Part 2 of the Amazon interview in which Philip Pullman discourses on Dust, the first couple (the biblical rather than the presidential pair), and which of his several worlds he'd like to inhabit. He also poses the possibility of a prequel and much, much more.
Amazon.com: Now when did Dust first come to you?
PhilipPullman: Very early on. This notion of dark matter--something all-pervasive and absolutely necessary but totally mysterious in the universe--was one of the starting points. It is a wonderful gift for a storyteller, because if nobody knows what it is, you can make it be what you'd like! Quite early on, too, I found the phrase from Paradise Lost which gives me the title for the whole trilogy: "Unless the almighty maker them ordain / His dark materials to create more worlds." That seemed to fit exactly the kind of thing I was talking about, so I leapt on it. And the idea that Dust should be in some sense emblematic of consciousness and original sin--what the churches traditionally used to understand by sin, namely disobedience, the thing that made us human in the first place--seemed too tempting to ignore, so I put them together. Incidentally, this notion that the sin of Eve was actually a very fortunate thing was clearly a turning point in human evolution. Felix culpa they used to call it: the happy sin. And I saw it as the point where human beings decided to become fully themselves instead of being the pets or creatures of another power.
Amazon.com: Would I be right in thinking that you very much enjoyed rewriting Genesis to fit each of your worlds?
Pullman: Oh yes! The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the temptation of the serpent is for me the central myth of what it means to be a human being. So it was clear to me from the beginning that this was what His Dark Materials would have to be about as well. It would have to lead up to a garden in which something similar took place, or something analogous, anyway.
Amazon.com: You write in your acknowledgments that you're indebted to Paradise Lost, to the works of Blake, and to Heinrich von Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater." Can you tell us about this last and its effect on you and the trilogy?
Pullman: Kleist's essay, which was written a year or so before he committed suicide in about 1812, tells of a conversation he had with a friend who was a dancer. The friend told him that he had just witnessed the most graceful exhibition of dancing he had ever seen--in the puppet theater. The marionettes' unaffected gracefulness surpassed anything a human dancer could manage. They talk about grace and self-consciousness, and Kleist tells a story of his own, about a young man whose grace and physical beauty were admired by all. One day this young man was drying himself after a visit to the baths, and he noticed--and called his friend's attention to the fact--that he had unconsciously fallen into exactly the same posture as that of a Roman statue of an athlete removing a thorn from his foot. From that moment, Kleist says, an invisible net seemed to fall over the young man. All his grace left him; his movements became stiff and self-conscious. The dancer follows with another story, about a time when he had been fencing with a friend, and beating him hollow. The friend invited him to try and fence with a tame bear, and the dancer scoffed, but found that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't touch the bear with the tip of his sword: the bear countered every time. Furthermore, when he feinted, the bear knew and didn't move. (Recognize that passage from The Golden Compass? I'm quite frank about my thefts.) Anyway, the conclusion they come to is that the further we go from the human--into the semi-consciousness of the bear, into the entire unconsciousness of the puppet--the more clearly grace emerges. It's self-consciousness that kills it off. We live in a dark valley, on a spectrum between the unconscious grace of the puppet and the fully conscious grace of the god. But the only way out of this impasse, they agree, is not back towards childhood: as with the Garden of Eden, an angel with a fiery sword guards the way; there is no going back. We have to go forward, through the travails and difficulties of life and embarrassment and doubt, and hope that as we grow older and wiser we may approach paradise again from the back, as it were, and enter that grace which lies at the other end of the spectrum. There you are. Kleist says in three or four pages what I had to say in 1,300 or so, and says it better. I can't tell you what an impression that essay made on me, and how profound and important I think it is.
Amazon.com: Let me ask you about the angels Balthamos and Baruch. Their evident passion for each other might not thrill those who have already been critical of Lord Asriel.
Pullman: I was very fond of Balthamos and Baruch as soon as they appeared. You have a little shiver of excitement when somebody or something comes into the story and you know it's going to be a source of rich narrative later on. And as soon as these two shadowy figures came towards Will at the end of The Subtle Knife, I felt that. I didn't give them their names then, but I knew that they were going to be in the third book.
Amazon.com: On the Random House site, you've created the Liber Angelorum, the book of angels, as an adjunct to The Subtle Knife.
Pullman: There's a lot more that I wrote--and a lot more I might say one day--about this business of angels. It's as interesting as dæmons, actually. Like dæmons, they illuminate something about human beings. I'm not saying, "There are these fellows with wings and they're made of spirit and they live forever." That's not very interesting. But what is is that they embody certain human qualities and emotions. That's the way Milton talks about angels in Paradise Lost, because in doing so he can express certain psychological states in very crisp, vivid brilliant images. And that's what I was trying to do, as much as my ability would let me, in the third book.
Amazon.com: What about the psychological states that the mulefa--the wheeled, trunked beings whom Mary Malone comes upon in The Amber Spyglass--embody?
Pullman: They embody harmony with the environment. I was about to say, "They're very Californian, the mulefa." [laughs] They stand for a state of happy fulfillment in the physical processes of life--they manage their world completely--because they have what we call consciousness. They impose certain things on their world, but unlike human beings, who impose agricultural chemicals and nuclear power and so forth, the mulefa go about it in a gentler way, respecting the integrity of the things that they're dealing with. For example, in order to build their houses, they actually grow the wood into the shape they want it to be, rather than cutting it down and planing it and sawing it and chopping it.
Amazon.com: If you had your druthers, which of your various worlds would you choose to live in?
Pullman: Well, it would be nice to see one's dæmon, I suppose, so I would quite like to live in Lyra's world. But on the other hand, it might be rather dangerous if I didn't know my way around. I suppose it comes back to the fact that we have to build our Republic of Heaven wherever we are, so I think I'd be happiest in my own world, where I am. Or if not happiest, then at least this is where I have to be, this is where I have to live and work.
Amazon.com: You've said that this is the last that we'll hear of Will and Lyra. Is this really true?
Pullman: At the moment. You see, this is the end of their story.
Amazon.com: Even if you never write anything more about them, will you be following their lives?
Pullman: Maybe, subterraneanly, there will be something going on still. The publishers would like me to do a companion volume, consisting of more background material, biographies of the characters, maybe--what do they call it now?--that prequel stuff. And who knows, I might do that. Certainly there is one large thing which I have left unsaid all the way through. Underlying the whole trilogy there is a sort of creation myth, which became explicit to me in the writing of it just as the story of the creation as told in the Old Testament underlies Paradise Lost. As I was writing His Dark Materials, I wrote it all down several times in several different forms until I got it clear to me. That exists, but it isn't explicit anywhere in the book, and that might be something which I could expand on.
Amazon.com: You have left a couple of things open, though.
Pullman: Yes, I never close doors completely. [laughs]
Amazon.com: I've heard that there's some difference between the U.K. and U.S. editions of the first volume.
Pullman: There's not much difference in the text--hardly any. But the British editions of the first two books have illustrations, a different one for each chapter, which I drew myself. I was very keen to continue that tradition with the third book, but a better idea occurred to me. So for the third book in the U.K., I have a little epigraph, a quotation from poetry or the Bible or something else, at the head of every chapter--just two or three lines, no more. These quotations were little fragments of poetry that have accompanied me throughout the whole thing, so they were very important to me. And I think they illuminate the chapters in an interesting way.
Amazon.com: Let me ask you about the poems that open The Amber Spyglass.
Pullman: The John Ashbery is an extraordinary thing. I first came across it in his Selected Poems when I was in Toronto at the end of a prepublication tour for The Golden Compass. I opened it for the first time and there was this wonderful stanza at the end of "The Ecclesiast":
Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living. The night is cold and delicate and full of angels...
I just adore it. It's a little summary of what was going to happen at the very end of the book, and I thought, I must have that. The Rilke--from " The Third Elegy," where he's addressing the stars and wondering if the lover's feelings for his loved one come from "the pure constellations"--again that struck me with great force as soon as I read it.
Amazon.com: And the Blake?
Pullman: It has been very important for me for a long time, that particular passage from his prophetic work "America." It seemed to express very clearly what happens when the dead are finally set free. I hope readers will enjoy them. Of course, when you put an epigraph in a book you know that many people aren't going to read it. But a few will, and they might be drawn to read a bit more of the poets concerned, which would be great.
Amazon.com: I love the description in The Amber Spyglass of the ghost children, whose voices were no louder than dry leaves falling and who passed through Lyra like smoke. I was wondering how difficult they were to create.
Pullman: They were very easy. I saw them at once and I heard them at once. This association of ghosts with dry leaves is quite an easy one to make, because there's an implication of melancholy, and of course death, in a dry leaf. It's very light and fragile and insubstantial. I saw those children very clearly in my mind.
Amazon.com: It's heartbreaking when they crowd around the dragonflies--the Gallivespian steeds--thinking that they're dæmons. And how did you think of the Gallivespians, those intemperate spies who are only as tall as Lord Asriel's hand-span?
Pullman: They just appeared suddenly, and I thought, Yes, I want you. Especially with the spurs and the venom and the touchy, prickly nature that they have.
Amazon.com: I was delighted by your point that they wouldn't be such good spies if they were our size.
Pullman: But you see, I was having great fun with that sort of thing. Even given the emotional tone that you're trying to put across, you've still got to make writing as amusing as you can.
Amazon.com: There are also times, just for a second--or a sentence--when you're appealing a little bit more to your adult readers. For instance in The Subtle Knife, when the queen of the Latvian witches flies off to Lord Asriel's, you write: "Every witch there knew what had happened next, and neither Will nor Lyra dreamed of it. So Ruta Skadi had no need to tell."
Pullman: I don't spell it out. It's there if you can see it, but it's not there if you can't. One of the gratifying things about this series is that I've had a lot of response from adults as well as from children.
Amazon.com: Did you enjoy showing us a bit more of Lord Asriel in the third book?
Pullman: Yes, I did. And particularly more of Mrs. Coulter.
Amazon.com: Do you think that your characters also have different aspects of you in them?
Pullman: Well, I suppose that's inevitable, but I wouldn't know what they are. I don't know whether they come from inside me or outside me. I don't know whether I create them or catch them. And I'm not even sure I particularly want to speculate. My job is to take what comes to me, wherever it comes from, and shape it into a story which will keep people turning the pages. So it doesn't really interest me whether they come from things I've observed or whether I make them up entirely or base them on real characters. I don't know where they come from; I just know they arrive.
Amazon.com: That seems similar to the interdependence between the mulefa and the wheel-pod trees. Mary Malone wonders: "Which had come first: wheel or claw? Rider or tree?"
Pullman: They come together--that's right. They both create each other.
[Amazon.com, 2002]
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