Parallel universes. Fallen angels. An armored polar bear. Can this man's fantasy books for young readers sneak a visionary taste for the big themes of love and mortality back into literature?
A FRIDAY NIGHT in November 2000. The First Parish Unitarian Church in Concord, where Ralph Waldo Emerson used to preach before his radical "Divinity School Address" of 1838 alienated the orthodoxy, is packed with 600 people, standing room only.
A writer comes out to read from his newest book. The book begins with quotations from three notoriously difficult poets: William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Ashbery. In its course it will quote Aquinas, Milton, and Heinrich von Kleist as well. It retells the story of the rebel angels in Milton's "Paradise Lost" from Blake's and Emerson's gnostic point of view: The rebels are right and the powers that regulate and rule the universe are evil usurpers of the creative energy to be found in all of us, in matter itself, till organized religion corrupts and misuses it.
The work is thrilling -- in some ways perhaps the most electrifying piece of literature of the past 20 years. Many religious leaders have come out against it. Some, including the archbishop of Canterbury, will defend it.
And most of the audience on this Tuesday night is under 16.
Philip Pullman's trilogy, "His Dark Materials," is marketed for readers 12 and up, most of whom know nothing of the sources behind Pullman's gripping story about two children who join forces with an armored polar bear, a Texan hot-air balloonist, a pair of fallen angels, and a host of other fantastic characters to crisscross parallel universes in order to defeat a theocratic state bent on destroying human consciousness and thus the world itself.
But like the Harry Potter series (to which they are infinitely superior), Pullman's novels are a crossover hit. In 2001, the third volume, "The Amber Spyglass," became the first young-adult novel to win Britain's prestigious Whitbread Prize. The quality press in America has tuned in to their appeal: Louis Menand of The New Yorker recently assessed the hit London stage adaptation, and Michael Chabon, himself the author of a delightful young-adult novel about baseball in parallel universes, published a substantial appreciation of the trilogy in The New York Review of Books.
In fact, Pullman has at least as large a following among adults as among adolescents: In England the volumes (like the Harry Potter books) are published in "adult editions" as well, differing only in their covers -- and sometimes in their higher sales figures.
Still, some of the snootier guardians of culture have cited and deplored the popularity of Pullman (and especially J.K. Rowling) among adults as evidence of the dumbing-down of popular literature. But however crude the characterization and conflicts in "Harry Potter" can be, there is nothing unsubtle about Pullman. "His Dark Materials" addresses the deepest issues that literature can address: the nature of life and death, the world into which we find ourselves thrown by fate, the future of our souls, and the extent to which both our souls and their fates are connected to our most intense, most childlike selves.
Like Rowling, Pullman addresses the power of the supernatural, which in his books stands for the equally supernatural magic of reading. Pullman and Rowling write about other worlds, worlds hidden in the interstices or shadows of the ordinary one we know, but worlds to which most adults, in the real world anyway, have no access. The mystery isn't why so many adult readers are reading these books, but rather why more adult writers aren't writing anything nearly as ambitious.
It's no surprise that themes like love, death, and the fate of the soul should be the province of young-adult literature. Passionate readers are most captivated by reading in their early teens. It's at that age that literature can take, can seem the most important thing in life. In some ways, it might seem that writers of young-adult fiction have an advantage: Their audience is primed for intense literary experience.
But this advantage also can be a disadvantage: Missteps such as platitudinous morality, piety, and cant are simply of no interest to such readers. (Remember how much you hated "Silas Marner"? You were right to.) The best writers of young-adult literature -- Pullman, Rowling, Lemony Snickett, Susan Cooper -- various as they are, take their readers very seriously indeed. For adults, serious novels and young-adult fiction tend to belong to mutually exclusive categories. But young readers think about big things, and any novelist who can write entertainingly but without hypocrisy about big things will win their hearts.
Of course, writers from Shakespeare and Milton through such 19th-century figures as Tolstoy and Tennyson used to treat the big things at such a fundamental level too. But visionary aspiration has gone out of style in serious adult fiction: We are too sophisticated or too cynical to suspend disbelief in such narratives any more, and this kind of aspiration has been confined in recent decades to niche writing like science fiction and eschatological fantasy. It's in young-adult literature that such writing has now found a proper home.
In Pullman's case, the breathtaking intensity and power of his writing, together with the moral audacity of his vision, consistently make his work sublime: You feel an exalted pleasure in reading it, one that differs from the standard pleasure that narratives give. It's satisfying when lovers go off into the sunset together, or the hero strikes it rich, or becomes president, or grabs the snitch in a quidditch match. But the pleasures of the sublime are intense partly because we don't quite know what they are.
The exaltation we experience in sublime literature is hard to distinguish from longing. The power and pleasure of Pullman's work are archaic and elemental. He is asking us to love literature for its sheer imaginative power, for the inaccessible but necessary other worlds it describes and embodies.
This is what Pullman's work is about: a longing that nothing can satisfy but whose intensity is its own difficult and ambivalent pleasure. Like the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom, Pullman equates this longing with the ancient heresy of Gnosticism: the idea that our souls are defined by a spark of transcendence by which we aspire beyond the pious moralisms of human order and society, and seek something the authorities that govern the world cannot or will not give.
Call it love. In some of the parallel universes of "His Dark Materials," every human being has a daemon, a totem animal with human intelligence who is always with you, your closest companion and dearest friend. Your daemon is not your soul but something like the personification of your capacity to be open to others, your capacity to love. The most elemental relationship in the trilogy is between Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon, whom she trusts to understand her with an intensity that no other person could hope to match.
In Pullman's universe, Lyra and Pantalaimon's love for each other represents an aspiration towards something that cannot satisfy us because it is as needy as we are. This is why Gnosticism was regarded as heretical: it expressed as much dissatisfaction with the self-regard and self-possession of the Creator as with the Creation. In Pullman's work, as in Pullman's reading of Milton, the Church represents the force of evil in the universe, insisting as it does on separating children from their daemons (whom the Church regards as materializations of original sin) to make the children tractable to authority.
The real-world stakes of Pullman's work turn out to be high. Some powerful religious voices -- including Britain's Association of Christian Teachers -- have been raised against Pullman, who has been excoriated for blasphemy. But no less a defender than the archbishop of Canterbury has called "His Dark Materials" a "reasoned criticism of Christianity," and in March he recommended at a meeting at 10 Downing Street that it become part of the religious-education curriculum in British schools.
It's hard to convey the unending inventiveness of Pullman's story. But the most powerful episode has to be the journey that Lyra and her friend Will (the trilogy's other hero) take to the land of the dead in the third volume, "The Amber Spyglass," an astonishing journey that closely follows Aeneas's voyage to Hades in Virgil's "Aeneid" -- and which rivals the original.
In a shanty-town slum, where the dead wait to cross over to the underworld, Lyra meets the personification of her own death, an eerily gentle, impersonal figure who has followed her through life, as all of our deaths do. But Lyra and Will are not dead, and to undertake the journey they must leave their daemons behind -- a desperately necessary betrayal of a fundamental relationship. In the underworld, they liberate the dead from eternal entombment in their own loneliness: They help the dead to return not to life but to freedom, to a communion with the beautiful material world into which they may dissolve and dissipate.
In the end Lyra and Will survive their journey, but it is a transformative one. They discover the truth that Will has already somehow known from the start, that "matter loves matter." What this means is that love is to be found in this life or not at all, that it is this life which is the transcendent one to which Gnosticism calls us, and from which the Church seeks to protect us or forbid us. (No wonder some have accused Pullman of blasphemy.)
Is Pullman really writing only for adolescents? I think that unlike Rowling (for all her adult readers), the answer is no. Pullman addresses an audience of adolescents, but wants us adults to overhear the story he tells that audience. He reminds us of the passionate idealism of that age, and draws us back not so much into that idealism as into a longing for it. It's that longing which is his subject: love of the world and its inhabitants before we come to see that world as the arena of a struggle to be successful. He reenchants the world by reminding us of how enchanted it once was.
Pullman has now begun a series of grace-notes to "His Dark Materials." The first, "Lyra's Oxford," published last fall by Knopf (America's premier publisher of adult literary fiction), tells a wisp of a story about Lyra set three years after the end of "The Amber Spyglass," and gives a sense of what it means for life to go on after the climactic, bitter-sweet end of the trilogy. The book is a lovely object filled with invented trivia, beautifully illustrated by John Lawrence: a map of Lyra's Oxford, with a list of other available maps of both real and imaginary places, postcards, a page from a Baedeker from Lyra's world, and so on. The book is intentionally slight; it is about the fact that life itself, the life that Will and Lyra work so hard to save, is a slight and plangent thing, and that to come to know this and to love it is to have achieved something of signal importance.
In other words, what we must come to love is the world we live in. Pullman concurs with Robert Frost's summary of Milton: "Earth's the right place for love:/I don't know where it's likely to go better." Earth, unlike heaven, can be a place of childish things, a place where you can write for children, and where such writing will make a difference.
[
0 comments - Add yours