Critical Bearings: His Dark Materials Illuminated, Edited by Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott

Overview

His Dark Materials Illuminated, edited by Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott (Wayne State UP, 2005), is an intriguing but frustratingly uneven study of Philip Pullman's work. The essay collection carries strong advance praise from several relevant scholars, and it has been favorably reviewed in at least one academic journal, but I found most of the essays to be missed opportunities on the part of their contributors to engage in a serious way with Pullman.

As I am not within the scholarly milieu, not writing specifically for other scholars, nor particularly interested in seeking acceptance for my work within their publications, my opinions may be rather peripheral, and shouldn't carry too much weight. Nevertheless, as I'm reading and thinking carefully about how best to learn from and perhaps to teach His Dark Materials, besides reading Pullman's own comments in essays and interviews and brushing up on some of his most conspicuous sources and literary touchstones, I've also been wading into the existing scholarship, to see if there is anything bright and shiny there worth stealing (with proper attribution, of course) and bringing back to a wider audience. So let's begin with HDM Illuminated. For along with its dross of shortcomings--which may well just be in the eye of this beholder, or endemic to the scholarly-essay-compendium form, or both--there is some gold here.

Following the editor's introduction, "Awakening to the Twenty-first Century: The Evolution of Human Consciousness in Pullman's His Dark Materials," which sounds promising, but proves a little breathless and new-agey, the collection is organized into three sections:

- Reading Fantasy, Figuring Human Nature
- Intertextuality and Revamping Traditions
- Pullman and Theology, Pullman and Science Fiction

Which, unfortunately, are about as faddish and baggy as they sound. There follow biographical and bibliographical notes. Each section is prefaced with an overview; individual essays do not have abstracts, and most carry only a few works cited and endnotes. Still these tangential remarks, citations (especially from interviews and speeches of Pullman's I wasn't previously aware of), and bibliographical signposts proved to be some of the most interesting material in the book.

Frankly, I don't feel like I actually learned very much about Pullman's story, themes, or characters--the things I care most about--nor about the process of his own reading, writing, and revision--the things I wanted to know more about. Most of the authors in the collection seem to treat Pullman's story as simply an experimental case study for whatever theoretical perspective or research topic they are concerned with: ideology, reader-response, various takes on theology, etc. Some of this, again, is built into such a collection and into the broader academic discourse, with its publishing imperative; some of this looseness, with most essays talking past one another from their rather arbitrary arrangement among the three sections, could also be the effect of the editors' choices. I'd be interested to see the original call for papers; I'm in contact with and hope to talk to at least one or two of the authors, though sadly before the book saw publication, Millicent Lenz, the editor, passed away.


Thoughts on the essays

Awakening to the Twenty-first Century: The Evolution of Human Consciousness in Pullman's His Dark Materials, by Millicent Lenz

I have my critiques of this piece, as of the collection as a whole, but I am appreciative of the work Lenz does here to establish Pullman as a subject for serious study. Perhaps it would be too pejorative, then, to note that she undercuts that seriousness by taking a quote from "New Dimensions Radio" for her epigraph, alongside a passage from The Amber Spyglass. The latter, as she hasten to point out, is the winner of the prestigious Whitbread Prize; the former, a self-help website's glib quote of the day. After all, my own project is engaged with just such bridge-building between scholarship and popular culture; perhaps we just don't have the same taste in listening. Lenz's dedication to the project of Pullman scholarship is evidenced by her having previously published an essay on Pullman in Alternative Worlds of Fantasy Fiction, co-edited with Peter Hunt, and here she continues to build on the idea of a creative evolution of consciousness, albeit without grounding that endeavor in neuroscience or even psychology, nor explaining why she does not do so. Besides citing Pullman's Arbuthnot lecture (which I haven't been able to track down), among other statements by the author from across his series as well as outside of it, Lenz draws on studies of Wagner and PB Shelley, as well as stray quotes from Thoreau and Beowulf, to make her case for Pullman's mythic storytelling as a representation of and blueprint for enlightenment, in the intellectual as well as the spiritual sense. It's a convincing enough argument, though I'm already partial to the thesis and thus would have liked to see less enthusiastic skipping around and more sustained analysis of the actual consequences of such a mode of consciousness. I think Lenz glosses over the inherent contradictions, or at any rate the paradox, of her faith in all of us undertaking our own process of mythopoesis, not only cheering on Lyra and Pullman in theirs. Instead of squarely addressing the requirement for Will and Lyra to return each to their real world, or to tell true stories in the world of the dead, or to account for less persuaded readers' claims that God is still a vital part of their lives--and not only the "Echoes in the space where God has been," in Pullman's provocative phrase, which she seems to believe is now normative or at least desirable--Lenz's essay concludes by opening the floor to the other authors. Her admirable invocation to "enrich the quotient of Dust in our literary universe" (13) would land with more force if Lenz had, if only in a footnote, wrestled a little more with what that multifaceted mote of a word might mean.


Reading Dark Materials, by Lauren Shohet

Eschewing a flashy two-part title--the only piece in the collection which dispenses with this badge of the contemporary academic essay--and mercifully lacking any overt theoretical framework, Shohet's "Reading" is also one of the strongest in the book. From an opening densely packed with well-chosen quotes from HDM, Shohet puts her finger on the implications of innocence and experience "in the modes of reading...and the stakes of good reading for the trilogy's interrelated models of art, identity, and ethics" (23). In this essay, she does what I am trying to do: not to impose a reading on Pullman, but to understand the reading which his story, by its story, content, form, and presuppositions, is teaching. To do so, I agree with Shohet that we need to build upon some of those implicit presuppositions: "Like Renaissance allegory, HDM creates a legible world that demands adequate reading for more than cognitive reasons...symbolic (exploring Lyra and Will's relationship as the relations between art/storytelling ['the Lyric'] and desire/action ['Will']); moral (plumbing the nature of persons and communities in the different worlds the novels depict); and 'anagogical' or apocalyptic (the battle between opposing supernatural forces that includes resolving the problem of death)." She points us to Hamilton's work on Spenser if we want to know more about allegory, but immediately dives back into the story, picking up on Dr Lanselius' hint of a Renaissance background for the alethiometer. Giving continual points of reference in Milton, Shohet elegantly negotiates the crucial problems of death, erotic love, and metaphysical vitalism in Pullman, before closing with a humbler and yet more effective appeal to hear "The Republic of Heaven" in the bells that close the story.


Second Nature: Daemons and Ideology in The Golden Compass, by Maude Hines

Drawing on Louis Althusser, Michel Pecheux, and Pierre Bourdieu, the essay applies the claim "it is impossible to get outside of ideology" to Pullman's work (37). While it may be compelling sociology, it doesn't have much to teach us about the story, which actually seems concerned with something like human nature--deeply connected to the material world--capable of transcending ideology, or at any rate constructing a novel, continually renovating ideology resting upon the possibility of measuring the truth and telling true stories. In particular, Hines explores the way in which Lyra's world treats daemons as normative, while to us they are fantastic. She makes some uncomfortable parallels, such as between the racist pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy and Lyra's ability to read peoples' emotions and social status through their daemons, or between her near brush with intercision and gang rape or castration, which are implicit in the text, but do not add up to significantly aid our understanding of what these things, shocking in themselves, are doing within the story. To me, they are plainly metaphors evoking human nature and evil, respectively, both of which seemed ruled out by Hines' ideological presuppositions. What I take to be Hines' central claim, when she is speaking of the witches' view of Lyra's destiny: "Destiny works like ideology here; nature, like free will," actually seems interesting, but it is confused and not developed by making references to "familiar fairy-tale narrative" and "Freudian family romance," rather than looking closely at what Lyra understands of her destiny, and what role her daemon plays in it (40).. In short, what actually happens in the story is much more interesting.


Dyads or Triads? His Dark Materials and the Structure of the Human, by Lisa Hopkins

Another intriguing title, and as I read over the examples of twos and threes, of which a few are pretty interesting--the conflict between Will and the man he kills because "neither of them saw the cat" (though you might say that neither of them saw their daemons, either), or the claim that "there are in fact three events that could be interpreted as constituting this betrayal" (52, though I disagree with the three she suggests being the only candidates)--I was mostly looking for Hopkins to discuss the key passages where Lyra and Will intuit that, besides their physical bodies and their daemons, "'there must be another part, to do the thinking!'" and where, when they ask her about it towards the end of the book, Mary Malone tells them, '''St Paul talks about spirit and soul and body.'" She winds up, "'So the idea of three parts in human nature isn't so strange.'" I felt the same could be said for this essay: So what? Hopkins ends right where the real work would begin, with questioning and unpacking these claims about the "triune nature of the human" (55). How, since it is an idea in Augustine (and in Plato and Aristotle, for that matter, while the children's initial insight sounds almost Cartesian) how is it that this "fundamentally cuts against" the complex doctrine of the Trinity, which Augustine, following his read of Paul, was influential in developing? Even without firsthand knowledge of the philosophers and theologians, a quick search would have pointed Hopkins to the relevant Bible verses, so that we could at least begin to think about the theology embedded in Pullman's story, as Mary plainly invites us to do. And then to top it off, the "Alethiometer" feature on the Random House website, cited in the notes, seems to be defunct. But I can't blame that on Hopkins.


Northern Lights and Northern Readers: Background Knowledge, Affect Linking, and Literary Understanding, by Margaret Mackey

I was excited about this one, again, because of what I was hoping and expecting to find in it. Lenz, in her intro, notes "Margaret Mackey's 'Playing in the Phase Space'[...] comments on Pullman's use of the concept and explores the textual 'play' that crosses media boundaries" (14). I wanted to hear more about play in Pullman's work, the ludic, if you like, as it relates to reading Pullman, but instead got a playful essay with practically nothing to say about Pullman's story. Instead, Mackey describes driving past hay trucks in winter, connects this to Dust and the North, says a little about the presuppositions and background knowledge readers bring to texts and a little about studies to that effect, hers and Gelertner's, and their relation to the classic reader-response literature. It would be a useful essay for someone writing a paper in an education class, I imagine, but it doesn't yield any new insights into Pullman. Alas, I can't even find a copy of her other essay anywhere.


Pullman's HDM, a Challenge to the Fantasies of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, with an Epilogue on Pullman's Neo-Romantic Reading of Paradise Lost, by Burton Hatlen

Pullman's Enigmatic Ontology: Revamping Old Traditions in HDM, by Carole Scott

"Without Lyra we would understand neither the New nor the Old Testament": Exegesis, Allegory, and Reading The Golden Compass, by Shelly King

Rouzing the Faculties to Act: Pullman's Blake for Children, by Susan Matthews

Tradition, Transformation, and the Bold Emergence: Fantastic Legacy and Pullman's HDM, by Karen Patricia Smith

In line with the approach traced by Shohet, though not quite with her insight into Pullman's work, the five essays in the middle section of the book address themselves to the task of elucidating Pullman's use of canonical literary sources. I consider them together here for the simple reason that though each treats a different source or cluster of sources, the upshot of each of these essays is pretty much the same: readers with a serious interest in Pullman, who are fired by his imagination and want to understand his work as fully as possible, and thus to see some of what inspired him, in turn, would do best to read those major sources for themselves. The essays are fine as secondary texts attesting to and gathering evidence of influences Pullman himself has repeatedly avowed his indebtedness to, but they do little to synthesize the effects of these influences taken together, which would help bring out and begin accounting for the complex tensions at work between them in his work as a whole. For an admirable work of that kind, I recommend Laurie Frost's encyclopedic The Elements of His Dark Materials, which carries a laudatory foreword by Pullman himself. (There are no doubt other dissertations and monographs out there by this time--I've seen references to a work by Gray which looks fascinating, but I have yet to read it.)

At around twenty pages each, Hatlen's and King's entries are the most substantial in terms of length in the entire collection. Lacking sufficient focus, though, they read like the outlines of book-length studies, ranging over interesting material and raising intriguing connections without contributing anything substantially new about the significance of Pullman's use of his sources. Hatlen makes the claim, echoed by many Lewis scholars, such as Dickieson and Ward, that Pullman's avowed distaste for the Narnia books does not prevent him from producing "a kind of inverted homage to his predecessor." Fair enough, and a topic well worth treating further, but Hatlen's essay instead tries to rope in Tolkien and Milton as well. Unfortunately, Hatlen discredits himself as a reader of Tolkien at the outset, with the dismissive, "Tolkien's achievements as a literary scholar were relatively modest" (76). Relative, perhaps, only to his impact as a novelist, but even that is by no means obvious, given the importance of his two great essays, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," and "On Fairy-Stories." The discussion of Milton may be valuable as a summary of the main currents of formidable scholarship by Fish, aligned with Lewis' orthodox read of Paradise Lost, and Empson, aligned with Pullman's Blakean conception, but it does little to illuminate Pullman's story.

King's essay revolves around a conceit much less commonly remarked upon than Hatlen's, connecting a "theological scholar-exegete," Nicholas of Lyra, with our main character, as well as noting her surname's reference to Dante (112). Though acknowledging that the connection between the names may be spurious, or, as she puts it, "merely serendipitous," King spins out an expanded version of Shohet's insight about layers of meaning with respect to medieval exegesis. She references the alethiometer and other characters' names in a somewhat scattered way, but also makes important connections to the Christian fantasist in whose shadow the Inklings themselves once stood, George MacDonald, and to an instance of dust imagery in Bunyan's epochal Pilgrim's Progress. One more cogent argument concerns the minor prophetic undertone's of Will's father's mantle, and his understanding of his mother's use of that phrase. Despite its somewhat playful indulgence of breadth at the expense of depth (one I can relate to), King's piece proves to be one of the richest and liveliest in the collection. Not least, because it winds up with commentary from Pullman on one of the least known of his key sources, Kleist's "On the Marionette Theatre," from an interview the full transcript of which is evidently no longer available.

Placed between the two longer essays, Scott's suffers from being too short. She takes on too much for ten pages: "This essay will explore how Pullman has used his three major literary sources--Milton, Blake, and the Bible--to reinterpret the ontology of humankind's moral and ethical universe, and to redefine humankind's quest for a meaningful purpose in life and the individual's responsibility in defining good and evil" (95). Again, Shohet tackles similar themes, but through the lens of imagery of reading does a much better job limiting her essay to a manageable scope. Inevitably, without a similarly focused image or question, Scott can do little more than present broad the broad strokes of what would make an interesting book in its own right (one someone may well have written by now). Though citing a number of relevant passages from Pullman as well as those three sources, countless others are left out. For one crucial example, perhaps because it is discussed, albeit briefly, by King, Asriel's discussion of Genesis does not figure in Scott's essay. Fresh fields of study, such as the witches' beliefs about Yambe-Akka, or shamanism, are referenced only glancingly, but would have represented a much better use of Scott's evident acumen. Tasked with completing the work of editing the collection after Lenz' passing, though, she no doubt had many other pressing concerns.

Matthews brilliantly concentrates her essay on Pullman's debt to just one author, William Blake. (Though in noting the strangeness of the mulefa, she can't pass up references to Gulliver's Travels and The Lord of the Flies.) Besides analyzing passages of various poems from across Blake's cosmos, providing a jumping-off point for further reading, Matthews ties the verbal and thematic echoes she discovers there in Blake back to equally well-chosen moments in Pullman. Thus, beyond the familiar sweeping statements about innocence and experience, we get some new insights into the importance of the body and sexuality, into daemonic separation and settling, and into how these relate to the narrative voice in the novel. That storytelling voice is perhaps Pullman's least appreciated master-stroke, one he muses on in his essays frequently, and Matthews begins to show a way to investigating it further, noting its indebtedness to poetry through allusions and epigraphs as well as celebrating its prose: "drawing in its imaginative energy on the soaring movement of comic heroes in its battles and journeys, but also, like Blake's writing, demanding access to the key myths of its culture" (133). Her closing critique of HDM's "linear reading...that loses some of the dialectical power of opposition and contraries," is well taken, hinting at the tension between Pullman's statements about the freedom of the reader and the evident didactic turns his story seems to take. However, I would want to dig deeper into the way in which Pullman illustrates a world saved by innocence as well as experience before buying into Matthews' argument fully. My only other quibble is that the essay would also have benefited from at least acknowledging the important role of Blake's illustrations, since Pullman's delight in, and dabbling in, visual art is well known.

Smith takes the opposite tack, cobbling together an agglomeration of references to recent generations of YA fantasy authors whose work Pullman has most likely never read. She imparts a measure of structure to this attempt to map a genre he disavows onto Pullman through a framework of "Five Key High Fantasy Conventions," more or less boiling down the Campbell mono-myth to a still more manageable (and distorting and reductive) handful of tropes (136). Like Hatlen's proposal about his debt to Lewis, Smith's rubric of "Troubled Young People with an Important Life Mission," "Excursions into Invented Worlds," and the rest is certainly there in Pullman's story, whether he likes to talk about it or not. But this is neither all that controversial nor particularly interesting. Pullman understandably (and correctly, I think) stresses what makes his work different, and while telling passages to that effect come out in Smith's essay, such as the valedictory renaming of the harpy Gracious Wings by Lyra, contra Tolkien, or Will and Lyra's return to their own worlds, contra Lewis, there is practically no attempt at analysis. The failure to engage with Pullman, then, is not total; however, the absence of any more substantive point of reference for what fantasy is or why it matters in the first place, such as Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories," or of a more sustained comparison of Pullman over against just one representative work of substance, such as Cooper's The Dark is Rising, makes the essay little more than a vague, misguided survey.


"And He's A-Going to Destroy Him": Religious Subversion in Pullman's HDM, by Bernard Schweizer

Rediscovering Faith through Science Fiction: Pullman's HDM, by Andrew Leet

Taken together, despite or perhaps due to their contradictory theses, these essays provide a helpful point of departure for discussions of religion in the books. And ultimately that's all these essays can ever be: points of departure, from which we would do well to depart, without being drawn into an interminable wrangle about which nothing can be proved either way. Without retreading too much of the ground covered by others who focus on Pullman's appropriations of Milton, et al., Leet and Schweizer do a fair job of compiling essays, reviews, and interviews where Pullman's beliefs and their representations in the story are at issue. Plainly, based on all that has been said--by Pullman, by his narrator, by his readers--totally opposite and equally coherent conclusions can be drawn. Secondary sources from further afield, ranging from Flannery O'Connor to Pope John XXIII, from Kierkegaard to Camus, can be mustered along either side of the debate; or rather, Pullman can be pulled in to support any number of lofty arguments on religion and faith which such authors might speak to, or to provide endlessly fresh material for one's own understanding of theology, whatever that might be.


Circumventing the Grand Narrative: Dust as an Alternative Theological Vision in Pullman's HDM, by Anne-Marie Bird

An instructive case-study in the delights of postmodern theory: we are masterfully extricated from academic cul-de-sacs generated by the theory itself. Besides weaving together statements from Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida (across four different books!), and their interpreters, Bird even manages to engage with Pullman now and then. Before proceeding to circumvent it, the essay admirably sets out to tackle Dust, which certainly deserves careful attention, given that at least one of its meanings is precisely such conscious attention. It is ironic, then, that by bringing out its complexity--"Dust is transformed from a conventional metaphor for human physicality/mortality into an ambiguous, almost mystical presence in which everything coexists"--Bird veers immediately into posing the false dichotomy between that "conventional metaphor" and "a means of fusing together and thus equalizing everything" (190). Conveniently, she thus dodges away from the actual development of the idea through the story, the various and changing perspectives on Dust which indeed drive the story, making Dust a highly unconventional metaphor, and the story nothing less than a grand narrative, with all its wealth of meanings. Instead, this liberated, free-floating Dust, this principle of "intrinsic amorphousness," is very agreeable to the postmodernist program of irreproachable ambiguity, what Bird takes to be Derrida's "free play" (196). Thus, she simply substitutes one conventional metaphor for another more to her liking.


Unexpected Allies? Pullman and the Feminist Theologians, by Pat Pinsent

"Eve, Again! Mother Eve!" Pullman's Eve Variations, by Mary Harris Russell

Two stronger essays close out the collection. Contra Bird, Pinsent demonstrates the perennial viability of careful scholarship, thoroughly supporting the claim which is well summed-up in her introduction: "when people think deeply about traditional religious ideas and are prepared to reassess and reinterpret the Bible and tradition without taking as axiomatic the meanings usually read into them, there may be a surprising degree of kinship between their conclusions" (200). She convincingly traces Pullman's affinities with feminist critiques within the church across a range of topics, concluding with Lyra's "growth into her role as the new Eve" (208). This is where Russell picks up the thread, forcibly restating Pinsent's argument in Pullman's own terms: "When the new Eve is ready for the new creation, built on truth, the old Authority, built on a lie, must vanish" (212). As Pinsent notes about that image of the new Eve, these lines of Russell's could apply to the Virgin Mary just as well. Discussions of Mrs Coulter and Mary Malone, as well as of Christian myth, provide context for Lyra's approximations to this truth. At last Russell juxtaposes the series of climactic moments around which Pullman's entire tale converges: the love between Will and Lyra and the salvation of Dust; their daemons' settling and their returning to their separate worlds; the end of the Authority, "'a mystery dissolving in mystery'" (220). To me the only connections still missing here are between this final release and that of the dead from their underworld, on the one hand, and the demise of Lyra's parents in their fall with the terrible Regent, on the other. These are further corollaries of that combination of knowledge-seeking and love which is the truth of Lyra's story, and which the story so powerfully encourages us to make our own.


To that end, I'm continuing to read Pullman, his commentators, and the rich tradition of which we are all a part and to which we all contribute. More bibliographies and reviews to follow.