Abstract
This article examines the multiple worlds in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy in light Pierre Bourdieu’s “space of possibles” and the combination of chance and choice that impact Lyra and Will’s decisions. Rather than viewing chance or destiny as disempowering, this article considers how the protagonists’ choices also encourage readers to confront their own notions of space in the world outside the narrative. As Lyra and Will work to escape and restore the dystopic multiverses through which they travel, Pullman’s text challenges readers to recognize and repair the dystopias in their own worlds and to accept the Keatsian “negative capabilities” of ambiguity and mystery in place of facile escape. Given this pedagogical imperative, Pullman’s enclosure of Lyra and Will in their separate worlds lies at the heart of his resistance to escapist tendencies of fairy-tale endings. Fantasy must be grounded in reality because Pullman’s readers must also continue the struggle for wisdom in their own worlds no less than Lyra and Will.
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Notes
For a reading of Pullman’s “phase space” as it applies to hypertext and online narrative see Mackey (1999).
Bourdieu’s examples are the literary field of nineteenth century France. He writes that “[t]o grasp the effect of the space of possibles, which acts as a discloser of dispositions, it suffices… to imagine what people such as Barcos, Flaubert or Zola might have been if they had found in another state of the field a different opportunity to deploy their dispositions” (p. 235).
In his interview with Ilene Cooper (2000), Pullman asserts his vision of the republic of heaven in what some would call religious terms: “We need joy, we need delight, we need a belief that our lives mean something and have significance in the context of the universe and that they are connected to the universe and connected to each other” (p. 355).
In his essay, “The Republic of Heaven,” (2001) Pullman elaborates on the republican notion of heaven as a response to the death of the Christian God. Pullman’s declarations of atheism aside, his republic of heaven is actually quite similar to the concept of collaborative eschatology put forward by John Dominic Crossan (2009). For similarities between Christian ethics and the thoughtful engagement Pullman’s narrative advocates, see Pinsett (2005) and Padley and Padley (2006).
Gooderham (2003) insists that the trilogy relentlessly undermines the very opportunities for freedom and choice it purports to provide and calls Pullman’s approach “excessive” (p. 170). Moruzi (2005) concurs and maintains that Lyra and Will’s “decisions as young adults are inconsequential because neither of them is given alternatives from which to choose” (p. 59).
Although American readers frequently infer that the titular compass refers to Lyra’s alethiometer, Pullman notes that the phrase refers to the compasses with which Milton’s God circumscribes the earth from chaos. See Book VII of Paradise Lost “He took the golden compasses, prepared/In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe/This universe” (v.225–229) and William Blake’s painting Ancient of Days (God as an Architect) (1794), which depicts God with a single golden compass (Parsons and Nicholson, 1999, p. 126).
Kaisa’s explanation of spatial relationships emphasizes multiplicity: “the lights show us a different universe entirely. Not further way, but interpenetrating with this one. Here, on this deck, millions of other universes exist, unaware of one another….” (GC, p. 188).
See for example Lyra’s response to Tialys’s suggestion of killing an injured toad in the suburbs of the dead: “It might still like being alive, in spite of everything,” and Will’s assertion: “That would be considering our feelings rather than the toad’s” (AS, p. 279).
This open condemnation of abusive sexual practices in the name of religion forms a major ideological strand of the trilogy. Ruta Skadi’s report on involuntary circumcision of children in all worlds condemns the real and fictional sanctions against sexuality more directly:
[t]hey cut their sexual organs, yes, both boys and girls; they cut them with knives so that they shan’t feel. That’s what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling. (SK, p. 45)
The harpy No-Name violently rejects Lyra’s fantastic story (AS, p. 293), but she responds to Lyra’s true story of real human experience with hunger:
Because it was true…Because she spoke the truth. Because it was nourishing. Because it was feeding us. Because we couldn’t help it. Because it was true. Because we had no idea that there was anything but wickedness. Because it brought us news of the world and the sun and the wind and the rain. Because it was true.” (AS 317)
Pullman (2002) expounds on the moral responsibility of the storyteller as teacher in his May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture, in which he states, “all stories teach, whether or not they have an evident moral” (p. 39). Millicent Lenz (2003) agrees and explains that the metafictional elements in His Dark Materials foster a pedagogy of transformation: “the imagination is made ready to accept human experience in the fullness of its contradictions, the mix of its creative and destructive qualities” (pp. 48, 49).
When asked about the “predatory” nature of child-adult interactions in His Dark Materials, Pullman replies that “children who read books don’t expect, any longer, the sort of cozy Enid Blyton picture of family life that used to be the only one presented. They know that their own families aren’t like that” (Parsons and Nicholson, 1999, p. 130).
Citing Pullman’s opinion that “It’s only sentimental adults who think kids are sweet and angelic” (Parsons and Nicholson, 1999, p. 130), Moruzi explains that Pullman “rejects nostalgic impressions of children and childhood, insisting on a more realistic portrayal” (p. 59). In his Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech in 1996, Pullman described children as “ignorant little savages” (par. 5), terms which echo his original description of Lyra as a “barbarian” and “a coarse, greedy little savage” (GC, pp. 34, 36).
See the scene in which Will remembers torturing his mother’s bully: “the next day I found the boy who was leading them. I fought him and I broke his arm and I think I broke some of his teeth” (SK, p. 232).
See Lyra’s realization: “She had thought she was saving Roger, and all the time she’d been diligently working to betray him…” (GC, p. 380; italics orig.). Will is forced to kill multiple times, despite his horror of violence. He exclaims, “truly, truly, I hate this killing!” (AS, p. 30) and later “retch[es], heaving and heaving with a mortal horror. That was two men now that he’d killed…Will did not want this” (AS, p. 162).
Pullman is famous for his frequent denunciations of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia as “pernicious” (Parsons and Nicholson, 1999, p. 131), but his protestations have not stopped a number of critics from pointing out similarities between his work and that of Lewis. See Gray (2007), Woods (2001), and Paulsell (2008).
Father Gomez’s approach to the mulefa recapitulates nineteeth century imperialist attitudes: “The first thing he would do here would be to convince the four-legged creatures, who seemed to have the rudiments of reason, that their habit of riding on wheels was abominable and Satanic and contrary to the will of God. Break them of that, and salvation would follow” (AS, p. 464).
Ruta Skadi’s sensation of flying celebrates the sensual and the sensory of the physical world:
she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all her senses, and in the hunger she was feeling now, and in the presence of her sweet-voiced bluethroat dæmon, and in the earth below her… (SK 125).
Cheerfulness is a key concept of Pullman’s ethics. The angel Balthamos promises to help Will “cheerfully” (AS, p. 94); Lyra puts on a “cheerful” face for Roger’s ghost (AS, p. 306). Will and Lyra both emphasize cheerfulness despite the pain of their separation (AS, pp. 509 and 518). In his essay, “The Republic of Heaven,” Pullman elaborates on cheerfulness as a corollary to knowledge and experience. “we must be cheerful … It’s difficult sometimes, but good will is not a luxury: it’s an absolute necessity. It’s a moral imperative” (p. 667).
See Warner’s comment that “metamorphosis play[s] a crucial part in anagnorisis, or recognition, the reversal fundamental to narrative form and so govern[s] narrative satisfaction” (p. 19).
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Sarah Cantrell recently completed a dissertation in comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her areas of interest are French children’s literature and fantasy literature for children and young adults.
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Cantrell, S.K. “Nothing Like Pretend”: Difference, Disorder, and Dystopia in The Multiple World Spaces of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials . Child Lit Educ 41, 302–322 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-010-9112-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-010-9112-1