis who may be sexually involved with men but who remains detached from them. Additionally, like Artemis and her band of nymphs, Serafina commands several other warrior witches. She chooses 20 of her most skilled sisters to fight alongside her in the new world Asriel has opened (SK, p. 53);53 they help free Lyra and Will when they are trapped in the temple at Cittàgazze (SK), and later most of the witches leave to fight again while leaving two ‘who stood close by, arrows at their bowstrings, guarding Will and Lyra’ (SK, p. 268). Some of Lyra’s acts can be seen as influenced by her exposure to this Artemis archetype. When a witch is captured and being tortured by Mrs Coulter, Serafina makes herself invisible to get close and then delivers a swift death to her sister by ‘slid[ing] her knife gently into the witch’s heart’ to spare her the agony of Mrs Coulter’s brutality (SK, p. 40). This is similar to Lyra and Will releasing the ghosts from the land of the dead. They know that the ghosts are in pain, cold and alone, hungry for the warmth of human connection, so by travelling through the underworld and cutting a hole into the barrier cutting them off from the rest of the universe(s), are able to escape this horror and become part of all the cosmos (AS, p. 363). Lyra earlier ‘betrays’ Roger in unknowingly taking him to his death by bringing him to her father who must separate a victim from his dæmon, but she offers him passage from the realm of the dead first and he becomes part of every living thing for all eternity (AS, p. 364). Lyra is also influenced by Serafina’s choice of solitude over a committed relationship. While Serafina had a relationship with Farder Coram and bore him a son, she chose to separate from him, knowing the pain he would feel at watching himself age and become infirm while she stayed young and vibrant, a trope that alludes to the plight of unions between mortals and gods/goddesses in Greek mythology. Similarly, Lyra chooses to

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separate from Will so that the final window can remain for the dead to escape. It is Will who wishes the last window to stay open for them, allowing them to continue their relationship and perhaps one day have their own children, while Lyra is the strong one who ‘shake[s] her head’ and says ‘“No…we can’t”’ (AS, p. 492). Also, Lyra’s choice to voluntarily separate from Pan is a trial that all the witches have undertaken that culminates in the ability to travel independently of their dæmons and to gain deeper insight and wisdom. Lyra’s ability to separate from Pan is described in ‘Lyra and the Birds’, a story which demonstrates that all sorts of birds have become protective of this young witch. Additionally, Will’s presence is evoked in this short work, for as she and Pan return to her school having nearly escaped death, they hear a nightingale singing, an obvious nod to a form that Kirjava, Will’s dæmon, takes before he settles (AS, p. 473).54 Mary Harris Russell contends that Will’s symbolic presence here and the crumbs Lyra leaves for the birds ‘[affirm] a nurturing connection with actual birds’,55 which ties Lyra to the Artemis archetype as protectress of animals. Because Lyra is a fire, not a water person, the Artemis archetype, represented by the witches, holds a greater influence on the person Lyra becomes than the Demeter archetype. Yet in Lyra’s journey to wholeness and her ascension from the underworld, she is not Artemis alone, but a mixture of Artemis and Athena. Dr Mary Malone as Athena Whereas Artemis is at home in the wilds of nature, Athena is linked to the city and civilization, the goddess of wisdom and crafts.56 She ‘values rational thinking and stands for the domination of will and intellect over instinct and nature’ and seeks to order or quantify the wilderness.57 She is driven by her intellect and not her emotion. She may work alongside men but avoids long-term commitments with them. A model of the ‘sensible adult’, she usually rises high in business or academia and values educational pursuits.58 As the goddess of crafts, she creates both beautiful and functional materials, and she embodies the spirit of one who ‘lives for her work’.59 Margaret and Michael Rustin assert that Mary Malone serves as ‘an important corrective to the earlier delineations of women in the trilogy’.60 Because she has risen to a respected position in academia without resorting to using her feminine wiles or deceptive practices like Mrs Coulter, Mary offers Lyra the Athena archetype as a more positive role model. Rustin and Rustin argue that Mary gives Lyra a sense of order, protection and fidelity, embodying most closely the

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role of elder sister or aunt. These critics also note that young people need leaders outside their immediate families, explaining that Mary ‘has the independence, intelligence, scientific imagination and life experience which can inspire Lyra’.61 Furthermore, rather than try to stunt Lyra’s sexual growth, she helps her to see the potential in intimacy.62 Mary is also linked to Athena by the animals with which she is associated; just as Athena is represented by an owl, a bird or a serpent in Greek mythology,63 Mary is symbolically the serpent/temptress while her dæmon is revealed to be an Alpine chough (AS, p. 477). Lyra is drawn to Mary when the alethiometer sends her to the Dark Matter Research Unit where Mary works (SK, p. 85). The truth-telling device reveals that Mary was not always a scientist but a nun who left the spiritual path in order to avoid having to deal with the concepts of good and evil (SK, p. 96). Interestingly, Lyra does not just learn from Mary, but Mary also learns from Lyra, for she tells Mary that intellect can only take her so far in discovering the answers to the questions she poses. When Lyra first enters Mary’s office, she sees a picture of the symbols of the I Ching (SK, p. 83). The I Ching is related to the alethiometer in that both are divination methods that require the diviner to form a question in her mind but to see the answer from all angles, remaining open to allowing a bit of mystery to inform the answer. Karen Patricia Smith points out that the I Ching is ‘symbolic of the changes [Mary] has undergone and will undergo […] I Ching serves as a crucial training guide for what Mary must do to both survive and complete her mission successfully’.64 Mary is stumped by her research into dark matter because she has not yet learned how to frame her question. Lyra, adept at using the alethiometer because she has had no preconceptions or instructions, a Daoist notion, offers Mary a solution, instructing her to teach the Cave to speak in words, not pictures (SK, p. 96). Mary follows Lyra’s suggestion with success; thus Lyra discovers she is an effective teacher who encourages Mary to combine a sense of spirituality and the unknown with scientific facts and procedures. Mary is the consummate student, approaching the new world she finds with curiosity. When she studies mulefa biology and evolution, ‘she learned so much that she felt like a child again’ (AS, p. 123). She uses her intellect and methods of inquiry to compile a dictionary of their words and learns the language of this highly intelligent species (AS, p. 124), yet simultaneously, she uses the I Ching in the way Lyra uses the alethiometer to ensure that she is following the right path. When the mulefa realize that her invention of the amber spyglass may hold the key to discovering why the trees are dying, she feels an

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enormous responsibility to use her wisdom to help them: Mary ‘felt more than ever like the new pupil at school where they had high expectations of her’ (AS, p. 234). Lyra awakens a dormant feeling in Mary in urging her to be more open to experiences that cannot be quantified by science, which encourages Mary to relate to her the story of why she stopped being a nun. Her tale demonstrates the importance of allowing oneself to be open to one’s sensual nature. Lyra’s ascension as Persephone begins when she leaves the underworld, but it continues when she hears Mary’s story: ‘She felt as if she had been handed the key to a great house she hadn’t known was there, a house that was somehow inside her, and as she turned the key, she felt other doors opening deep in the darkness, and lights coming on’ (AS, p. 444). Mary tells Lyra that once she convinced herself that she could be content and whole without having experienced intimacy, but eventually she chose to let herself be open to all experiences, leaving her life as a nun to live with a man (AS, p. 443). Eventually, she elected to return to a life of solitude and focused on her work and hobbies, unencumbered by her vows to the Church; thus Mary, like Serafina, is not a virgin physically but emotionally, for both have chosen to remain unmarried and forego long-term relationships. Since Mary as a trusted guide delivers this message to Lyra, it awakens Lyra’s own curiosity; she is transformed fully from maiden to woman when she gives her virginity to Will. Later, like Mary, Lyra chooses to live and work on her own and follow her calling to protect all the worlds as opposed to committing to Will in a relationship. The effects of Mary Malone’s guidance are most apparent as the trilogy ends. In the past, Lyra did not put much stock in education, but when she returns to Jordan College the Master introduces her to Dame Hannah who runs a boarding school, St Sophia’s (Sophia means ‘wisdom’, Athena’s primary trait), where she will do her life’s work, learning again to read the alethiometer (AS, p. 515). As Lyra says to Pan, they cannot possibly build the Republic of Heaven ‘if they put themselves first. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard’ (AS, p. 518). Two years later, in Pullman’s short story ‘Lyra and the Birds’, Lyra is studying on the roof of Jordan College when she becomes embroiled in another controversy concerning a witch and her dæmon.65 The scholar who becomes her dissertation adviser, Dr Polstead, is introduced in this piece, and amid the collection of papers that make up Once Upon a Time in the North two letters from Lyra appear: one is to a friend

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named Tom in which she tells him that she will be attempting an MPhil in Economic History, offering her working title of her dissertation to him with the note ‘It must be a winner’;66 the second is a letter to Dr Polstead, asking how to properly cite ‘ephemera’ such as newspaper clippings. This text also contains her official certificate for Dissertations for Master’s Courses.67 Russell states that ‘The Lyra we glimpse here is becoming more accomplished at living in her actual, scholarly world and at going through the process of making meaning […] for a purpose’.68 Thus, the young girl who once had little respect for education has followed in the footsteps of the Athena archetype, who has influenced her to understand the importance of gaining wisdom and remaining true to her personal calling. Final thoughts Mrs Coulter’s influence over Lyra is both troubling and limited; it is impossible to discern whether her intentions towards Lyra are self-serving or genuine. Even if she is sincere, her reach and influence are narrow because she attempts to wield power in a patriarchal system. Therefore, Lyra must seek stronger, more varied influences. When she is the Maiden or Kore portion of Persephone, Ma Costa is her Demeter archetype, nurturing her and teaching her by example to be fiercely protective of those she loves. When she begins to awaken to the more mature side of her role as Persephone, she adopts the guidance of Serafina Pekkala as Artemis, a fierce, beautiful and independent fighter who values herself and her autonomy and bond with animals and nature. As she continues to explore the path she must follow, she is affected most deeply by Dr Mary Malone as Athena, a woman with whom she enjoys a mutually beneficial pedagogical relationship as both learn to better balance the spiritual and the secular. As Maureen Murdock argues, ‘the heroine must become a spiritual warrior […] she must not discard nor give up what she has learned […] but learn to view her hard-earned skills and successes […] as one part of the entire journey […] to use these skills to work toward the larger quest of bringing people together, rather than for her own individual gain’.69 The ability to serve both herself and others constitutes wholeness.70 As Valerie Frankel says, ‘The heroine’s journey is a path of cleverness and intuition, buoyed by water and earth. It is a path of birth and patience, or guardianship, but never of passivity’.71 When Lyra’s story concludes in His Dark Materials, she exhibits the characteristics of all three goddesses. Two years later, having chosen to

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close the window to Will forever, she moves forward to embrace her Artemis and Athena qualities, ready to defend herself and the innocent if necessary while embracing knowledge, truth and wisdom in her study of history and the alethiometer. While the alchemist Sebastian Makepeace is referred to as someone ‘on the fringes of scholarship’, ‘eccentric’ and ‘cracked’,72 Lyra sees in him a single-minded purpose much like her own: the desire to find the answers. As he says to Lyra, ‘Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it’.73 Such a statement is reminiscent of Joseph Campbell’s directive: ‘The way to find your own myth is to determine those traditional symbols that speak to you and use them, you might say, as bases for meditation’.74 Had Lyra followed in the footsteps of her biological mother, she would have grown to become a liar and deceiver, narcissistic and self-serving. Instead, after receiving care and love from a foster mother, Lyra summons her own death and faces the underworld in hopes of saving another, and her voluntary separation from the deepest part of her soul rewards her with the courage to integrate the characteristics of the two women who symbolize the goddesses who gathered narcissus flowers alongside Persephone at the time of her abduction. As Farder Coram says, ‘To go into the dark of death is a thing we all fear […] But if there’s a way out for that part of us that has to go down there, then it makes my heart lighter’ (AS, p. 500). Therefore, in making the decisions that honour her own self and the whole of humanity, and in continuing to look for the symbols that reveal deeper truths, Lyra finds and follows her pathway to bliss. Pullman has spent many years of his life re-telling myths. Perhaps, then, His Dark Materials is a re-imagination of the myth of Persephone, only in Pullman’s rendition Persephone is ascending, finding that through her chosen path of solitude and study she may have the greater impact on all the worlds if she remains in the light. Notes 1. Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, David Kudler (ed.), (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004): 89. 2. Ibid.: 133. 3. See Valerie Estelle Frankel, ‘Of Wands and Spyglasses: Reconciling the Hero’s and Heroine’s Journeys’, The Washington and Jefferson College Review, 47 (2011): 17–31. This article provides an examination of the way the hero’s and heroine’s journeys differ through an analysis of Lyra’s quest ‘to rescue family members and lost loved ones, establishing herself as a sacred mother rather than ruler of the external world’ (p. 18).

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4. Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: 159. 5. Maureen Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey (Boston: Shambhala, 1990): 2. Murdock provides Campbell’s justification for his comment in his own words: ‘In the whole mythological tradition the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to. When a woman realizes what her wonderful character is, she’s not going to get messed up with the notion of being pseudo-male’ (quoted in Murdock: 2). Also, in Campbell’s ‘Dialogues’ he says that he ‘wanted to bring female heroes in’ when he first wrote about the hero’s journey, but the only way was to use fairytales, because he believed that fairytales came from women while myths came from men. ‘The women were too busy; they had too damn much to do to sit around thinking about stories’, Campbell claims (p. 145). 6. Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey: 3. 7. Randall E. Auxier, ‘Thus Spake Philip Pullman’, in Richard Greene and Rachel Robison (eds.), The Golden Compass and Philosophy: God Bites the Dust (Chicago: Open Court, 2009): 19–20. 8. Ibid.: 20. 9. Ibid.: 19. 10. Ibid.: 18. 11. See Susan Redington Bobby, Beyond His Dark Materials: Innocence and Experience in the Fiction of Philip Pullman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). My monograph explores this theme in the majority of the works Pullman published outside the realm of His Dark Materials. 12. Lilijana Burcar, ‘Gender Politics and the Return of the Innocent Child in His Dark Materials’, The Washington and Jefferson College Review, 57 (2011): 33–50 (35). 13. Ibid.: 36. 14. Ibid.: 96. 15. Philip Pullman, ‘I have a feeling this all belongs to me’ in George Beahm (ed.), Discovering the Golden Compass: A Guide to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2007): 9–33 (26). 16. Ibid.: 26. 17. Philip Pullman, Ancient Civilizations (Exeter: Wheaton, 1981): 30–1. 18. Ibid.: 38. 19. Claire Squires, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum, 2003): 62. 20. Karen Patricia Smith, ‘Tradition, Transformation, and the Bold Emergence: Fantastic Legacy and Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ in Millicent Lenz with Carole Scott (eds.) His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005): 135–51 (146). 21. Ibid. 22. Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives (San Francisco: Harper, 2004): 135.

162 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

Susan Redington Bobby Ibid.: 171. Ibid.: 173. Ibid.: 174. Ibid.: 185. Ibid.: 177. David Colbert, The Magical Worlds of Philip Pullman (New York: Berkley, 2006): 76. Philip Pullman, quoted in Colbert, The Magical Worlds of Philip Pullman: 77. Quoted in Frankel, ‘Of Wands and Spyglasses’: 26. Ibid. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (New York: Knopf, 2000): 206. Granted, all of these interpretations of Mrs Coulter’s character come from male characters, which raises the question of her being unfairly assessed. However, every female character with whom Mrs Coulter comes in contact also holds a similar view of her traits. She seems to be hated and/or feared by all characters, regardless of gender. Philip Pullman, quoted in Colbert, The Magical Worlds of Philip Pullman: 82–3. Philip Pullman in an email to the author, 4 December (2011). Valerie Estelle Frankel, From Girl to Goddess:The Heroine’s Journey through Myth and Legend (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), loc. 402 (ebook). Diane M. Duncan, ‘Love, Loss and Magic: Connecting Author and Story’, Changing English, 14.3 (2007): 271–84 (279). Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman: 135. Frankel, ‘Of Wands and Spyglasses’: 19. Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (London: Point Scholastic, 1995). Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman: 172–3. Christine Downing, The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine (New York: Continuum, 1996): 39. Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey: 98. Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman: 199. Ibid: 202. Auxier, ‘Thus Spake Philip Pullman’: 19–20. Downing, The Goddess: 164–5. Ibid.: 175. Ibid.: 165. Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman: 46. Ibid.: 49. Ibid.: 57–8. Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (New York: Knopf, 1997): 53. Philip Pullman, Lyra’s Oxford (New York: Knopf, 2003): 46. Mary Harris Russell, ‘Kicking Up Some Dust’, in Greene and Robison, The Golden Compass and Philosophy: 87–97 (93). Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman: 75.

Goddess Archetypes and Lyra’s Journey to Wholeness 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

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Ibid.: 76. Ibid.: 79–80. Ibid.: 80, 100. Margaret Rustin and Michael Rustin, ‘Learning to Say Goodbye: An Essay on Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass’, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 29.3 (2003): 415–28 (420). Ibid. Ibid. Downing: 123–4. Smith: 145–6. Philip Pullman, Lyra’s Oxford (New York: Knopf, 2003): 3–4. Philip Pullman, Once Upon a Time in the North (New York: Knopf, 2008), n.pg. Ibid. Russell, ‘Kicking Up Some Dust’: 95–6. Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey: 11. Ibid. Frankel, ‘Of Wands and Spyglasses’, loc. 183. Pullman, Lyra’s Oxford: 21. Ibid.: 45. Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: 97.

9 Interview with Philip Pullman Philip Pullman, with Tommy Halsdorf and Catherine Butler Background to the trilogy TH/CB: Was there a precise moment of genesis for His Dark Materials, and how did you proceed after the initial trigger, if indeed there was one? PP: I suppose the initial trigger came at lunch with my publisher, David Fickling, when we discovered that we both loved Paradise Lost. The idea of doing a sort of fantasy with the same story first took root that day. TH/CB: You acknowledge debts to Milton and Blake and an essay by Kleist as major influences, but in some of your other works there is a strong element of German Romanticism (Count Karlstein, Clockwork). How far does this feature enter His Dark Materials, and why specifically German Romanticism? PP: Because I love it. My recent work on the Grimm tales has confirmed it: I have a German soul. I suppose it was mostly the music that got to me first, but the literature came not long after. Hoffmann is another name that might come up in that context. TH/CB: In your introduction to the 2005 Oxford University Press edition of Paradise Lost, you write that Satan’s flight evokes ‘a complex and majestic image’ and continue by saying: ‘This is a story about devils. It’s not a story about God.’ Yet, in His Dark Materials, which you have called a retelling of Paradise Lost, Eve rather than Satan is the hero. Why is this? PP: I wanted the story to end on a positive note, with the triumph of curiosity. Paradise Lost’s final page or so is a 164

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masterpiece of sadness and resignation, but by that point the devils have been done away with and the protagonistic baton passed to Adam and Eve, who sin and have to pay for it. The end of Satan and his fellow devils is a coarse medieval comedy, as if Milton could think of nothing better than to turn them all into snakes. I wanted to show the positive aspects of the end of innocence. Genre TH/CB: You are a passionate admirer of fairy tales, having written a number of works deriving from them, and retold fairy tales such as Puss in Boots or the recent Grimm collection. What is the fascination with these stories and in what ways do they enter His Dark Materials? PP: I love fairytales for the reasons I set out in the introduction to my Grimm selection, which are too long to go into here. But there is hardly any fairytale influence in His Dark Materials, which is a novel—a very different kind of thing. TH/CB: Given that you once described the trilogy as ‘stark realism’, what purpose do the fantasy elements in your story serve? In addition, you have mentioned being influenced by David Lindsay, saying that A Voyage to Arcturus is the only fantasy you really like (along with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master & Margarita). What did you take from these works? Why and how are these stories—and yours—different from other fantasy stories such as Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or Rowling’s Harry Potter series (some of which you have criticized)? PP: I found that I could use the fantasy elements (the dæmons, for example) to say something about humanity and human nature. They would have been useless otherwise—they’d only have got in the way. But the dæmon allowed me to show visibly and dramatically the difference between innocence and experience, which was my overall theme. What I object to in much of the fantasy I’ve read is that it seems to say nothing at all interesting about the condition of being human. If a novel can’t do that, it’s hardly worth reading. TH/CB: What role does magic take in the book? How distinct is it from science? Or philosophy? PP: The magic I talk about is difficult and not always effective, and not always magic, either. The witches’ power

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of invisibility, for example they recognize what Will does as being exactly the same thing. He is good at not being noticed; I describe their invisibility as a kind of fiercely held modesty. Same thing. TH/CB: Several critics have noticed close parallels with Narnia (for example, Lyra’s hiding in the wardrobe like Lucy, or Mrs Coulter’s seduction of Tony Makarios resembling the White Witch’s seduction of Edmund, among other elements). Was this deliberate, and if so what was its purpose? PP: There are no parallels at all. Where else could Lyra hide? Is every kind of seduction only a reference to Lewis’s White Witch? What nonsense. TH/CB: How far can the trilogy be seen as postmodernist, or maybe as returning to older narrative techniques and values? Concerning the Biblical backdrop to the story, could it be described as a ‘reverse’ or dissident allegory? PP: The pleasures of labelling the kind of thing a book is are often denied to those who write the books. You can describe it as anything you like.

The world of His Dark Materials TH/CB: Among many other things His Dark Materials contains an idealistic ecological vision in the world of the mulefa. Was this one of your central concerns in writing the book(s), and is this vision something that touches you as an author and a person? PP: Yes, I think that’s fair. While it wasn’t a central concern in the way that innocence/experience was, it was a concern. I was very struck by a sentence I read in Eduardo Galeano’s recent Children of the Days: ‘If nature was a bank, they would have rescued it long ago.’ TH/CB: The history of the world of His Dark Materials is close to ours in a way that suggests the two ‘split’ at some point around the Reformation—yet it is also fundamentally different (it has always had dæmons, for example). To what extent do you see the work as an example of ‘alternative history’? PP: That’s pretty well exactly what it is. But I didn’t want to get bogged down in comparative timelines and lists of

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kings and queens and what have you. All that sort of thing just gets in the way. It’s the sort of thing that fascinates fantasy fans and nobody else. TH/CB: What exactly is fixed when a dæmon settles, and does this limit the possibilities of adults’ future development? PP: Well, its form is fixed, of course. If your dæmon settles as a magpie, a magpie is what he/she will be for the rest of your life. And its form will express something important about your nature. But it’s also a source of strength to know what kind of person you are. TH/CB: One of my students had an interesting question that I thought I would pass to you—possibly you have an answer or hypothesis What happens if, as unfortunately sometimes occurs, a human (or dæmon) has a mental illness or disability? Are both affected, and what happens at puberty? Is Dust still attracted and the dæmon fixed? PP: It’s a good question, and if I ever needed to have a character like this in the story I’d no doubt find an answer for it. In fact I’m certain I would, because the answer would be part of the story too. But I wouldn’t have such a character or situation just decorating the edges of the narrative, so to speak—it would have to be central, other things would hang on it, the situation would have to be of fundamental importance. But I can’t find an answer out of the blue.

Religion and controversy TH/CB: You have claimed that with the trilogy you are just telling a story, but the books have undeniably been read as conveying strong messages nevertheless. Have you been pleased or shocked by the various reactions to the story, or both? Also, how far is the narrator removed from the author? PP: The relationship between the author and the narrator is something very interesting, which would take me a long book to go into. But that’s a different matter from the ‘controversy’ business. Frankly, I’m not shocked by anything that people say. I’m pleased that they say anything at all. TH/CB: What are your thoughts on the afterlife, given that His Dark Materials rejects the Christian version but offers an

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alternative vision? Was your writing at all influenced by non-Abrahamic Eastern religions/philosophies? PP: Not much influenced by those. I don’t know much about them. This vision is more Greek than anything else, I’d have thought. TH/CB: The rebel angels tell Mary Malone that above all, they want vengeance. Is this not a little strange, as surely there are more pressing (and ethical) concerns at stake in the war against the Authority? PP: No doubt angels have their failings as much as we do. TH/CB: Now that a few years have passed, what are your feelings on the film, the polemic surrounding it, and the fact that the second and third books have not been? Is there hope for a future production? Do you feel that it was killed by the religious right in America, as Sam Elliott has suggested? PP: I think Sam Elliott was probably right. But I also think that the only way they could have made all three parts would have been to make them all simultaneously. They certainly couldn’t reassemble the same cast now: for one thing, Dakota Blue Richards has grown up, and for another Daniel Craig is much more expensive. I don’t think there’s much point in trying to do it all over again with a different cast and director. What I think might work, on the other hand, would be a TV series of ample length, such as Game of Thrones. You never know.

The future TH/CB: The world of His Dark Materials has been extended by a sequel, Lyra’s Oxford, as well as a His Dark Materials prequel, Once Upon a Time in the North. Rumours suggest that the long-awaited Book of Dust will continue and add to these stories. After that, will there be more stories to come or do you feel that world will then be fully explored? When did you decide on this continuation and why? PP: Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North are jeux d’esprit, no more than that. The Book of Dust, however, is something more substantial. I’m writing it now, and I hope you’ll excuse me if I don’t say very much about

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it. That would be like digging up a plant to see how the roots are growing. It will take me all this year [2013] and all next to finish, so I estimate that it will be published at the end of 2015. But that’s a guess. It’s on its way, though. TH/CB: Is His Dark Materials a burden—something to which every new book is inevitably compared, and from which every new book is a breaking away? So many years on, what are your feelings about the trilogy? PP: I suppose it might be a burden if I hadn’t done anything else. But I have written several very different things since then: my last two books, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ and my selection of tales from the Brothers Grimm, could hardly be more different from His Dark Materials, or from each other. I’m not worried about that sort of comparison. To be honest, what other people think matters very little to me. I’m glad if they like what I’ve written, of course, and I’m well aware that the fact that many people have liked His Dark Materials has made it possible for me to live without the fear of poverty in old age, which is a great blessing; but I’d write just the same whether people liked it or not.

Selected Bibliography and Further Reading The following list is not by any means complete, but intended as a guide to some of the major works by and about Philip Pullman and the His Dark Materials trilogy.

Works by Philip Pullman His Dark Materials Pullman, Philip. Northern Lights (London: Point Scholastic, 1995; Retitled The Golden Compass in the United States). Pullman, Philip. The Subtle Knife (London: Point Scholastic, 1997). Pullman, Philip. The Amber Spyglass (London: Point Scholastic, 2000). (A ‘Tenth Anniversary’ edition with appendix material by Pullman, illustrated by Ian Beck, was published by Scholastic in 2005.) Pullman, Philip. Lyra’s Oxford (Oxford and New York: David Fickling Books, 2003). Pullman, Philip. Once Upon a Time in the North (Oxford and New York: David Fickling Books, 2008). Pullman, Philip. The Book of Dust. [forthcoming]

The Sally Lockhart quartet Pullman, Philip. The Ruby in the Smoke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Pullman, Philip. The Shadow in the North (New York: Knopf, 1988); Originally published as The Shadow in the Plate Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pullman, Philip. The Tiger in the Well (New York: Knopf, 1990). Pullman, Philip. The Tin Princess (New York: Knopf, 1994).

Fairy tales and illustrated stories Pullman, Philip. Count Karlstein, or The Ride of the Demon Huntsman (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982). Pullman, Philip. Spring-Heeled Jack: A Story of Bravery and Evil (London: Doubleday, 1989). Pullman, Philip. The Wonderful Story of Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp (London: Scholastic, 1993). Pullman, Philip. The Firework-Maker’s Daughter (London: Doubleday, 1995). Pullman, Philip. Clockwork, or All Wound Up (London: Doubleday, 1996). Pullman, Philip. Mossycoat (London: Scholastic, 1998). Pullman, Philip. I was a Rat! or The Scarlet Slippers (London: Doubleday, 1999). Pullman, Philip. Puss in Boots (London: Transworld, 2000).

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Pullman, Philip. The Scarecrow and his Servant (London: Doubleday, 2004). Pullman, Philip. Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (New York:Viking, 2012).

The New Cut Gang Pullman, Philip. Thunderbolt’s Waxwork (London: Viking Penguin, 1994). Pullman, Philip. The Gas-Fitters’ Ball (London: Viking Penguin, 1995).

Other novels Pullman, Philip. The Haunted Storm (London: NEL, 1972). Pullman, Philip. Galatea (London: Gollancz, 1976). Pullman, Philip. How to be Cool (London: Heinemann, 1987). Pullman, Philip. The Broken Bridge (London: Macmillan, 1990). Pullman, Philip. The Butterfly Tattoo (London: Macmillan, 1998; originally published as The White Mercedes London: Macmillan, 1992). Pullman, Philip. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010).

Plays Pullman, Philip. Frankenstein:The Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Pullman, Philip. Sherlock Holmes and the Limehouse Horror (Walton-onThames: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1992).

Websites (www.philip-pullman.com): Philip Pullman’s official site offers a variety of autobiographical insights by the author on issues concerning his life and work, an interview and video archive, as well as a fan forum and Q&A section. (www.hisdarkmaterials.org/): This website claims to be part of a larger network, His Dark Media, which offers its community access to linked fantasy literature sites; however, apart from forum discussions little is available. Nevertheless, it offers a large amount of general information on the author, his books and The Golden Compass movie, collects all sorts of news, reviews essays and supplies a list of critical works. Furthermore, it boasts an image section, a lively fan forum and chatroom, as well as Srafopedia, a collaborative HDM encyclopedia. (www.bridgetothestars.net/): possesses similar features and facilities to hisdarkmaterials.org, though it is possibly not quite as popular. It is still worth a visit for both fans and scholars seeking information on and around His Dark Materials. In addition, it offers links to affiliate websites, and a section on educational resources.

Selected interviews and critical pieces Pullman is a versatile writer, whose interests range across literature and art, storytelling and narrative, religion, education and humanism—to take only the subjects most obviously relevant to His Dark Materials. The

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following is necessarily only a selection from his output, but includes pieces that illuminate the ideas and subject matter of the trilogy; its inspirations, both literary (Milton) and geographical (Oxford); Pullman’s working methods and artistic principles, his thoughts about children’s literature and the fantasy genre; and his reaction to the controversy occasioned by his books. Pullman, Philip. ‘Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech’ (1996): http://www. randomhouse.com/features/pullman/author/carnegie.php. Pullman, Philip. ‘The Dark Side of Narnia’. In The Guardian (Supplement), 1 October (1998): 6–7. Pullman, Philip. ‘Achuka Interview: Philip Pullman’, on Achuka Children’s Books website: http://www.achuka.co.uk/archive/interviews/ppint.php. Pullman, Philip. ‘Philip Pullman: Interview (Lexicon)’, Oxford: 11 August (2000): http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2000/08/interview-philip-pull man-august-2000.html. Pullman, Philip. ‘Dreaming of Spires’. In The Guardian (Lives and Letters). 27 July (2002): 28–9. Pullman, Philip. ‘Introduction’. In John Milton. Paradise Lost, Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 1–10. Pullman, Philip. ‘I Must Create a System’, The Blake Society, 25 October (2005): http://www.philip-pullman.com/assets_cm/files/PDF/i_must_ create_a_system.pdf. Pullman, Philip. ‘Foreword’. In Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale. Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook (eds.) (London: BBC, 2008): 1–12. Pullman, Philip. ‘The Moon Doth Shine as Bright as Day.’ The Humanist, 68(4), (2008): 20–4. Pullman, Philip and Marie Bridge. ‘Philip Pullman in Conversation with Marie Bridge’ Marie Bridge (ed.), On the Way Home: Conversations between Writers and Psychoanalysts (London: Karnac, 2007): 98–140. Pullman, Philip and Kerry Fried. ‘Amazon.com: Darkness Visible: An Interview with Philip Pullman: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ tg/feature/-/94589/103-9154051-3920629. Pullman, Philip and Susan Roberts. ‘A Dark Agenda?’, November (2002): http://www.surefish.co.uk/culture/features/pullman_interview.htm.

Features and adaptations Pullman’s works have inspired a number of different media adaptations, from radio plays and theatre productions, such as Nicholas Wright’s lauded Royal National Theatre Production of His Dark Materials, which premiered 20 December 2003, to television and big-screen movies. The most high-profile of these is undoubtedly New Line Cinema’s 2007 interpretation of the first book of the trilogy. In addition, a number of documentaries/interviews, ‘making of ’ accounts and other spinoff products have been released.

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Beyond The Golden Compass – The Magic of Philip Pullman. Dir. Jean-Pierre Isbouts. Koch & Pinnacle Vision, 2007. Documentary. His Dark Materials. Adapted by Nicholas Wright. London: National Theatre, 2004. Play. His Dark Materials Trilogy: BBC Radio 4 Full-cast Dramatization (BBC Audiobooks). BBC, 2003. Radio play. How to be Cool! Dir. Ian Emes. Granada TV, 1988. TV adaptation. I Was a Rat! Dir. Lawrie Lynd. BBC, 2001. Inside His Dark Materials. Dir. Gerry Malir. Artsmagic Ltd., 2006. Documentary/interviews. The Butterfly Tattoo. Dir. Phil Hawkins. Cinema Epoch, 2009. Film. The Golden Compass. Dir. Chris Weitz. New Line Cinema, 2007. Film. The Golden Compass. Sega, 2007. Video game. The Ruby in the Smoke. Dir. Brian Percival. BBC/WGBH Boston, 2006. Film. The Shadow in the North. Dir. John Alexander. BBC/WGBH Boston, 2007. Film. The World of Philip Pullman – His Life & Works. Scripted by Nicholas Tucker. Artsmagic Ltd., 2006. Biographical video. Wright, Nicholas. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: based on the novels by Philip Pullman, adapted by Nicholas Wright (London: Nick Hern, 2003).

Works on Philip Pullman The multiple universes of His Dark Materials constitute a world with a complex politics, physics, metaphysics and natural history of their own. Like other such worlds, notably those of Tolkien and J. K. Rowling, Pullman’s has been the subject of a number of explicatory and encyclopaedic guides. Some, such as Laurie Frost’s Definitive Guide to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, offer maps and annotations while others are more traditional literary introductions to the trilogy. Most of the books listed below are aimed at the general reader, with some—such as those by Vic Parker and Susan Reichard—being pitched particularly at a young adult audience.

Reader’s guides Beahm, George. Discovering The Golden Compass: A Guide to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2007). Colbert, David. The Magical Worlds of Philip Pullman (London: Penguin, 2006). Frost, Laurie. The Elements of His Dark Materials: A Guide to Philip Pullman’s Trilogy (Buffalo Grove, IL: The Fell Press, 2006). Frost, Laurie. The Definitive Guide to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (London: Scholastic, 2008). Gresh, Lois H. Exploring Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007). Parker,Vic. Philip Pullman (Writers Uncovered) (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2007).

174

Selected Bibliography and Further Reading

Parkin, Lance and Mark Jones. An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Philip Pullman’s Internationally Bestselling His Dark Materials Trilogy (London: Virgin Books, 2005). Reichard, Susan E. Philip Pullman, Master of Fantasy (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 2006). Simpson, Paul. The Rough Guide to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (London and New York: Rough Guides, 2007). Squires, Claire. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy: A Reader’s Guide (New York and London: Continuum, 2003). Squires, Claire. Philip Pullman – Master Storyteller: A Guide to the Worlds of His Dark Materials (New York and London: Continuum, 2007). Tucker, Nicholas. DarknessVisible: Inside theWorld of Philip Pullman (Cambridge: Wizard Books, 2003). Watkins, Tony. Dark Matter: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Philip Pullman (Southampton: Damaris, 2004).

Books on alternative productions Butler, Robert. The Art of Darkness: Staging the Philip Pullman Trilogy (London: National Theatre/Oberon Books, 2003). Haill, Lyn (ed.) Darkness Illuminated (London: National Theatre/Oberon Books, 2004).

Books on religion, spirituality and science The aspect of Pullman’s trilogy that has attracted most attention is its engagement with religion, and especially with the relationships between religion, science and spirituality. Several of the books listed in this section are written from a Christian perspective, either as critiques, like those of Michael Knowles or Peter Vere and Sandra Miesel, or in an attempt to reclaim Pullman as a writer within the Christian tradition, as in the cases of Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware or Donna Freitas and Jason King, who make the case for His Dark Materials as a ‘Christian classic’ (8). Other books take an expository approach, as in John and Mary Gribbin’s guide to the science of the trilogy, or Richard Greene and Rachel Robison’s collection exploring its philosophical implications. Both these books use Pullman’s work as a jumping-off point for a more general discussion. Bruner, Kurt and Jim Ware. Shedding Light on His Dark Materials: Exploring Hidden Spiritual Themes in Philip Pullman’s Popular Series (Carol Stream, IL: Salt River, 2007). Craske, Jane. Being Human: In Conversation with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (Peterborough: Inspire, 2007). Freitas, Donna and Jason King. Killing the Imposter God: Philip Pullman’s Spiritual Imagination in His Dark Materials (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2007). Greene, Richard and Rachel Robison (eds.) The Golden Compass and Philosophy: God Bites the Dust (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2009).

Selected Bibliography and Further Reading

175

Gribbin, John and Mary Gribbin. The Science of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (London: Hodder, 2003). Knowles, Michael. Sex, Death and Religion in Philip Pullman’s Trilogy His Dark Materials: A Catholic Critique (Kindle version: 2012). Rayment-Pickard, Hugh. The Devil’s Account: Philip Pullman and Christianity (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004). Vere, Pete and Sandra Miesel. Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children’s Fantasy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007). Wheat, Leonard F. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials – A Multiple Allegory: Attacking Religious Superstition in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Paradise Lost (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008).

General academic studies and collections of essays Existing critical volumes on Pullman’s trilogy have tended to coalesce around the areas of religion, science, gender and sexuality, and genre, with some attention also being paid to intertexts and adapations. Barfield, Steven and Katharine Cox (eds.) Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2011). Bobby, Susan Redington. Beyond His Dark Materials: Innocence and Experience in the Fiction of Philip Pullman (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2012). Lenz, Millicent and Carole Scott (eds.) His Dark Materials Illuminated (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005). Yeffeth, Glen (ed.) Navigating the Golden Compass: Religion, Science and Daemonology in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (Dallas: Benbella Books, 2005).

Individual chapters, articles and essays Al Jomaa, Mervat. ‘Transitional Objects and the Problems of Parenting: the Process of Growing Up in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.’ Journal of Children’s Literature Studies 9(2) (July 2012): 139–54. Bird, Anne-Marie. ‘Without Contraries is no Progression: Dust as an All-Inclusive, Multifunctional Metaphor in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.’ Children’s Literature in Education, 32(2) (2001): 111–23. Bird, Anne-Marie. ‘Subtle Knives or Blunt Instruments? Pullman’s Use of Magical Devices in the Development of the Protagonists in “His Dark Materials”.’ The Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, 7(1) (2010): 9–22. Bruton, Sarah. ‘Her Dark Materials: Redefining the Witch in Philip Pullman’s Trilogy’ Journal of Children’s Literature Studies 9(2), (July 2012): 125–38. Burcar, Lilijana, ‘Gender Politics and the Return of the Innocent Child in His Dark Materials.’ Topic, 57 (2011): 33–50. Butler, Andrew M. ‘The Republic of Heaven: The Betrayal of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy’, in Nickianne Moody and Clare Horrocks (eds.), Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Debates for the Twenty First Century (Liverpool: Association for Research in Popular Fictions, 2005): 285–98.

176

Selected Bibliography and Further Reading

Colás, Santiago. Telling True Stories, or The Immanent Ethics of Material Spirit (and Spiritual Matter) in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.’ Discourse, 27(1) (2005): 34–66. Cox, Katharine and Spencer Jordan.‘Philip Pullman’s Oxford: Representations of Oxford in His Dark Materials and Lyra’s Oxford’ Journal of Children’s Literature Studies 9(2) (July 2012): 111–23. Cuthew, Lucy. ‘Loving the World in which we Live: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia as Approaches to Sublunary Existence’ The Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, 7(1) (2010): 87–98. Falconer, Rachel. The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and its Adult Readership (New York: Routledge, 2009). See especially the chapter ‘Coming of Age in a Fantasy World: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’: 73–94. Fitzsimmons, Rebekah. ‘Dialectical “Complexifications”: The Centrality of Mary Malone, Dust, and the Mulefa in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 22(2) (2011): 212–33. Fox, E. Quinn. ‘Paradise Inverted: Philip Pullman’s Use of High Fantasy and Epic Poetry to Portray Evil in His Dark Materials’, in Jamey Heit (ed.), Vader, Voldemort and other Villains: Essays on Evil in Popular Media (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2011): 125–44. Gray, William. ‘Pullman, Lewis, MacDonald and the Anxiety of Influence’, Mythlore, 25: 117–32. Gray, William. Death and Fantasy: Essays on Philip Pullman, C. S. Lewis, George Macdonald and R.L. Stevenson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008). Gray, William. Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Greenwell, Amanda M. ‘“The Language of Pictures”: Visual Representation and Spectatorship in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, Studies in the Novel, 42(1/2) (2010): 99–120. Harris, Joanna. ‘Reworking Eve: Gender Ideology in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ The Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, 7(1) (2010): 23–41. Jaques, Zoe. ‘States of nature in His Dark Materials and Harry Potter’, Topic, 57 (2011): 1–16. Keane, Beppie. ‘Of the Postmodernist’s Party Without Knowing It: Philip Pullman, Hypermorality and Metanarratives’ Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 15(1) (May 2005): 50–8. Lee, Yiyin Laurie. ‘Locating the Postmodern in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, 9(2) ( July 2012): 96–110. Lenz, Millicent. ‘Philip Pullman’, in Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz. Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (London and New York: Continuum, 2001): 122–69.

Selected Bibliography and Further Reading

177

Lenz, Millicent. ‘Story as a Bridge to Transformation: The Way Beyond Death in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass’ Children’s Literature in Education, 34(1) (March 2003): 47–55. Lenz, Millicent. ‘Shifting Shapes of Fear in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy: Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife’, in Roderick McGillis, (ed.), Children’s Literature and the Fin de Siècle (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2003): 139–46. Moruzi, Kristine. ‘Missed Opportunities: the Subordination of Children in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ Children’s Literature in Education, 36(1) (2005): 55–68. O’Sullivan, Keith. ‘Democratising Literature: His Dark Materials as Crossover Fiction.’ The Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, 7(1) (2010): 74–86. Oziewicz, Marek and Daniel Hade. ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell? Philip Pullman, C. S. Lewis, and the Fantasy Tradition’ Mythlore, 28(3/4): 39–54. Padley, Jonathan and Kenneth Padley. ‘“A Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven”: His Dark Materials, Inverted Theology, and the End of Philip Pullman’s Authority’ Children’s Literature in Education, 37 (September 2006): 325–34. Pavlik, Anthony. ‘The Not So Green Republic: the Ecology of His Dark Materials’ The Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, 7(1) (2010): 54–73. Pugh, Tison. ‘Erotic Heroism, Redemptive Teen Sexuality, and the Queer Republic of Heaven in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’, in Innocence, Heterosexuality and the Queerness of Children’s Literature (New York:Taylor & Francis, 2011): 61–82; Rutledge, Amelia A. ‘Reconfiguring nurture in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 33(2) (2008): 119–34. Santini, Monica. ‘Revengeful Lovers and Broken-hearted Mothers: Patterns of Femininity in Philip Pullman’s Witches’, in Paola Bottalla and Monica Santini (eds.), What are Little Boys and Girls Made of? (Padua: Unipress, 2009): 105–22. Vassilopoulou, Panayiota and Jonardon Ganeri. ‘The Geography of Shadows: Souls and Cities in P. Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ Philosophy and Literature, 35(2) (2011): 269–81.

Journalism and reviews The controversies surrounding His Dark Materials have brought it to the attention of a wider spectrum of writers than children’s literature usually attracts. We have not attempted to include every review of the novels here, but to present some of the more notable articles that to place the trilogy within its wider contexts. These range from Robert McCrum considering Pullman as a ‘genre’ author in ‘Not for Children’, to Peter Hitchens denouncing his atheism, to the Archbishop of Canterbury providing a more measured assessment of Pullman’s achievement. Caldecott, Leonie. ‘Philip Pullman: The Stuff of Nightmares’. Catholic Herald 26 December 2003: http://www.churchinhistory.org/pages/leftpane/ reflect-lit/pullman/stuffofnightmares.htm.

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Selected Bibliography and Further Reading

Eccleshare, Julia. ‘Rational Magic’. Guardian 28 October 2000: http:// www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/oct/28/booksforchildrenandteenagers. philippullman. Hitchens, Peter. ‘The Most Dangerous Author in Britain’. Mail on Sunday, 27 January 2002. Marr, Andrew. ‘Pullman does for atheism what C. S. Lewis did for God.’ Daily Telegraph. January 24, 2002: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ comment/3572210/Pullman-does-for-atheism-what-C-S-Lewis-didfor-God.html. McCrum, Robert. ‘Daemon Geezer’, Observer, 27 January (2002): 27. McCrum, Robert. ‘Not for Children’, Observer, 22 October (2000). http:// www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2000/oct/22/features.review7. Thorpe, Nick. ‘Philip Pullman’, Sunday Times, 4 August (2002): http://www. nickthorpe.co.uk/journalism/arts/philip-pullman-sunday-times. Vulliamy, Ed. ‘Author puts Bible Belt to the Test’, Observer, 26 August (2001): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/aug/26/usa.books. Weich, David. ‘Philip Pullman Reaches the Garden’, 10 September (2006): http://www.powells.com/authors/pullman.html. Williams, Rowan. ‘Dark and Light: An Unexpected Review by the Archbishop of Canterbury’, Times. 10 March (2004): 14.

Index Aboriginal cultures and soul 40 ACHUKA 81 Adam and Eve 29, 42, 45, 96, 116, 127 adult–child relationships 119–20, 121, 123–4 adulthood 116–17 moving into 79, 88, 113–14, 115, 120, 122, 139 afterlife 28, 30, 33, 167–8 agency children’s individual and collective 117–18 alethiometer 24, 26, 41, 50, 70–2, 109, 121–3 Allen, Nicola 133 Almond, David 40 Amber Spyglass, The 2, 59–60, 71, 77, 84, 115, 123, 149 angels in 24 and child-adult relationships 120, 121, 123–4 ethics and scientific enquiry in 64 influence of Romanticism in 113 Jesus Christ in 31–2 mulefa in 106 religion in 21, 22, 23 sex/sexuality in 115 wins Whitbread Book Award 2, 85 American Library Association 82 Ancient Civilizations (Pullman) 148–9 angels 23–4 animals distinction between humans and 105–7

anti-clericalism 8 Arai, Ryoji 2 Artemis 148, 150 Serafina Pekkala as 147, 154–6, 159 Asriel, Lord 4, 48, 58, 59–60, 65, 66, 134, 150 Astrid Lindgren Award 2 Athena 150 Mary Malone as 147–8, 156–9 Auxier, Randall E. 147 Bakhtin, M. M. 40, 56 Barfield, Steven 62 Barthes, Roland 99 BBC 11 bears, armoured see panserbjørne Belacqua, Lyra see Lyra Belvedere College Dramatic Society 11–12 Beowulf 40 Bible 3, 4, 22, 36, 54, 61, 77 Biblical Fall see Fall Big Read poll 2 Bildungsroman 78, 87 Bird, Anne-Marie 29, 59 Blake, William 4, 5, 36, 66, 77, 100, 142 America: A Prophecy 60 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 100, 127 Songs of Innocence and of Experience 100, 113–16, 127, 143 Bohr, Niels 98 Bolen, Jean Shinoda Goddesses in Everywoman 149–50, 154 Book of Dust, The (Pullman) 10–11, 168–9

179

180 Bradbury, Malcolm 87 Bradley, Arthur 84 Broken Bridge, The (Pullman) 6 Burcar, Lilijana 147 Burgess, Melvin Junk 81 Butler, Andrew M. 71, 128 Butler, Judith Gender Trouble 142 Butler, Robert 7 Butterfly Tattoo, The (Pullman) 6 Calvin, John 43 Campbell, Joseph Pathways to Bliss 146–7 Canterbury, Archbishop of 1 capitalism 98 Carus, Titus Lucretius On the Nature of Things 38 Cassirer, Ernst 44–5 Catholic League 84–5 Chambers, Aidan Breaktime 1 childhood 9–10 as continuous 114 dialectical relations 120–3 moving away from to adult experience 118–19 negotiating relations 118–20 and play 117 romantic constructions of 113–26 transition of Lyra and Will’s childhood to adulthood 119–20 children, individual and collective agency of 117–18 children’s films 38 children’s literature 1, 2, 80, 82, 85 Christianity 7, 8, 20, 24, 26 class and gender 133 Clockwork (Pullman) 1, 5, 6, 9 Coats, Karen S. 150 Colás, Santiago 89

Index Colbert, David 150 Colebrook, Martyn 62 connectedness 26, 59, 73 Coram, Farder 154, 155 Coulter, Mrs 22, 66, 88–9, 133–6, 147 as a failed Demeter 149–51 film depiction of 50, 51 gender role 133–6, 140, 143 relationship with Lyra 118–19, 133–4, 150–1, 159 as scientific enquirer 64–5 and witchcraft 137, 138 Count Karlstein (Pullman) 5 Crick, Francis 38 dæmons 5, 28, 36, 39, 42, 44–7, 48, 88, 97, 102–3, 106, 165, 167 and Dust 142 gender role of 128, 140–1 and humans 107 linking of to sexual desire 115, 136 and soul 36, 39, 44–5, 49, 56 and superego 103, 105 Darwin, Charles 96 Dawkins, Richard 19 de Beauvoir, Simone The Second Sex 131, 132, 133 de Man, Paul 97, 101, 103–4 Death of the Author 99 ‘Death of God’ 77 Demeter 148, 149 Ma Costa as 147, 151–4, 159 Mrs Coulter as a failed 149–51 Derrida, Jacques 97, 99, 108, 109–10 The Animal That Therefore I Am 106–7 The Beast & the Sovereign 102, 105 DeWitt, Bryce Seligman 98 Dexter, Colin 42 Dolgin, Kim 150 Donohue, Bill 85

Index Downing, Christine 152, 154 Duggan, Patrick 63–4 Duncan, Diane M. 151 Dust 5, 7–8, 9, 27, 28–9, 54, 59, 62, 64, 65, 67, 70, 84, 99, 102, 103, 106 and dæmons 142 and Über-gender 128, 141–3 Dyer, Denys 104 Eagleton, Terry 77 Education Reform Act 79–80 Elliott, Sam 12, 168 Enlightenment 60–1, 76, 77, 78, 86, 87–8, 89, 98 ethics and scientific enquiry 63–4 Everett, Hugh 98 fairy tales 165 Falconer, Rachel 135 Fall 7, 9, 22, 23–5, 30–1, 33, 37, 42, 45, 46–7, 55, 59, 86, 96, 109, 116 Fantasy genre 3, 24, 47, 48, 71, 84, 165 female emancipation 132 femininity 66, 89, 128–31, 133, 135, 142, 144 Fickling, David 77 Fiedler, Konrad 44 film differences between seeability of page text and visuality of 51–2 Firework-maker’s Daughter, The 6 Focus on the Family 85 Foucault, Michel Discipline and Punish 86, 88 Fox, Matthew 25 Frankel, Valerie 151 ‘Of Wands and Spyglasses’ 151 Freud, Sigmund 96, 99, 102–3, 105, 107–8

181

Gaarder, Jostein Sophie’s World 1 Galatea (Pullman) 5 Galeano, Eduardo Children of the Days 166 Gamble, Sarah 131 Garden of Eden 42, 45, 96, 106, 109, 127 Gas-Fitters’ Ball, The (Pullman) 5 Gavin, Adrienne 138 gender 127–45 bodily awareness and womanhood 131–7 and class 133 and dæmons 128, 140–1 dominance of masculinity over femininity 134–5 dust and Über-gender 141–3 and Lyra and Will 128–31 and Mrs Coulter 133–6, 140, 143 and time 139 and witches 137–40, 143 Genesis 22–3, 25, 29, 45, 89, 96, 101–2, 109, 121 geocentric view, demolition of 96 German Romanticism 164 Gnosticism 20, 24 goddess archetypes 146–60 Golden Compass, The (film) 12–13, 37–8, 48–52, 55–6, 84, 168 associations belonging to title 49 criticism of 48, 84–5 daemon/soul in 36 global sales 12, 85 musical score 51 production difficulties 12–13, 48 Goldthwaite, John The Natural History of Make-Believe 81 Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, The (Pullman) 11, 31, 169 Gooderham, David 87

182

Index

Gooding, Richard 9 grace 45, 46–7, 97 vs self-consciousness 100–7, 109–10 Gray, William Death and Fantasy 139 Greece, ancient 148–9 Gribbin, Mary and John The Science of Philip Pullman 59 Grossman, Cathy Lynn 85 Gruner, Elisabeth 84 Guardian 83 gyptians 70, 118, 119, 128, 129, 133, 152 Halliburton, Rachel 83 Haraway, Donna 97, 106, 107 When Species Meet 107 Harry Potter series 3, 37, 82 Haunted Storm, A (Pullman) 5 Haynes, Roslynn 59 heaven see Republic of Heaven Hebrew scriptures 24 Heisenberg, Werner 98 Heller, Erich 101 His Dark Materials (Pullman) appendixes 72 background to 164–5 controversiality of 1 film based on see Golden Compass, The influences on and sources 3, 4–5, 45–6, 77, 100, 113, 164 narrator 6 opposition to in the United States 84–5 as a piece of storytelling 6 and polemic 7–10 radicalism of 2 responses to 82–3 sequels and prequels 10–11 spin-offs and adaptations of 11–12 stage productions 11–12, 25, 28, 83, 102 themes 6

video game based on 13 world in 166–7 Horn Book Magazine, The 82 humanism 7, 77–90 Humanist Manifesto 78, 82, 84 I Ching 67, 103, 157 intellectual institutions, construction of 62–3 intertextuality 4, 49, 51, 99 Iorek Byrnison 6, 10, 84, 104–5, 118, 119, 129 Jameson, Frederic 97, 99 Jesus 30–1, 55 Jones, Enid 4 Jung, Carl 88, 103 Jungian psyche 103 Kant, Immanuel 87, 101 Keats, John 68 Khomeini, Ayatollah 80 Kidman, Nicole 50 Kingsley, Charles The Water Babies 1 Kingsley, Mary Travels in West Africa 67 Kleist, Heinrich von 45, 109–10 background 100–1 ‘On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking’ 103 ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ 4, 45–6, 79, 97, 100–7, 113, 123 knowledge, pursuit of 58–75 Kristeva, Julia 99 ‘Women’s Time’ 139 Leavis, F. R. 73, 77 Leet, Andrew 22 Lenz, Millicent 67, 132 Lewis, C. S. 21, 37, 40 Chronicles of Narnia 1–2, 76, 81 The Last Battle 115–16 Lindsay, David A Voyage to Arcturus 165

Index Lister, David 80 literary criticism 98, 99–100 Lively, Penelope 81 Locke, John 98 Lodge, David 38–9 Lyotard, Jean-François 97–8 The Postmodern Condition 98, 99 Lyra feminine attributes 143 gender role 14, 128–31, 135 goddess archetypes and journey to wholeness 146–60 relationship with her daemon 136, 141 relationship with Mrs Coulter 118–19, 150–1, 159 reversion to stereotype 135 and scientific enquiry 70–2 sexual awakening 115–16, 136, 137 uncanniness of 108 witchlike qualities 137, 139 ‘Lyra and the Birds’ 148, 156, 158 Lyra’s Oxford (Pullman) 10, 148, 168 Ma Costa 133, 137, 149 as Demeter 147, 151–4, 159 McCaughrean, Geraldine A Pack of Lies 1 McGillis, Roderick 60 McKnight, Carol 82 magic 165–6 Major, John 81 Malone, Dr Mary 29, 59, 61, 69, 72, 103 as Athena 147–8, 156–9 and religion 25–7 and scientific enquiry 65–8 many-worlds theorem 99 marionettes 108–9 and the prosthesis 109 and the uncanny 108–9 Martin, Bernice 77

183

masculinity 144 dominance over femininity 134–5 and Will 130, 143 Matthews, Susan 66, 71 Mengele, Dr 63–4 metaphysics 39, 45 Miller, Laura 78 Milne, A. A. 81 Milton, John 77 Paradise Lost 4, 22, 36, 45, 60, 100, 102, 113, 164–5 modernity 98 Moody, David 82 Morrison, Blake As If 81 Moruzi, Kristine 88, 120 mulefa 12, 23, 25–6, 30, 67, 97, 106, 166 Murdock, Maureen 146–7, 159 Murray, Lavinia 11 myth-making 25, 27–30, 32, 76 mythology 146, 148–9 Narnia films 37 National Theatre production 11, 25, 28, 83, 102 Nazi concentration camps 63–4 negative capability 59, 68, 70, 123 New Atheists 78 New Line Cinema 12, 13, 48 Newton, Isaac 98 Nightingale, Benedict 83 Norse Ragnarök 9 Northern Lights 1, 2 and childhood play 117 children’s agency in 118 dæmons in 28, 44–7 elements and themes 47 ethics and scientific enquiry 63–4 Lyra and pursuit of knowledge 70–1 religion and negative commentary on the Church 21, 42–4, 47–8, 54

184 Northern Lights – continued reliance on biblical stories religious language 23 scientific enquiry in 61

Index 54–5

Old Testament 46, 54, 55 Once Upon a Time in the North (Pullman) 10, 72, 168 original sin 62 Otto, Rudolf 55 Paganism 24 panserbjørne (armoured bears) 97, 104–5, 107, 108 parallel universes 55, 62 Parry, John 59, 62, 68–9, 72 Parry, Will see Will Pekkala, Serafina see Serafina Pekkala Persephone 148, 149, 149–50, 153, 158, 160 Peterson, Eugene 39–40 Plato Apology 44 Symposium 142 Playbox Theatre Company 11 Plotz, Judith 114 postmodernity 76, 96, 97–100, 109, 166 definition 97–8 prosthesis 109 psychoanalytic symbolism 108 Pullman, Philip awards 2 career before His Dark Materials 3–6 Carnegie Medal acceptance speech (1996) 80, 85, 86–7 comparison with Rowling 3 criticism of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia 81, 115–16 female characters in works of 5–6 hostility towards religion and anti-Church stance 19, 36–7, 48, 53, 76, 78, 82

as a humanist 8, 76–90 as illustrator 4 influence of Romanticism on 113 International Humanist Award 78 interview with 164–9 penchant for mythology 148–9 religious beliefs 8–9, 82 teaching career 78–9 transition to controversialist 80–2 upbringing and formative years 3–4, 22 website 79 Purkiss, Diane 138 Rayment-Pickard, Hugh 20, 25, 28, 84 reading 51–2 Reagan, Ronald 80 Reformation 60–1, 98, 166 religion 7–9, 11, 19–35, 42–4, 78, 84, 167–8 authoritarian nature of 21 definition 19 description of clerical individuals 21–2 and Mary Malone character 25–7 negative commentary on the Church and criticism of organized 19–22, 42–3, 47–8, 54, 76 presence of angels 23–4 and science 62 religious education (1944) 79–80 religious language 22–3 Republic of Heaven 9, 20, 30, 77, 82, 86, 87, 110, 113, 121, 143, 149, 158 ‘Republic of Heaven, The’ (essay) 82 Roman Catholic Church 43

Index Romanticism 113, 114 and depiction of childhood 113–26 German 164 Rowling, J. K. 3 Ruby in the Smoke, The (Pullman) 5, 6 Rushdie, Salman 80 Russell, Mary Harris 60, 156 Rustin, Margaret and Michael 156–7 Rutledge, Amelia 66 Schaefer, Margret 108 Schweitzer, Bernard 20 science and religion 62 in the worlds of His Dark Materials 59–65 scientific enquiry 58–75 and ethics 63–5 and John Parry 59, 62, 68–9, 72 and Lyra 70–2 and Mary Malone 65–8 and Will 71–2 scientific method 98 scientist figures, portrayal of 61–2 Scottish Youth theatre 11 seeability 44–5, 49, 51–2, 53 self-consciousness 97 vs grace 100–7 September 11th (2001) 78 Serafina Pekkala 138, 139, 142 as Artemis 147, 154–6, 159 sex/sexuality 115–16, 124, 135, 136 Shadow of the North, The (Pullman) 5 Shakespeare, William Macbeth 48 Shepard, Ernest 81 Shohet, Lauren 67 Smith, Karen Patricia 149, 157 Snopes.com 85 social conditioning 128

185

Socrates 44 soul 36, 38–40, 53, 56, 98 and Aboriginal cultures 40 and dæmon 36, 39, 44–5, 49, 56 and Kleist 45–6 South Bank Show, The 121 spiritual materialism 7 Spring-Heeled Jack (Pullman) 5 Squires, Claire 62, 89, 106, 149 Stoddart, Greta 79 Stoppard, Tom 13 Subtle Knife, The 2, 5, 61, 68, 84, 108, 117 superego 103, 105 Tate, Andrew 84 Thatcher, Margaret 79 Theisen, Bianca 104 Thomson, Stephen 87, 88 Thunderbolt’s Waxwork (Pullman) 5 Tiger in the Well, The (Pullman) 5 time and gender 139 and space 40–2 Tin Princess, The (Pullman) 5 Tolkien, J. R. R. 37 The Lord of the Rings 40 totem 40 Tucker, Nicholas 7, 140 Über-gender 128 and Dust 141–3 uncanny 107–9 United States negative reaction to His Dark Materials and film 19, 82, 84–5 visuality and film 51 Voltaire 98 Wagner, Erica 32 Wallace, Alfred Russel 96 Weitz, Chris 12, 13, 37

186 Will 88, 108, 117, 135, 139 masculine attributes 130, 143 and scientific enquiry 71–2 sexual relationship with Lyra 115–16, 136 Williams, Dr Rowan 28, 83 witches 137–40, 165–6 and gender 143 Wizard of Oz 48 women negative portrayal of 21 subjection of 132, 133 see also gender

Index Wood, Naomi 110 Wordsworth, William 114 World Humanist Congress (2008) 78 Wright, Nicholas 8, 25, 83 Xaphania 132

20, 24, 29–30, 122–3,

Young, Cathy 84, 88 Young People’s theatre (Bath)

12