Milton, Blake and Dust in Pullman’s His Dark Materials

Pullman acknowledges his debt to Milton’s Paradise Lost, a masterpiece of literature that nowadays eludes many people, for a number of reasons: it’s in verse, it’s very long (12 books), it’s about religion, it’s written in 17^th century English, which is a little different from today’s, though far from impenetrable. Milton’s aim was to write the ultimate epic, the story of creation, and the redemption of humanity by Jesus’ death. He tells of the temptation of Eve and the Fall of the first humans, tempted by Satan.

Unfortunately for Milton, Satan takes over the story, becoming rather more of an interesting hero-figure than God or his son. And the question of the Fall also becomes double-edged: before it, Adam and Eve mimsy around the Garden of Eden blandly doing the gardening and having rather wet and innocent conversations, and a bit of very dull sex. Our feeling tends to be, well if this is paradise, I’m not sure I’m all that interested. The temptation is to take the forbidden fruit, of the knowledge of good and evil, after which they become humans as we know them: sex and arguments and blaming each other. And the real question is, why was the fruit forbidden? Because, is Milton’s and God’s answer, and that’s that… and we humans have become what we are because we have that knowledge. There are consequences: death. Adam and Eve have no idea what it is and cannot imagine it; we are the only species on the planet that knows of death and can contemplate it… And while I’m on with the Miltonic parallels, clearly there is an intended resemblance between Asriel’s armed camp preparing for battle with the Authority, and the building of Pandaemonium in the second book of Paradise Lost.

Pullman is fully aware of the importance of this difference between innocence and experience, and how it shapes us through our lives. There are things which happen to us which change us irreversibly, and which we cannot easily explain to others who have not experienced them. How do you describe to someone innocent the experience of an LSD trip, or sex for the first time, or indeed what love actually is? And, of course, you can’t rewind from any of these points, or turn back the clock: you are now changed, experienced. I have often felt that it’s perhaps easier for adult (experienced) readers to overlook this liberating aspect of Pullman’s stories, whereas they may perhaps be more eye-opening or life-affirming for younger readers. I don’t know for certain, of course; I’m on the wrong side of the fence here.

So in His Dark Materials, there are forces – organised religion – who would have humans remain permanently in a pre-pubescent state of innocent obedience, easily controlled. And the rebellion Pullman visualises is one against this tyranny, which might install the republic, rather than the kingdom of heaven. The more I think about it, the more utopian I find this notion, as well as extremely attractive. The idea of humans taking control over their own lives and their futures, rather than kowtowing to external forces, is one which has been revolutionary through the ages, and sadly, we are no nearer to achieving it…

Here is where Milton and Pullman overlap, for me: the crux is free will, which Christianity says we were given as a test: would we freely choose to obey and serve God, or would we wilfully choose what we shouldn’t and take the consequences? Milton feels the first humans made the wrong choice and it had to be rectified; Pullman lauds that choice, and has his Adam and Eve figures willingly give in to temptation and not regret it.

Dust. There is a serious amount of philosophical, even theological argument woven in to the novels; we don’t have to worry too much about it or strive too hard to comprehend it all. There is a serious information dump about Dust and its link with the Christian notion of original sin in the final chapters of Northern Lights, in conversation between Lyra and Asriel, and I’m still not sure how convincing I find this, given Lyra’s supposed age at this point. The concept is further developed in The Subtle Knife, where the arrival of Dust is linked back 33,000 years, presumably to the time of the first emergence of human consciousness in our species, which is where Pullman seems to situate the mythical Adam and Eve event and the original ‘Fall’. I’ve still not completely fathomed the significance, several times iterated, that things began to go seriously awry three centuries ago with the making of the knife: I can’t fit this timing in to a historical event, though I suppose we are at the start of the Enlightenment and the scientific era…perhaps a more astute reader can enlighten me here. Clearly these two dates are significant to Pullman’s ideas, and the second Fall, in the world of the mulefa, has the effect of reversing something.

On a sadly neglected epic

I was reminded by a magazine article I read a couple of days ago that next month marks the 350^th anniversary of the publication of John Milton‘s epic, Paradise Lost. It deserves a post here, as it’s one of my favourite works of literature, and, as most critics seem to agree, sadly neglected nowadays.

Why sadly neglected? Firstly, it’s poetry, which doesn’t get much of a look-in nowadays, especially after some of the death-by-poetry onslaughts to which many school students are subjected by exam boards at the moment. And it’s epic poetry, which means it’s very long – twelve books, each of some thousand lines or so – remember, we are in pre-novel days here. Though prose narratives of a kind had been written by 1667, a subject like Milton’s deserved verse, and got it. That’s how stories were told.

Once we are past poetry and length, then there’s the subject-matter: religion. Specifically, to ‘justify the ways of God to Man’, as the poet himself put it. And religion does not figure large in many people’s lives nowadays. In Milton’s theology, everything, but everything centres around the felix culpa, that ‘happy fault’, the Fall, which allowed God to manifest his love and mercy to humans and the Son of God to offer himself as a sacrifice to atone for that original sin. The whole of human and cosmic history revolves around the events of Book IX. And of course, for Milton, it was all Eve’s fault, a silly woman deceived by a talking snake, who then tricks her gullible partner into repeating her sin… truly in this twenty-first century Paradise Lost doesn’t seem to have a great deal going for it.

Why do I like it? For me, the Adam and Eve story is at the level of a legend, but it’s part of our cultural past in the West, whether one is Christian or not. And it’s a good story. I don’t buy the Son of God sacrifice and redemption story either, but again, the Bible stories, whatever your take on them, are all part of our past, out history and cultural heritage, whether or not one accepts them as true. And to lose our past is just that, a loss.

But it goes deeper than that. Whether intended or not, Milton explores and shows us just what makes us human: our free will, our choices, our wish not to be limited or confined by others’ rules. The Adam and Eve after the Fall, after their comfort sex, are people like us, with our flaws and faults; before the fall they were not human as we know it. And in the cosmic story which surrounds the little, human story of Adam and Eve, the same issues are fought over: good and evil, and the origins of evil in the world; freedom and servitude; the very purpose of existence. It’s no surprise to me that as brilliant a writer as Philip Pullman has offered a contemporary take on this story and its implications for human beings nowadays, in his Northern Lights trilogy, and in the up-coming Book of Dust. Pullman celebrates the liberation offered by what Milton the Christian must condemn…

And, for me, these philosophical arguments are reinforced, if not surpassed, by the poetry. It is stunning, and a work of true genius: Milton’s style matches the subject-matter. There is the grandeur of God in his Heaven, the magnificent defiance of Satan and his cohorts, and the human intimacy of out human forebears. There is magnificent description on a cosmic scale, warfare in the heavens, the beauty of Paradise: the rhythm of Milton’s verse captures it all, as he extends the scope and scale of the English language with far more newly-coined words than Shakespeare (though more of Shakespeare’s have survived into contemporary usage). I will admit that it’s a challenge, nowadays, to read on the page, though well worth it; this is the reason why I usually recommend the outstanding, unabridged audio recording by Anton Lesser on Naxos Audiobooks as the way to enjoy the poem. It deserves to be enjoyed by more people…

The myth of the Fall

Thinking further about forbidden knowledge and dangerous knowledge took me back to the myth of the Fall of Adam and Eve, which I don’t believe in any literal way, but which I am convinced serves some deeper purpose somewhere in our species’ consciousness and warns us about the dangers of knowledge.

The basic outline appears in Genesis, and is elaborated on in such texts as The First Book of Adam and Eve, and, of course most significantly, in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Within a fairy tale is presented a core philosophical question central to our understanding of ourselves: how do we deal with the knowledge (illicitly) gained?

Humans have the ability to reason; this enables us to make choices, and allows us a certain measure of free will. Religions take particular stances on this question, which I don’t think it’s necessary to go into here. In the Hebrew-Christian version of the Fall, firstly it is Lucifer who says ‘I will not serve’ thus rebelling against God (and becoming Satan in the process), and who subsequently, in his disguise as the serpent, tempts Eve with the notion of becoming like a god if she eats the forbidden fruit. The knowledge of good and evil attainted through this rebellion is, arguably, what makes us human. A similar story also exists as the Prometheus myth, incidentally.

So, for better or worse, we have access to knowledge: but can we cope with it? We are necessarily a curious species: we want to know things, and we can’t stop learning. Thus eventually we invent dynamite, nuclear weapons, genetic engineering and a whole host of other things that we aren’t convinced are wholly good things, at least, under our shaky control. But we can’t put the genie back in the bottle, as I pointed out in my last post.

But it is this original sin – if we briefly use the religious terminology – that makes us the humans that we are. Adam and Eve are far more interesting after they have fallen: they argue, they enjoy sex, they become conscious of themselves as individuals. They are us. I’d never really thought about the significance of Adam’s saying to God ‘I saw that I was naked’ – there is the ‘I’ for perhaps the first time as Adam becomes someone different from what he was before…

In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve do not seem human before the Fall. Similarly, in Huxley’s Brave New World, although the inhabitants of AF 632 seem happy enough, they are not human as we know it, Jim – and this was the position my students and I inevitably reached when we studied that novel.

Our fallen-ness is explored in literature and evidenced by our history over several millennia; we may be humans, but we are perhaps not a very intelligent species. We are unable to balance the needs and desires of the individual – me – which exists because of our self-knowledge and ability to reason, and the needs and desires of the collective or group.

For me, the issue becomes even more complicated if we then look at the – purely Christian, because found in no other religion, I think – consequence of the Fall, which is the redemption that allegedly follows. What exactly are we to be saved from? What are we being offered instead? If we are to be saved from our inabilities to cope with our free will, if we are to be saved from our inability to see the consequences of our actions, perhaps I could be in favour of that, but would I still be human? And would that be any great loss? And then we shade into the realm of the utopian, the perfect worlds of which so many writers have loved to dream, and which we must admit are unattainable, or, if attainable, then at the cost of our human-ness…

I’m not sure where all this gets me…but I do have a framework into which this ancient story now fits, and a message about myself and my species which does speak to me…

The First Book of Adam and Eve (Librivox)

Most people are familiar with the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis; it’s fairly brief. And there is more: if you read Milton‘s Paradise Lost, for instance, there is a lot more detail to their story both before and after the Fall, bringing the characters to life, developing their motives and arguments, as well as those of God and Satan.

The First Book of Adam and Eve dates from the fifth or sixth century, and comes from the Egyptian or Coptic tradition; it was translated some eighty or ninety years ago and appears in the Librivox collection. What happened to Adam and Eve once they were expelled from the Garden of Eden?

They moan and complain an incredible amount to God about the harshness of their situation. He listens and replies. They have to learn to cope with a much more difficult existence, coming to understand such things as darkness, rain, the need to eat and drink. Satan continues to visit and confuse and waylay them even further, even though this is strictly unnecessary, as he has already achieved his primary purpose. Through various accidents, they die several times, but as their time is not yet accomplished, God brings them back to life again; similarly, when they despair and contemplate suicide, they are not allowed to succeed.

The promise of future redemption is, of course, heavily underlined and further explained to them. And we learn of the birth of their children – not just Cain and Abel but also twin daughters, which is how the entire human race was meant to develop…

It’s an interesting text, and I can see its origins in people wanting more detail than the bald account in the Bible: more information, which doesn’t contradict the Bible, more information which elaborates on God’s future plans, which reassures believers…