The main task, though, is to keep it all—all these things I’ve been talking about today: the making-up part, the writing-down part, the formal patterns, the theme (once you know what that is), the right place to put the camera, the stance towards the characters, all that—to keep them all roughly in balance. In a novel, you never succeed, actually. If you want to write something perfect, go for a haiku. In a work of any length there are bound to be things that don’t work, and passages where the emphasis is wrong, and places where the tone is too dark or too light, and a character or two who doesn’t come to life; and when you read it back after a year or two, you see the faults all too clearly. But you just try to do better next time.
And when you’re doing what I do, writing story rather than literature, you have to keep yourself out of the way. Readers—especially an audience that includes young readers—aren’t in the least interested in you, and your self-conscious post-modernist anguish about all the things there are to be anguished about when it comes to text. They want to know what happened next.
So tell them.
And the way to do that, the way to tell a story, as I’ve said before, is to think of some interesting events, put them in the right order to make clear the connections between them, and recount them as clearly as you can. And while you’re doing that, if you also give the reader enough visual clues for them to know where a scene is taking place, and who’s present, and what time of day it is, and where the light’s coming from; if you make it clear who’s speaking and what they’re saying; if you put the camera in the best place, and don’t move it till you need to; if you get all those things more or less right, then, with a bit of luck, the readers will stay with you till the end of the story, and go and buy your next book when that comes out.
There—I think I’ve said enough. Thank you for listening, and if you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them; and if I don’t know the answers, I’ll make them up.
THIS LECTURE WAS GIVEN AT ST. CROSS BUILDING, OXFORD, 21 MAY 2002.
It’s always struck me as curious how much film people talk about story, and how little book people do. No doubt it’s because film is a much more collaborative business, and because so much money is involved, and because those who put up the money are so much more anxious about getting their investment back. Naturally they’re all passionately interested in making the story watertight.
But it’s also the fact that a book is a solitary enterprise. We don’t have to talk about it before it’s finished, and in fact it’s better not to. I can’t possibly talk about a novel I’m writing, because everything beyond the sentence I’m writing at the moment is provisional, and I’m not even sure how I’m going to end the sentence.
Heinrich von Kleist: “On the Marionette Theatre”
GRACE LOST AND REGAINED
On an essay of extraordinary insight and power—and its influence on His Dark Materials
Sometimes, by chance or fate or the workings of an inscrutable Providence, we meet exactly the right work of art at exactly the right time to have the maximum impact on us. We raise the steel-framed umbrella just as the thunderbolt gathers in the cloud.
For me, this happened one day in 1978, when I came across an essay in the Times Literary Supplement by an author I’d never heard of: Heinrich von Kleist. It was called “On the Marionette Theatre,” and it was translated and introduced by Idris Parry. When he wrote the essay, in 1810, Kleist was thirty-three years old. A year later he was dead.
It had the force of a revelation on me. It is an unusual essay, very short and very simple on the surface. It has the form of a little story, a dialogue, an encounter between two friends—both thoughtful and intelligent men—who talk in a leisured, thoughtful way about puppets, and about grace, and about consciousness…And about that mysterious moment when we become self-conscious, a moment that occurs in every human life at around the age of adolescence, as in this wonderful little story:
“About three years ago, I happened to be at the baths with a young man who was then remarkably graceful in every respect. He was about fifteen, and one could see in him faintly the first traces of vanity, a product of the favour shown by women. It so happened that just before that, we’d seen in Paris the figure of the boy pulling the thorn out of his foot. The cast of the statue is well known; you can find it in most German collections. He was reminded of this when he looked into a tall mirror just as he was putting his foot on a stool to dry it. He smiled and told me what he had discovered.
“In fact I’d noticed it too at the same moment, but…I don’t know if it was to test the quality of his apparent grace or to provide a salutary counter to his vanity…I laughed and said he must be imagining things. He blushed and raised his foot a second time, to show me, but the attempt failed, as anybody could have foreseen. In some confusion he raised his foot a third time, a fourth time, he must have tried it ten times, but in vain; he was quite incapable of reproducing the same movement. What am I saying? The movements he did make were so comical that it was only with difficulty that I managed to keep from laughing.
“From that day, from that very moment, an extraordinary change came over this boy. He began to stand all day in front of the mirror. One by one, his attractions slipped away from him. An invisible and incomprehensible power seemed to settle like a steel net over the free play of his gestures, and after a year nothing remained of the lovely grace which had given pleasure to all who had seen him. I can tell you about a man, still alive, who was a witness to that strange and unfortunate event. He can confirm it word for word, just as I have described it.”
The theme interested me firstly because I loved and revered William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which as Blake said were written to show those contrary states of the human soul; and secondly because my own childhood and adolescence were still painful and fresh in my mind, though I’d left them behind over fifteen years before; and thirdly because in 1978 I was a schoolteacher, and my pupils were at the age when they were going through precisely the sort of change described by Kleist.
Every teacher of young children knows the wonderful freedom and expressiveness—the natural grace—they bring to such things as painting, for instance; they’ll spread the paint around with no hesitation or doubt or uncertainty, without any self-consciousness. But something happens to them as they grow up; they become aware of the difference between what they can do and what accomplished artists can do; they realise that their pictures look clumsy, ill-coordinated, naïve, in a word childish; and they lose the confidence to work as freely as they used to. A sort of cramp seizes their hands. They say, “Oh, I can’t draw at all, I was never any good at it.” And they stop drawing.
And so the freedom they once had vanishes like smoke. In Kleist’s words, “an invisible and incomprehensible power seems to settle like a steel net over the free play of their gestures.”
This self-consciousness is also bound up with the coming of sexual awareness, of course. This is a time when our bodies are beginning to change visibly; when hormones we’ve never experienced begin to flood through our bloodstream; when the greatest social difficulty we have to deal with on a daily basis is sheer embarrassment.
Anyway, I used to notice this effect, this steel net settling over the children I was teaching, this transition; and I remembered my own adolescence, and the curious double sense I had, of the awful embarrassment of physical things combined with the opening out of mental ones. It was a time when I discovered poetry and painting. It was like discovering a new continent—new forms of knowledge, new ways of understanding, immense vistas of possibility.
And then I realised why Kleist links these two most unlikely things—the marionettes in the marketplace, and the story of the Temptation and Fall in the Garden of Eden. Eve was tempted not by wealth or love but by knowledge. Eat this fruit, says the serpent, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. So, tempted by that prospect
, the dizzying prospect of knowledge, they ate the fruit that had been forbidden to them.
And the first result of their eating the fruit was embarrassment. They knew they were naked; it hadn’t occurred to them before. Knowledge comes with a cost. Like the bear that appears later in von Kleist’s essay who effortlessly parries a sword-thrust, because his mind wasn’t troubled by knowledge; like the puppets who swing with effortless grace on their strings, because they have no minds at all; like the beautiful young boy who fell without thinking about it into the attitude of a beautiful work of art, Adam and Eve in their first state were full of grace and innocence. But once they had eaten the fruit, consciousness was open to them, and with consciousness came self-consciousness, awkwardness, embarrassment, sorrow, grief and pain.
As I say, this happens every day, and it happens in every life. Every young child is born into the Garden of Eden, and every child is eventually expelled from it. And you can’t go back. As Kleist points out, we can’t regain innocence once we have lost it. An angel with a fiery sword guards the way back into Paradise. The only way is forward, through life, deep into life, deep into the difficulties and the compromises and the betrayals and the disappointments that we inevitably encounter.
But it isn’t all gloom. There is a prize, and it’s a great one. In Kleist’s terms, we might eventually re-enter Paradise from the back, as it were, by going all the way round the world. This grace that we lost by acquiring knowledge has two forms: that of the puppet, with no consciousness at all, and that of the god, whose consciousness is infinite. Innocence at one end of the spectrum: wisdom at the other. But if we want the wisdom that comes with experience, we have to leave the innocence behind.
I thought about Kleist’s essay and everything it implied for a long time, but I didn’t think of writing anything about it. There was nothing I could add to what was already perfect. It became part of the way I thought about everything.
Then one day I found myself beginning to write a long story of a sort I hadn’t tried before, a sort I could only call fantasy. There was another world, and there were landscapes of Arctic wildness and Gothic complexity; there were gigantic figures of moral darkness and light engaging in a conflict whose causes and outcome were invisible to me. And it began with a little girl going into a room where she shouldn’t go, and having to hide when someone comes in, and then overhearing a conversation whose meaning she doesn’t fully understand, but which fills her with a sense of excitement and dread…
I daresay some writers begin with a theme they want to write about, and then find a story to fit it, and characters to embody the various arguments within it, and so on. I never do. It would feel mechanical, contrived. I don’t know what my theme is until the story is already well under way.
And it wasn’t until this story was advanced enough for me to have written a dozen or more versions of the first chapter, and to have discovered that Lyra had a dæmon called Pantalaimon who could change shape and who was a part of her very self, that I discovered what the theme of this book was. I discovered it in the same moment that I realised that children’s dæmons could change shape, but adult dæmons couldn’t.
I knew enough about storytelling by that time to know that if something doesn’t help, it’ll hinder. If a shape-changing dæmon were something that every character had as a matter of course, the reader would get fed up with it, and so would I, because it would mean nothing. It would be a silly bit of decoration that had no purpose or significance.
But if the difference between children and adults were this visible and dramatic…
And if the theme of the whole story were this very change from innocence to experience…
Then all kinds of possibilities opened up, including the possibility, after a dozen years or more, of doing something like justice to the matters touched on so lightly, so gracefully, in that essay on the marionette theatre by Kleist. If we want wisdom, we have to leave the innocence behind…
That’s what it means when Lyra, at the end of His Dark Materials, loses the power to read the alethiometer. She’s leaving her innocence behind. Where I disagree with a number of writers from the so-called golden age of children’s literature is precisely here, in their view of innocence. Too many of them seemed to feel that childhood was a golden age and its loss is tragic, something to be looked back on for ever with nostalgia and regret.
Well, that’s a view I don’t share. That view would have left Lyra perpetually bereft, able only to lament the loss of her power, stuck in a lifelong mourning for the death of her childhood. I think we can be more positive than that about growing up; I think we can find some reason for welcoming it, some reason for hope. And Kleist’s wonderful essay gave me a clue as to how.
One of the two friends who have this conversation about puppets is himself a dancer. He has learned to dance. By toil and effort and discipline, he has worked his way through the pain and disappointment and setback until he has begun to achieve a mastery of his art. He has left the puppet behind; he is on his way to becoming a god. It seemed to me there was a clue here for Lyra. The adults who read the alethiometer do so with the aid of books of reference—of conscious awareness, in other words. They have to look things up and make the connections consciously, unlike the young Lyra, who does it with the grace and speed of an animal or a bird. To her, the conscious way of reading the alethiometer must seem terribly clumsy and slow and pedestrian and earthbound.
But as she is told, eventually, after great study and toil, her reading of the instrument will be better, deeper, truer, more aware, in every way richer than the one she could achieve when she was a child. There is a great deal of work, and not a little suffering, and many setbacks, before she will reach that goal; but there is a goal, and it can be reached.
That’s where the hope comes in. It’s the hope of every human life, in fact; the hope that we can learn something true, and pass it on.
My debt to Kleist doesn’t quite end with adopting his theme. There is a bear in his essay, and there happens to be a bear in my story as well, and at one point I stole an incident involving Kleist’s bear and gave it to mine. I hope I shall be forgiven for that, because after all I can hardly own up to it without drawing attention to that essay in the first place. My story is much longer than the essay, but that is because I am much less of a genius than Kleist was; he managed to say in 2,500 words or so what I could only cram into 1,200 pages. Nevertheless, I think there are some incidents in the story that might divert the reader, and a character or two who might engage the interest and affection.
I hope so, anyway. It is my way of thanking Providence, or chance, or fate, for that original and unforgettable thunderbolt.
THIS ESSAY WAS ORIGINALLY DELIVERED AS TWO SEPARATE PIECES: A PLATFORM SPEECH AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE FOR A PERFORMANCE IN 2004 OF “ON THE MARIONETTE THEATRE,” AND AS A PART OF THE INTRODUCTION TO THE FOLIO SOCIETY EDITION OF HIS DARK MATERIALS (2008).
As I say, I first came across Kleist’s essay in 1978, when information still had a physical form. That being the case, the only way I could keep it by me was to cut it out of the TLS and look after it, which I did, with the help of much Sellotape as it got more and more worn and frayed. But that was in the very old days, when we were only a step away from having to copy things out by hand if we wanted to preserve them. Practically medieval. By the time I was able to pay tribute to Kleist in the afterword to The Amber Spyglass, the internet had arrived, and anyone who was interested in his essay only had to enter the title in a search box, and up it came within seconds. Of course that’s a great gain, and I wouldn’t be without it, but I do remember treasuring that tattered page of newsprint with its precious cargo of words, and I still have it.
Paradise Lost
AN INTRODUCTION
On the poetry, story, mood of Milton’s great epic, and its influence on His Dark Materials
Here is an old story about a bibulous, semi-
literate, aging country squire sometime in the eighteenth century, sitting by his fireside listening to Paradise Lost being read aloud. He’s never read it himself; he doesn’t know the story at all; but as he sits there, perhaps with a pint of port at his side and with a gouty foot propped up on a stool, he finds himself transfixed.
Suddenly he bangs the arm of his chair, and exclaims, “By God! I know not what the outcome may be, but this Lucifer is a damned fine fellow, and I hope he may win!”
Which are my sentiments exactly.
I’m conscious, as I write this introduction to the poem, that I have hardly any more pretensions to scholarship than that old gentleman. Many of my comparisons will be drawn from popular literature and film rather than from anything more refined. Learned critics have analysed Paradise Lost and found in it things I could never see, and related it to other work I have never read, and demonstrated the truth of this or that assertion about Milton and his poem that it would never have occurred to me to make, or, having made, to think that I could prove it.
But this is how I read this great work, and all I can do is describe that way of reading.
THE STORY AS A POEM
So I begin with sound. I read Paradise Lost not only with my eyes, but also with my mouth.
From Book II, beginning with line 636:
As when far off at sea a fleet descried
Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring
Their spicy drugs: they on the trading flood
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