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Originally Posted by Lalwendë
It's all far too contradictory.
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Or contrived?
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Originally Posted by Pullman 2000
Embarrassment is often a sign that something important is happening: some revelation is taking place. The revelation is often signalled with red, the most alarming of colours: we blush. Darwin was fascinated by that: "Blushing," he said, "is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions." He believed that it has a social function, that it signals to other people that the individual who blushes is not to be trusted, because he or she has violated the mores of the group, or has even committed some crime.
And of course embarrassment was the very first consequence of the Fall in the third chapter of Genesis: "she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons."
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Such social Darwinism! I wonder if Pullman, who seems to favour science, has checked out any current medical or psychological research in personality theory.
And, frankly, I thought it was shame (a strong sense of ignomy, dishonour, unworthiness, disgrace) that drove Adam and Eve to clothe themselves, not simply embarassment or self-concsciousness/ill at easeness.
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Originally Posted by Pullman 2002
Where literature is concerned, if you can make yourself look at things as calmly as you can, you eventually realise that phrases such as "he said" are actually a very good way of indicating who said what, and that the past tense is the natural storytelling tense, and that the business of writing narrative consists of thinking of some interesting events, putting them in the most effective order, and relating them as clearly as you can; and that the best place for the narrator is outside the story, telling it, and not inside the story drawing attention to his own self-consciousness.
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Suuure. And so when he first describes an abduction of a child in HDM (Tony Makarios'), what is he doing when he resorts to the present tense? Or is he attempting to make that present tense conditional or subjunctive with the opener, "It would happen like this"?
It's quite amazing. The more I read Pullman's non-fiction prose, the less I like his fiction prose. And this is the opposite of my reading of Tolkien's non-fiction prose. Fascinating.