Is it bad to say that I liked Kristen Poole's remarkable book about The Book of Dust better than Philip Pullman's long-awaited conclusion to it in The Rose Field--at least on a first read?
Perhaps it's a sign of me getting old that I'm starting to prefer the secondary literature to the primary, and commentaries, histories, and essays to poems and stories, at times. Or perhaps it's just easier to read and write about them, so that I'm finally getting around to this review of, or rather confessional, cento-like tissue of quotations from Poole's wonderful Seventeenth-Century Literature, Science, and Religion in His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust.
You can save some time and check out this Interview with Kristen Poole; I'm hoping to talk to her at some point, too!
Let's see. The epigraph alone is a doozy:
'So is it in men, most of which are childish in the best things, till they be cradled in their graves—glad they will be to hear the tales of Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, Æneas; and, hearing them, must needs hear the right description of wisdom, valor, and justice.' —Sir Philip Sidney, Defense of Poesie
This is reminiscent of such rich reflections, redolent of many great places one might go: to Plato (it's all in Plato, right?) and his Socrates in the Republic on the myths and poets (and Spariosu's development of the idea in works such as Dionysus Reborn), which is I guess ultimately the main thing Sidney is defending poesie against; to PB Shelley and his own Defence of Poetry and how in the zeitgeist of his age they lived it out, those fervid Romantics (Shelley being outdone, arguably, by the likes of Keats and Byron and PB's own wife, MW, the author of Frankenstein); but more immediately than either, if less obviously, to Edmund Spenser's preface to The Fairy Queene,, where he claims, somewhat confusingly, to
'have followed all the antique poets historicall: first Homer, who in the persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governour and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the other in his Odysseis: then Virgil, whose like intention was to doe in the person of Æneas: after him Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando: and lately Tasso dissevered them againe, and formed both parts in two persons, namely, that part which they in philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a private man, coloured in his Rinaldo: the other named Politice, in his Godfredo. By ensample of which excellent Poets, I laboure to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised: which if I find to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encoraged to frame the other part of pollitike vertues in his person, after he came to bee king.'
In this devious way, following Spenser's 'continued Allegorie, or darke conceit,' we can draw a surprisingly straight line from one sir P to another. For Pullman's more recent work is nothing if not just such a complex defense of poetry and the imagination as these rival forebears, as well as Milton and Blake and Lewis in his earlier trilogy, have propounded in their time. Pullman's view of the moral educational virtue of literature in essays such as "Miss Goddard's Grave" are, if anything, more clearly indebted to Spenser and the ancient debate than even his Book of Dust is to The Fairy Queene as a romance in the poetic tradition.
Or how's this for a captatio captatio'd:
'My own prejudices about so-called “children’s literature” kept me from reading His Dark Materials until my own children were of the right age, but then I quickly became enthralled. I saw in these novels not just lovable characters and captivating world-making, but, over and over again, an integration of the literature, philosophy, and scientific ideas of the time period I study. Always the teacher, I meant to write a little something about the presence of the seventeenth century in Pullman’s work. But one little something led to another, and then another, until I discovered, a bit to my surprise, that I had a book’s worth of things to say.'
So Poole. While the specifics of my engagement with Pullman are quite different, as far as that last comment goes: don't I know it! My own sallies into this thread of the discourse have so far yielded only podcasts on HDM and BD along with a couple of presentations at Signum events, but my avowed goal is to carry on writing not just one but several books' worth of things I have to say about these books, or be forever disappointed, as I was when my essay was rejected for the Mythlore issue on Mythopoeic Children's Literature, though at least I'll be consoled somewhat knowing that more illustrious and friendly interlocutors such as Verlyn Flieger, Kris Swank, and Marek Oziewicz made it in.
For evidence that Pullman met Tolkien during their time overlapping at Oxford, Poole helpfully cites the interview hosted at https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2000/08/interview-philip-pullman-august-2000.html, which seems to be a live website even now! I'll have to reach out to the host.
Poole muses on Exeter chapel, 'modeled on the medieval royal chapel Saint-Chapelle in Paris,' speculating on how the beauty of art, music, and stories owe more than many might suspect--or suspect Pullman of admitting--to religion; for more on the power of myth and the way of reading and thinking through its effects, a line is traceable here via Karen Armstrong, cited in Pullman's "Republic of Heaven" essay, to Johannes Sloek, author of the transformative little book Devotional Language.
Poole doesn't take long to start interrogating Pullman's avowed dislike of all things 'spiritual' (and apologies, but all quotes are from an ebook, so I don't have page numbers. I did reach the limit of text percentage allowed to copy, so read on and you'll get a significant portion of the book interspersed with my own musings):
'Like many others, as it turns out, I find His Dark Materials to be profoundly spiritual, and the ideas of its atheist/agnostic author dovetail creatively with my own theology. (The Christianity that Pullman sets up as a straw man, his caricature of a religion that teaches a hatred of the physical world, seems like a relic from a distant medieval past.)'
Same here! For an antidote to Pullman's view of Christianity, my favorite prescription, aside from the already mentioned indelible Sloek, the humble Signum U led by Corey Olsen, whom I consider my role model, or the obvious and blindingly famous likes of Marilynne Robinson or the Bible Project, is Sufjan Stevens. Coincidentally, he is also perhaps the only person I'd like to meet and talk with more even than I would Pullman.
When they meet, Poole is nervously aware of Pullman's distraction. She starts talking about 'a seventeenth-century bishop who proposed that parliament ban the use of metaphor in the pulpit. Philip startled and suddenly looked at me intently, and said that very morning he had written a bit in which Marcel Delamare, the Machiavellian head of the Magisterium, proposed a bill banning the use of metaphor.' They hit it off from there. Art imitating life and all that. It just goes to show the danger of inferring from apparent allusions the actual extent of an author's readings and borrowings, even a magpie like Pullman. There still has to be room for that daemon imagination.
With that caveat in mind, still it is hard to argue with Poole's insights:
'Pullman’s two trilogies rely on different early modern texts not only for storylines but for form: His Dark Materials is clearly shaped by the genre of epic per Milton’s Paradise Lost, whereas The Book of Dust turns to the genre of romance per Edmund Spenser’s late sixteenth-century masterpiece, The Faerie Queene.' This rings absolutely true, and it's an observation I've heard from several other folks in talking about the book, and repeated myself. Search up recent conversations with Jonathan Groves and Ben Kozlowski for more. Or simply read on!
Poole elaborates:
'Epic, the mode of His Dark Materials, has long been an exalted literary form, and most readers are inherently familiar with its conventions: a central hero, some underlying conflict of good vs. evil, and a narrative arc toward resolution. Romance, the mode of The Book of Dust, is much less familiar: it is an episodic quest narrative, often with intertwining plot lines, and no clear endpoint—'
That...about sums up The Book of Dust! lol.
Then Poole asks some good questions we might also want to ponder--especially those of us holding onto that old view of literature as moral instruction:
'What happens to telos, or purpose? What happens to the ethics? What changes with regard to the author’s relationship with the reader?' Or in short, what are we postmoderns (or post-postmoderns, metamoderns) to do with books like these, which impose such questions on us yet eschew clear answers, like all good poetry. My tentative answer is, we learn from them how to inquire deeply and trust that there is an answer worth striving for--Socratically, and/or in fear and trembling, as the case may be. And meanwhile we enjoy the stories for their own sake, and talk about them with one another.
So we read on with Poole, a tremendous reader and writer: 'presenting on my research for this book in the college’s beautiful seventeenth-century senior common room, showing slides in a darkened space full of scholars—ironically re-enacting the very opening of Northern Lights/The Golden Compass'--now that's good! Wryly, she must acknowledge she brings no head of an explorer to appall and delight her audience with; Asriel, mercifully, she ain't.
Again, in line with Pullman, Poole asserts: 'According to Sidney, the goal of literature is to “teach and delight.” In the pages that follow, I hope that you find interesting things to learn, and that you have fun doing so.'
And so that's some highlights from just the introduction. As you may imagine, I was taught and delighted a great deal throughout!
I have a note here that simply says, 'opium - SL 19C.' So I guess there's a mention of Sally Lockhart and the history of the opium trade, or something. Maybe the idea I wanted to convey--or that I'm misremembering from Poole--is that this sort of analysis could be extended to all of Pullman's works. But as she states in what might be the overarching thesis:
'Throughout His Dark Materials and the companion series The Book of Dust, Pullman frequently draws inspiration from the scholars of the past, his imagination reworking inherited ideas for elements ranging from the alethiometer to angels, and from particle physics to the multiverse. Pullman’s old scholars don’t just stare out of dusty antique frames—they become lively fellow travelers and conversation partners.' Literally so in the case of Hannah Relf or Mary Malone; and recall Lyra's degree in history included among the fragments in Once Upon a Time in the North.
'The aim is not so much to read Pullman through the lens of the past, as to read the past through the lens of Pullman—' she goes on. Which is fair enough, since Poole is an historian herself. In my own project, I think I do lean more towards trying to read Pullman through various lenses he suggests with his borrowings and allusions, conscious and unconscious, for the purpose of recurring once more and once again to those perennial questions he helps us to raise and articulate, questions of meaning, purpose, and how to live.
'Sadly, many people today consider “the past” to be a place not unlike the land of the dead.' Well, yes, but then many other people consider the past as conveyed in great books and other works of art to be very much alive and conducive to a life well lived; or you might say, along the lines of that epic tradition, we consider the land of the dead to be among the key rendezvous points for the aspiring hero along their journey. Is Poole really so pessimistic about the classics? Or is this a realistic portrayal of the sort of 'presentism' identified by Lewis (and Pullman, who also places his protagonist in a wardrobe), or 'youth-ism' more particular to our consumer society?
'From exploring the political effects of religious fanaticism to the psychological consequences of betrayal to philosophical questions about the self and the material world, the novels address weighty matters indeed.' Indeed!
When she gets into specifics, though, is where Poole's scholarship and powers of conveying her own sense of discovery really shine. Witness her close read of the opening of The Amber Spyglass, as she notes 'the choice of “arboreal,” which holds within it “boreal,” With the linguistic shimmer of “pattern” behind “patter,” sound and sight comingle, evoking the sensation of the scene—standing in the woods, “needles” of the pine branches, which at first invoke an intriguing foresty sensation, are part of a word strand that comes to include “shafts” and “lances.” Thrill can become threat.' All I can contribute is the note I keep meaning to write up or podcast on, about how the specific phrase about 'darts of scented ice' appears verbatim across the breadth of Pullman's career as an author, and how a similar image, though not the exact words, are embedded here in perhaps his most ambitious feat of prose.
I have another note I can't parse now: 'young and old anxiety already made her point.' I think this relates to that moment where the Librarian and the Master console one another after the episode in the Retiring Room; I think I'm just saying she overlooked it as an example to cite for some reason.
On to Part I: Language and Meaning
Next a little riddle: '76 years; history of these particular ideas about the alethiometer’s symbols reach back centuries and centuries. Here’s a whirlwind tutorial on that history.' Poole cites Plato, church fathers like Origen and Augustine, and even Shelley King's essay on Nicholas of Lyra, as well as Fludd.
So why the 17C in particular? 'In Pullman’s imagined multiverse, the three main worlds of the story—Will’s world (which is our own), Lyra’s world, and the world of Cittàgazze—appear to have shared a common path of historical development until they diverged in the early modern period (that is, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).
'If in our world the 1600s were a pivot between the one thousand years of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of modernity, in Lyra’s world there is what we might call the “long seventeenth century.” '
For the scientific worldview of that time, Poole writes, '"experiential theology” would be a good synonym. This idea of experimental theology was advocated by the Calvinist preacher William Perkins...
'King James (who was James VI in Scotland before becoming James I of England when he succeeded Queen Elizabeth I in 1603) himself wrote a treatise called Dæmonologie (1597) which justified the legal persecution of witches and, by extension, the brutal consequences for the condemned.'
Terrifying. And, to me at least, not nearly so well known as Pullman's debts to Milton and Spenser; and I don't even know who Drayton is...
'Shakespearean insults, calling his academic rival a “coxcomb,” “Blackguard! Rogue!” “popinjay,” and “pirate” (326). John Parry quotes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a letter to his wife—“more things in heaven and earth” (SK 113)'--I can't remember if I caught that one in my podcast, but you can bet I missed that the insults from Santelia are pulled from the Bard.
'Donne Holy Sonnet 10, “Death Be Not Proud” (published in 1633): “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die” (lines 13–14).' That's Asriel, yep!
'...poetry of William Blake and an early nineteenth-century essay by Heinrich von Kleist... film noir...'
All this is a beautiful, succinct, circumspect picture of the debts Pullman owes to other thinkers, and the book as a whole does a beautiful, etc. job of developing these insights. Let's see...
'In a number of interviews, Pullman has expressed admiration for Philip Goff’s book Galileo’s Error, which maintains that Galileo’s move to approach science in largely mathematical terms has limited our ability to account for consciousness.' On the recommendation of David Nixon, I recently read this one. It's good, but not without its points of tension for an application to the worlds of Pullman's fiction, I think. I'll have to say more in another place.
Poole hedges a bit: 'I don’t mean to suggest that the books only draw from this period. There are many intellectual, philosophical, and literary strands to these stories, ranging from ancient texts (like Virgil’s Aeneid) to modern scientific inquiry (like quantum mechanics). Indeed, part of the readerly excitement of these novels comes from finding these disparate elements assembled together.
But she knows she's onto something: 'His steady stream of insider jokes about seventeenth-century figures; his blurb for a book on Robert Burton’s 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy (“Glorious and intoxicating and endlessly refreshing”'--gotta love how Pullman blurbs the books he loves, and that's another topic worth its own development elsewhere.
Wonderful analysis of the famous print, cited by Poole; see also Nerval, El Desdichado, or Kristeva...
We come back to the Defense: 'Attacks on imaginative literature, Sidney tells us, included that “a man might better spend his time” in pursuits other than reading fiction, which critics contended “is the mother of lies.” Not true, Sidney proclaims, because “to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false.” The historian, “affirming many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies. But the poet … never affirms. The poet never makes any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes.” At issue is intent:
'On a deep level, His Dark Materials and, in a different vein, The Secret Commonwealth (the second volume of The Book of Dust) explore the meaning of meaning. And it is here that the novels meet the seventeenth century. It could easily be said that at all points of history people have contemplated the meaning of meaning. But the specific questions that human beings have about meaning change through time. The alethiometer is a device that renders into physical form ideas about language that were especially prominent in the seventeenth century: allegorical interpretation, hieroglyphics, and perfect language. Far from just a clever gadget, the alethiometer serves as a device—in both the literal and literary senses of that word—to explore how meaning is created. ... The alethiometer teaches Lyra—and the readers of her story—how to read.'
This, for me, is catnip. Very well sprinkled, well said. Oh and the image there on the cover also appears infra as Figure 6 Astrolabe, partly by Humphrey Cole, London, c.1590. Inv. 43454. © History of Science Museum, University of Oxford.
Along with this masterpiece right out of Clockwork: https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/prague-astronomical-clock/
And https://www.fromoldbooks.org/Various-Occult/pages/Fabricius-Fludd-Natura-Mirror/ for this image taken from Fludd’s “The Mirror of the Whole of Nature and the Image of Art,” on which Poole:
'This is an interlocking system with Art at its center—a beautiful woman with a monkey (a golden one, perhaps?), the symbol of ars simia naturae (“art is the ape of nature,” meaning art imitates nature)...
'“The meaning of nature,” writes Harrison, “like the meaning of scripture, was a matter of relating the parts to the whole. As a single passage of scripture might be made to bear the meaning of the whole, so discrete material objects were seen to be reflections of the whole. A speck of dust, observed Robert Grosseteste [the thirteenth-century philosopher/scientist/theologian], ‘is an image of the whole universe’ and ‘a mirror of the creator.’”20 It is an easy move from Grosseteste’s dust...' Poole cites, for those keeping track, Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and Science, 47; the Grosseteste quotation is taken from S. Gieben, “Traces of God in Nature According to Robert Grosseteste." Scholarship! Yay!
Poole sees my Sufjan and antes up: 'William Byrd (d. 1623) tried to express an allegorical understanding of God in his gorgeous multi-layered music.' And lest either of us think we're pretty completionist when it comes to commentating, she alludes to the 'Ghislerius Jeremiah,' an enormous tome which I can't find any images of online, so you'll just have to marvel at Poole's own photo included in her book.
She cites Lauren Shohet approvingly on the main characters' names, and in the acknowledgements reveals that they are friends. Jealous! I still think Shohet's essay is the best single commentary out there on Pullman, but Poole's operating on a totally different scale and is just as good in her own way.
In defense of The Secret Commonwealth as allegory (pace, say, Tolkien's courteous dislike): 'The book becomes a psychological journey about the discovery of the self, a quest for imagination and a re-enchantment of the world, and a political commentary about our own moment.'
Allegory, but also 'stark realism': 'If Pullman used the names of Renaissance figures like Khunrath and Agrippa to blur the lines between his fiction and history, in The Secret Commonwealth there is one character’s name that pierces through the veils of allegory with a powerful realism: Nur Huda el-Wahabi, a fifteen-year-old girl who died in the horrific 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London.' I should have pointed out, since it may not be obvious, that Poole writes without the benefit of having The Rose Field yet published. This is awkward, but hardly matters: knowing that Nur Huda's character recurs in the final book, playing an important role in Lyra's search for Pan, and forms a kind of bridge between the middle and final volumes, akin to the figure of Ama in The Amber Spyglass, only lends additional force to Poole's argument.
'Henry Reynolds theorized allegory in his book Mythomystes (1632), and members of the royal court kept themselves entertained by dancing in elaborately staged and costumed pageants called masques, which frequently featured allegorical themes. and reaction of literalism'-- see also John Rogers' Open Yale Course on Milton's connection to the masque.
Yet more obscure: 'scientists and protestants... John Biddle (d. 1662), Webster is best known as the author of a treatise called Academiarum examen, or The Examination of Academies, For Webster and many of his contemporaries, the dire consequence of Adam’s sin was thus not the discovery of bodily shame, as earlier and later generations would have it, but the loss of the ability to read the living language of God in the world . John Wilkins (1614–72) The Discovery of a New World, or, A Discourse Tending to Prove, That (’tis probable) There May Be Another Habitable World in the Moon (1638). machines Vindiciae academiarum, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language god a straight line God changed Totney’s name from Thomas to Theaurau John (that is, The-aurora-John). mean; his explanations read as if he has digested equal parts of LSD and French poststructuralism.)' Which is fun stuff.
'Finally,' says Poole, though in context it's clear we're only talking about the finale of the section, 'there was a puzzle in this novel that I couldn’t figure out: Gottfried Brande from Wittenberg. The German name (loosely) translates to something like “The peace of God all burned up.” And Wittenberg: the town of the sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther? Or where Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been off studying at university? And then it dawned on me: Doctor Faustus, immortalized in Christopher Marlowe’s play (published in 1604), is from Wittenberg.' Yes, and yes. Like Professor Kozlowski, one could profitably read the whole of the (modern) western canon from the point of view of permutations on the Faust story.
'Even as these obelisks and their carved writings entered Roman culture, they were misunderstood. Plutarch, the famous historian of Roman history (who lived from the year 46 to about 119), already thought that the hieroglyphic signs were symbols of secret priestly wisdom, rather than representations of sound.' Poole cites Dieckmann, “Renaissance Hieroglyphics,” Comparative Literature 9, no. 4 (1957): 309.
In a wonderful leap, Poole links this to the concept of '"digital decay”: when websites die because they aren’t continuously curated or migrated to updated platforms, we lose knowledge and information. Many interviews with Philip Pullman have already been lost in this way.) Pullman has criticized Tolkien’s vein of fantasy writing, which he sees as not really “saying something which I believe to be true about the way which I think we are,”6 but one truth The Lord of the Rings does tell through the loss and rediscovery of the ring is that history moves in strange ways. This phenomenon of lost knowledge being found again is part of what marks the time period we call the “Renaissance.”'
Incidentally, Pullman might not be a terribly astute reader of Tolkien, but like his characterization of the Bible, this view he puts forth is instructive and still quite widespread nonetheless.
I just liked this one: 'Willibald Pirckheimer, incidentally, would make a very good name for a cat.)'
Valeriano as a source for hieroglyphs will keep anyone busy: https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_08979/?st=gallery
And then there's 'Figure 25 Leonardo da Vinci, The Lady with an Ermine, c.1490. Czartoryski Museum, Kraków. ]BW in text/ wiki color?] Did Pullman himself go down the rabbit hole of tracing out all these connections? One suspects that he did. The ermine is also known in English as a stoat, a close cousin (sharing the same taxonomic family, Mustelidae) of the pine marten, which of course is the animal form that Pantalaimon finally settles into. (There are inklings throughout Northern Lights/Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife that Pan could settle in this way; in The Subtle Knife, when Lyra first meets Will, her dæmon becomes “a red-brown stoat with a cream throat and belly” [sk 20]. Even before he settles, he repeatedly turns into a white ermine with “sharp little ermine-paws” [nl 75].30 ) Da Vinci’s painting thus not only provides inspiration for portraying the human-dæmon relationship, but the hieroglyph of the ermine makes its way into Pantalaimon, who reveals something about the nature of Lyra, a person who maintains her purity even in the midst of harrowing adventures, including passing through the underground land of the dead.' Bravura interpretation, 10/10 no notes. Except lots more notes.
Poole on reading as immersive experience:
'The Enlightenment would reject not just the notion of hieroglyphic symbol, but the worldview that they had engendered in the Renaissance. As Singer would note, already by the mid-seventeenth century “an intellectual sea change was taking place that made … the hieroglyphic tradition objects of skepticism and disinterest. During the Renaissance, hieroglyphs were conceived to be an esoteric system of sacred symbols that revealed and could be used to express the Ideas of God. Since the new age was not particularly interested in the Ideas of God, it had no use for nor much interest in such symbols. The changing attitudes towards the problems of language, religion, history, art, and learning are all reflected in the decline of the hieroglyphic tradition.” Thomas C. Singer, “Sir Thomas Browne and ‘The Hieroglyphical Schools of the Egyptians’: A Study of the Renaissance Search for the Natural Language of the World” (PhD diss., Columbia University, New York, 1985).
Briefly touching on the connection between Egyptians and Pullman's gyptians, Poole blew me away by remembering Farder Coram remembering 'the pools of ink the Hindus use for reading the future'. Fantastic stuff.
So we come to Part 2: Science.
'...replicating a fantasy organization called Solomon’s House, which was depicted in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis,' Poole reminds us, the first modern scientists took as their motto 'Nullius in verba, or “take no one’s word for it.” They put everything to the test.
'The one area that was rejected was mathematical demonstrations, because they were found to be boring (rightly so, but I’m the wrong person to ask).' Well I don't claim to be the right one, that would be pretty square, but let me well-actually just for a moment here: first there's the details to quibble with. What about the importance Pullman does lay on math, specifically 'the good numbers' in TRF (not Poole's fault, again, since that one wasn't out yet) but also in Asriel's discussion of the imaginary root of minus 1, which she should have picked up on, or the importance of quantum math for LBS? More generally, there's the implicit denigration of the scholarly parity of the fields of math and the humanities, as if one has to be the right sort of person to talk about either. Like Ranciere, following Jacotot, or like Francis Su in Mathematics for Human Flourishing, why not recognize the human mind at work in all these fields equally? The insight into incompleteness by Godel, or indeed the mystery of the diagonal back in the Meno, should settle any worries about math as an exclusively analytic, left-hemisphere, grasping sort of thinking.
Poole, too, knows her history of science: 'Newton’s famous quip “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” was in fact addressed to Hooke, who perceived it as an insult aimed at his short stature.' Sick burn!
'D’Addario observes that members of the society “delighted in contemplating the strangest of phenomena, and in demystifying such phenomena. These investigators sought out these strange objects and events since they believed that surprise and amazement forced them out of a habitual adherence to accepted knowledge.”4 Pullman’s novels, especially those of His Dark Materials, also delight in the process of scientific inquiry.' We recall the opening scene in the Retiring Room, and the researches of Mary Malone... Poole cites Christopher D’Addario, “Raining Mice and Russian Leather: The Production of Knowledge in the Early Royal Society and Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus,” English Literary History 84 (2017).
On the change to the title, a misprision of a line in Blake: 'And yet, if the initial switch from “compasses” to “compass” was an error, some good has come of it, since the subsequent volumes in His Dark Materials ended up being titled after instruments that take us into different realms of science. In fact, the American titles—The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass—now have a nice thematic coherence that Northern Lights rather interrupts. Each of these instruments (alethiometer, knife, spyglass) relate to different realms and histories of science. ... Such colossal figures as Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton developed their own telescopes and made their own discoveries. The telescope did not just change how far people could see; it changed how they actually saw the universe. It also changed how they saw their place in the cosmos.' Like the kingdom of the gryphons, I'd add, now that TRF is out, and Crowley's intimations of Bruno in his Aegypt books.
'through discovering the moon to be another world like ours, the earth becomes a place of beauty and wonder, rightfully joining the dance of the stars.' For me, this is close to the visions of Chesterton's essays, via Tolkien's great On Fairy-stories, and mystic poets like GM Hopkins or Blake himself, and something of an ultimatum on the value of art.
Poole notes parenthetically that 'The idea that circles represent purity and ovals represent corruption even makes its way into the production design of the 2007 film of The Golden Compass,' and I think of Dante, and Alex's work on adaptation.
'Baron Johann Matthaeus Wacker von Wackenfels (another good name for a cat)'
'The Dream (the Latin title of which is Somnium, sive Astronomia lunaris Kepler was translated into English only in 1965—a few years before the American moon landing—by an editor who was clearly interested in space travel and very impressed by Russian cosmonauts.'
Perhaps I'm getting mixed up, but is the allusion to Orlando going to the moon in search of his lost wits in SC or RF? Either way, I like the comparison: 'If we can think of Galileo as the first spaceman, we can think of Pullman as the last seventeenth-century author.' (And what of his Errors, then, following Goff?)
In a footnote, a delightful find in Kepler's Dream: '“These spirits are the sciences, which reveal the causes of things. This allegory was suggested to me by the Greek word daimon, which is derived from daiein, that is, ‘to know,’ as if it were dæmon.'
'Both authors turned from the language in which they were writing (English for Pullman, Latin for Kepler) to Greek for the idea of the dæmon. And both met with repercussions from ignorant and prejudiced people. '
She cites further 'Plutarch’s On the Face of the Moon, Lucian’s satirical True History,' to which we might add Cyrano, Ariosto...
One more to check out: 'Mary-Jane Rubenstein, in her book Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse...'
Which winds along to 'Pierre Borel’s Discours nouveau prouvant la pluralité des mondes, translated into English in 1658 by D. Sashott as A New Treatise, Proving a Multiplicity of Worlds. Opening with another classical reference, the author proclaims, “Democritus … constantly smiled, because the World could not apprehend the multiplicity of Worlds; I, like him, have also sufficient occasion to smile, and laugh at those who are ignorant of the plurality of the Worlds, and even to compare them to brute beasts.”'
Like me, Poole looked up 'Banesh Hoffmann’s The Strange Story of the Quantum (first edition 1947)—a dated if beautifully written book that we might presume Pullman himself is vicariously recommending to interested readers.'
And in the same vein: 'Greene, a physics professor at Columbia University, is adept at translating abstract, complex ideas for the popular reader.'
On the irony of Pullman's counterfactual Good Man Jesus, Poole perceptively observes: 'Not having experienced our Protestant Reformation, Lyra’s world also did not experience our so-called eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its ensuing separation of science and religion: there, it is the “experimental theologians” who discuss elementary particles.'
William Makepeace Thackeray, “The Alchemist” (1830s?). The Morgan Library, Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987. 1986.2447. We wonder with Poole, could this be the source of the Jericho alchemist's name?
'The Secret Commonwealth tells the story of many journeys, and one of these is Lyra’s way back from skepticism to belief, from practicality to imagination, from rationality to magic. A dogmatic commitment to reason has left Lyra close-minded. Over the course of the novel, we watch the process—halting and zigzagging though it might be—of Lyra’s re-enchantment, of her reconnection to the world of the supernatural and mystical.' A summary that sadly might oversell what Pullman actually delivers...
This I need to think about more: 'The seventeenth century witnessed a long process called “disenchantment,” a momentous shift from the mystical and magical to realism and rationalism. Reason and facts, it would seem, won the day over religion and speculation.' And this is a good thing in many ways! A great writer like Willa Cather, as late as the early 20C or so, writes her valedictorian speech on superstition; a fascinating historian has a book about the survival of superstition and syncretism in Europe, The Cheese and the Worms. And a glance at our politics reveals the limits of scientific understandings of truth and logic, with catastrophic effects.
Though Poole cites Toth later on "Gnostic Spiritual Heritage," she misses a key interview the scholar conducted with Pullman where he says, "To me the world, I don't think the world was ever disenchanted. It still is enchanted. So I'm quite happy with that sort of thing. I'm quite happy to be thought a mystic or whatever it is." - Zsuzsanna Tóth interview https://www.academia.edu/27964999/_I_don_t_think_the_world_was_ever_disenchanted_It_still_is_enchanted_Excerpts_from_an_Interview_with_Philip_Pullman_Part_1_?sm=b&rhid=38134907210
And Toth, for her part, might be interested to look beyond or behind HDM and TBD to Pullman's early novels, Galatea and The Haunted Storm, for more evidence of what a strange place Pullman's enchanted world becomes. His Broken Bridge and his autobiographical sketch would also repay more attention in this light.
Despite or correlated with this enchanted worldview, Poole notes that 'Pullman—who paradoxically describes himself as a “congenial melancholic”' could fit right into the masterpiece whose art history analysis I linked above: 'Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I (1514). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943. Accession Number: 43.106.1.'
Apropos of the image: 'In these descriptions of folded space, Pullman taps into the speculative physics of our own world and our own time, where extra dimensions hypothesized in string theory are “compactified,” folded in on themselves like complicated works of origami. As Pullman’s fascination with contemporary theoretical physics reminds us, we are living through a period of rapid and revolutionary changes in our scientific concepts of matter and its motions—' Again, to me this suggests there's more to his views on math? Complexity of space in AS and LO, and back once more to the imaginary numbers which pop up in electrical engineering...
Poole plays to her strengths: 'While the natural philosophers of the Royal Society were the ones conducting experiments, it was the storytellers and the poets who were translating scientific notions into the world of the imagination, creating characters to fire the mind and images to convey complex ideas.
'Cavendish wrote a long prose narrative called Blazing World (1666)—a remarkable story of a young woman who is taken to the north, travels into another world, meets talking bear-men, and wonders about particle physics. Sound familiar?'
She spells it out for us: 'The speculation about Dust in Lyra’s world shares much with seventeenth-century speculation about atoms in our world, and Pullman’s interest in panpsychism parallels Cavendish’s interest in vitalist materialism. It’s a case of what’s old is new again, as historic development ceases to be seen as a steady linear march of progress and more like the looping movement of the northern lights.' I think it was Shohet who suggested Rogers' book on Vitalism to me, and I second that rec!
Again, at the limits of math and science, we are comfortably back in our preferred humanistic imaginary, with Poole writing 'of actio in distans (“action at a distance”), the idea that separated particles can work upon each other; this idea would eventually lead to quantum entanglement, which Einstein derogatorily dubbed “spooky action at a distance.”' She gives a great precis on Einstein, based on Pullman's character Tialys and the mercurial Fludd, wrapping up with a reflection on 'the essential unity of the world .… In a sympathetically operating universe such an account seems plausible.'
'Where the Stoic pneuma is a continuum that filled the entire cosmos, the Epicurean atoms need space between them, a void in which they can move about.' Very helpful distinction. I also like Greenblatt's Swerve.
'Lucretius famously compares the motion of atoms to the movement of dust in a sunbeam. He writes: "Consider sunbeams. When the sun’s rays let in Pass through the darkness of a shuttered room, You will see a multitude of tiny bodies All mingling in a multitude of ways Inside the sunbeam, moving in the void," We see them, as do Mary and the mulefa.
'"But since I have shown that nothing can be created From nothing, nor things made return to nothing, The primal atoms must have immortal substance Into which at their last hour all things can be resolved And furnish matter to renew the world. (1.543–47) And, crucially: “these same atoms form sky, sea, land, rivers, sun, / The same compose crops, trees, and animals” (1.820–21). For Lucretius, knowledge of this re-entry of our atoms into the cosmos alleviates a terror of death and frees us from religious fears.' Powerful commentary on Will and Lyra and their feats in the world of dead. Much earlier, too, I should have noted, Poole makes the startling connection between their literal freeing of the dead through courage and sacrifice and the telling of true stories and the statement in John "The truth shall set you free."
Poole really does her homework on this one: 'More remarkably still, Pullman himself had not read On the Nature of the Universe before he wrote the novels.12 That Pullman nonetheless incorporated such clear Lucretian notions is a striking example of how ideas and images can be absorbed into a culture, flowing with a stream of human ingenuity that wends its way from age to age. Sometimes that stream can go underground, only to resurface centuries later.' I think of Coleridge: "Where Alph, the sacred river, ran..."
Poole develops in another direction: 'We might even say that Cavendish domesticates Epicurean atomic physics. Lucretius wrote of atoms “dancing,” but for him those atoms are more often “engaged in endless strife, / Battle, and warfare, troop attacking troop” (2.117–18). But for Cavendish, the different shapes of atoms are compared to the different building blocks for a house, and that house is then compared to the making of our planetary home. Here is a bit from another of her 1653 poems, “A World Made by Atoms.” Small atoms of themselves a world may make, For, being subtle, every shape they take. And as they dance about, they places find; Such forms as best agree make every kind. For when we build a house of brick or stone, … We lay them even, every one by one: So atoms as they dance find places fit; They there remain, lie close, and fast will stick.16 I love how the bellicose nature of Lucretius’s universe is rendered peaceful (the atoms “their places find” and “agree”) and even cozy (they “lie close”). The peace that Cavendish envisions at the atomic level was in profound contrast to the turbulence of her life when she wrote these poems. Cavendish (Figure 40) recounts having grown up in a secure and harmonious family, but things came crashing down...
'In her writing, she insists on fancy—the work of the imagination—as a rational method, dismissing experimental scientists as boys playing with toys.19 Cavendish had a reputation as a bit of an eccentric, being known for her extravagant clothing which edged into cross-dressing (she made bows instead of courtesies), and one contemporary found that her speech was full of “oaths and obscenity.”
Frontispiece and title page of Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (London, 1668). Call number 152-774f. Folger Digital Image Collection, file 167037. Folger Shakespeare Library.
Poole is on a roll: 'The story is strange and interesting, but the plot is more of an excuse to engage in speculative contemplations about the nature of the material world. And one of the most extraordinary aspects is what the spirits have to say about animated matter. We are returned to Epicurean atoms and Lucretius’s analogy of dust motes in a shaft of sunlight when the empress asks the spirits: “what opinion they had of those creatures that are called the motes of the sun? To which they answered, that they were nothing else but streams of very small, rare and transparent particles .… Then the Empress asked, whether they were living creatures? They answered, yes: because they did increase and decrease, and were nourished by the presence, and starved by the absence of the sun” (138). These dust particles are alive. The empress believes that matter is alive; matter is conscious; matter and spirit are interconnected. Cavendish’s own understanding of physics has been called “vitalist materialism.”21 She was pushing back on the rising mechanist physics that considered the universe as a machine made of “dead matter,” as she put it.22 Instead, she understood matter to be self-moving, living, and perceptive, a theory known as hylozoism. All natural bodies, in her view, have these qualities, and thus have sense and reason.23
'A journey to the North Pole, traveling to other worlds, bear-men walking on the ice, animated matter—surely Cavendish’s text was a literary influence on Pullman? But when Peter West of Durham University asked Pullman over Twitter in 2019, “out of interest, was Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World at all influential on HDM?” Pullman replied, “I’ve never read it, but books can influence you even if you don’t read them. I shall look into this one.”'
Elsewhere, Poole notes: 'In an interview about his interest in pansychism, Pullman has stated, “consciousness is something that pervades everything. And although many philosophers find this vision hard to accept, poets don’t find it hard to accept.” - Paulson, “Why Philip Pullman Is Obsessed with Panpsychism.”
Playing on the metaphor of the Copernican revolution, Poole has us come back to the essential re-enchantment: '“The sky full of stars seemed dead and cold, everything in it the result of the mechanical, indifferent interactions of molecules and particles that would continue for the rest of time, whether Lyra lived or died, whether human beings were conscious or unconscious: a vast, silent, empty indifference, all quite meaningless” (sc 440). Pullman’s trilogies can be read as a manifesto against this dead—and deadening—world view. Dust pushes back against a philosophical dualism that has endured since the seventeenth century. We need Dust, an awareness of matter and the cosmos as brimming over with life and energy.
'The way in which we comprehend the physics of our world can shape our own values. Pullman’s vision of Dust and of animated matter leads to an affirmation of human curiosity, creativity, and empathy. And this is where Pullman takes his place in a long line of poet-philosophers contemplating the nature of the universe. From Lucretius, we inherit the ancient physics of atoms rendered into poetry. From Cavendish, we get speculations on atoms and matter being conscious. And from Pullman, we are led to contemplate how conscious matter compels a conscientious, ethical response to the world and its people. This recognition of participating in a universe that is pulsing with life calls us to live with both intention (Will) and a poetic sensibility (Lyra).' Again, this is Shohet, amplified.
Part 3, of course, is on Religion.
'Pullman’s decrepit pseudo-deity has “no will of his own” (as 411), much as Lord Asriel describes a zombie as a slave that “has no will of its own” (nl 373). Pullman’s investment in the idea of free will is so profound that it becomes the name of his trilogy’s hero.' See also the zombies depicted in Galatea.
'In fact, the thoroughgoing emphasis on self-sacrifice in these novels verges into Christ imagery. And indeed, the further we get from the initial shock of God’s death, the more scholars and literary critics have seen in these books a religious bent in spite of themselves, a strand of “Christianity without Christ,” or the inheritance of Christian Gnosticism.19 We are invited to see that “Pullman is an a-theist in the sense of being without a god, not in the post-Enlightenment sense of a rejection of the supernatural/spiritual.”20 (Boucher)
And this is a wonderful point, pointedly made: 'The critique of “the spiritual”—a word that Pullman had said he disdains—changes in The Secret Commonwealth to a critique of the critique of the spiritual. There is perhaps some brilliant embedded self-satire here on Pullman’s part. The Hyperchorasmians, a novel about the killing of God, “represents a satire on the reductionist reading of His Dark Materials,” and “the figure of Brande resembles the positivist worldview and overt anti-theological ideals of the New Atheists … implying that Brande is a caricature of Pullman-as-New-Atheist,” note scholars Geoff M. Boucher and Charlotte Devonport-Ralph.' The way in which this line of self-portrayal gets pursued or not in TRF is an area of particular concern for me.
On reading Paradise Lost: 'In other words, just let the sounds and music of Milton’s language wash over you as a way to create meaning. (And a quick aside: Pullman’s joy in language can also be heard in his own narration of the audiobooks of His Dark Materials, which I most highly recommend. Listening to him read his story is an experience that is partly like hearing a medieval bard reciting poetry by a roaring fire, and partly like a congenial grandfather reading you a bedtime story.)' Absolutely agreed!
Poole, like Pullman and the teacher he most admires, Enid Jones, sounds like a great teacher: 'When I teach Paradise Lost to university undergraduates, on the very first day of class we gather in a circle and just start reading the poem aloud. For about ten minutes there is embarrassment, incomprehension, and some truly awkward Miltonic reading. But then, inevitably, a small miracle occurs: one by one, the students start to hear the music of the language and the play of the words, and the reading becomes more fluid and more graceful, and with this better reading comes an increasing ease of understanding.'
Once more in close reading mode: 'Can you “see” the camera movement here? We first watch Satan from a distance, an enormous, impressive presence rising from the burning surface. Then there is a quick close-up, as we are drawn to the detail of his hands, with the fire sloughing off his fingers in spikes—or “spires,” like upside down church steeples, establishing a pattern where Satan is the inverse of heavenly goodness. He takes flight. He lands on ground that, like the lake he has just left, is burning. Also—what can make reading Milton even better than watching a movie—in the midst of the scene we learn of his inner experience: the unexpected, alienating phenomenon of feeling the “unusual weight” of the “dusky air” of hell, unlike the pure atmosphere he had been used to in heaven. And who needs CGI special effects when you have words?'
Back in Rogers territory: 'the question of angels and food is an exploration of the very nature of matter (see 5.411–18, for instance). For this reason, Milton makes a point about angels eating with gusto. The “curious passage of gastro-theology,” to borrow Pullman’s words, was the angel Raphael’s lengthy response to Adam’s hesitant question about what angels can eat.' (We wonder, and wonder why Pullman doesn't seem to know or particularly care: do daemons eat, reproduce?)
'Augustine’s distinction of their office (angel) and their nature (spirit): “from what they are, spirit, from what they do, angel” (sk 249). I would say that Pullman’s momentous rewriting of Augustine—“From what we are, spirit; from what we do, matter. Matter and spirit are one”—revolutionizes the concept of angels and the material world for our own times, except that, as I hope I have convinced you, the idea of unified matter and spirit was already prominent in the mid-seventeenth century, embraced by thinkers like Margaret Cavendish and John Milton.' Color me convinced!
'And here we have the crux of Pullman’s adaptation of Milton: while the monist physics are similar, the values are inverted. For Milton, the “more refined, more spirituous, and pure” the body, the more exalted. For Pullman, it is corporeality that should be celebrated—the sensuous, physical experience of inhabiting the material world.' Bears mentioning that Pullman is very much following Blake here, right?
'"wisdom 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 are occupied by her enemies” (as 482). Mary Malone—channeling Pullman, who is not shy in voicing his own opinions about political stupidity—notes that this is true for her (our) world as well. This is the great cosmic problem: not the opening and closing of windows between worlds, but the opening and closing of minds. It is Xaphania who in the end gives what we can call the lesson of the whole story, however trite that sounds. ... Sophisticated people might sneer at this passage, which sounds old-fashioned and moralizing after the book’s philosophizing and daring apostacy. But I dare say that it is Pullman’s own life philosophy, an alternate Gospel delivered by angelic Wisdom, which serves as a synthesis of human ethics and goodness.' And so it is extremely interesting and in a way vexing, in a way refreshing, that the angels are shown to be untrustworthy guides in TRF.
More Milton: 'Eikonoklastes (1649). Defensio pro populo anglicano (Defense of the English People), published in 1652. They did not have a coherent political theory of republicanism “in the sense of a consistent argument for the principled superiority of kingless government over kingdoms”; - Robert von Friedeburg, “Republics and Republicanism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750, Vol. 2, ed. Hamish Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), - In a pamphlet called The Ready and Easy Way, Milton tried to persuade, cajole, shame, and browbeat his fellow citizens so that they would not cave in to the false promise of security presented by kingship.
On his sufferings: 'Perhaps it is not in spite of these circumstances, but because of them that the poem is infused with a depth of experience, poignancy, profound observation, and a stubborn, almost perverse sense of hope.' I wonder if this works its way into the division Pullman sets up between the Republic (whether of Asriel or Lyra) and the Kingdom of Heaven (whether of the church of their world or ours).
In an effort to parse the (elder) poet's views: 'The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is the difference of place: Milton held very different political visions of the heavenly and earthly realms. On earth, he disdained tyranny and elevated personal liberty. But for heavenly things, he emphasized absolute obedience to God.' See also Blake, etc.
Poole sees: '"rebel’s party,” says Baruch, a clear nod to Blake’s quip about Milton (as 60). And it is Balthamos who most succinctly explains their theological position: “The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty—those were all names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves—the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter. It seeks to know more about itself, and Dust is formed. The first angels condensed out of Dust, and the Authority was the first of all. He told those who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie.” (as 31–32) This reads less like a political platform than a creed, a statement of faith for the rebels. I would not go so far as to say that this is definitively an expression of Pullman’s own beliefs—he is telling a story, after all—but in making this boldfaced rejection of the idea of God in a book that is ostensibly aimed at children, he is at the very least playing devil’s advocate. At the most, Pullman—knowing full well how radical this passage truly is—becomes one of the greatest rebels of them all. Or does he? Pullman kills off a version of God that was already largely dead, even in the seventeenth century.' Weird how there's all these stories of dying gods...
'If Milton was an accidental advocate for the devil’s party, a number of scholars have pointed out how Pullman presents an alternative theological vision that closely aligns with liberal Christian theologies of today. As Donna Freitas and Jason King write, “Pullman-the-atheist, who wants ‘to undermine the basis of Christian belief,’ must surely be a bit embarrassed by Pullman-the-writer, who uses such classical and orthodox Christian beliefs to tell his story, coupling them with the edgier, more contemporary work of liberation and feminist theologians.”' King was another scholar who kindly took the time to talk with me for a podcast.
'Pullman portrays today’s repressive regimes and the repercussions of religious fanaticism, whether the excesses of Christianity or (in The Book of Dust) of Islam. It is very interesting that during his university years, shortly after losing his faith as an adolescent, Pullman visited the public library and found a book by Frances Yates on Giordano Bruno,' another one well worth tracking down!
In a footnote: 'It is perhaps worth recognizing that in Pullman’s multiverse we do not appear to have had one original world that then split into others, like branches spreading out from the trunk of a tree. The fact that the Bible in Lyra’s world contain dæmons indicates ancient differences. In terms of social development, however, it does appear that her world and ours developed in tandem until the sixteenth century.' Curious, too, how closely the paradise of the mulefa borders on the world of the dead.
On the theme of Recovering Paradise: 'The Garden of Eden was a source of widespread concern in seventeenth-century England. It was the subject of serious scholarly inquiry, as figures like Francis Bacon tried to repair the damage of the Fall through experimental science. It was the stuff of poetry, as illustrated by one of the most widely read poems of the century, Josuah Sylvester’s Devine Weekes, an English translation of the French poet Du Bartas’s long poem about the Creation.1 It was a popular theme for needlework, as girls and women imaginatively pictured paradise with every colorful stitch.2 It was the model for a (probably fictional) mid-century religious sect known as the Adamites, [and this is where I got the warning about the copy limit] who worshipped naked to imitate the innocent state of Adam and Eve.
'in the seventeenth century the driving concern was how to get back to the garden, how to recover or re-enter the physical and spiritual state of Edenic paradise. “The image of Eden, and the possibility of its recuperation,” writes literary scholar Nigel Smith, “was the most powerful idealistic and utopian image in the century.” - Nigel Smith, The Poetry of Andrew Marvell (Harlow: Pearson, 2003), 153.
For satire or sheer poetic bliss, it's hard to beat Marvell's garden: "Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass..."
'Ken Hiltner contends, “What made Eden of particular interest to early modern England was that, as a pristine garden, it captured the imagination of a country in the midst of an environmental crisis of unprecedented proportions.” - Hiltner, ed. and intro., Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton’s England
To me, following more prescient observers like the folks behind Attensity! the current environmental crisis in turn maps on as allegory for the crisis of human awareness much like what Pullman depicts in HDM. In his "Republic of Heaven" essay, Poole points out, Pullman says we "need a story; need a myth." Is this adequately transmitting the insights of Kleist and Sloek, or does the essay belie the depths sought in his fiction?
She writes: 'Our modern capitalist culture has largely lost sight of this category of myth. A myth is not a lie, nor is it a true story, in the binary that emerges for Lyra at the end of His Dark Materials. Instead, a myth is a story that tells a truth. In the 1600s, facts were just beginning to gain cultural dominance in knowledge-making, but facts and the factual didn’t yet reign supreme.12 Myth still resonated, and was valued. Pullman understands this (in spite of a rather perverse career-long tendency to insist on literal readings of the Bible).13 His retelling of the story in the Garden of Eden isn’t just iconoclastic, a negative dismantling of a central story of Christianity: he uses the story’s elements to create a myth that is a positive affirmation of his own belief system.' Basically, this is what I was trying to say in my bungled essay for Mythlore.
Poole indulges in a lengthy footnote: 'In The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, for instance, he depicts the story of Jesus feeding a large crowd with just a few loaves and fishes as an ordinary event that was fraudulently recorded as a miracle (90). Many people today would understand that story instead as a myth about how radical generosity and hospitality beget more goodness; we are not confined to reading it as either distorted fact or supernatural miracle. It is also interesting how Pullman is focused on debunking the easy theological target of good-boy-goes-to-heaven morality rather than engaging with the core Christian story of the crucifixion and resurrection. This story dramatizes, in its most extreme form, someone putting the good of humanity above what is good for the self; the ability of someone lacking in political power to overcome the tyranny of a repressive regime; the possibility that hope and joy can overcome the cruelty of man’s inhumanity to man. Pullman’s opposition to Christianity seems focused on a presumed Christian hatred of earthly pleasures and an authoritarian God, both anachronistic ideas for many strands of current liberal Christian theology.' I don't think he'd disagree; yet he persists, and I assume it's out of provocation, to sell more books.
Poole's remarks on "double helix" Dust; Lyra as Eve:
'The original story of Adam and Eve is found, of course, in the Bible. The Bible actually contains two back-to-back versions of the story, the result of the compilation of different creation myths in ancient times.' Or, as Bible Project folks argue, as poetry and prose.
'As a feminist, Pullman takes up the cause of questioning Eve’s role in the Fall, celebrating her and giving her new life in the character of Lyra. Indeed, the creatures who inhabit paradise in Pullman’s story have a name—mulefa—that is a near anagram of “female.”17 In his myth-making, Pullman doesn’t set out to just take down the idea of God as a king; he takes down patriarchy.' Amen.
'The exact location of the primeval Eden could be rediscovered using these cartographic skills, argued A Treatise of the Situation of Paradise (1694) - See Kenneth L. Carroll, “Early Quakers and ‘Going Naked as a Sign,’” Quaker History 67, no. 2 (1978): 69–87. See my discussion of this phenomenon in my book Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England.'
And: 'Hugh Plat’s plant guidebook, The Garden of Eden, or An accurate description of all flowers and fruits now growing in England, with particular rules how to advance their nature and growth (1653).
More parenthetical humor and more wonderful reading lists for someday: 'Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (1629), Park-in-sun’s earthly paradise,” a pun on his name.'
'Eden was both an idealized paradise and the scene of a spiritual crime. The concept was also entangled with the fraught beginnings of empire.' On this concept, I recommend Walcott's Omeros.
She brings up 'Dorothy Calthorpe’s prose narrative “A Discription of the Garden of Edden”
And 'Edmund Waller’s poem On St. James’s Park. - "eden really lost" David Quint, “Milton, Waller, and the Fate of Eden,” Modern Language Quarterly 78, no. 3 (2017): Eden really has been lost.”22 In this light, we can see Milton’s chosen title—Paradise Lost—as not merely indicating the poem’s subject matter, but as making an emphatic and even countercultural claim: through Adam and Eve’s disobedience, the Garden of Eden is lost to us forever, no matter how much science or gardening we do. (Although Milton did write a sequel, Paradise Regained [1671], in which Jesus figuratively restores Eden when he resists Satan’s temptations in the wilderness.)' Probably should pay more attention to this PR.
Finally we come to my last few disjointed notes and images:
botanic gardens
'paradise within thee, happier far” (12.585–87). Lyra’s adventures leave her with no such inner paradise.'
Song of Songs
Mrs Coulter's arc; SC confirming that all they did was kiss
Thomas Burnet, author of The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Burnet,_Sacred_Theory_of_the_Earth_Wellcome_L0028390.jpg
And 'environmental apocalypse' close to home:
The village of Mayschoß in the Ahr Valley, Germany, 2021. Photo: Boris Roessler via Getty Images. (missing in ebook)? https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/july-2021-rhineland-palatinate-mayscho%C3%9F-a-fireman-walks-news-photo/1234069911 ?
Acknowledgements include: Arabella Pope, Shannon Coulter (excellent names, not so much for cats as for scholars), Alex Peerless, Corinna Brueckner (daughter), Kathy Foster, Lauren Shohet (!), Juliana Breuckner, Erica Quinones; OUP, Exeter fellowship Rob Stagg and Nandini Das, librarians, Rick Trainor introduced to PP surreal, and her husband.
"when my hands were like birds with broken wings" sounds like a poem, but only references seem to be a mission in Cyberpunk 2077, which can't be right; or is it the broken wing Lyra inflicts on Bonneville's daemon?
Look, if anyone has made it this far in these notes I hope to shape someday into an engagement with Poole's work half as good as her own, suffice to say, you should really buy the book. Probably go with the paper copy, so you're not tempted to copy-paste a huge chunk of it in a rambling, effusive, belated review.
