‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[HerenIstarion]

I have strong suspicion people are just having a time-out, getting their breaths back for another nine page dive

Thanks for the link, read first, comment later

*heads off in the direction of Touchstone...

edit:

Thank you again, there was a good read on it. Should we stress on:

And does so effectively. I know a number of teenagers, contemporaries of my oldest daughter, who have no religious background at all, and yet who are completely caught up in the mythos of Middle-earth. Through this mythos, symbolically embedded in the story, young people are unconsciously absorbing any number of spiritual nutrients which may serve them well in later life. They will have learned to see the world in a certain way, as it is seen by Christianity.

?

[davem]

Originally Posted by HerenIstarion

Should we stress on:

...They will have learned to see the world in a certain way, as it is seen by Christianity.

?

Clearly Tolkien's wish & intention. And I suppose Caldecott is correct also in her analysis of Pullman's intentions, & of his desired intentions. What strikes me most strongly is the way Pullman, even in a 'fantasy' story, cannot let go of his athiesm. He's basically undermining fairy story, by deliberately denying any possibility of eucatastrophe. He eventually cuts this world off from magic, & from any possibility of 'liberation'. So, he strands us, here, in this one world, this one life. And all we have to look forward to is cessation.

Tolkien seems to be offering the exact opposite.

So, can we class both writer's works as 'fantasy' - HDM is not 'fantasy' in the sense in which Tolkien uses the term, because Eucatastrophe is completely absent. Indeed, Pullman seems to have created a story in which eucatastrophe is impossible. He seems almost to see enchantment & eucatastrophe as part of the 'childish' innocence which has to be outgrown & left behind. Yet the world he offers to the 'wise' adult is simply bleak & ultimately hopeless. Pullman seems incapable of accepting the possibility of enchantment even in a story. His 'fantasy' worlds have to be as bleak as the 'real' world, as far as he is concerned.

Tolkien's secondary world, as well as his vision of this world, are equally 'enchanted'. So, a fanfic set in Middle Earth, if it is to be 'canonical' must contain & express that hope, & eucatastrophic possibility, while a 'Pullmanic' fanfic must be free of all enchantment, & even of the possibility of it.

To bring this back to the subject of this thread, I think we have to say that 'enchantment' & 'eucatastrophe' are central to Tolkien's canon, & have to be seen as present in everything he wrote, rather than as things which can be ignored, or seen as peripheral. Its really in a comparison with Pullman's work that we can see this clearly. The total absence of enchantment & eucatastrophe in Pullman's world(s) shows their presence in sharp relief in Tolkien's world. It also shows them as being at the emotional core of Tolkien's creative work.

I think it also explains why HDM left me cold. Tolkien is attempting to get us to see the world in a certain way, from a certain perspective - a'Christian' one, as Caldecott will have it, & that seems to go to the core of his purpose - as if that was the 'canonical tradition' that he was working within, & attempting to conform his writings to. Pullman is working within a different canonical tradition - equally biased - though no doubt he would claim more objectively 'true'.


Both writer's visionsare quite 'dark', but what seems to anger Pullman as regards Tolkien's vision, is that Tolkien holds out the possibility of Light breaking through.

I don't know if I've strayed away from the subject of this thread here, but I think maybe its easier to explore the relationship of reader to book if we compare different writers work.

[Bêthberry]

This is an interesting approach here,davem, to develop the discussion by comparison with other fantasy writers. However, I think the comparison with Pullman, as represented by the Touchstone article, is perhaps not the only way for a Christian to interpret the Dark Materials trilogy.

I am copying something which Rimbaud sent to some of us, a review of the stage production in London, England of Pullman's trilogy. I think Rimbaud got this from the Guardian but I am not sure. It is written by the current Archbishop of Cantebury, the spiritual head of the Anglican Church and strikes me as being far more astute or perceptive about literature and faith than the Touchstone article, but this is simply my opinion.

'A near-miraculous triumph'

Archbishop Rowan Williams reveals how it felt to see religion savaged and God killed in His Dark Materials

Wednesday March 10, 2004

In the interval of the second part of His Dark Materials, I found myself surrounded by a lively school party from Essex wanting to know what I thought of it so far. Was I shocked? No. But wasn't it about killing God? Yes - but which God is it who gets killed? Is this what a believer would recognise as the real God? This set some animated discussion going: some of the group had noticed the scattered hints that "the Authority" in Philip Pullman's story had arrogated power to himself, or that he was not the actual creator.

And that is the kind of discussion that I think the drama ought to provoke. Nicholas Wright's version of Pullman's story in fact brings into sharper focus some of these issues. It is clear very early on that there is a plan to overthrow the Authority and that the Church is aware of this and determined to prevent it. What takes Pullman a long stretch of very subtle development to uncover is here foregrounded almost at once. But what kind of a church is it that lives in perpetual and murderous anxiety about the fate of its God?

What the story makes you see is that if you believe in a mortal God, who can win and lose his power, your religion will be saturated with anxiety - and so with violence. In a sense, you could say that a mortal God needs to be killed, from the point of view of faith (as the Buddhists say: "If you meet the Buddha, kill him"). And if you see religious societies in which anxiety and violence predominate, you could do worse than ask what God it is that they believe in. The chances are that they secretly or unconsciously believe in a God who is just another inhabitant of the universe, only more powerful than anyone else. And if he is another inhabitant of the universe, then at the end of the day he just might be subject to change and chance like everything else. He needs protecting: churches are there to keep him safe.

I read the books and the plays as a sort of thought experiment: this is, after all, an alternative world, or set of worlds. What would the Church look like, what would it inevitably be, if it believed only in a God who could be rendered powerless and killed, and needed unceasing protection? It would be a desperate, repressive tyranny. For Pullman, the Church evidently looks like this most of the time; it isn't surprising that the only God in view is the Authority.

Like some of the Gnostic writers of the second century, Pullman turns the story upside down - the rebels are the heroes. Unlike them, though, this is all done to reaffirm the glory of the flesh, the actuality of here and now. The Harpies guarding the land of the dead find peace and nourishment only in stories of the actual, the everyday, in the wonder of the utterly ordinary. The scene where Lyra pacifies these monsters (far more frightening in the book than the play, because the book can show how they activate the inner devils of self-doubt or self-loathing) by talking of children's games in Oxford is intensely moving.

The dramatised version also highlights and simplifies the most ambitious metaphor in the books: Dust. Dust is precisely the glory and vitality of the ordinary; if you try to live in more than one world, Dust drains away, from the individual and from the world as a whole. So the knife that cuts doors between the worlds has to be broken. The whole story is about the triumph of Dust, of the glory of the everyday. Dust is threatened from one side by the Authority and the Church, who fear the everyday and its contingency, who fear even more the risk of error and tragedy that are part of the everyday, part of adult experience. They want to prevent real decision-making, with its potential for loss and betrayal. But Dust is also threatened by those who want to obliterate the consequences of once-and-for-all decisions, and once-and-for-all death, by making possible an endless retreat into alternative worlds. Dust is somewhere between repression and empty or uncommitted liberty, a danger to both - between premodern absolutism and the postmodern aversion to history and personal psychology.

Pullman is very much a celebrant of a kind of modernity, in that sense. What he does for the religious reader/spectator is to prompt the question of how this sort of modernity (a word that theologians these days often don't like) may converge with some accounts of what a settled religious life entails: acceptance (not passivity); the monitoring of fantasy for the sake of adult responsibility; but also the sense of hidden glory pervading the environment, the beauty that is open to Christian theoria and Buddhist mindfulness. The life-sustaining energy of being itself becomes invisible, even blocked off and ineffectual, if there is always an escape from the unwelcome here and now, an escape that the human will can manipulate. If anything, Wright's drama, by pushing the characters of Asriel and Mrs Coulter just a bit more towards conventional romanticism, weakens Pullman's unsparing portraits of the moral ambivalence of these liberators. Timothy Dalton and Patricia Hodge turn in what the director calls "high-definition" performances, which I felt made them less interesting, less mysterious.

Repressors and would-be liberators are equally merciless to the individual; that is why Lyra's life is at risk from both sides. As Lyra, Anna Maxwell Martin manages flawlessly the shifting perspective of a child "on the cusp" of adolescence, and the fusion of profound strength with emotional openness that is Pullman's greatest achievement in creating this unforgettable character. Dominic Cooper as Will lacks the stolid, taciturn integrity of Will in the books, but their relationship works on stage.

Overall, the stage version is a near-miraculous triumph. It may well end up with Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream or Nicholas Nickleby as one of those theatrical experiences that justifies the whole enterprise of live theatre in our day. Of course, there are failures. The angels were disappointingly unmysterious, left only with a rather querulous dignity, which didn't allow much room for the seriousness of their mutual love. The death of the Authority lost all its pathos; Pullman manages the remarkable feat of making it both a matter of chance and a moment of disturbing poignancy, all the more poignant for not being fully grasped by the children at first. On stage it was flat to the point of being almost comical. But so much was so well-imagined, not least the realisation of the daemons and the evocation of different universes.

I said earlier that it rather underlined some of the themes in Pullman that should prevent us just concluding that this is an anti-Christian polemic. Pullman's views are clear; but he is a good enough writer to leave some spaces. This is a church without creation or redemption, certainly without Christ; it was interesting that on stage the ritual gesture of the clergy was not the sign of the cross but a sort of indeterminate marking of the brow, as if to acknowledge that this is not simply the historical Church. Pullman's most overt attempt to connect the Church of Lyra's world with ours is in the character of Mary Malone, the ex-nun, whose adventures form one of the main strands (beautifully imagined) in the third volume. Wright removes her entirely - understandably in terms of narrative economies, sadly in terms of the human depth and warmth of the story, and provocatively in allowing that bit more distance between the historical Church and the alternative.

But this should not be read as a way of wriggling out of Pullman's challenges to institutional religion. I end where I started. If the Authority is not God, why has the historic Church so often behaved as if it did indeed exist to protect a mortal and finite God? What would a church life look like that actually expressed the reality of a divine freedom enabling human freedom?

A modern French Christian writer spoke about "purification by atheism" - meaning faith needed to be reminded regularly of the gods in which it should not believe. I think Pullman and Wright do this very effectively for the believer. I hope too that for the non-believing spectator, the question may somehow be raised of what exactly the God is in whom they don't believe.

[Child of the 7th Age]

While a high school student from Arkansas is a long way from the Archbishop of Canterbury, this brief article also suggests what Bethberry was saying: that a person may account themselves a Christian yet view Pullman in a different light than that put forward in Touchstone. This young Christian woman feels that a reading of HDM "allowed her to grow as a person and closer to God." This student feels that reading Pullman has made her better able to understand the complexities of life, and less likely to automatically condemn someone whose faith is diferent than her own. On this, click here.

My personal views on HDM are a bit more complicated than that. I find some parts of the series challenging, even questionable, and others spell-binding and positive. I will never feel the easy affinity I do when reading Tolkien. Yet I hesitate to say Pullman's work presents a totally "bleak" world that lacks any enchantment. This is not at all the feeling I had when I closed the pages on the final volume. I will try to organize my thoughts later as I am running out the door, but for now will offer several links for anyone who's interested.

For the upcoming movie and the enormous difficulties in transferring Pullman's themes to film given the very real religious sensibilities that exist, see this.

For a general fansite, and an article discussing the relation of Pullman's works to myth in general and the Creation story in particular, check here.

[Bêthberry]

Thank-you, Child, for posting that other Christian witness to Pullman's trilogy. I was indeed hoping to suggest that many interpretations and experiences are possible and, of course, all equally valid for the reader.

I am also heartened by your statement that you do feel Pullman's world does incorporate enchantment. Indeed, I was very uneasy with davem's initial statement that Pullman's books cannot be fantasy as Tolkien defines it because they are atheistic. That, to my mind, defines literary genres by ideology, something which leads inherently I think to a grave limitation of what can legitimately be called literature.

What strikes me most strongly is the way Pullman, even in a 'fantasy' story, cannot let go of his athiesm. He's basically undermining fairy story, by deliberately denying any possibility of eucatastrophe. He eventually cuts this world off from magic, & from any possibility of 'liberation'. So, he strands us, here, in this one world, this one life. And all we have to look forward to is cessation.

Tolkien seems to be offering the exact opposite.

So, can we class both writer's works as 'fantasy' - HDM is not 'fantasy' in the sense in which Tolkien uses the term, because Eucatastrophe is completely absent. Indeed, Pullman seems to have created a story in which eucatastrophe is impossible.

I think we need to be very careful using words such as eucatastrophe and magic. For instance, Tolkien gives very specific and special meaning to his use of 'magic', suggesting that it is not a slight of hand or optical illusion which defies the physical properties of ths earth but rather a particular kind of artistic unity or vision where intention and completion are united. It is art. "the magic, or rather art," Tolkien says in OFs.

In this sense, Pullman's His Dark Materials are full of artistic wonder and breathtaking feats of writing for me. His concept of dæmon pulls at my heart and mind every time I read the books, particularly in the uniqueness of each person's dæmon and in the special relationship with an animal which is at its heart--something Tolkien also discusses in OFS. The gyptians and their boats and the marshlands of the lower Thames and Lyra's escape are quintessentially elements of fantasy for me, as is the description of her childhood at Jordan. The bears? The confederacy of the witches? The Angels? Mary Malone? Mary's life speaks so poignantly to me of hope and the great possibilities of love which human beings are capable of. And I could go on naming so many other elements of His Dark Materials which strike me as high points of articistic creation, the very spell of which Tolkien speaks.

However, I suspect that for you Tolkien's definition of magic and eucatastrophe are inescapably religious. That you view them in this manner is, of course, your right as a reader. ( Nor are these two facets of fantasy the sole elements which Tolkien discusses.) However, I would like to focus on eucatastrophe alone for now and respectfully point out that Tolkien's definition is not primarily religious. Here I will go back to my earlier post and explain it more lucidly I hope.

Tolkien introduces the word "eucatastrophe" in the section entitled "Recovery, Escape, Consolation." (He says that eucatastrophe is the highest function of fantasy, but not the sole one. ) And he also defines it as the unexpected consolation of the Happy Ending. He uses the words Joy and Evangelium but the main focus of his argument lies in examining the effect of this unexpected turn of events.

It is only in the Epilogue that Tolkien brings in what for him was "the greatest and most complete conceivable eucastrophe," the story of Christ. He does not define the Christian witness or truth as the function of fantasy. He argues it the other way around. He establishes first his definition and understanding of how fantasy satisfies human desires, and in particular this unexpected consolation, and then he offers what for him is the most complete form of the artistic effect. I would venture to say that Tolkien remained a Christian, a Catholic, because for him its very heart reflected the fundamental truth of art for him.
A letter which Tolkien never sent seems to me to confirm this idea that for him fantasy was an artistic or literary effect primarily (and that it could be used for ill or good).

I refer to the draft of Letter 153, to Peter Hastings. Hastings, a Catholic, had apparently written to Tolkien to question metaphysical matters in LotR. Tolkien several times observes that Hastings takes Tolkien too seriously , and, indeed, Carpenter provides a note which explains why Tolkien never sent the draft: "It seemed to be taking myself too seriously." I offer two passages from the letter to suggest Tolkien's desire that his writing be viewed as art.

I am taking myself even more seriously than you did, and making a great song and oration about a good tale, which admittedly owes its similitude to mere craft.

and

The tale is after all in the ultimate analysis a tale, a piece of literature, intended to have a literary effect, and not realy history.

It is here, I would suggest, that we can find explanation why people of so many different persuasions and faiths can find such great enjoyment in Tolkien. A truth of art, which for him his faith also mirrored, but an aesthetic experience first and foremost.

I write in haste and am called away. My apologies for the many infelicities of expression.

[davem]

Of course Pullman 'enchants' - the whole of the story is enchanting, magical, open to possibilies uncounted. Right till the end, & then Pullman snatches it all away, closes the doors to the other worlds forever, & even seperates the two lovers forever. Its an incredibly cruel ending - not just for Lyra & Will but for us all, especially for child readers, because it denies the possibility of Magic breaking in ever again - unless something goes 'wrong'. If things go 'right', all the worlds will remain seperate forever. The Magic & wonder you feel when reading the book is taken from you at the end. Because for Pullman that 'magic' & enchantment are 'childish', & things which must be grown out of. They are 'childish things' which must be put aside.

My discomfort with Pullman is not what he gives us throughout the story, but with the fact that having given it to us, let it become meaningful & uplifting, he then snatches it away, & when we grieve for it, he tells us, 'Well, sorry, but that's only for children, & you have to grow up now & leave it all behind'. What message do the two writers offer us - Tolkien tells us that the magic, the possibility of enchantment, is always there - 'Still round the corner there may wait, a new road or a secret gate', & that like Smith, we too may find our way into Faerie. Pullman tells us not to be so silly & grow up.

Essentially, Pullman is like Nokes - the Fairy Queen is pretty, & all very nice for children, but no sensible grown-up will believe in her, or take the idea of Faerie seriously - and any children who insist on holding on to that belief must be shown how dangerously unrealistic it is, & be persuaded to give it all up, & come & live in the real world with the grown-ups who know better.

I heard Pullman on a radio interview back when The Amber Spyglass came out. He said that he was using fantasy to undermine fantasy, & wished he could write 'serious' fiction.

I don't doubt that: ''this young Christian woman feels that a reading of HDM "allowed her to grow as a person and closer to God." but is that what Pullman wants? - the growing closer to God part, I mean? Nothing in the book makes me feel that. The message running throughout the story seems to be that authority is simply wrong- especially supernatural authority, & must be broken free of. He seems to be the same as the scientists who separate the children from their daemons. He wants ultimatley to remove the possibility of real magic from his child readers, where Tolkien wants to give it to them & to all of us.

Pullman seems to see all magic, enchantment, & faith as dangerous & corrupting, as something we must be 'saved' from. We must be awakened from the mad 'dreme' & grow up into sensible adults. The young woman Child mentions, is, it seems to me, a classic example od what this thread is about - she's finding something in Pullman's work that he didn't put there, something in fact which is the opposite of his intention.

[Bêthberry]

I have time now for only the briefest of replies. I would myself be very interested in reading that inverview with Pullman, davem. And as for the girl's reading of Pullman, I would not hesitate to accept her reading experience, as I have said here about readings of Tolkien. We can listen to statements of an author's intention but when all is said and done a book, like a child, must make sense and meaning without parental control. As, in fact, your gloss on Pullman reflects your feeling that he betrays fantasy. That is an interpretation, your interpretation, but it is not the only interpretation.

I would, however, ask you to consider some other aspects of fantasy which Tolkien discusses because I think it is an aspect that Pullman draws upon in the trilogy. Tolkien says that faerier never really ends, the story goes on. Look at the last line of LOTR, Sam returning to the everyday world of The Shire, "Well, I'm back." The Amber Spyglass ends with Lyra telling her daemon they must build "The Reublic of Heaven." This is not a denial of fantasy, but a suggestion that the responsibility for continuing the vision it offers us lies with us, a challenge to see this world newly under what we have learnt from faerie. Pullman's trilogy goes on as much as Tolkien's does.

As for your statement of alleged cruelty thatf the lovers are separated, I think not. I would point to Eowyn's first love for Aragorn and Tolkien's recognition that not all first loves are like the mythic love of Aragorn and Arwen. In this "shipwreck of life"--to use Tolkien's phrase--there are many different kinds of love and not all need lead to domesticity and plighting of eternal troth. There is narrative wholeness and profound respect for the characters, for fantasy and for human existence. It is, for me, hopeful.

Writers are a bothersome lot oftentimes. Give them a genre or form and they will immediately begin to see ways to expand upon it, redefine it, to extend it, to reimagine it. That's what Tolkien did with the old northern narratives, to give them form and meaning for the Seventh Age. And that is what Pullman is doing. Faerie, the perilous realm, is endless. Some of us take strength from it, are invigorated by it, and, like Sam and Rosie, use that strength to rebuild this world. Others, like Frodo, find it leads elsewhere. No path is necessarily better or worse and no one path suffices for us all.

I must bid you all adieu. I will be away from this thread for some days now.