Influences and Comparisons
John Milton
John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, written between 1658 and 1663, is one of the greatest literary creations of all time. Drawn from the Old Testament, it sets out to ‘justify the ways of God to Men’ by retelling the story of how Adam and Eve came to be expelled from the paradise of living in the Garden of Eden. It starts with Satan surrounded by fallen angels who, like him, have been expelled from Heaven to live in the Abyss of Hell. Nothing daunted, he resolves to build the rival kingdom of Pandemonium. But rather than risk another war against God, Satan decides to get back at his hated rival in a more subtle way.
Escaping from Hell, accompanied by his daughter Sin and their joint son Death, Satan sets out to wreck God’s plans for His newly created earth. Coming across Adam and Eve living a perfect life untouched by any flaws, guilt or death, Satan starts tempting Eve in dreams to do the only thing she and Adam have been forbidden from doing: eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. When Adam and Eve refuse, having been warned by the angel Raphael to resist any further temptations on this score, Satan returns disguised as a snake. He tells Eve that God is simply jealous of them and does not want them to become as gods too, which would surely happen once they ate the forbidden apple. Eve finally gives way, and is then joined by Adam, determined now to share her fate. Adam and Eve are expelled from paradise, and in due course, having previously been immortal, must die as the direct result of their one, great sin.
Pullman first came across Paradise Lost at the age of sixteen when he studied its first two books at school. Immediately swept away by the majesty of the language and the power of the poetry, he also found it a superb story. In an interview years later he quotes the following lines that he still knows by heart:
High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence.
(Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 1–6)
15. ‘High on a throne of royal state, which far / Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, / Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand / Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold, / Satan exalted sat’ (II, 1–5). (Source: Doré’s Illustrations for “Paradise Lost”, Gustave Doré. Copyright © 1993 by Dover Publications, Inc.)
For Pullman, this not only conjures up a vivid and compelling picture; it also raises the questions: ‘What’s going to happen next? What’s he going to do?’ So while he went on to reject the theological argument about the Fall of Man on which the poem is based, he was happy to draw much of his inspiration from it. Such borrowings include the phrase His Dark Materials, the overall title for his trilogy, which comes from the poem and is quoted just before the first page of Northern Lights. It refers to the mixture of water, earth, air and fire involved in the creation of the world and now at large in the wild shores of Hell.
The overlap between Paradise Lost and Pullman’s trilogy is not exact. While Lord Asriel shares some of Satan’s malign energy, he is also an individual in his own right whose life path in the trilogy is never predictable. Nor is Lyra a direct replica of Eve.
In Paradise Lost, Milton wrote of Adam and Eve after they have been expelled from paradise:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way.
This is a sad image of two lost souls uncertain where to go next. But in Pullman’s reworking of this great poem, Will and Lyra now have the entire world before them as well as their own spirits still intact and ready for the next challenge. The contrast could hardly be greater.
But what the two works do have in common, other than the basic Christian framework from which they make such different deductions, is a richness of imagination. Milton’s brooding landscapes are echoed throughout Pullman’s work, and there is also a common cast of angels, good and bad. Most importantly, both writers offer readers a trip into an imaginative world where wonders literally never cease but whose central core is still primarily about the eternal struggle between good and evil.
William Blake
Another of Pullman’s heroes is the poet and artist William Blake, born in London in 1757. Blake believed that it is in the freedom of the imagination rather than in rational thought that we can best perceive the nature of the divine love and sympathy which surrounds us all. As he wrote in A Vision of the Last Judgment: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is, infinite.’ Only after that can humans hope to discover ‘the real and eternal world of which the Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow’.
Blake was also much taken with the contrast between innocence and experience, writing his most famous sequence of poems around this theme. Several are about a ‘Little Girl Lost’ whose name is Lyca, a possible inspiration for the Lyra of His Dark Materials. The tension between innocence and experience is also a preoccupation with Pullman, who sees advantages in both states, with experience the natural replacement of innocence rather than its inevitable corruption. Blake also believed that the human soul must first pass through the fallen world before it can reach a new, higher state of innocence. This idea is an obvious influence in those scenes in The Amber Spyglass where Lyra and Will visit the underworld.
Blake wrote in his principal prose work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that the ultimate aim of all humans should be to enter the New Jerusalem of the redeemed imagination. For him, this involves the denial of eternal punishment and ultimate authority – views that have strong connections to Pullman’s thinking as well. In Milton, one of his last works, Blake portrays the great poet returning from eternity in order to correct his former views about original sin. He now preaches a doctrine of self-sacrifice and forgiveness, and denounces what he has come to see as the evil committed by God.
The principal enemies of the individual when it comes to making the spiritual journey through the fallen world from darkness to light are what Blake described as the various spectres that haunt us and which we must always learn to cast away. For Blake, such spectres are the creation of oppressive religion backed up by the state. His views are summed up in lines from his Songs of Innocence and Experience, for example: ‘God and his priest and King, who make up a heaven of our misery’. Pullman too describes the equally dangerous and destructive Spectres in his stories as symbolic, in the way that they suck out an individual’s soul, causing the type of depression that can render any human life temporarily unbearable.
As part of his denial of the existence of the material world and nothing else, Blake insisted that at times he talked regularly to angels. Pullman also uses angels in his trilogy, along with other mythological or fabulous creatures. This is not because he believes in the everyday existence of such things, but as regularly recurring symbols within the human imagination over the centuries, he clearly thinks that they must by definition stand for something important to all of us. Bringing them into play in a modern story helps build a bridge between today’s readers and the most popular fantasies of the past, underlining the continuity of human imagination over the centuries.
Heinrich von Kleist
The third major literary influence upon Pullman, Heinrich von Kleist, was born in 1777 and became an army officer before taking up philosophy. But after reading the works of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Kleist came to the conclusion that human beings would always be incapable of arriving at the absolute truth about anything. Abandoning philosophy in order to become an author, he wrote several plays and many short stories. Eventually sinking into despair, he shot himself in 1811 as part of a suicide pact made with a woman suffering from incurable cancer.
His essay On the Marionette Theatre was written a year
before his death, and is reprinted in the appendices of this book. Working from the observation that marionettes being set to dance always seem less affected than any human performers, Kleist describes how all individuals, following the example first set by Adam and Eve, have at some stage to become self-conscious. This means that everyone has to lose the child-like spontaneity and grace found in their younger years. The only way to re-enter this former paradise of total lack of self-consciousness is by working through the experience that accompanies adulthood, including those lessons learned through suffering, sorrow and other personal difficulties. So while it may be sad to lose the sort of innocence that marked us out as children, this is no tragedy. Instead, we can use our adult knowledge to recreate the same type of grace again, once we have discovered enough about ourselves and others to acquire the type of wisdom all humans are capable of.
There are obvious connections with His Dark Materials here, not least the mention in Kleist’s essay of an Iorek-type tethered fighting bear who still manages to get the better of a nobleman armed with a sword and skilled in fencing. Like Kleist, Pullman also sees the story of Adam and Eve as symbolising the way that children have eventually to grow up by eating from the tree of knowledge. But this inevitable step forward should always be seen as an important acquisition rather than as any sort of dreadful loss or crime, because the loss of innocence also marks the beginning of the acquisition of wisdom.
Lyra and Will too have to sacrifice their innocent but sadly impractical desire to spend the rest of their lives together, while Lyra also loses her unconscious ability to work the alethiometer. However, by fully engaging with the life in front of her, she will one day learn how to use the alethiometer again, but this time through hard work rather than through any innate skill. Or as Kleist puts it: ‘we must eat again of the tree of knowledge a second time in order to return to the state of innocence’. This particular state is best symbolised by those older characters in His Dark Materials, such as Farder Coram, John Faa and Lee Scoresby, whose sound and selfless advice to Lyra is always worth listening to. This is not simply because they have already seen and learned so much during their long lives; it is also because they have reached a level of moral wisdom that only experience linked to self-knowledge can truly bring about.
Pullman, C.S. Lewis and growing up
Although Pullman is on record for despising the Christian-based Narnia stories of C.S. Lewis, the two writers actually share a good deal of background. Both lost a parent when young and later spent most of their adult life in Oxford. Both are fascinated by ideas of ‘Northernness’, and both create worlds separate from this one where children are put to severe moral tests before finally saving both themselves and everyone else. For both, these tests include withstanding guilt about a sick mother left behind but still in desperate need of a cure. In Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, the child Digory is tempted to break a solemn promise by the hope that he might be able to help his sick mother. In The Subtle Knife, Will almost gives way when he has a vision of his own mentally ill mother’s suffering face just as he is about to wield the knife that will finally cut the world free. Each writer also describes mighty battles within which the good finally manage to defeat the bad.
The Narnia stories famously start with a child making a voyage to another land that exists at the back of a wardrobe. In the opening pages of Northern Lights, Lyra too hides inside a wardrobe, shutting the door just as the much-feared steward, who has twice beaten her before, enters the room where she is not supposed to be. This surface similarity between the two stories comes up again at other points. The pitiless Tartars that kidnap Lyra are reminiscent of the Calormenes in Lewis’s The Last Battle, with ‘their white eyes flashing dreadfully in their brown faces’. Pullman may at other times be deliberately imitating the Narnia stories in order then to highlight the fundamental differences that exist between Lewis’s approach and his own.
As Pullman has said himself, he had long ‘wanted to give a sort of historical answer to the, so to speak, propaganda on behalf of religion that you get in, for example, C.S. Lewis’. But by attacking Christianity through its own story of the Garden of Eden, Pullman also succeeds in giving at least this part of the Bible an increased visibility that may otherwise have been lost on generations of younger readers. At a time when hearing or reading Bible stories is becoming less common in many schools, some young readers could now find themselves learning about some of the great stories of Christianity from Pullman himself. If this is an irony, Pullman would surely take it in good heart. Brought up on Bible stories as a child, he has never wavered in his love for them purely as stories. It is when they become dogma that he and they part company.
While Lewis follows the orthodox Christian values of his time, Pullman breaks away from them in anger and disgust. In Lewis’s The Last Battle, one of the main child characters, Susan, is accused by another of the same age of being ‘interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.’ Pullman, on the other hand, describes in positive terms the happier times when Lyra learned from her mother how best to apply lipstick, powder and scent. He also welcomes and celebrates the onset of sexuality and the way this changes the relationship between Will and Lyra. In one beautiful passage, Lyra listens to Mary Malone, now taking on the role of serpent in the Garden of Eden. This is because, by talking about an old love affair, she gradually causes Lyra to feel herself coming alive in a new and passionate manner by way of response:
She felt a stirring at the roots of her hair: she found herself breathing faster. She had never been on a roller-coaster, or anything like one, but if she had, she would have recognized the sensations in her breast: they were exciting and frightening at the same time, and she had not the slightest idea why. The sensation continued, and deepened, and changed, as more parts of her body found themselves affected too.
This lyrical description is reminiscent of the joy felt for each other by Adam and Eve in Book 4 of Paradise Lost. They too experienced sexual feelings without any of the attendant guilt that afflicted them later on after they had eaten the apple and then realised, for the first time, that they were both naked and ashamed. But Lyra is presented here as an Eve who is never going to experience the equivalent of the Fall. Will, when he reciprocates her feelings towards him, also feels nothing but tenderness and love. What a pity, Pullman seems to be saying here, that the sexual instinct has not always been celebrated in this way rather than seen through the distorted lens of religiously based disgust.
In Pullman’s trilogy, Will and Lyra end their story determined to live their lives in the here and now. They have already discovered that the best way to survive the afterlife is to take with them as many positive stories about their former life as possible, of the type that are enjoyed at the time and then remembered with pleasure and affection afterwards. But the essence of all these stories must be their truthfulness, even if this means sometimes recalling painful as well as pleasurable moments and events from the past.
Even more importantly, they have just fallen in love and exchanged first, passionate embraces. This moment occurs just after Lyra offers Will some of the sweet-tasting red fruit packed for them by Mary Malone that morning. The symbolism is clear: Eve once again is offering fruit to Adam, but now that the Church and Christianity have finally been sent packing there is no one else around to tell them that what feels so good is in fact wicked and bad.
Except, however, for the lone assassin Father Gomez, who for a few moments has Lyra in the telescopic sites of his powerful rifle and is about to pull the trigger. But he is eliminated at the last moment by Balthamos, one of the good angels, just as Eve was once given support by those angels still fighting against the tyranny of Heaven. In the Bible story, Eve lost; in this one, she wins. And at the same moment, ‘The Dust pouring down from the stars had found a living home again, and these children-no-longer-children, saturated with love, were the cause of it all’. The vi
ctory of the new Adam and Eve is therefore complete. Humanity itself, having previously taken the false path of shame and guilt, can now follow in the same direction as Will and Lyra, unhampered by the past and full of hope for the future.
In the final book of the Narnia series, The Last Battle, the children discover that the land they are in is actually heaven. Without realising it, they have all been killed in a railway accident, but find that they are now so happy and fulfilled that they no longer miss any of their former times on earth. But Pullman takes a totally different view in his novels. For him, life on earth is the best there is ever going to be. The contrast could hardly be greater.
There still remains a mountain for Will and Lyra to climb, even so. Pullman has no truck with the idea that childhood is that period of innocence when we are closer to the divine. He has always hated the sort of children’s literature that for him ‘wallows in a sort of sticky nostalgia for nursery teas, and teddy bear, and bath-time, and wishes it had never grown up’. However happy it might have been: ‘We cannot dwell forever in the paradise of childhood, we have to go forward, through the disappointments and compromises and betrayals of experience, towards the fully conscious kind of grace that we call wisdom. Innocence is not wise, and wisdom cannot be innocent.’ The compensations of maturity remain huge but they must necessarily be hard won.
The occasional overlaps that do exist between Lewis and Pullman arise for a variety of reasons. Both are authors with a strong sense of mission. Their sense of a world divided between good and evil, and the way that all individuals have to take sides in this eternal battle, actually have a lot in common. Where they differ is over the whole question of Christianity. But at other times, particularly when the forces of light are battling it out with the powers of darkness, they become far more alike. At these moments, neither writer has much time for moral ambiguity in their books. Always happy to fight the good fight, both have little patience with waverers and the fainthearted. Readers who have previously enjoyed the Narnia stories might therefore find much in His Dark Materials that could seem pleasantly familiar as well as deeply enjoyable in its own right.
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