Pullman’s His Dark Material, a Paradoxical Equilibrium between Responsibility and Autonomy
p. 235-242
Résumé
For fifteen years a major evolution has taken place in children’s literature with the writing of crossovers. These novels were sometimes first published as children’s books, even if the author had not intended it—this is the case of Pullman’s His Dark Materials1—or were sometimes chosen and adopted by adult readers even if they had been originally meant for a young readership. With intended crossovers like His Dark Materials, the concept of responsibility which had been pervading children’s literature so far lost its grip on this literary category since educating children was no longer its main purpose. Pullman’s trilogy seems to have contrived a form of autonomy from the rules and traditions which were weighing on children’s books.
Texte intégral
1For centuries, children’s literature has been characterised by some rules and codes imposed upon it by its ultimate goal: educating children or even making young readers fit in with the social norms and diktats of the time. Autonomy from these norms was even considered as a heresy in the seventeenth century. A major evolution took place at the end of the twentieth century with the writing of crossovers, books transcending literary categories. In 1995 Northern Lights,2 the first volume of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials, was the first crossover to be published and, as such, this book benefits from some sort of autonomy: it can reject external values such as ideological, political, moral and pedagogic values. It can be assumed that if this narrative was not written for a specific readership, it is devoid of any practical function and of instrumental values which is Kant’s conception of what he calls die schöne Kunst or the work of fine art. But, in several lectures or interviews, Pullman also claims the existence of a ‘school of morals’ in literature and acknowledges his responsibility as a writer of fiction. So, this paper will attempt to show that Pullman manages to reach some sort of equilibrium between responsibility and autonomy by first mentioning some central concepts of his philosophy of writing, then by showing that he is a committed author who claims a form of autonomy from the codes and traditions of children’s literature which are nevertheless seeping through in the narrative.
2Northern Lights has had an interesting destiny. Originally Pullman didn’t intend it to have a specific readership, but as he had already published children’s books, David Fickling his editor, decided to publish it in a series for children. It was quite successful at once and was subsequently issued in the U.S.A. but as a book for adults. In Great-Britain, adult readers became more and more interested in His Dark Materials and a second edition was proposed for them. The public finally fulfilled Pullman’s initial desire which had been to write a story and not a book for a specific readership: ‘If the story I write turns out to be the sort of thing that children enjoy reading, then well and good. But I don’t write for children: I write books that children read. Some clever adults read them too.’3 The main purpose of Pullman’s trilogy is consequently not to educate young readers and it has contrived a form of autonomy from the rules and traditions which used to weigh heavily on children’s books. For him, stories are the essence of his work, they are what really matters and he declares that his books were not written to convey a message of any sort: they are only stories and he is ‘in the “Once upon a time” business.’4 He has denounced for years now this message business which he calls ‘theocratic absolutism.’ He defines it as the imposition on readers of a pre-established meaning or message which, in its turn, delineates what he calls ‘the single correct meaning’. This ‘theocratic absolutism’ corresponds to the mission children’s literature has assigned to itself for centuries and leads to a categorisation of books: ‘[...] Reading one sort of stuff will damage; reading another sort of stuff will improve. And we shall decide which is which.’5 To oppose this form of absolutism, he promotes ‘the democracy of reading’, a concept taking into account the interaction between the reader and the text, as reader-response theories do:
Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book—and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook— in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn’t like a lecture: it’s like a conversation. There’s a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter. And we are active about the process.6
3But Pullman also believes literature has a duty which is, according to him, perfectly defined by Dr Johnson whose words Pullman slightly transformed: ‘The only aim of writing is to help the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ He is persuaded that books can teach us about moral questions and he advocates what he calls ‘the school of morals’ in literature, he ‘think[s] we can learn what’s good and what’s bad, what’s generous and unselfish, what’s cruel and mean, from fiction.’7 These two positions seem to be antagonistic and hard to reconcile. If ‘the democracy of reading’ is the leading force in the process of writing, how can any moral education be intended simultaneously? Can autonomy and commitment be both claimed by an author? In fact, we can find an answer in His Dark Materials and it lies in a double orientation, characteristic of modern children’s literature: on the one hand, there is a strong desire for autonomy from the traditions and rules which used to pervade children’s books and on the other hand, we find the idea of responsibility, the upholding of a didactic mission of literature. Pullman, imitating his favourite author William Blake, manages to reach some sort of equilibrium between these two orientations. He aims at the marriage of responsibility and delight: commitment cannot be avoided but ‘the democracy of reading’ and delight are two powerful forces which cannot be ignored. Conscious of his responsibility, he is a committed author who claims a form of autonomy from the codes and traditions of children’s literature. Not writing specifically for children, he does not hesitate to evoke themes and subjects that are generally cautiously avoided in children’s writing.
[Some people] say that children’s books shouldn’t deal with matters such as sex and drugs, or violence, or homosexuality, or abortion, or child abuse. Taboos change over time: only a couple of generations ago, it was rare to find a children’s book that confronted divorce. Against the keep-them-safe argument, I’ve heard it said that young readers should be able to find in a children’s book anything they might realistically encounter in life. Children do know about these things; they talk about them, they ask questions about them, they meet some of them, sometimes, at home; shouldn’t they be able to read about them in stories?8
4In His Dark Materials, Pullman develops ideas and concepts belonging to quantum physics such as dark matter, the multiple-world theory and the entanglement of photons. He also induces his reader to think about death, life, religion, God and creation. Of course, some of these subjects were present in novels of apprenticeship centuries ago, but Pullman decides to deal with these through child abuse and torture. He presents God as a senile and drooling old man and the Church as a destructive and totalitarian power which controls the world. Sexuality and homosexuality are also central in the three narratives and traditional education is denounced. Through the young heroes, a girl named Lyra and Will, a young boy, who experience a passage from childhood to adulthood, we get a negative image of school which is unable to give any sort of useful knowledge and even if Lyra has lived for years in an Oxford college, she has been given a piecemeal education and only really learns when she meets Gypsies, an armoured bear and witches. School only provides an inadequate education that is useless in modern society and readers are induced to get knowledge elsewhere. The image of adults is also degraded. They are irresponsible, cannot be relied on or are even deceptive and treacherous. In His Dark Materials, children are more mature, more honest and even more intelligent than adults. Finally, two other aspects of Pullman’s trilogy are rarely found in children’s books. The Amber Spyglass,9 the last volume, does not have a happy ending and several narrators are present throughout the three novels, giving a split-up perspective of events. In brief, Pullman does not restrict his writing to adult readers and blurs the limits between children’s literature and general literature.
5But even if he writes differently from former authors of children’s books, the codes and traditions of this literary category are nevertheless seeping through. The coming of age of young heroes has always been a very common theme in children’s narratives and has been widely used in every European country since the publication of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Moreover, we can find in His Dark Materials the age-old pattern of the monomyth described by Campbell,10 a pattern that can be found in every mythology. It consists in separation, initiation and return, a usual movement in children’s books and in Pullman’s trilogy. Lyra and Will are given magical objects that help them in their quest. They are supposed to annihilate death, to destroy the influence of the Church and to create the Republic of Heaven by re-enacting original sin. Lyra is given an alethiometre (a word derived from the Greek aletheia which means truth), a kind of clock with symbols, which is in fact a truth-telling device; Will gets a subtle knife which can cut through anything, even through the fabric that separates the numerous worlds from one another. Besides, the lavish use of intertextuality inexorably connects His Dark Materials with former works of art.
6The title of the trilogy is an excerpt from Milton’s Paradise Lost which Pullman intended to rewrite. When he imagined the story of Lyra and Will, he wanted to reverse the moral polarities of Milton’s poem and decided his story had to be of the devil’s party. Indeed, it deals with original sin while giving it a positive value. For Pullman, the concept of original sin was the cause of man’s decline because it was considered as evil by the Church. After the Fall, man was encouraged to negate his instinct and his real animal nature and so he limited himself and submitted to the religious power that promised him a better afterlife. In Pullman’s work, man has a body, a soul and a daemon which is an animal of the opposite sex and stands for his instincts. In this treatment of the human condition, we can find the second major influence on Pullman, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and more generally Blake’s work. Like Blake, the author of His Dark Materials believes that ‘if the doors of perception were cleansed away everything would appear as it is, infinite.’11 He recommends a new awareness: man must take his instincts and his senses into account in order to reach a higher level of consciousness and humanity. Moreover, this quotation from Blake also finds echoes in the use of the multiple-world theory. The reality we perceive is only a fragment of a whole we are still incapable of seeing because of the limitations imposed upon us by rigid traditions and precepts and even if traditional elements and codes are still present in His Dark Materials, the specific use Pullman makes of them reverses their value. He can seem to adhere to the Romantic belief in a totality but, in reality, he goes further. Romanticism was mostly a reaction against the rationalism that had characterised the eighteenth century and Romantic writers believed that man was the victim of a repressing society which limited his actions and his perceptions. Consequently they were striving for a release from this bondage humanity lived in and they yearned for a spiritual reality which could only be reached through feelings and imagination, even though many artists were then dissatisfied with religion. For Pullman, there is no spiritual reality: man must seek for human reality and God is a lie created to deceive man, to make him dependent. This is a common device in Pullman’s trilogy: tradition is present but only to be subverted. He uses tradition as a starting point and seems first to be faithful to it, but soon he denounces its limits and goes beyond it. A brief analysis of the first page of Northern Lights illustrates it.
7The chapter starts with a graphic epigraph representing a trite object, a decanter of Tokay which gives its name to the chapter. This object however plays an essential role in the whole narrative. The Master of Jordan College will put some poison into the decanter in order to kill Lord Asriel, a scientist on the verge of changing human destiny with a fantastic discovery. Some detective novels use the same device: a weapon or an object used as a weapon gives its name to a chapter or a whole book and young readers are often familiar with this genre and cannot miss the allusion. They are induced to think that this narrative is probably a kind of detective novel dealing with facts. The description of Jordan College which follows reinforces this idea. But with the first words ‘Lyra and her dæmon,’ fancy appears. What is a dæmon? This question comes to the reader’s mind at once and she inevitably associates it with demons and considers it as a dangerous creature.12 As the creature is Lyra’s dæmon, she can only be as evil as he is. His name is then mentioned, Pantalaimon, and it reinforces the reader’s first impression that she is reading a fantasy where the devil and some of his acolytes will play the leading part. Experienced readers will even find in this name an echo of Milton’s Pandemonium. But soon they understand they are not on the right track. Pan is in fact more reasonable than Lyra and tries to convince her not to get into mischief: he is her guardian angel and will help her overcome every obstacle. At last, we must keep in mind that Pantalaimon is also the name of a saint and in Greek it means ‘all helping.’ The initial perception of the reader is progressively modified: clues are scattered in the text and have to be collected by the reader who can then interpret what she is reading; she must work out the meaning of the narrative and she gradually becomes aware that she is on the wrong track. She joins a game, she is asked to think, to formulate hypotheses; facts and fancy are intertwined, which makes the game even harder. This passage perfectly exemplifies the paradoxical equilibrium in Pullman’s writing. By intertwining facts and fancy he compels the reader to take responsibility for the meaning of the story which has to be worked out. The author relies on his knowledge by referring to well-known works of art or literary genres but Pullman diverts the impact of the reader’s experience: he uses it to pull in the reader and then he indirectly leads him to doubt and find a new meaning to the text. The reader is constantly urged to revise his interpretation of the text. Indeed, Pullman’s narrative is paradoxical. His Dark Materials is a crossover published in the twenty-first century and, as a ‘book that children read,’ it emphasises its difference from former children’s books. In those narratives especially designed for young readers, the reader was often trapped in a form of passivity as his skills were often underestimated, which resulted in an oversimplified text. A study of the incipit of a famous and successful children’s book, Tolkien’s Hobbit, shows this difference in the role allotted to the reader.13 The novel starts with a very detailed description of the hobbit’s world which is never misleading. From the very beginning the reader is given the opportunity to visualise this universe. Tolkien wants to create a secondary world as coherent as reality which will inspire a secondary belief in readers. With this subcreation, he challenges the willing suspension of disbelief which is, according to him, characteristic of poor-quality narratives. The reader is not active in the process of reading and is never asked to work out the meaning of the text which is made explicit often with intrusions of the narrator.
8Pullman changes his reader’s perception of reality: what was immoral becomes moral, what was bad becomes good, what was incorrect for children to read becomes correct. While retaining the moral mission of Victorian narratives, since he shows his reader what love is and what courage is, Pullman points out that all certainties are outdated: nothing is stable or finite in the modern world and our knowledge is only composed of fragments of an infinite reality. Relativism is essential in His Dark Materials and Pullman shows that children’s literature must release itself from the yoke of conventions, without forgetting its heritage even if this leads to its disappearance and its final reintegration into literature as a whole and this is the paradoxical equilibrium he manages to create in his trilogy. According to Pullman, children’s literature should follow the same movement as its young heroes: after separation, initiation and positive evolution comes the return to the original point of departure which is general literature and the current growing interest of the public for crossovers seems to corroborate his philosophy of writing.
Notes de bas de page
1 His Dark Materials is composed of three volumes, Northern Lights (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000).
2 Philip Pullman, Northern Lights (London: Scholastic, 1995).
3 Philip Pullman, ‘About the Books’, ed. Philip Pullman www.philip-pullman.com/about\_the\_book.asp, 15 May 2008.
4 Philip Pullman, www.philip-pullman.com, 15 May 2008.
5 Philip Pullman, ‘Miss Goddard’s Grave’, ed. Philip Pullman www.philip-pullman.com, 16 May 2008.
6 Philip Pullman, ‘Voluntary Service,’ The Guardian 28 December 2002 books.guardian.co.uk/departments/, 16 May 2008.
7 Philip Pullman, ed. Philip Pullman www.philip-pullman.com, 16 May 2008.
8 Philip Pullman, ‘Voluntary Service,’ books.guardian.co.uk/departments/, 16 May 2008.
9 Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic, 2000).
10 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973).
11 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 14 in Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (New-York: Norton, 1979) 93.
12 Of course, readers associate this term with the modern ‘demon’ and don’t remember the Greek word daïmon or the Roman word daemon which only meant spirit.
13 We must point out that Tolkien rewrote the second part of The Hobbit just before the publication of The Lord of the Rings. But the first part of the narrative is original and Tolkien confessed later in many interviews that he was not satisfied with the beginning of The Hobbit in which showed the restricted vision he had then of children and their reading skills.
Auteur
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Sabine Requier-Ulrich
EA 741, Université Paul-Valéry —Montpellier III
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