Militant secular humanism for kids (the problem with Pullman)

I've been meaning to read Philip Pullman's controversial His Dark Materials trilogy for years now, to see how interesting and powerful and appealing a treastise on the conflict between religion and modernism it really is. And as an epic, it doesn't disappoint: it really is great, sweeping kids lit, if very decidedly and self-conciously written for the children of liberal intellectuals who want an alternative to the traditional (Judeo-Christian-based) childhood myths. It's also really, really frustrating stuff. What's frustrating is how genuinely appealling the policical-philisophical ethic at the heart of Pullman's morality tale is, and yet, at the same time, how throughly -- and predictably -- in then end, he manages to botch it.

The first book of the trilogy, The Golden Compass, is the best, most disciplined, elegant and haunting of the three. Pullman writes precise, lyrical fantasy, with a voice that patrols the middle ground between realism and fairytale, and with the totally uncondescending voice requisite for good children's lit. The power of the book is the vividness of the world of his heroine Lyra and of her daemon (familiar) Pantalaimon, a sort of parrallel universe to our own, a modern-medieval juxtaposition of a a traditional European society endowed with an ultra-modern appreciation of scientifc progress and an obsession with deconstructing the cosmos. The story begins in a place we come to know as "Lyra's Oxford" (that sits on top of the Oxford in this world) where the trilogy's protagonist, Lyra (the liar) is the prototypical wild child on the cusp of adolescence. Later, Pullman expands the world as Lyra travels to a counter-London, meets up with a nomadic tribe called Gyptians (sweetened stereotypes of gypsies), and travels through a counter-Scandanavia toward the North Pole. Along the way, she meets an aeronaut from the country of Texas; forms a bond with the exiled king of the armoured bears; and learns about places with names like Afric, Sveden and Corea. Nothing here is wildly original, but it's all beautifully, unfliniching and vividly done.

In the second book, The Subtle Knife, Lyra meets Will, an inhabitant of our own world whose mother has gone mad from grief after her husband goes missing on an Arctic expedition (he has, of course, ended up in Lyra's world). Will's fate is to have had intense responsibility -- knowledge, experience -- forced upon him before his time. In keeping with Pullman's obvious, unblinking allegory, we are told, then shown, Will's role is to complement Lyra's passion with his own determination, his force of will, to keep her from either flying off the handle or giving in to despair. Will and Lyra's friendship is one of many examples of synthesis Pullman invokes throughout the story, in which good things are nearly always (with one profound exception) the product of union: science with myth, passion with reason, progress with restraint, individuality with universality.

Pullman gets a bit sloppier throughout the three books as the details of the universe are unveiled and the cosmos he creates gets bigger and more unwieldy. In particularly, he never really satisfactorilly develops the idea of why and how so many parallel worlds have come into being. As Lyra's father explains to her near the end of The Golden Compass, the multitude of worlds are best seen as products of a science-fiction quantum physics type process, whereby at any moment, one thing when one thing might happen but another does, one world breaks off from another, with the counter-possibility realised in the other world. But this theme is really only hinted at vaguely here and there through the second and third books; the details of what exactly makes the worlds split, and why the splits are irreversible and incompatable with each other, and whether they are good, bad, inevitable or preventable, is never revealed. Instead, the story settles down comfortably into five particular and very different worlds, one of which is the world of the dead, one of which is our own world, and one of which is inhabited by a type of human creature, the mulefa, that do not physically resemble people at all, suggesting a break far back on the evolutionary path.

The Subtle Knife drags a bit, but the third book, The Amber Spyglass is as rivetting as the first, though not nearly as elegant or rigorous in its exposition, despite containing some lovely passages and mini-myths (Lyra's taming and conversion of the Harpies; the development of the mulefa's world and of the mortal dilemma faced by these creatures; and the death of God (The Authority) 110 pages before the end). Lyra and Will travel to the world of the dead, where the dead from all other worlds are caught, and then travel to the land of the mulefa where they meet another of the trilogy's recurring characters, Mary Malone, the physicist and former nun from Will's world, whose role in the drama is to "play the serpent" in the children's eventual, climatic "fall from grace".

There are three great coming-of-age themes that good childrens literature can deal with: the nature of death (and violence and physical pain); the nature of morality (good and evil); and the nature of sex. Pullman grapples with all of these and adds a forth: the nature, or conflict, of tradition and change, institutional conservatism and progress. In The Golden Compass, Pullman's potential fatal flaw seems to be that his militant secularism, his hypermodernism, will lead his story into the trap of bloodlessness, the fetishization of logic and information, and the rejection of grace, of mystery, that conservatives typically resent in modernism. By the end of the The Subtle Knife and certainly midway into The Amber Spyglass , this fear dissolves completely: in fact, as suggested above, Pullman's books are -- or desire to be -- expositions and celebrations of modern liberal synthesis in its finest form.

Lyra herself is the clearest example of such synthesis: her mother, Mrs. Coulter (the book's chief villain and Pullman's best character), is a servent of the Church while her father, Lord Asreal (there's that unblinking allegory again), is a staunch heretic and the Church's foremost opponent. While Mrs. Coulter conducts brutal experiments on children trying to find a way of preserving innocence and preventing the inevitable adolescent fall into sin (marked by the accumulation of a substance called "Dust"), Asrial is off amassing a physical army to conduct a war against what he considers the brutality and intellectual suffication of the Church and the God who supposedly leads it. Out of Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asrial's (unwed, sinful) union of militant religosity and militant secularism (or, in the interest of politicizing everything, militant right and militant left), comes the synthesis, Lyra -- whose destiny is to embody and spread grace without dogma, goodness without threat of punishment, science with responsibility: everything secular humanists believe drives humans toward perfection. In fact, Lyra's own achivements are conditional on her finding a partner - Will - who complements her virtues with his own.

Nor is Pullman's triligy an simple celebration of the triumph of science and logic over faith and spirituality. In the story's moral code, the alchemists of Cittagazze who created the subtle knife are as guilty as the church of bringing devastation and suffering into the universe, of corrupting the natural order. And, despite the more sinister semblance of Mrs. Coulter and Lyra's adoration of her father, both of Lyra's parents are horrendously and roughly equally wrong in their exploits. In one of the trilogy's most powerful passages, we learn that Asrial fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the Republic of Heaven he hopes to build; that such a physical place is impossible to build because the inhabitants of every world cannot exist for long periods of time outside of their worlds of origin -- this being the trilogy's the one great exception to the rule of synthesis. Asrial's misconception, his lack of spiritual instinct, means that he is preparing to wage a war for nothing, and engaging in an experiment that will eventually destroy those he hopes to save from The Authority's forces by forcing them outside their nature. Also, while Mrs. Coulter realizes the monstrocity of the Church's operations on children only after the Church chooses to go after her own daughter, it is the heretical Asrial who commits the most hurtful murder in the trilogy, driving Lyra to despair and paving the way for her later journey into the land of the dead.

Pullman's exploration of death and dying is intense and accounts for a good deal of the controversy surrounding the trilogy. The books are brutally violent (by Harry Potter standards, they're gruesome) and the violence is rendered without euphamism, without blanching, almost clinically. Both major and minor characters die, often unexpectedly. The Subtle Knife, begins with a full-fledged torture scene aboard a ship. In the last book, Pullman takes his exploration of death from the physical to the metaphysical as the children travel to the land of the dead (Lyra meets a character who actually is her "death") and interact with the ghosts there. Finally, readers learn the fate of matter and spirit and the way that, in Pullman's unChristian world, the universe, when in harmony, refreshes itself with the dead.

Pullman's best, most groundbreaking expositions, though, are of the nature of morality and of good and evil (much like the otherwise very different Harry Potter books). Part of Pullman's essential authorial modernism lies in his rejection of the notion of absolute good and evil in human nature. As Mary Malone explains to the children in Pullman's voice near the end of the story, deeds but not individuals are evil; and evil beings can become good simply by changing their behaviour (as the Harpies do). Absolutes do exist: the good absolute is Dust, which is also the substance of human experience. The absolute evil is Dust's antithesis, the Spectres of Indifference who eat their victims' humanity. Any conscious human being -- possessing Dust, vulnerable to the Spectres -- is capable of good, or evil, at any time. Again, the best exposition of Pullman's essential philosophy is Lyra's parents. Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel, in union, die in battle with The Authority's successor, Metatron, in order to redeem their daughter. They are able to do this only after Mrs. Coulter convinces Metatron that she exists as a simple manifestation evil, that she is absolute. As the angelic leader of the Church, Metatron's fatal flaw, of course, is that he is dogmatic enough to believe such a thing possible.

Pullman's unabashed atheism is occasionally a weakness in the books, particuarly toward the end. Even as he resists succumbing to the leftist rejection of grace, he does succumb at times to the narrowing of viewpoint engendered his own intense dislike for Christian dogma. In the same passage in which she lectures the children on the nature of good and evil, Mary Malone explains to Will and Lyra why she left the Church: "the Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all". This is, in fact, rather petty. In fact, Pullman's trilogy has almost nothing to do with the Christian myth; his parable, modelled loosely on Paradise Lost, is an indictment of dogma, of intellectual repression and euphamism, not of any single faith. In particular, Pullman writes nothing at all about the myth of the Christ. He explicitly limits the allegory to Genesis and to the Fall, a myth common to the Jewish and Islamic faiths, and presumably to the faiths of the millions of additional worlds of the trilogy; Asrial reads out loud the version of the Adam and Eve myth that exists in Lyra's world at the end of The Golden Compass to demonstrate the myth's universality.

Of course, in the Christ myth, Jesus dies on the cross to redeem the sin of the Fall through his own physical suffering. Pullman, in his modernism, in his belief in the grace inherent in human life itself, wants to reject this sort of symbolic suffering as a solution to anything. But, in fact, it is Lyra's final destiny to make a sacrifice to redeem the world. But, as the author chooses the Garden of Eden over the Cross, it's a sacrifice rooted in sex rather than death.

And it's sex that really messes Pullman up in the end. I hestitate to write this because I once read a review of the Harry Potter series in which the reviewer griped that the books are unreaslistic because Harry doesn't whack off like a normal fifteen year old. There is certainly no reason why kids lit should have to deal with sexuality. If anything, modern liberalism suffers from the fetishization of sexuality, particularly among youth. But Pullman chooses to base his allegory explicitly on the Judeo/Christian sex myth, on the story of innocence and experience, and therefore has a responsibility to follow through. And after building up the tools and symbolism of this myth -- the process of sensory redempion and climax, the connection between carnal and scienfic knowledge, the reaction of Dust to the sex-act -- he basically wusses out. And by doing so, he ends up with the worst of all possibles: the Fall that Lyra experiences with Will at the end of the book is icky but not particularly brave or devastating or even clear in what has occurred (or why, or what difference it should make). In the end, Pullman is unwilling to make his readership look at sex and the consummation/ conception myth (how does new Dust enter the world?) with the same unclouded gaze as he asks them to look at death and morality. Actually, what Pullman feeds us is the same sort of confusing nice-nasty euphamism that is the mainstay of traditional dogma, the sort of thing that Pullman seems elsewhere to believe eventually leads to the torture of children and the corruption of nature.

Pullman's juxtaposition of The Fall takes two parts: the first is that Lyra and Will's Fall, their indoctrination into experience, is not a devastating but a joyful, redeeming event. Where the religious myths despise experience as sin to be punished (as Adam is punished with labour and Eve with childbirth), Pullman celebrates it as life, as fuelling and replenishing and calming the universe, creating Dust and attracting it back from the abyss from where the Spectres come. The second part is that, unlike Adam and Eve, Will and Lyra, once having known each other, must make a sacrifice: they must give each other up and return to their own worlds to build separate versions of the Republic of Heaven.

Both of these aspects of Pullman's myth-inversion are problematic, but the second part -- the dramatic climax of the trilogy -- is more so. For one thing, it requires us to believe that the sacrifice that Lyra and Will make in separating from each other transcends all the sacrificing that has been going on throughout the books -- Will's abandonment of his mother in his own world; Lyra's earlier abadonment of Pantalaimon to enter the world of the dead; Asriel's warriors dying in conflict with the forces of the Authority for nothing -- only because it succeeds the Fall, the discovery of adult love for each other. But this is ludicrous from a secular humanist point of view. By the time of their Fall, Lyra and Will have shared experience of the deepest, most private kind, involving the intimate shared knowledge of pain, death, responsibility, war, separation of their souls and bodies from their spirit-daemons. Yet Pullman, who at other points explicitly endorses the notion of casual, finite love, asks us to believe that a bit of kissing, a pre-pubescent infatuation must shift priorities beyond what anything else, any other kind of shared experience, can achieve.

This is not only implausible; it's also rather hypocritical. In particular, Will's transfer at the very end of his "deepest bond" -- that which will break the subtle knife -- from his mother to Lyra is entirely at odds with the (conservative) notion that human devotion need not be absolute and unbending, a zero-sum game. Will's changing obsessions suggest a paucity of meaning, what Pullman hopes to reject in his secular modernism; Will's brief willingness to sacrifice his duty to his mother -- a love that shattered the knife once before -- to stay with Lyra and die in her world is frankly rather callous. Equally confusing is the role played by Mary Malone whom the angels have sent to "play the serpent" to the children, and who accomplishes this task by telling the children stories of her own experience and (naturally) by giving Lyra fruit to take on her journey with Will to search for their daemons. At the end of The Subtle Knife, the angels tell Mary that they wish to bring the children together to extract "vengeance". But vengeance on who and on what if sexual love is in fact beautiful, if it in fact stops the erosion of dust? Pullman never really explains.

All of this might, of course, be surmountable if Pullman were willing to go the full length in exploring the mythology of adult knowledge and modesty, intercourse and conception. But here, Pullman draws up short, leaves his allegory undeveloped, with very bad results. In particular, he is deliberately confusing in creating the consummation symoblism, obviously to leave it ambiguous what the children (who are, after all, only twelve) have actually done. Mrs. Coulter, the most overtly sexual of the trilogy's characters, seduces men from whom she wants to elicit information by having her monkey daemon fondle their daemons, which brings them toward climax even without her touching them. Pullman conveniently has the children's Fall occur while their daemons are away from them; once reunited, the daemons coyly refuse to tell the children what transpired during their absence. At other places in the books, Pullman suggests that consummation occurs when human lovers touch or grasp each others' daemons; confusingly, Will and Lyra do this twice, once before their Fall and once after their reunion with the daemons.

The result of all this is unsatisfying, a disappointing cop-out (that will likely raise all the wrong questions among younger readers). Granted, Pullman's ambition -- the exposition of a world with a fully functioning moral code of secular humanist synthesis -- is huge and some letdown is unavoidable. But it's still disappointing that Pullman, stumbling on sex and an occasionally too-narrow interpretation of dogma, can't quite bring off the grand vision he sets out to achieve for his young, and older, readership.