[Milton-L] Milton and Pullman

Tue Mar 31 16:11:31 EDT 2009

I've had some second thoughts about my remarks on Pullman and have explored them on my blog, but since they are directly relevant to the discussion of Pullman on this listserve, I'll paste here what I posted there:

http://gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com/2009/04/or-am-i-not-pullman-sinister-one.html

"Or am I, not Pullman, the sinister one?"

In a previous post ("Philip Pullman: 'shallow and sinister'?"), I agreed with Milton scholar Professor James Fleming, who had written that he found Pullman both shallow and sinister: 
As far as I can tell, The Golden Compass ends with Lord Asriel, the good-scary guy, murdering a child (Roger). This is presented as a noble sacrifice, allowing the great man to open up the heavens in defiance of an authoritarian God.
I agreed but also had an inkling that something else might be going on: 
Like Professor Fleming, I was troubled by the "noble sacrifice" -- though there may have been an allusion to Christianity in that.
Lord Asriel is a complex figure but is partly modeled upon Milton's Satan in his rebellion against God, and therein lies Pullman's cleverness.

If Stanley Fish is correct in Surprised by Sin, then Milton intends for the reader of Paradise Lost to identify with Satan not because Milton has cast Satan as the hero of this epic but because Milton wants us to renact the original fall from Paradise in our experience as readers. We initially admire Satan's heroic qualities and follow him as he escapes from hell and crosses the treacherous realm of chaos, but we later discover that we have been misled and therefore come to recognize the sin within ourselves that drew us into that identification.

I suspect that Pullman is doing something similar with Lord Asriel. He wants us to initially identify with Asriel but to discover through Asriel's sacrifice of the child Roger that we have been misled.

Why should this be problematic for the reader? Couldn't one simply reject Asriel? I think that Pullman intends his readers to do so, but he is also setting a trap for his Christian critics, who will certainly not wish to identify with Asriel (even if they initially might have done so as readers). The Christian critique of Asriel will likely center on Asriel's apparent "end-justifies-means" ethic, namely the evil of sacrificing a child to open a way toward attaining what Asriel considers good. Pullman could then retort -- more or less plausibly -- that this is precisely what the Christian God does, i.e., sacrifice a child to attain the good. If Christians reject Asriel, then they must also reject their own God. If they refuse to reject their own God, then they cannot criticize Asriel.

I think that this is what Pullman is up to with his depiction of Asriel. Whether the trap that he springs catches Christian critics is less clear to me, for the two cases of sacrifice are not entirely analogous.

What do readers of Pullman think about this?

Jeffery Hodges

--- On Fri, 3/27/09, Horace Jeffery Hodges <jefferyhodges at yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Horace Jeffery Hodges <jefferyhodges at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Milton-L] RE: Milton and Pullman
To: "John Milton Discussion List" <milton-l at lists.richmond.edu>
Date: Friday, March 27, 2009, 3:53 PM

You're not "alone in finding Pullman both shallow and sinister." Even worse, he can't tell a good story.

In the mid-90s, I was sitting in a cafe in London reading book reviews in some newspaper and came across two reviews, one of Rowling and the other of Pullman. An excerpt from the latter's book aroused my curiosity, but I didn't actually read the series until around 2005, long after I'd read most of the Harry Potter series.

I was greatly disappointed by the story's development in the Pullman's series. I started reading with high expectations, and the quality of his writing is certainly very good, but the story went nowhere. Even the writing seemed to falter in the latter book . . . but perhaps I was just getting bored.

Like Professor Fleming, I was troubled by the "noble sacrifice" -- though there may have been an allusion to Christianity in that -- but whatever Pullman might have intended by that, and by the entire series, I finished reading him with a sense of letdown.

In my opinion, he let his animus toward Christianity distort his story.

Despite Pullman's literary gifts, which are considerable and far better than Rowlings', the latter tells a much better story that kept me interested to the very end.

The 'noble sacrifice' in the Harry Potter series worked rather better, too.

For anyone interested, I blogged on my reaction to Pullman back in 2005, soon after having finished him in disappointment:

http://gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com/2005/10/his-dark-materials.html

Jeffery Hodges

--- On Fri, 3/27/09, James Fleming <jfleming at sfu.ca> wrote:

From: James Fleming <jfleming at sfu.ca>
Subject: Re: [Milton-L] RE: Milton and Pullman
To: "John Milton Discussion List" <milton-l at lists.richmond.edu>
Date: Friday, March 27, 2009, 2:59 PM

Am I alone in finding Pullman both shallow and sinister?

As far as I can tell, _The Golden Compass_ ends with Lord Asriel, the good-scary guy, murdering a child (Roger). This is presented as a noble sacrifice, allowing the great man to open up the heavens in defiance of an authoritarian God.

A little _Brothers Karamazov_ rids us of this deed.

JD Fleming
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