THE MYTH OF THE LOST PARADISE
Genre and Intertextuality in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Philip Pullman’s His DarkMaterials
By Anna Schipper
S1395327
Supervisors: Dr. I. Visser and Prof. dr. R.J. Lyall Honours Dissertation English Language and Culture Faculty of Arts
Contents
Chapter I: Theories of Genre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Chapter II: Paradise Lost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Chapter III: His Dark Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Chapter IV: Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Note
The primary texts referred to in this dissertation are abbreviated in parenthetical references as follows:
NL SK AS PL
What had Eden ever to say Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise Fall from these beclouded skies.
Chapter I: Theories of Genre
Throughout the history of literary criticism there has been much debate on the position of genre theory in the literary spectrum. What exactly are genres and what is the function of genre theory? More specifically, the question we need to focus on in this dissertation, how can the function of genre help us understand the relationship between John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials? This chapter will provide an answer to more general questions of genre before focusing on the genres that Milton and Pullman were working in. Chapters II and III provide an in-depth look at the two works involved; their structure, themes, characters and their objective and ideas. Chapter IV stresses the importance of the differences and the similarities between the Paradise Lost and His Dark Materials, exploring the exact relationship between the two works.
Nowadays, to the common reader the word genre seems to have little meaning beyond terms such as fantasy, thriller, romance, and science fiction, indicating different kinds of literature. The notion that genre is closely linked to the plot and themes of a text is not new, and there are multiple examples to support this. Thinking back to Early Modern drama, when an audience would go to see a comedy or a tragedy, they already knew partly how it would end; a comedy would end in marriage, a tragedy would end in death. The link between genre and plot creates expectations from an audience. Genres are, in a way, nothing more than vague categories in which we place works of art. Yet defining the word genre is more complicated than just giving a text a label describing the sort of literature readers and critics believe it to be. The boundaries of these categories are ever-changing and indeed – perhaps now more so than before – works need not necessarily be placed into a single genre. Indeed, in many cases it is not obvious in what genre a work should be placed. Which leads us to the following question; in what way are we allowed to classify at will, and in what way are genres fixed? The ideas about this have changed drastically over the course of the past centuries from John Milton’s time to the modern age.
their need to create order. But even if, or maybe because, we impose genres on texts, literary genres are changing constantly. In a way, every literary work changes the boundaries of the genre it relates to. Consequently, all genres are changing continuously, which leads to literature itself changing. To take the example of the epic poem, every author of an epic poem has changed the way the genre of epic poetry works and is seen by its readers. Milton would never have been able to write Paradise Lost in its current form if Homer, Virgil, Lucan, Dante, or Tasso had not written their works. Paradise Lost only exists as an epic poem in relation to all the other works in the genre. Genres and their boundaries change, and therefore genre theory changes as well.
The Neoclassical or Early Modern period was a period of heightened genre consciousness, as Lewalski states.1 John Milton in particular is now seen as perhaps the most genre-conscious of the English poets. In general, Early Modern writers and literary theorists like Scaliger, Minturno and Puttenham take genres very seriously. Early Modern genre theory does not allow genres to change or to mix. Influenced by the literary criticism of Aristotle in his Poetics Early Modern theorists had very strict ideas about form, tone, and structure of literary works; genre theory from this period is therefore clearly prescriptive.2 Yet as Rosmarin notes, the terms ‘prescriptive’ and its opposite ‘descriptive’ are themselves prescriptive terms because they bring with them the notion that prescriptive genre theory is ‘bad’ and that descriptive genre theory is ‘good’, which is a misconception.3 There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ genre theories, merely historical ideas that might now seem outdated. Prescriptive genre theory is not merely restrictive, it also offers writers a choice of writing within a certain genre or to go beyond familiar boundaries and break new grounds. The average writer will most likely stay within familiar genres whereas the good writer will experiment with the genre boundaries, something that can be said of, for example, Shakespeare and what we now see as the
1 See Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘The Genres of Paradise Lost: Literary Genre as a Means of
Accommodation,’ pp. 79-111 in the Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge, 1989).
2 Over the course of the past decades there has been a renewed interest in genre theory of the seventeenth
and eighteenth century. For a more detailed description of genre theory in Early Modern times, see Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp. 226-237; Alistair Fowler, Kinds of
Literature (New York, 1982), especially pp. 37-53; and Renaissance Genres, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
called ‘problem plays’ or John Milton whose Paradise Lost has lately been regarded as a work with a polygeneric nature.4
It is important to realise the differences between ‘classical’ and modern genre theory. Since about 1900 there has been a shift in the way genres are seen and used. Wellek and Warren link this shift in the conception of genre to the widening of the audience and the cheaper printing costs. More genres were created and they changed faster, leading to what we now see as descriptive, modern genre theory, which allows genres to mix and does not limit the number of possible kinds. This shift also marks a shift in the way writers approached writing a certain work, whereas before they would first decide which genre they were going to write in before deciding on a plot, modern writers would not have to worry about which genre to choose and could focus on the story first.
In today’s literary criticism we are still confronted by traces of generic hierarchies of the past and it goes without saying that in any period in history there have been certain texts that have been perceived as better or higher than other texts. The epic poetry of Virgil or Milton is without a doubt higher up the generic hierarchy than, for example, a pastoral eclogue or a satiric comedy from the same time. Wellek and Warren link hierarchy to the size of literary works, because tragedy and epic have been at the top of the generic hierarchy since classical times. Renaissance theorists regarded epic as the highest possible form, even though Aristotle sees tragedy as the highest form, with epic as a good second. The hierarchy in literary genres is especially important in Early Modern genre theory because authors from the Early Modern period were very much concerned with form and style, and these are partly the elements that placed a work high or low in the generic hierarchy. Fowler provides us with a diagram showing the various styles and their connection to genre in the Renaissance:
High Middle Low
epic georgic pastoral eclogue
tragedy romantic comedy satiric comedy
hymn elegy verse epistle
etc. etc. etc. 5
4
Lately there has been more interest in the polygeneric nature of Paradise Lost, for which the basic book is by Barbara K. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, 1985).
5 See Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes
Fowler notes that this relationship between style and genre might be considered in terms of subject constraint or as part of the way genre organises itself. The relationship between genre and style as shown above gives us a clear view which genres are placed high or low in the hierarchal system. This diagram only works for pre-modern works though, because the rise of the novel as the dominant form of literature ‘obscured style’s relation to genre’ (Fowler 71).
The rise of the novel brings about a drastic change in the way we see genres in literary theory. Before the nineteenth century, genre was not only closely linked to style, but to structure as well, not only the external structure but also, more specifically in ancient criticism, the metrical structure. But when the novel form entered literature, it worked its way to the top of the generic hierarchy over the course of the past centuries, obscuring the link between structure and genre, so now we needed new ways to create a literary hierarchy. In the twentieth century, the word genre became almost synonymous with plot, with novels classified mostly by subject matter: we now have the crime novel, the historical novel, the science fiction novel, the romantic novel, all categorised by subject in our libraries and bookshops. Indeed, these subgenres are so closely linked to hierarchy, Fowler notes, that ‘science fiction was until recently sold together with pornography’ (226).
The function of genre is complex, and literary scholars have written whole works centred around the question of generic functions.6 It would be wrong to assume that genre merely categorises, and to use Fowler’s words, the function of genre is not a passive way of describing and restraining works of literature. Genre makes ‘the expressiveness of literary works possible’ and the relation between genre and literature is ‘not one of passive membership but of active modulation’ (20). This notion of an active relationship between genre and literature makes it a suitable tool to look at the relationship between Paradise Lost and His Dark Materials. But before we can look at these two works, it is important first to establish the literary spectrum and genres in the times of both John Milton and Philip Pullman, since in order to compare these two works written in different genres and different ages, it is important to realise the differences in their backgrounds.
6 For more detailed descriptions of the function of genre, see for example the previously mentioned books
In 1667 when John Milton’s great epic poem Paradise Lost was first published, England had just been through the English Renaissance, the English Reformation, and the English Civil War. The seventeenth century in England had very much been a time for changes; these were turbulent years in many areas of life – religion, science, politics and culture. In the beginning of the century William Shakespeare was still writing plays, and over the course of the century we see that apart from producing its fair share of poetry, the seventeenth century marks a shift towards prose with Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan. But John Milton did not set out to write a prose text or any long poem. He deliberately chose to write an epic poem, a literary genre very much bound by strict rules and expectations. C.S. Lewis, for instance, starts his ‘A Preface to Paradise Lost’ with a look at epic in general because Milton would have started with the question of what pre-existing genre he was going to write within rather than by developing the plot first.7 What exactly does the phrase ‘epic poem’ mean, what are the characteristics of that specific genre? And what inspired Milton to choose epic poetry as the form for his story ‘of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree’ (PL I. 1)?8
Epic poetry in English literature is now an almost extinct genre,9 but in classical times and Renaissance, the greatest work any author could produce was an epic poem, written in high style. Out of all the literary genres, epic poetry is arguably the genre that is the most prescriptive, certainly in the Early Modern Period, the period Milton is writing in. Milton was very much aware of the abstract idea of epic and the tradition of epic poetry that he was writing in. Milton probably also would have categorised Paradise Lost with both Homer and Virgil in the fixed genres of his time. Nowadays we would distinguish between the Iliad and the Aeneid as oral and literary epic, or primary and secondary epic. Fowler describes the two categories as follows:
Primary epic is heroic, festal, oral, formulaic, public in delivery, and historical in subject; secondary epic is civilized, literary, private, stylistically elevated, and ‘sublime.’ (160)
7 See C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London, 1960).
8 All quotations from Paradise Lost are taken from the 2005 edition with an introduction by Philip Pullman
(Oxford, 2005).
9
Under primary epic we would classify Homer and Beowulf. Virgil and Milton wrote secondary epics. From the Middle Ages on, secondary epic became the one true form of epic, the ‘correct’ and ‘noble’ form to use. Secondary epic, as Hainsworth puts it, ‘make[s] excessive demands on the cultural resources of its audience’.10 Fowler adds the cultural position of epic in Milton’s time, ‘From the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, epic ruled as not only the highest but also the best of all genres’ (216). It was no surprise then, that Milton chose this form to write Paradise Lost. The ‘correct’ form of the epic would demand respect from his peers and his audience, but most importantly, epic was the perfect form for his narrative of the greatest story in Christianity; the Fall of Adam and Eve. No other genre would be able to support a story of this scale.
There is no easy definition that will classify all literary texts that are generally believed to be epic poems, yet there are recurring elements and conventions we will find in many epic works. Traditionally, the author starts with an invocation, calling upon a muse to help him write his poem. The epic will start with a brief overview of the situation, and the narrative will then begin in medias res, in the middle of the action, with any explanation written in flashbacks. But although Milton obeys these established conventions of epic, his story and his characters are far from the classical works by Homer and Virgil. Therefore there must be something else that allows people to compare Milton with Virgil and Homer, and that is maybe the most important characteristic of epic; the epic form is above all a very self-conscious form. The author of an epic knows very well what he is doing, and is very aware of the tradition he is writing in. Milton, for example, mentions his predecessors multiple times and the influences of other epic writers before his time are very visible in Paradise Lost.
The themes of epic are traditionally ideas of heroism, nationality, and faith. The story of many epics will be a quarrel introduced in the opening lines and it will have a setting in a period of historical significance. Traditionally epic might also have a heroic character like those in the classical epics by Homer and Virgil, their trials and their suffering, and their overcoming all obstacles over the course of the text, yet Paradise Lost does not offer us a heroic figure that we follow throughout the work until a satisfying ending. Something that characterises all major epic works is the idea of scale,
mass, and weight, usually through thousands of lines of verse. An epic need not necessarily be long though, but it needs to have epic proportions.
Perhaps the most important characteristic of an epic is its structure. The number of books, for example, is important to the Early Modern writer of an epic. Homer composed the Iliad and the Odyssey in twenty-four books each and ever since then this has been the ‘correct’ form of epic. Virgil divided this by two and wrote his epic in twelve books to illustrate that without Homer he could not have written the Aeneid, but that it also was a work on its own and it did not need to have the same amount of books that Homer used. Interestingly enough, Paradise Lost was first published in 1667 in ten books, but in 1674 a new edition was published which had been revised by Milton to twelve books, which we may perhaps infer was a modification to emphasise the connection to classical epics. The structure of epic specifically is what distinguishes Renaissance epic from romance. More on the structure of epic will be discussed in the next chapter.
Hainsworth states that the ‘evolution of epic genre has been a cumulative process’ (10). What he means by this is that the roots of epic poetry are infinitely old, as old as human speech and storytelling, and these stories of grand scale with their heroes have evolved to epic as we see it nowadays. ‘If [the poet] can then relate the hero and his deeds to the cosmic order and give his poem the sort of general relevance that persuades his patrons not to let him perish, the epic has arrived’ (10). But what makes an epic a true epic is not the scale of the actions or the journey of the hero. It is the personal viewpoint the poet himself adds to the age-old components of the narrative.
It is often claimed that Paradise Lost was the last true epic to have been written in England. Hainsworth argues that this was because Paradise Lost was simply unsurpassable. Fowler takes the loss of the epic genre as an example of the change in literary genres during that period. Whatever the case, Paradise Lost as an epic poem still speaks to the imagination of audiences these days.
century, replaced by the countless number of novels we find in our bookshops these days. Hainsworth gives the best description of the rise of the novel:
The rise and fall of literary forms is harder to understand than the rise and fall of empires. Milton’s epics, even when their content had been made exclusively Christian, were given to an unappreciative public and were the last great poems of their kind. Before the end of his century the war between the admirers of the ancient and modern literatures – the Battle of the Books – had been bravely fought by the ancients – and lost. (147)
As mentioned before, the shift to the novel as the dominant literary form also marks a major shift in genre theory because it means a radical change in the way genres were divided. The major forms of literature were generically categorised mostly by form; there was epic, romance, comedy, tragedy, novel, and so on. These could all be divided into subgenres according to their subjects and forms. But when the novel had taken over, genre theory underwent a fundamental change in classifying. Plot and genre have always been closely linked, just as style and genre have, but now more than ever do plots help us classify literature. Booker makes a claim for the idea that there are only seven plots in the whole of literature, and all stories and texts are variations on one or more of those plots. His classification system incorporates the following seven ‘basic plots’: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth.11 The division into categories by plot shows that in modern times plot has become more important to readers than form. We need only walk into a book store to see that everything is neatly organised for us by plot.
His Dark Materials is, however, not just a novel or any series of novels; it is a trilogy. Now that epic seems to be an extinct genre, authors have felt the need to express the scale of their stories in another structure. Looking back, Milton’s choice of epic combines perfectly with the subject and the epic themes he is dealing with. But for Pullman at the end of the twentieth century, trilogy is his best means of recreating the scale of a work like Paradise Lost. Only skilled writers are able to make effective use of the notion of trilogy. It needs a perfect mastery of narrative pace, cliffhangers, structure, as well as having three rounded wholes encompassed by one single plot. The most famous fantasy trilogy of the twentieth century is arguably J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the
11 For a detailed explanation of how these plots are chosen and recognised, see Christopher Booker, The
Rings, who chose the trilogy form for his greatest work. Ever since Tolkien, the fantasy genre has been littered with trilogies, not all of them good.
The word has been dropped casually into this text, but it is vital to the rest of the argument: fantasy. Before we continue, a definition of fantasy is in order. Smith identifies five key conventions of high fantasy in her essay, and although she presents them as conventions for fantasy in children’s literature, she gives us a definition which also works for our purposes. The ‘high fantasy’ genre is a ‘type of serious fantasy that has mythic overtones, life and death battles between good and evil, and critical tasks for young protagonists to undertake.’12 We have encountered these phrases before. It is striking how close the definition of high fantasy comes to the definition of the (high) epic. High epic is also serious epic that has mythic overtones. It brings us descriptions of life and death battles, and in the case of Milton also between good and evil. Epic poetry also has critical tasks for its protagonists to undertake, for instance the tasks and difficulties Odysseus has to overcome in the Odyssey in the ten years he spends on sea. Smith goes on to state that ‘the essence of myth gave way to high fantasy’ (137), a statement which is echoed by Philip Pullman as quoted by McCrum: ‘We all need some sort of myth, some sort of over-arching narrative to live by. For hundreds of years in the West, this need was fulfilled by the Christian story, but that is now either dead or dying.’13 In other words, with the loss of the epic story on good and evil, we have lost a kind of narrative that we need to live by. This also gives us another link between epic and fantasy, namely that it fulfils what is apparently a basic human need for stories of good and evil, in which people who do the right thing overcome people who do wrong. There is another noteworthy similarity between epic poetry and high fantasy:
High fantasy is often more difficult to read and absorb than other types of writing. It can make incredible demands upon the mind, because of its intertextuality. If one has some understanding of the Bible, northern mythology, Greek mythology, classic fairy tales, and William Shakespeare, one will find the Dark Materials trilogy even more accessible. (Smith 137)
12 Karen Patricia Smith, ‘Tradition, Transformation, and the Bold Emergence: Fantasy Legacy and
Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ in His Dark Materials Illuminated, ed. M. Lenz and C. Scott (Detroit, 2005) p. 136.
13 See Robert McCrum ‘Daemon Geezer’ in the Guardian of January 27, 2002.
This is exactly what Hainsworth wrote about the genre of secondary epic.
So now that we have established what high fantasy is, and how it bears a striking resemblance to the classical and early modern epic, let us consider how to classify His Dark Materials. Many critics have placed His Dark Materials in the fantasy genre, perhaps not even consciously, because it obeys the characteristics of typical fantasy stories. This is true for many popular children’s literature from the twentieth century. It is striking how much popular children’s and young adult’s fiction can be classified as fantasy or bears elements of the fantasy genre: C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series, Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series, Alan Garner, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, even the now immensely popular Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. In fact, it is difficult to come up with famous children’s literature of the last fifty years which does not in one way or the other incorporate fantasy elements. Maybe the boundaries between realism and fantasy are more vague in children’s literature because the world of children involves more imagination than the world of adults in general?
If we take modern fantasy books for adults they are practically all set in different universes than ours; we find ourselves in new lands, speaking new languages, and encounter new religion, politics, and science.14 Yet not all books classified as fantasy, especially children’s books, take place in completely different worlds. The protagonists from the Narnia series or the Dark is Rising series start out in England. They travel between worlds, yes, but the starting points of the journeys are at least realistic. Pullman does something similar. The worlds he creates are both much like ours, but at the same time notably different. The trilogy starts off with a scene of a young girl hiding in a wardrobe and witnessing the planning of a murder; this scene might very well have taken place in our world were it not for the first four words of the opening sentence: ‘Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.’15 We have entered a world which is like ours, but not really: the world of magic realism.
14 Of course these elements are not restricted to fantasy literature and especially the element of
encountering new science brings the science fiction genre to mind. Science fiction is generally accepted as a literary genre in which many ‘good’ literary works can be placed. Isaac Asimov, Aldous Huxley, and H. G. Wells are all critically acclaimed authors who have worked within the science fiction genre over the past century.
Fantasy as a genre is, as we have seen, comparable in different ways to the high epic of the Early Modern period. There are the universal themes of good and evil, a main character with important tasks to undergo, and the high style which connects to the intertextuality of both epic and high fantasy. It is not surprising, then, that Philip Pullman chose the fantasy genre to recreate the scenery, the atmosphere, and the plot of Paradise Lost. His Dark Materials needs to be fantasy because no other genre deals with scale, character, and themes like religion, nationality and faith in the way that epic does. No other modern genre would have raised the fundamental issues that Pullman raises in His Dark Materials. In a way it might even be possible to say that, had Paradise Lost been written at the end of the twentieth century, in the form of a novel, it might have been classified as fantasy, despite the Christian story.
This might be a good moment to touch upon the issue of the relation between a text and its audience, especially the question of belief. The reception of a recent fantasy would be fundamentally different from the reception of a Christian epic in the seventeenth century in the sense that what a modern audience sees as fiction, an Early Modern audience might have seen as true. We are now able and willing to separate ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’, but in Milton’s time to question the ‘truth’ of the story of The Fall would have been considered heresy. And who is to say that Milton’s audience did not believe Paradise Lost and accepted it as a literal truth? Milton wrote, generally speaking, to tell ‘truth’. Pullman and his contemporaries do not claim to write the ‘truth’, nor do they set out to do so. The meaning of a text can only be seen as created within the relationship between a text and its readers. As Wellek and Warren say: ‘The meaning of a work of art is not exhausted by, or even equivalent to, its intention’ (42).
Few modern readers of Paradise Lost accept its story as factual truth; there is a major difference in perception, and therefore meaning, of the Milton of the seventeenth century and the Milton we are reading today. If epic went out with Paradise Lost then maybe the issue of belief had something to do with this as well. From the eighteenth century on, the two chief modes of narrative are ‘romance’ and the ‘novel’.
or epic overtones, a descendent of medieval romances and, indeed, the epic. Wellek and Warren state that “we should now call it “mythic”’ (216) and they name Anne Radcliffe, Sir Walter Scott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as writers of ‘romance’. The modern equivalent of the eighteenth century romance is not the modern romance genre, but the fantasy genre, as Moorcock demonstrates, which gives us yet another link between the two genres.16 So if epic and fantasy are really linked closely together in scale, themes, and atmosphere, we must investigate how Milton uses the epic genre to incorporate these constituents in Paradise Lost.
Chapter II: Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost is renowned for the way it rewrites the Christian story from the biblical book of Genesis, especially in the way it uses its scale and its structure to create a powerful atmosphere that still appeals to readers these days, despite the overtly Christian subject. On the subject of recreating Paradise Lost for younger readers, Philip Pullman declares that what first attracted him to the epic poem was the rich language and the atmosphere.
So it was the landscape, the atmosphere, that was my starting point. But as the narrative began to form itself on the page, I found that – perhaps drawn by the gravitational attraction of a much greater mass – I was beginning to tell the same story, too.17
Milton uses the epic form to its full potential in creating the setting and the plot of Paradise Lost. Epic poetry by definition implies a great and serious subject related in a high style, and an epic scale and structure are the major components in the rules of epic. Keeping the relation to the generic question in mind, how exactly does Milton use both scale and structure to create the atmosphere in Paradise Lost that Pullman so loves?
The focus in this chapter will be the generic nature of Paradise Lost. John Milton was very aware of the genre he was writing in – the genre of epic poetry – and the atmosphere and setting can only be fully appreciated by an audience which is as aware of the history and the convention of the epic as Milton himself. In this chapter I will look at the structure of Paradise Lost along with its themes and the characterisation to conclude what the effect is of many of its elements. Naturally the themes, the structure, and the characterisation of any story are closely interwoven, but especially so in Paradise Lost, because of the complexity of the relation between all three, and fundamentally the complexity of the subject matter and the entire text.
Milton originally intended to write Paradise Lost as a drama.18 There are a number of reasons why he might have changed his approach, such as the closing of the theatres in 1642 under influence of the Puritans and the grand subject and the scale that Milton intended for his narrative, which would be more suitable for an epic poem than a
17
Milton, John. Paradise Lost, introduced by Philip Pullman (Oxford 2005) p. 9.
18
drama. Most importantly however, as mentioned in the first chapter, epic was seen as the highest form of literature in the Renaissance, and writers were bound by strict rules about form and content. Writing a ‘true’ epic was arguably the greatest Milton could achieve, and he must have been aware of this fact.
The action in Paradise Lost begins, as Horace suggested it should, in medias res, with the great battle already fought and the rebel angels Fallen into Hell. The events of the war have to be narrated by Raphael in Books V and VI. Furthermore, the poem begins with an invocation, ‘Sing heavenly muse’ (PL I. 6), which we need to wait for but expect at the end of the difficult grammar of the opening lines, and the poem is filled with similes and other epic conventions. Yet however much Paradise Lost resembles the classical epics, Milton’s subject demands a rigorous change because the poem is not a classical epic, it is a Christian epic. Milton naturally did not invent the Christian epic – Dante’s Divine Comedy and Tasso’s La Gerusalemme Liberata being the most well-known precedents – yet as we shall see in the discussion, the term Christian epic is an oxymoron. Man’s disobedience, which Milton states early on is the theme of Paradise Lost, brought death into the world. Yet in the last two books Milton seemingly contradicts himself, describing death as ‘[man’s] final remedy’ (PL XI. 59). In his book on the structure of Paradise Lost, John M. Steadman says the following about the conflict between classical and Christian epic in Paradise Lost:
On the whole, Milton has retained the formal motives and devices of the heroic poem but has invested them with Christian matter and meaning. In this sense his epic is (to borrow a geological term) something of a ‘pseudo-morph’ – retaining the form of classical epic but replacing its values and contents with Judeo-Christian correlatives.19
I briefly mentioned the increased interest in recent years in the polygeneric nature of Paradise Lost in the first chapter, and this is the place to expand that notion slightly. For neoclassical critics, form and genre were extremely important and when they did not match perfectly this invoked criticism. Paradise Lost is without a doubt an epic poem, but many neoclassical critics felt that its subject and plot structure were inappropriate for an epic because they were essentially tragic. In The Original and Progress of Satire, John Dryden protested that Milton’s ‘subject is not that of an Heroic Poem, properly so called.
His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all other epic works.’20 The subject of the Fall and the subsequent loss of Paradise in itself is not a heroic theme. More on the main characters of the poem will be discussed later in this chapter, but for now, whoever is seen as the main character or hero of Paradise Lost – Satan, Eve, or Adam – their change is from happiness to misery, which is essentially a tragic process. So Milton used the epic conventions to create a ‘proper’ epic poem, yet his subject complicated matters. The main generic difference between epic and tragic is the scale of the story, and Milton’s subject demanded the genre that deals with the big questions. Milton took a story which is mentioned briefly in the Bible in a few lines, and expanded it into a long poem. We can conclude from the above that Paradise Lost is a Christian epic written within the framework of the classical epics, something which did not go over well with some of Milton’s contemporary critics, as Dryden’s comment above confirms. Yet Milton had to choose the epic genre for his story on the Fall because in the Renaissance, epic was the only genre which was able to deal with the scale, the great theological and philosophical questions, and the implications of his story.
But choosing to write a Christian epic not only gave Milton the trouble of finding the right balance between the structure of the classical epic and the Christian subject, it also forced him to write an ending suitable to an epic. Although the epic can contain tragic elements in its structure, it is in essence an epic which amongst important other things needs an epic ending, which means a positive ending. Steadman concludes that although Milton adapted his essentially tragic plot to include such conventional epic devices as ‘divine and infernal councils, voyages from heaven or hell, and retrospective or prospective episodes’ (124), he did not radically change his tragic plot. This proves problematical because Milton’s subject of the Fall essentially needs a tragic ending: Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden and Paradise is lost, which would give us an ending different from that of the protagonists in the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Yet conventions force Milton to end on a different note, which is why the last two books from Paradise Lost are so important to the structure of the story because it is only here that Milton gives us answers to the questions he raises in the earlier books. In his essay on the meaning of Paradise Lost Andrew Milner argues that the solution in the last two books is
needed for theoretical and literary reasons, because without this conclusion we would be left with only the Fall itself and the experience of defeat, which would essentially make Paradise Lost nothing more than a tragedy. He writes:
But Paradise Lost is not a tragedy. On the contrary, it succeeds not only in posing the problem of defeat, the problem of the Fall of man, and not only in explaining that problem in terms which are, as we have seen, essentially psychologistic, but also in proposing a solution to that problem.21
The predictions of the archangel Michael give Paradise Lost a true epic ending: the earth
Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days. (PL XII. 463-5)
Another angle to approach the idea of a true epic ending is Milton’s idea of the fortunate Fall, felix culpa – introduced as early as Book III when during the debate in Heaven Christ offers to give his life in order to save mankind, before the Fall has even taken place – because the Fall essentially brought about the coming of Christ to earth. When Adam acknowledges this, Michael replies:
then wilt thou not be loth To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far. (PL XII. 585-7)
This also fits within the idea that the Christian myth essentially abolishes tragedy altogether and that ultimately there is no tragedy in Christian epic.
So now we have concluded that the structure of Paradise Lost helps achieve the atmosphere of the story, it is also important to realise how exactly the scale of the story is achieved. Naturally the great battle in Heaven and the idea of a story that describes the beginnings of all time according to the seventeenth century Christian worldview are important aspects of the scale, but there is more. Although Paradise Lost is not a tragedy, Milton pays great attention to the notion of action, time and place because the use of these three provide us with the sense of the large scale of the poem.
The action in Paradise Lost is not centred around God, as one might expect, but around Satan, the archangels, and Christ who ends the war in heaven and offers himself to save the human race. God is a fairly absent character throughout the text, and it is Satan who sets most of the action in motion while God watches and comments, but never
21 Andrew Milner, ‘The Protestant Epic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ in Paradise Lost: Contemporary
acts. The main action of the poem is the temptation of Eve and Adam, which is framed by the great battle in Heaven and the predictions of the future of the Earth. The scale and the atmosphere of Paradise Lost partly derive from the sense of the important and immense action central to the story.
The idea of time in Paradise Lost is partly focused on by the fact that the Christian God is omnipotent and omniscient, resulting in the fact that Milton’s God needs to be aware of not only the past and the present, but the future as well, something that becomes obvious when God discusses the Fall before it takes place.
For man will hearken to his glozing lies, And easily transgress the sole command,
Sole pledge of his obedience, so will Fall. (PL III. 93-95)
Place is also an important aspect in Paradise Lost because the poem focuses on the idea of multiple worlds; Hell, Heaven, Earth and arguably the Chaos that Satan crosses to convey the largeness of the setting. Milton essentially uses the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos which places the Earth in the centre of the universe, Heaven above, and Hell below. In Milton’s time, there were many planetary systems available to him. Next to the Ptolemaic system, Milton’s choice was between the Tychonic or the Copernican system. Milton seems to have chosen for a mix of the Tychonic system and the Ptolemaic system, although Raphael curiously refers to the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun as well as the idea that the sun revolves around the earth:
Whether the sun predominant in heaven Rise on the earth, or earth rise on the sun He from the east his flaming road begin, Or she from west her silent course advance With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps On her soft axle, while she paces even,
And bears thee soft with the smooth air along,
Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid. (PL VIII. 160-167)
placed on his throne in Heaven, all-knowing and all-powerful, but immobile, whereas God in the story of Genesis, for example, takes walks in the Garden of Eden.
A final note concerning the structure of Paradise Lost will be a comment on the shift Milton made in the number of books of his work. With epic as the prescriptive genre that it was in the seventeenth century, external structure is greatly important in Paradise Lost. As mentioned before, Milton changed the structure of Paradise Lost from ten to twelve books, a significant change to reflect a communication with the writing of the past because of the number of books used by Homer and Virgil in their works: twenty-four and twelve. Ann Gossman writes in her article about the structure of Paradise Lost that critics often refer to the geometrical or architectural structure of the poem and speculate on why exactly Milton changed the number of books. 22 Colin Burrow argues in his book that Milton, like any other author trying to imitate the form of an ancient genre, tries to convey the struggle between classical epic and Renaissance epic in Paradise Lost, saying that:
The poem intimates that one can try to imagine towards past epic, and that one can at least seek a transcendent release from the limitations of past forms of heroism; but it also implies that one can never quite arrive at the motive structure of past authors; and that one cannot escape fully from the idiom of the writers who have transmitted the work of those past authors into the present. 23
This struggle in imitating the past and yet writing something new is visible all throughout Paradise Lost. The fact that Milton eventually made the shift to the classical twelve books may suggest that he was also very aware of the problem himself.
The idea of Paradise Lost as a Christian epic presents us with a few other difficulties. The themes that Milton focused on were primarily theological themes because of the demands of his subject, but at the same time, Milton knew very well that he was not only writing a Christian story, but an epic as well, and therefore his themes also needed to be great themes inherent to the genre of epic.
There are two themes that are important to the Christian doctrine, but also at large themes that seem to come back in literature over the course of the centuries before and after Milton, and they are also themes that Pullman uses and emphasises in His Dark
Materials: the theme of innocence as opposed to knowledge and experience, and the theme of free will as opposed to predestination and fate.
The theme of innocence is important in Paradise Lost and there are multiple references to the innocence or the intuitive knowledge of Adam and Eve before the Fall. When Raphael comes to the Garden of Eden in the four middle books, he speaks with Adam about the two types of knowledge that exist, angelic knowledge which is a kind of intuitive knowledge, and human knowledge which is attained through discourse. When Raphael explains the difference as ‘but in degree, of kind the same’ (PL V. 490), he is suggesting that if humans remain obedient they will eventually attain intuitive knowledge. Raphael then tells Adam on the subject of the universe, ‘Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid, / Leave them to God above, him serve and feare’ (PL VIII. 167-8), once again warning him to be happy with what he has and to stay obedient to God. Interestingly enough, the tree from which Eve and Adam eat is called the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and they eat from it and fall, they lose the capacity to attain the intuitive knowledge that Raphael spoke about. Instead, as John Leonard states in his introduction to Paradise Lost, they ‘gain knowledge of the darkness into which creation Falls when it is deprived of God’s goodness’.24 Generally, the focus of the Fall in the seventeenth century would have been on the appearance of sin into the world, yet Milton makes a deliberate shift towards the appearance of a different kind of knowledge. As we have seen, it is no surprise that Milton changed the focus of the Fall to incorporate the human perspective and aspects of the idea of felix culpa because of epic conventions that force him away from a tragic ending.
The second theme is the universal theme of free will and predestination. For centuries before Milton texts had been written focussing on the question that Christianity struggles with; how can there be free will if God is omniscient and already knows what is going to happen? Milton goes to great lengths to make God explain more than once that his foreknowledge has nothing to do with the Fall because God created Man with the power of free will. This is of course needed because in the first lines of Paradise Lost Milton promises us to ‘justify the ways of God to men’ (PL I. 26). We can only imagine
24 See John Milton, Paradise Lost, edited with an introduction and notes by John Leonard (New York,
what God’s explanation seemed like to an Early Modern audience, but for the modern reader it creates a sense of God being responsible for the Fall, even though he explains in depth that he is not when in his first speech he exclaims, ‘whose fault? / Whose but his own?’ (PL III. 96-97). We begin to see what Blake meant when he spoke of Milton as ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’25 Empson wrote perhaps the most influential book on the theological issues in Paradise Lost, and he shows how certain passages in Paradise Lost, for example when Gabriel sends Satan away instead of defeating him, show that the only possible conclusion is that ‘God was determined to make man Fall, and had supplied a guard only for show; as soon as the guards look like succeeding he prevents them.’26 Milton does give us a reason why God does not intervene and stop Satan before he can tempt Eve:
Now dreadful deeds Might have ensued, nor only Paradise In this commotion, but the starry cope Of Heaven perhaps, or all the elements
At least had gone to wrack, disturbed and torn With violence of this conflict, had not soon The Eternal, to prevent such horrid fray,
Hung forth in Heaven his golden scales. (PL IV. 990-997)
But the reason seems to us a little weak, and Empson states that ‘if he is going to send nearly all of us to Hell as a result of Adam’s Fall, we cannot be expected to agree with him that it was less important than the scenery’ (Empson 113). But there needs to be free will in the Christian theodicy, meaning Milton had to incorporate it in one way or the other. So free will is important to Milton, and as Danielson shows, the ‘Free Will Defence’ was a vital component of Milton’s theodicy. In the seventeenth century the argument was that the freedom to obey or to disobey in angels and humans is not a self-limitation on God’s part ‘because the “cannot” is a logical entailment of his own exercise of power.’27
Besides the themes of innocence, knowledge, and free will, the narrative of Paradise Lost is made up out of two important subjects: rebellion and the Fall. Paradise
25 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (London, 1975) with an introduction and commentary
by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. First published 1793.
26
See William Empson, Milton’s God (London, 1965) p. 112-113.
27 See Dennis Danielson, ‘The Fall of Man and Milton’s theodicy,’ pp. 113-129 in the Cambridge
Lost is a story of failed rebellion and temptation. Fundamentally, rebellion and temptation imply a fight between good and evil with good winning out in the end, a popular subject in many stories up until this day. The results of the failed rebellion echo through the entire story. Much has been written on where Milton’s sympathies lie in the rebellion, but as mentioned before, modern readers would easily view Milton’s God as a tyrant, who is, as Burton Hatlen says in his essay on Philip Pullman’s influences, ‘auto-intoxicated with His own power, willing to tolerate enormous human suffering merely to prove that He was right in the first place.’28 But even though the rebellion of Satan and the Fall of Adam and Eve are elements of Milton’s orthodox Protestant theology, we are still reading the story today. As Wellek and Warren say, ‘the reader’s failure to share that theology doesn’t denude the poem’ (Wellek and Warren, 245).
The Fall is perhaps the greatest theological issue in the Bible, yet my notes on this subject will be brief for much has been written on the Fall in Paradise Lost by people with a better theological background.29 Returning to the theme of free will, this is what makes the Fall possible, bringing knowledge and sin into the world. Yet at the same time, without sin there can be no free will, because then humans would lack the element that allows them to choose evil over good.
To really understand the ideas and themes of Paradise Lost we need to conclude with an overview of the important characters of the poem. One of the conventions of an epic poem is that it needs to have an epic hero. By choosing the story of the Fall as the subject of his epic, Milton limited his options of the number of heroes he could focus on, resulting in many debates on the real hero of Paradise Lost. In the classical epics, the focus of the story is on the great journey, the great issues, the supernatural plot elements, the epic hero, and they were not especially well-known for their well-developed characters. Yet Paradise Lost takes a different approach and because of the fact that thought and argument are as important as action, creating psychologically complex and credible characters.
28 See Burton Hatlen, ‘Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a Challenge to the Fantasies of J. R. R. Tolkien and
C. S. Lewis, with an Epilogue on Pullman’s Neo-Romantic Reading of Paradise Lost’ in His Dark Materials Illuminated, ed. M. Lenz and C. Scott (Detroit, 2005) pp. 88.
29
The most interesting character from the perspective of a modern reader is arguably Satan. He is the driving force behind the epic, the centre of the action, and he is central to the entire plot. Some argue that he is a sympathetic character, and certainly in contrast to the tyrannical Old Testament God that Milton portrays this is not altogether a ridiculous viewpoint. The initiative of the action belongs to Satan and Hell because of the relationship between divine decree and epic action in Paradise Lost. In contrast to Homer, Virgil, or Tasso, where the supreme deities decree the epic action, Milton’s subject demands a different approach. With an omnipotent and omniscient God and an emphasis on free will, naturally Satan needs to be the one initiating the action. Yet the result of Milton writing Satan as such an active character is that he invokes sympathies for his cause from the audience. Milton states in his opening lines that he will justify the ways of God to men, but over the course of the first books, he goes to great lengths to justify Satan’s actions, giving him a real reason for his rebellion, something Empson greatly focuses on in his book. But Satan’s rebellion and his temptation in Book IX are two very different actions. If the rebellion can be justified against a tyrannical God, the temptation is a low action, seen as a revenge on men because God was too powerful to go against. Satan’s motives for the second action are fundamentally wrong: envy, revenge, and ambition, and this is what sets him apart from a true epic hero.
As described above, God is often seen by critics as a tyrant who, in the words of Hatlen ‘allows immense suffering to prove that he was right all along’ (Hatlen 88). Empson’s admiration for Milton’s devil sprang largely from his strong dislike for Milton’s God.30 In an epic poem there can be no room for a God like the Christian God because the character would be incredibly dull from an author’s point of view. You cannot give Him a personality in the way that you can give other characters like the angels and the humans personalities. The classical epics describe their gods as characters who have arguments and differences, but an omnipotent God does not make for good story-telling, which was perhaps Milton’s greatest problem in writing Paradise Lost. The writer who would have made a vindictive God a majestic character might have been a good Christian but never a great epic poet.
The last characters I would like to mention in this chapter are Adam and Eve. In this epic story they seem to play only minor parts at first glance, yet they are fundamental to the story. They have to be psychologically credible and likable, well-rounded characters who do not fall too easily for readers to care about their fate and optimistic outcome, a fact Milton was surely aware of. They convey the human focus of the story, and are the best example of Milton’s emphasis on free will. Eve is a complicated character, and it is obvious that Milton took great care in creating her. The central action of Paradise Lost is the temptation of Eve and her subsequent Fall. The main characters in the scenes of the Fall are Satan and Eve. Hatlen believes that contrary to the Romantic idea that Satan was the Promethean hero of Paradise Lost, the ‘true hero’ of Milton’s poem is Eve, with Adam in an important auxiliary role, because it is Eve whose curiosity and need for independence essentially causes the Fall. He writes:
Does Milton blame Eve for all the ills that humankind suffers? Perhaps so, but we can as easily see him praising her for making possible our entrance into a full human estate. Further, after the Fall, when Adam vociferously blames Eve for what has happened, it is Eve who begs forgiveness and who offers to kill herself so that humankind will not have to suffer the consequences of her sin. At this moment Eve becomes not only the prime mover of our entrance into a fully human condition but also a proto-Christ, bearing the responsibility of all sin on her shoulders. (90)
Seeing Milton’s Fall as a positive event which brings knowledge into the world and which makes us fully human does indeed mean celebrating Eve as the hero of Paradise Lost. Pullman’s reading of Paradise Lost must therefore feature Eve as an important character, because he creates an independent, curious female protagonist who is easily compared to Milton’s Eve, and who is even described in the novels as a second Eve, and whose Fall is very much positive. In choosing this approach, Pullman definitely shows his ideas about the consequences of the Fall, and suddenly seeing Eve as the ‘true hero’ of Paradise Lost does not seem so unrealistic anymore.
Chapter III: His Dark Materials
Comparing Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials to John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost might seem like an obvious thing to do if one keeps Pullman’s own comments about his literary influences in mind. However, the link between the two works is not in all areas as obvious, and certainly not as uncomplicated as one might expect, because there is more to look at than the mere similarities in the plots. How does Pullman use Paradise Lost in order to create his own fantasy trilogy? More specifically, how does Pullman use the fantasy genre to give shape to his ideas on the scale, the atmosphere, the themes, and the characterisation of Paradise Lost?
His Dark Materials is often categorised as epic or high fantasy, a claim for which there are strong arguments, such as the appearance of one main character, the theme of good versus evil, the coming of age story, and the fact that His Dark Materials is a series of novels. Yet as we have seen in the first chapter in an overview of the fantasy genre, His Dark Materials has many of the elements of a classical fantasy story, although there is a subgenre of realism which might classify it more precisely: the previously mentioned world of magic realism, a genre with fantasy or magical elements in an otherwise realistic universe.
in the introduction to his essay that ‘Pullman’s most distinctive contribution to the fantasy genre is his blurring of the line that separates the “real” from the fantasy worlds’ (75).
The fact that Pullman is writing in a generic system which is less prescriptive than that in Milton’s time means that he has much more freedom in the creation of his story in many different ways; the plot, the themes, the narrative voice, etc. There are no strict rules that he has to obey in order for his work to be recognised as a fantasy work, or even in order for his work to be recognised at all. The use of the fantasy and the science fiction genre means that he can include talking bears, miniature spies, and vehicles controlled by the mind without any surprise on the reader’s side, which is partly a result of descriptive genre theory.
But His Dark Materials is not only high or epic fantasy; it is also children’s literature, a fact which must not be overlooked. Children’s literature is, maybe even more so than magic realism in adult literature, very much a genre in which anything is acceptable. Yet children’s literature, like fantasy literature, is not a genre which is high up in the literary hierarchy of the late twentieth century.31 Yet, perhaps partly because the age group of his intended audience, but also partly as something inherent to the style of His Dark Materials, this is something that Pullman does not do. If anything, Pullman shows great respect for his audience in his writing, something which is further emphasised by the use of high cultural epigraphs in his third book of the trilogy from a range of authors (Keats, Marvell, Emily Dickinson, Webster, the Bible, Blake, Milton). Susan Matthews mentions in her essay on Blake’s influences on Pullman that ‘the use of high cultural epigraphs seems also to be a claim for the status of children’s literature.’32
The use of these epigraphs not only shows a great respect for the intellectual capacities of the reader, it also focuses the reader’s attention on a very important aspect of His Dark Materials: intertextuality. Pullman acknowledges in the introduction to his
31
Although modern genre theory does not place as much emphasis on the differences in scale and glory between genres, there is still a notion of hierarchy. As noted in the first chapter, there is no fixed hierarchy in literature over the ages, but in the twentieth century hierarchy is linked closely to plot and genre. Fowler dedicates a complete chapter to the hierarchies of genre in his book Kinds of Literature, noting that in the time of the novel, the twentieth century, there is a ‘relatively firm distinction between verisimilar novels on the one side and thrillers, westerns, and fantasy on the other’ (226).
32 Susan Matthews, ‘Rouzing the Faculties to Act: Pullman’s Blake for Children’ in His Dark Materials
novels that he has been deeply influenced by authors as John Milton, William Blake, and Heinrich von Kleist. With a cultural background like Pullman’s, why choose the low hierarchical genres of fantasy and children’s literature to write in? The answer to this question is, as mentioned before, that both of these genres possess something which many other genres lack: the capacity to tell with a freedom of themes, subjects and storytelling in general. Yet children’s literature needs a strong narrative voice which is in control of the story, something which Pullman uses to narrate his complicated story.
With the generic boundaries now established, the structure of His Dark Materials is an interesting starting point. First of all, His Dark Materials is written as a trilogy. Hatlen, in referencing the influences by J.R.R Tolkien on Philip Pullman says:
Here I would point, first, to the trilogy form itself. The Victorian ‘three-decker’ has not been a notably popular literary form in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but Tolkien memorably revived the form. (77)
Although the trilogy form was a form used in American literature in the early twentieth century with works by John Dos Passos, John Galsworthy, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and Pearl S. Buck, it is only after The Lord of the Rings established itself as a classical fantasy text, that the trilogy form became a much imitated form in both the fantasy genre and the science fiction genre.33 There is a reason why fantasy series, trilogies in particular, are so widely used. Because of the scale of the story Pullman was writing, he needed a form bigger than just the novel. Trilogies give the author the time to develop their story and their characters, exploring their development and moral reasons, the latter of which is especially important in stories focusing on the theme of good versus evil. The depth of major fantasy trilogies, His Dark Materials included, is achieved by the scale and the careful development of the setting and the characters, and it takes time to get the complete sense of new universe across to a reader.34
Because of the trilogy form of His Dark Materials a link to the Lord of the Rings trilogy is easily made, yet there are many more differences than similarities, not the least of which is the entire setting of the story. Lord of the Rings uses the ‘typical’ fantasy
33 Examples of fantasy trilogies, not all of them from the same literary quality, of the twentieth century,
include works by Garth Nix, Robin Hobb, Gillian Bradshaw, Guy Gavriel Kay, Dennis L. McKiernan, and many others.
34 His Dark Materials has over 1100 pages. Something so elaborate needs to be split into more than one
setting: ‘a blanket erasure of the twentieth century in favor of a vaguely medieval (and specifically North European, and almost entirely male) world of warrior kings, riders of the “mark,” wizards, and goblins’ (Hatlen 78). His Dark Materials uses anything but a typical fantasy setting and from the many imaginary species in the trilogy only Pullman’s witches can be seen as typical fantasy characters. Even they, however, have their own characterisations which sets them apart from archetypical fairytale witches. Above all, Pullman’s rejection of the archetypical fantasy of Tolkien can be seen in his rejection of Tolkien’s metaphysical dualism, as Hatlen shows in his essay (Hatlen 79). With the exception of minor creatures and arguably the characters belonging to the Church, Pullman’s characters have a moral depth to them that few fantasy authors have written before him, and for a long time into the trilogy it is not clear to the reader who is on which side.
In conclusion, Pullman is working within a tradition of high fantasy and drawing upon this tradition in his narrative, yet he also incorporates his own individual variations upon the established patterns. The trilogy structure to express the scale of the story is partly what links Pullman to Milton, who chose the epic genre as the only genre that was able to accommodate the scale of his story. Other elements that link the two together are the themes and the characterisations.
move intuitively, always keeping in touch with the compassionate center that serves as her spiritual guide, her ultimate concern.’35
Lyra’s innocence is described in her power to act intuitively, especially in reading the alethiometer she has been given. When the Master of Jordan gives her the alethiometer, he tells her: ‘It tells you the truth. As for how to read it, you’ll have to learn by yourself’ (NL 74).36 We soon learn that reading the alethiometer is one of the hardest things to do, and even accomplished scholars have to put a lot of effort and time into reading it. Yet Lyra with her innocent intuitiveness learns to interpret the alethiometer skilfully and quickly. When asked by Dr. Lanselius how to read the device, it is emphasised that she does not read it through scholarly devotion and skill, but rather with an intuitiveness that these learned scholars do not have. ‘Without the book of symbols, how do you read it?’ he asks her, and Lyra replies that she ‘just makes [her] mind go clear’ (NL 173). Pullman’s creation of the alethiometer can be seen as a symbol for a child’s innocence and intuitive behaviour as opposed to experience and knowledge that arrives only after adolescence. This is further exemplified by the fact that Lyra suddenly loses her skills of reading the alethiometer at the end of The Amber Spyglass, the third book, after kissing Will, and therefore moving definitively beyond the innocence of childhood. But Pullman does not stop there, he goes on to give us more information when the female angel Xaphania offers Lyra advice on how to regain her skills: ‘You read it by grace […] and you can regain it by work […] But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and duller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you’ (AS 495). Even though the theme of innocence as described in His Dark Materials is a theme which can mainly be attributed to Blake and von Kleist’s literary influences, it is also important to see the link between Lyra’s innocence before she moved into adolescence when kissing Will and Eve’s innocence before she took the apple and moved into the world of knowledge. For Pullman, knowledge is positive. Shelley King takes these two ways of reading the
35
See Andrew Leet, ‘Rediscovering Faith through Science Fiction: Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ in His Dark Materials Illuminated, ed. M. Lenz and C. Scott (Detroit, 2005) p. 183.
36 All quotations from the His Dark Materials books are taken from UK editions published by Scholastic in
