This lecture discusses Northern Lights (alternately titled The Golden Compass) in the literary contexts of Milton’s Paradise Lost, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia.  The lecture begins by considering the features of the fantasy genre that Northern Lights shares with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It goes on to discuss the deep philosophical and ethical antagonisms that make Pullman’s fantasy sequence so different from Lewis’s.

I. AUTHOR AND LITERARY BACKGROUND

THE AUTHOR

For Philip Pullman, see:http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/051226fa_fact This is Laura Miller’s article, which includes an interview with Pullman, published in the New Yorker on 26 December 2005. The title is “Far from Narnia.”

HIS DARK MATERIALS: PUBLICATION AND FILMING

Northern Lights was first published in 1995. In the USA its title is The Golden Compass, a phrase borrowed from Milton’s Paradise Lost. The change of title suggests a simplified approach that directs the reader’s attention towards the alethiometer, a complicated part-magical part-scientific divination device, and away from the philosophical challenge posed by the parallel universes that can be viewed through the Aurora Borealis, or “Northern Lights.” More than two decades after its first publication, Northern Lights continues to be popular with adults, teenagers, and older children. Pullman published the second book in the trilogy, The Subtle Knife, in 1997. The third novel, The Amber Spyglass, followed in 2000.

Launched by New Line Cinema in 2007,The Golden Compass film was written and directed by Chris Weitz and starred Dakota Blue Richards, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Ian McKellen. The film was less successful in the USA than the producers had hoped, and plans to film the later books in the trilogy were abandoned.

LITERARY BACKGROUND OF HIS DARK MATERIALS

1.  John Milton’s Paradise Lost: The Anti-Theology of His Dark Materials

Pullman bases His Dark Materials on his reading of English literature. One of the authors that he focuses on is William Blake (1757-1827). In The Amber Spyglass each chapter is headed with a quote from Blake or other poets. Blake was a visionary, a philosopher, an artist and a poet whose prolific output included the Songs of Innocence (1789) and the Songs of Experience (1794). These are collections of short lyric poems that explore the transition from childhood to adulthood (puberty), and document the contrasting world views of children and adults. Pullman says that this same transition is the central theme of His Dark Materials. Blake had a unique and radical view of the world, and, within the genre of children’s literature, so does Pullman in His Dark Materials.

Paradise Lost, the wonderful epic poem in twelve books that John Milton first published in 1667, is a more obvious source for Northern Lights. Paradise Lost begins by telling the story of Lucifer’s fall from heaven to hell. It describes how, transformed into Satan, he rallies the fallen angels to continue the war against God. Their plan is to cause God’s new creation on earth, humankind, to fall from a state of obedience to one of rebellion and sin. Satan sets out on a heroic journey across the abyss of Chaos that separates Hell from the universe made by God. Meanwhile Adam and Eve are blissfully happy in their home in Eden, the earthly paradise at the centre of God’s creation. The angel Raphael visits them and warns them that an approach by one of the fallen angels will seek to undermine their obedience to God and their love of him, which is the basis of all their joy. Raphael narrates the war in heaven that led to the fall of Satan and his followers, and their own creation by God, first the man and then the woman.

After Raphael’s departure, Satan arrives in Eden. Taking the form of a beautiful serpent, he persuades Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge that God has set in the midst of the garden, and on which he has placed a prohibition. Then Adam eats the fruit out of his love for Eve. Paradise Lost goes on to narrate the effects of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, first on the natural world and then on their own consciousness, feelings and behaviour. Milton’s epic concludes with Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden and entrance into our fallen world, but they take with them God’s promise of a Messiah who will redeem humankind.

The quote from Paradise Lost that opens Northern Lights describes Satan’s view of Chaos, the creator’s “dark materials,” the confused matter from which he orders and creates all worlds and all creatures. Pullman draws especially on Paradise Lost for his depiction of angels in the later books of His Dark Materials. However, as an acknowledged atheist and humanist, he gives his angels a radical twist which they do not have in Milton’s profoundly Christian poem.

According to His Dark Materials, the original unconscious matter that made up the multiverse—a universe consisting of innumerable worlds—began after a very long time to understand itself. Matter then took the form of particles of consciousness, or Dust. When these coalesced into structures, or complexifications, the “Bodies” of angels were born. “God” is the first angel to come into existence. When the second angel took form, the first angel claimed that it was “God,” who had created everything, including the second angel. Thus “God” created his Authority. When some angels discovered the truth, they rebelled against God—the great rebellion of Lucifer and his army of angels so vividly narrated in Paradise Lost—but God won, and the rebel angels were cast out of heaven. In revenge for their Fall, Lucifer tempted Adam and Eve, whose fall in its turn awakened human consciousness, i.e. self-consciousness or knowledge of themselves as separate and independent beings.

In His Dark Materials Lord Asriel revives the angels’ rebellion against the lies and oppression of the first angel, i.e., against the Authority. Throughout the trilogy Asriel is therefore a Satanic or Promethean figure. Similarly, Lyra fills the position of Eve, except that her awakening to adult sexual love—the equivalent of Eve’s fall—is presented as redemptive, not destructive. To understand Pullman’s full reversal of Milton’s theology, it’s necessary to read to the end of The Amber Spyglass. Overall, Pullman’s approach to the Miltonic universe is somewhat similar to that of William Blake, who wrote, famously, that as a true poet, Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Similarly, Pullman claims, “All of the imaginative sympathy of Paradise Lost is with Satan rather than with God.”

2.   J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman

His Dark Materials demonstrates Pullman’s love of English literary tradition. A second factor, most obvious in Northern Lights, is his love for the famous university city of Oxford, with its long traditions of scholarship, innovation and teaching. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were both Oxford scholars. In the 1940s and early 1950s they met regularly at the tavern of the Eagle and the Child (“The Bird and the Baby”) with a group of friends, the Inklings. Here they read aloud passages from the classic stories that each was writing–Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings–for criticism and comment. Both Lewis and Tolkien were leading scholars of language and of literature, with a deep knowledge of Greek and Latin classics and of French and English medieval literature. Lewis wrote a study, A Preface to Paradise Lost, in which he expertly explains the theology of Milton’s great work. A direct line of literary descent runs from Milton, through Blake and Lewis as commentators on Paradise Lost, to Philip Pullman.

Despite his love of Oxford’s buildings and traditions, and his reverence for literature and literary scholarship, however, Pullman opposes the invented worlds of both Tolkien and Lewis. In his interview with Laura Miller, he scoffs at any notion that his own fantasy writing might resemble theirs. “The Lord of the Rings is fundamentally an infantile work,” he said. “Tolkien is not interested in the way grown-up, adult human beings interact with each other. He’s interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.” His Dark Materials is more directly connected to The Chronicles of Narnia than it is to The Lord of the Rings; yet Pullman rejects Lewis as a fantasy writer even more vehemently than he dismisses Tolkien.

In terms of genre and public recognition, however, Pullman is undeniably Lewis’s literary heir. The last of the seven Narnia chronicles, The Last Battle, won the Carnegie Award, the highest British honour for children’s literature, in 1956, and Northern Lights won it forty years later in 1996. His Dark Materials belongs to the same fantasy tradition that Lewis’s tales brought forward and adapted for the twentieth century. However, the relationship between the two authors’ books is not just sequential–it’s antagonistic. In fact these are the two points that I want to discuss: firstly, the fantasy elements that Northern Lights shares with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; and secondly the ways in which these two novels for children differ.

II. SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES: NORTHERN LIGHTS AND NARNIA

SIMILARITIES: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe shares the following fantasy elements with Northern Lights

A.  Parallel worlds. In Lewis’s novel, the children enter the parallel world of Narnia through a wardrobe. In Northern Lights Oxford is not quite the real Oxford, and Lyra’s wider world differs in important respects from the real one. For example, it includes witches and talking beasts (panserbǿrne). Furthermore, all the people have daemons who constantly remind readers of the book’s fantasy dimension. In later books of Pullman’s trilogy, an infinite number of parallel worlds is discovered. They include the “real” Oxford, and the “real” human world that we know.

B.  Quest is a central narrative feature of Northern Lights. Lyra and her friends set out on a dangerous journey northwards, searching for the children who have been stolen at the behest of the General Oblation Board (the servants of whom are called GOBblers by the common people). The Oblation Board is the Church that serves the Authority. Lyra’s playmate Roger is one of the stolen children. The second goal of Lyra’s quest is to rescue her father, Lord Asriel, from his imprisonment in the bleak, far northern district of Svalbard.

C.   Wonder or the fantastic is present in many forms, just as in The Chronicles of Narnia, for example in the bears, in the alethiometer’s power to foretell the future, and in the daemons and witches.

D.  As in Narnia, time is dislocated or uncertain. In Northern Lights the futurism of science fiction surfaces in the hospital of Bolvangar, where horrific experiments are carried out on living subjects. This future, however, mingles with the historical elements, for example the gyptians, the barge-people whose lives resemble those of old-time gypsies. The dislocation of time is more obvious and pervasive in The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass than in Northern Lights..

 E.   Nostalgia for the never-was is not obvious in Northern Lights, except perhaps in the depiction of Oxford. By contrast, romanticising of the past is an important element in Lewis’s depiction of Narnia, which looks back with longing to an idealised medieval society of just rule by kings and queens which, of course, never existed.

F.   Allegory or didactic purpose. Lewis clearly wants to inspire his young readers with love for Christ (allegorically the great Lion, Aslan “Our Lord”) and a commitment to Christian ethics. I haven’t found any allegory in Northern Lights, and any moral advice offered to young people is subordinate to the narrative. Pinned up beside Pullman’s desk is a list of the film director Billy Wilder’s rules for writers. Rule No. 1 is “Grab ’em by the throat and never let ’em go.” Maintaining suspense and reader interest is a constant priority. How well do you think Pullman succeeds in this? However, despite his resistance certain “teachings” do emerge from His Dark Materials. Later I’ll suggest what these might be.

His Dark Materials therefore displays six features of fantasy literature that are also found in The Chronicles of Narnia.  Yet Pullman rejects the idea that his work is fantasy. In an interview with Wendy Parsons and Catriona Nicholson (The Lion and the Unicorn 23:1 (1999): 116-134), he states: “Northern Lights is not fantasy. It’s a work of stark realism. I don’t read fantasy.” Despite this denial, critics have persisted in classifying His Dark Materials as fantasy. Pullman is sometimes provocative in his interviews, possibly in order to stimulate debate about issues that interest him, or as a marketing tool. Nevertheless, you might like to decide for yourselves whether Northern Lights belongs to the fantasy genre; and which  features might support Pullman’s claim that Northern Lights is “stark realism.”

DIFFERENCES: Pullman’s Reversals of the Lewis Model

      A.  Opposed Philosophies

Lewis and Pullman write from opposite premises. Lewis sees the greatest good for humans as lying in love for and obedience to the Christian God, who, as he demonstrates through Aslan’s death in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so loves the “sons of Adam” that he lays down his life to save them (sinners like Edmund). By contrast, Pullman finds the greatest good in human qualities, including friendship, sexual love, resourcefulness and self-reliance. In radical opposition to The Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials paints a picture of an egomaniac angel, so power-hungry that he installs himself as God, and defines himself as the (ultimate and only) Authority.

Dust: Pullman further challenges Lewis’s adherence to the idea of God as creator found in Genesis and in Paradise Lost. In these traditional sources God creates Adam from the dust of the earth, but Pullman remakes Dust, which settles on people only as the state of childhood innocence gives way to adulthood, human self-consciousness, and the ability to learn, know and understand. He sees these abilities as having been produced naturally, if unexpectedly, by the forces of evolution.

Although Pullman likes Lewis’s literary criticism and quotes it often, he considers the Narnia fantasy series “morally loathsome.” In a 1998 essay for The Guardian, entitled “The Dark Side of Narnia,” he condemned “the misogyny, the racism, the sado-masochistic relish for violence that permeates the whole cycle.” The Chronicles of Narnia end with the ascension of the Pevensie children to a Narnia in which everything is a perfected version of the earthly Narnia. In Pullman’s view, however, Lewis’s stories teach that “death is better than life; boys are better than girls . . . and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it.”Pullman even argues that Lewis really isn’t all that Christian, and accuses him of following “some sort of crazed, deranged Manichaeism.” (Manichaeism was an ancient religion in which good and evil, light and darkness, were seen as two equal opposed forces. Christian theology says that God’s love and power are primary, all-encompassing, almighty and therefore destined to prevail over evil.)

Lewis assumes in all his writings that as a divine creation the universe is fundamentally rational and orderly. Therefore a rational basis exists, and can usually if not always be found, for making the right moral choices. In His Dark Materials, however, both children and adults are often confused or uninformed about the facts that affect their decisions. Neither group can claim to have all the answers. They all have to work their way through to desired outcomes by trial and error.

Lewis and Pullman differ too in the responsibility that each assumes as author. Whereas Lewis guides the reader’s responses to his characters with a powerful authorial voice, Pullman lets his characters’ experiences stand in all their ambiguity. The reader shares characters’ ignorance and learns with them. 

     B.  Happiness in Heaven versus Happiness Now 

Lewis looks forward to an ultimate fulfillment of human life in heaven, a realm to be reached after death. The Narnia children attain this perfect happiness late in the series, after they die in a train crash. Lewis follows the Greek philosopher Plato in thinking of heaven as a divine realm of Ideas, in which the multiple imperfect Forms of this world are perfected as joy and love. This world is therefore “Shadowlands,” and heaven is the reality of which this world is a dark and transitory imitation. 

By contrast, Pullman urges humans, including children, not to look forward to a heaven but to live fully in the here and now. He suggests that people should find their happiness in transitory human joys, efforts, virtues and accomplishments. He encourages his readers to find fulfillment as beings who, as a result of their affinity with Dust (matter endowed with consciousness), have become aware of their own separate being and of their individual powers to feel and think and question. This idea emerges most clearly in the culminating episode of The Amber Spyglass, when Lyra’s and Will’s discovery at puberty of their mutual love attracts back all the particles of Dust that were escaping from the multiverse, a catastrophe that would have left the universe cold and dark, meaning merely “material,” or deprived of the consciousness embodied in humans. Instead the returning Dust re-infuses all life with consciousness, knowledge and feeling.

    C.  Obedience to Elders versus Unreliable Elders 

Christ alludes more than once in the Gospels to “the kingdom of heaven.” Therefore, Lewis’s parallel worlds–those that like Narnia co-exist invisibly with ours–are kingdoms. Their right government accords with the hierarchy that Lewis sees as likewise inherent in earthly creation–in descending order, God, king, man, woman and animals. The earthly authority of worthy superiors (political leaders, good parents, teachers, mentors, benevolent bosses) descends from a loving God into layers of beings who are by nature inferior. In Narnia Aslan (Christ) and the Emperor beyond the Sea (God the Father) are fantasy representations of the Christian God as the ultimate loving authority. The result, according to Pullman, is that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe teaches children the lesson, “respect and obey your elders.” Children brought up in this way are likely to grow into obedient and malleable adults.

By contrast, Northern Lights endorses an attitude of questioning, distrust, and rebellion towards all authority. This includes: 

• the Authority (the first angel to come to consciousness claiming to be God);
• his instrument the Magisterium–which some readers identify with Roman Catholicism or other branches of Christianity;
• the Authority’s earthly bureaucracy, the Oblation Board;
• and humans who wield authority, such as political leaders, parents and teachers. 

In accordance with Pullman’s aims, Lyra’s parents in Northern Lights, Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter (Marisa) are, to say the least, enigmatic. When the story opens, Lord Asriel has posed for ten years as Lyra’s uncle, refusing to acknowledge her as his daughter. Obsessed with his struggle against the Authority, he has paid her little attention. Asriel finally sacrifices another child, Lyra’s best friend the kitchen boy Roger, to achieve his goal of penetrating to the parallel universe that he can see through the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights of the book’s title. Asriel uses the energy connecting Roger to his daemon to build a bridge across the Aurora, hoping through this to destroy the power of the Magisterium. Asriel’s loyalty to Lyra is ambiguous; we can only say that, on their arrival at Svalbard, he is relieved when the child he is fated to destroy by severing his connection with his daemon (a process called “incision”) turns out to be Roger and not his daughter.

Similarly, Mrs Coulter serves the Oblation Board (“oblation” means “sacrifice”) by betraying children to it. She is therefore the essence of an unreliable elder. She is also a traitor to Lyra, deceiving her while pretending to befriend her. She regards her as special, but in Northern Lights this seems to be as much because of the prophecy about Lyra as because Lyra is her daughter. The word “coulter,” sometimes spelled (U.S.) “colter,” means “knife” or ploughshare. It is the iron blade fixed low down in front of the plough that cuts the soil vertically. Given Mrs. Coulter’s association with the criminal cutting away of a child from her or his daemon, the name is more than appropriate. It is also ambiguous, however, because ploughing by the coulter prepares the soil for planting and ultimately for harvest, and in many ways, Mrs. Coulter’s influence on Lyra and the multiverse does turn out to be productive and fruitful. Mrs. Coulter is modelled on, or a reaction against, the White Witch, Jadis of Charn, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew. Both Jadis and Marisa are beautiful and powerful women, dressed in furs. However whereas Jadis (whose name is French for “formerly,” “in times past”) is unambiguously treacherous and unchanging in her evil, Mrs. Coulter is not so clear-cut. Like her daughter Lyra, she is capable of change and growth, and throughout the trilogy we can trace changes for the better in her. In fact even as early as Northern Lights the reader can suspect that Mrs. Coulter has some motherly feelings towards Lyra, and some pride in her.

At last, in The Amber Spyglass, both Asriel and Mrs Coulter redeem themselves when they sacrifice their lives in a heroic struggle to bring down Metatron, the usurping angel who succeeds the Authority. In the process they “regain grace,” as Pullman puts it, through purely human effort– “discipline, pain, suffering, and so forth”–and confirm themselves as Lyra’s loyal parents. From Lyra’s perspective and for most of the three books, however, her parents seem at best puzzling and at worst destructive, and the reader sympathises with Lyra when she asks: “Why do they do these things to children, Pan? Do they hate children so much, that they want to tear them apart like this? Why do they do it?” (Northern Lights 389). Such a question would be unthinkable in a Narnia chronicle, where, in accordance with Lewis’ hierarchical view, the right of adults to instruct and guide children is unquestioned.

Lyra’s foster parents, the scholars (teachers) of Jordan College are just as enigmatic as her birth parents. Their moral ambiguity contrasts strongly with the wise benevolence of the Professor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Almost the first thing that happens in Northern Lights is that Lyra catches the Master of Jordan College attempting to poison Asriel. However the Master’s goodness becomes obvious later when he gives Lyra the alethiometer and shows a genuine concern for her welfare. The reader will be as puzzled by these contrasts in behaviour as Lyra herself, and it is only much later in Northern Lights that it becomes clear that the Master had to choose between a lesser and a greater evil.

The other parent figures who might be seen as reliable in Northern Lights are the Gyptian leaders, John Faa and Farder Coram. However, these are the children’s friends rather than parents. They are humanised by age and by Farder Coram’s hopeless love for the witch Serafina Pekkala. Lyra never grants them the authority of parents–she battles against them and leaves them behind.

If elders in His Dark Materials are shown to have their difficulties in dealing with the physical and moral multiverse, children are by contrast empowered. A reversal in roles and (it could be said) gender occurs, in that whereas in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Aslan is the rescuer and redeemer of the whole realm, particularly the boy Edmund, in Northern Lights the girl Lyra sets out to rescue her father. David Gooderman suggests that when children read fantasy, they want to identify with competence and control. Lyra demonstrates both these qualities when she runs away from Mrs Coulter’s London party, and when she uses her wits and eloquence to survive after the Tartars steal her from the Gyptians and take her to Bolvangar.

Through characters such as Asriel and Mrs Coulter Pullman expresses his fascination with the human ability to make conscious choices, not choices that change a person’s essential nature, but choices that make the best of the nature they have. He says in the interview with Parsons and Nicholson: “We lose the innocence that we were born with and then we go on through life. But if we work hard, and if we train ourselves like the dancer, if we undergo all kinds of discipline, pain, suffering, and so forth, then the point is that we can regain grace.” For Pullman, humans are solely responsible for achieving their own redemption; for Lewis redemption is God’s gift of grace following human repentance for wrong-doing.

D.  Friendship and Love

With no Aslan to redeem all, and with morally ambiguous parents and elders, Lyra must indeed rely on herself. This makes Northern Lights a more suspenseful, because more unresolved, narrative than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lyra’s successful relationships are with her friends rather than with parental figures. Far from upholding hierarchy as in the medieval world view that Lewis transferred to Narnia, His Dark Materials repeatedly celebrates equal love between characters who are friends. In Northern Lights Lyra’s friends are Iorek Byrnison, Lee Scoresby, Roger, and her daemon Pantalaimon. Through these relationships, Pullman introduces his key teaching on the centrality of human love. We have seen that in his interview with Laura Miller he argues provocatively that the Narnia Chronicles aren’t all that Christian: “Here’s a simple test: What is the greatest Christian virtue? Well, it’s charity, isn’t it? It’s love. If somebody who knew nothing about Christian doctrine, and who had been told that Lewis was a great Christian teacher, read all the way through those books, would he get that message? No.”

This is another issue that you might like to think about further. It seems to me that in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Lewis writes movingly about Aslan’s love for humans, and about the love of Lucy and Susan for Aslan, but that he pays less attention to love among the four Pevensie children. They are loyal to each other, and protective of each other, but there’s nothing to match say, the obviously strong and equal human love that unites Lyra with her friends. This love is not facile; it’s often challenged, but it grows stronger throughout the Pullman trilogy.

Pullman explains further:

Sexual love, regarded with apprehension in Lewis’s fiction and largely ignored in Tolkien’s, saves the world in His Dark Materials. Later in the series Lyra’s coming of age and falling in love mystically bring about the mending of a perilous cosmological rift. “The idea of keeping childhood alive forever and ever and regretting the passage into adulthood—whether it’s a gentle, rose-tinged regret or a passionate, full-blooded hatred, as it is in Lewis—is simply wrong,” Pullman told me. As a child, Lyra is able to read the alethiometer with an instinctual ease. As she grows up, she becomes self-conscious and loses that grace, but she’s told that she can regain the skill with years of practice, and eventually become even better at it. “That’s a truer picture of what it’s like to be a human being,” Pullman said. “And a more hopeful one. . . . We are bound to grow up.”

  E.  Anthropomorphic Animals versus Dignified Animals

Another point of contrast is between Lewis’s and Pullman’s animal characters. Lewis’s hierarchical world view–the medieval “chain of being”–assumed animal inferiority. The Narnian animals are delightful, but only the human children, the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, can rule Narnia permanently as kings and queens.  This is because God gave Adam dominion over the animals in the book of Genesis.

Writing at the turn of the twenty-first century, when it is obvious that humans need urgently to replace dominion over and exploitation of animals with conservation and protection, Pullman upsets the Narnian hierarchy by creating animal characters who are the equals if not the superiors of the human characters.

• The daemons are the children’s deeply loved friends and companions, their other selves, their consciousness, their feeling bodies, their “souls.” Far from being trapped in the material universe, the children’s daemons are mercurial in their transformations. This makes the animal fantasy dimension of His Dark Materials especially rich. Indeed, the conception of Lyra’s daemon seems to have been the turning point in Pullman’s writing of the trilogy. Pantalaimon changes between being unobtrusive: moth, mouse; to being protective: small dragon, polecat; to being Lyra’s sleeping companion and comforter: ermine. Children may want to regard the daemons as pets, but the daemons resist this by sometimes being wiser than their children. In Northern Lights Pantalaimon tells Lyra when she has made mistakes, but as her experience grows in later books, she becomes the initiator. However, this relationship is clearly an overturning of Lewis’s hierarchical assumptions about the relative places of animals and humans.
• Iorek Byrnison is Lyra’s friend, and in many ways her superior. To understand Pullman’s idea of the panserbǿrne, it’s helpful to read the beginning of the Parsons and Nicholson interview, where he discusses his source. Basically, Iorek is the embodiment of a Zen Buddhist sense of “grace,” meaning being in “flow,” or in perfect natural harmony with what exists. In creating Iorek Pullman maintains a dimension of mystery—as a non-human creature Iorek always eludes Lyra’s understanding. This is another way in which Pullman challenges the Old Testament notion of human superiority over the animals. Perhaps the unhappy confusion of the bears under Iofur Raknison, as they strive to become human, is a comment on Lewis’s humanised animals as being a corruption of animal nature? A teaching that emerges from the picture of the corrupted bears—who fail to be human at the same time as they fail to be bears in the concluding Svalbard section of Northern Lights–is BE YOURSELF. The fact that daemons take on a permanent form—“settle”—when the child reaches puberty is a poetic way of conveying the idea that we all have a unique individuality. The children can’t choose the final form of their daemons. This poetically makes the point that we must accept the basic nature that we have: we should strive our hardest to make it the best that it can be, but wisdom tells us that we can’t change it into something that it isn’t.

 F.  Absolutist and Situational Ethics

Although both Lucy and Lyra hide out in wardrobes at the beginning of their adventures—a deliberate intertextual reference by Pullman—Lyra in most respects is a reversal of Lewis’s Lucy. She’s a tomboy, self-willed and rebellious, always in trouble, a little girl who takes charge of her life and hardly ever accepts restraints imposed by others. Obedience of the kind that Lucy learns, sometimes by suffering the consequences of her mistakes, is not in her nature at all. Above all, Lyra Silvertongue is an accomplished liar who uses her skill for good purposes, e.g., to rescue the children from Bolvangar and to protect Iorek as he approaches the kingdom of Iofur Raknison. This directly reverses Lewis’s portrait of Lucy, who above all  is truthful: the Professor tells Peter that he should believe Lucy rather than Edmund when she reports the existence of Narnia, because in Peter’s experience Lucy always tells the truth. In building this contrast with Lewis, Pullman is suggesting the validity in a dangerous and unpredictable universe of situational as opposed to absolutist ethics: humans need flexibility, as well as courage, if they are to produce the best outcome for themselves and the people they love. Of course, they first need to be sure that their motives and goals are right. Lyra doesn’t go in for examining her conscience, but her good feelings help her to find her way through a morass of dangers. Lyra’s lying is also related to the notion of creativity, especially literary creativity, or story-telling, as a positive value.

G.    Female Inferiority versus Gender Equality

In Northern Lights Pullman implicitly rejects what he calls the misogyny of The Chronicles of Narnia. In the latter Peter as the oldest male sibling is High King, and Lucy and Susan have defined roles: their nature is not suited to hand-to-hand battle, for example. They are the nurturers of Aslan as he goes to his death, and, like the women in the Gospels at the crucifixion, they stay and watch and grieve after the male disciples have fled. This suggests that as females they have a different kind of strength. Lewis therefore isn’t exactly a misogynist, as Pullman claims—misogynist means “woman hater.” Instead, Lewis’s belief in the hierarchy of being–theorised by feminist writers as a series of binary oppositions–is his logical justification for assuming female inferiority.

By contrast Pullman reverses the hierarchy that assumes masculine command. In Northern Lights Lyra is the natural leader of her friend Roger who is a far weaker figure. When Will enters the narrative at the beginning of The Subtle Knife, he becomes, after a period of adjustment on both sides, Lyra’s equal companion and friend. The pair’s mutual love and respect embody what most people imagine as being the ultimate goal of gender politics.

Another reversal in His Dark Materials concerns the good witch, Serafina Pekkala, who has a heavenly pedigree. She provides an exalted image of femininity that contrasts with Jadis, the White Witch in Narnia who is the Jinn descendant of the mysterious demon Lillith, Adam’s legendary corrupted first wife. (Interestingly, the OED defines “Jinn” as, “In Muslim demonology, an order of spirits lower than the angels, said to have the power of assuming human and animal forms, and to exercise supernatural influence over men.”)

  H.  Medieval Militarist Ideology versus Ancient Epic

The medieval militarist ideology of massed battles that is assumed in Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles is moderated in Northern Lights, where fighting takes place between individuals rather than armies. Pullman evokes the conventions of epic battles (e.g. Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid) in the climactic fight between Iorek and Iofur. He even uses the Homeric convention of epic simile (pp. 350, 353) to describe this battle, in yet another intertextual connection to much older literary traditions.

I.   Innocence versus Experience

In his interview with Parsons and Nicholson, Pullman helpfully names the theme of His Dark Materials as “the change from innocence to experience.” Since this change is traditionally (as in William Blake) associated with the child’s awakening to sexuality, Pullman’s statement brings us to a final difference between his and Lewis’s fantasy writing.

Pullman blames Lewis for depicting Susan Pevensie’s sexual coming of age—suggested by her interest in “nylons and lipstick and invitations”—as grounds for exclusion from heaven. (But is this a fair comment on Susan’s fate?–read The Last Battle, the last of The Narnia Chronicles, to find out!) By contrast, in His Dark Materials Lyra’s coming of age and falling in love with Will mends the rift in the cosmos through which the vital Dust is escaping. Pullman values the change from childhood to adulthood, whereas Lewis seems to deplore it.

In fact Pullman reinterprets Adam and Eve’s Fall, usually seen as a change from innocence to experience, as a transformation of ignorance into knowledge, as a growth in consciousness which through training and discipline in adult life can aim to recapture the “grace” of natural flow at a higher level. He points out that as a child, Lyra is able to read the alethiometer with instinctual ease. As she grows up, she becomes self-conscious and loses that “grace,” but she’s told that she can regain the skill with years of practice, and eventually become much better at it than before. “That’s a truer picture of what it’s like to be a human being,” Pullman said. “And a more hopeful one. . . . We are bound to grow up.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bobby, Susan R. “What Makes a Classic? Daemons and Dual Audience in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. The Looking Glass. 8:1 – Alice’s Academy (2 January 2004).

Laura Miller’s. “Far from Narnia.” New Yorker , 26 December 2005. see:http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/051226fa_fact .

Parsons, Wendy and Catriona Nicholson. “Talking to Philip Pullman.” The Lion and the Unicorn 23:1 (January 1999): 116-134.

Lenz, Milicent with Carol Scott, eds. His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 

Wikipedia provides a helpful plot survey of the three novels, and an analysis of characters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials

Wood, Naomi. “Paradise Lost and Found: Obedience, Disobedience, and Storytelling in C. S. Lewis and Philip Pullman.” Children’s Literature in Education 32:4 (December 2001): 237-59.

Yeffeth, Glen, ed. Navigating the Golden Compass: Religion, Science and Daemonology in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials.”  Dallas, Texas: Benbella Books, 2006.