Interview with Philip Pullman (part two)

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TW: Because Jesus gets one, well two mentions in His Dark Materials, from Mary Malone. But, it’s the same conversation; his name comes up twice. I was going to come to this later on, really, but since we’ve got on to it I’ll ask it now. You said once in one of the interviews I read, that as you were working through His Dark Materials, that you had to keep stopping and writing the underlying myth. And I was interested that Jesus, apart from Mary Malone saying she had given her life to Jesus, he is left out altogether. My guess is that in your thinking you’ve got a place for him, and I’d like to know what that is, really.

PP: Well, I can actually supply you with a copy of the myth if you like

TW: Would you? That would be great. Are you still working on the book of Dust?

PP: I haven’t started it yet, but I will do. The place of Jesus in my myth. Let me just look it up – it’s only a few strokes of the keyboard away – because I want to get it right . . . Now, I can sort of summarise this but it would probably be better if you read the whole thing through. I start from the coming into being of the figure I call the Authority, whom I think of as not the creator, but as simply the first conscious being. Matter I see as being potentially conscious. Matter loves matter, that’s the starting of it. Matter loves matter, it delights to join with itself and form organised structures. At some point when the complexity of the organisation becomes sufficient, matter begins to become conscious. And when matter becomes conscious of itself and is able to be self-reflexive, then it generates Dust, you see, and so Dust comes to life. At some point early in time a being arose of Dust, and he was the first thinking creature. He was the one I call the Authority. Because matter loves matter, and loves to form molecules and come together in structures and so on, inevitably other beings of Dust arose in time. He told them that he was the first one, that he had created them, and they believed him – why should they not believe him? And he told them they had to worship him. So they did. But as more time went on and more beings arose, one of them was wiser than him, which the early church and, indeed, the writer of the Old Testament book of Proverbs, knows as wisdom, Sophia. And she said to the being, who was calling himself by this time Lord, King, God, Father, Almighty, ‘Look, it would be better if you told the truth. I know what your game is – you’re not even our creator. Better if you told the truth. Lets have a bit of democracy round here.’ Anyway, as a result of all that, there was a rebellion and she was thrown out of . . . – it’s the revolt of the angels, that story. We have a sort of reversal of the polarities of the morality here, because the good guys are the rebels and the bad guy is the Authority. Time had been going on, and all over the place, in all the universes (which I conceive of as being split asunder in the shock of the battle – it’s not necessary but it’s a nice little picture), because of matter loving matter, the creatures were evolving and developing in all sorts of ways. And the rebel angels at the prompting of the Sophia decided to set about secretly advising these creatures how to gain the knowledge of themselves. To some they showed the tree that would bring them the Dust, to others they taught songs that would sing the Dust down from the stars, to others they gave a special helper called the dæmon with whom they could talk and develop the knowledge of themselves. In every world they found the best and the truest way for the creatures to become what they could truly be, and to rejoice in the Dust which was the true state of the matter that they were made of. Obviously, the Satan story of the Garden of Eden was that happening.

Right, now time went on, and all sorts of repressions were set in train by the authority, more rebellions by the rebels and so on and so forth. Time went on in a continual struggle between the might of the Authority and the subtle promptings of the rebel angels. From time to time, men and women or creatures of other kinds would listen to the rebel angels and to the quiet voice of Sophia, and grew towards wisdom themselves. The great moral leaders of mankind, Jesus included, were people of this kind, inspired by the rebel angels and Sophia, not by the Authority. Whenever such a one came along and upset the Authority’s order, the Authority soon arranged for his churches and priesthoods to punish them and pervert their teachings, and so on and so forth – churches and popes, and the inquisition and the burnings of the heretics, etc. So Jesus in my scheme was a human being prompted by the whisperings of wisdom and the rebel angels to tell people some truths about morality. The great moral teachings of Jesus are unequalled. And the church has never taken a blind bit of notice of them. Apart from the church in Southampton.

TW: [Laughs.] We’ll come back to that one a little bit later. That’s a great story within the context of His Dark Materials. What about your place for Jesus in the real world, if you like. How much of it still works?

PP: It all still works. He was a human being who . . . all his teachings, all his wisdom were human ones. We don’t need to have a divinity; we don’t need to involve God. God’s another epicycle. Except that he said he was the Son of God and so on and so forth.

TW: But why . . .?

PP: Deluded is one answer. C S Lewis has a paragraph about this, which when I first read it when I was a boy convinced me completely. He said Jesus was this man who did all these things, and he claimed to be the son of God. Now there are only three ways of looking at this, only three ways of interpreting it. Either he was a madman and his statements have no more value than that of a man who says he’s a poached egg; or he was the greatest liar in the history of the world, and we have to regard him as being the Devil; or what he said was true. There are only those three ways to interpret it. And that I thought, gosh, that’s right – it must be true; the other things can’t be true. Well actually, that’s a typical piece of CS Lewis bullying rhetoric, because there aren’t only three ways of regarding it, there are many, many other ways of regarding it. Firstly, he could have been speaking in metaphor, not literally. Secondly, it could be an error in translation. Thirdly, it could be his followers putting this into the story afterwards, because he didn’t write this – he was quoted as having said it by somebody who wrote seventy years after he died, etcetera, etcetera. There are all sorts of other ways of regarding it. So my way of looking at Jesus is seeing him as a moral genius who probably deluded himself into thinking that he was divine and was killed for political reasons.

TW: What then do you make of the claims for the resurrection?

PP: Just nonsense.

TW: Why?

PP: Because people either don’t rise from the dead, or they weren’t really dead in the first place. He could have been taken down before he was dead in a state of shock or something, and then revived later on. If that happened we don’t know. I mean, this was a very long time ago and I know from experience of seeing stories about me in the paper when I was only interviewed last week, and I know how wrong they can get it. I mean, for goodness’ sake!

TW: I’m sure, but some of the early church writers – like Paul, for instance, who says ‘There are people around whom you can talk to – they’re still alive – who’ve seen him.’

PP: Well, as I said in the bit of our conversation before we got on to your questions I was in a church with a lot of people – with a thousand people, possibly – who could swear blind that they had heard someone speaking in the tongues of angels.

TW: But clearly they had heard them talking something.

PP: It was gobbledygook! I’m rather sceptical about Paul, because he was a man who clearly had his own rather peculiar agenda. In the first place, he was convinced – wasn’t he? – that the world was going to end within his lifetime.

TW: No, there are some passages where he seems to think that, and passages where he doesn’t. What I’ve read suggests that he was probably saying Jesus is going to return at some point, and it could be our lifetime and therefore we need to be ready, not that he was convinced it was going to be within his lifetime.

PP: And he was also . . . well, being situated as he was at the sort of crossroads of a number of different cultural pathways and inheritances, there is a lot of Platonism.

TW: Or we have read Platonism into it.

PP: Well, isn’t that the same thing? Aren’t we seeing it there because it is there? When Paul says, for example, ‘Now we see through a glass darkly, then face to face,’ isn’t that the same as Plato’s famous image of the shadows in the cave? There is a truer reality elsewhere. Here the reality that we think we see around us is a mere shadow, a mere image in the glass. It isn’t the real thing, but the real thing is elsewhere. That’s pure Platonism. We’re not reading that into Paul; it’s clearly there. As well as that, you have his has his own issues (as we say now) with Judaism, and the sense that he had as a Jew, but a Roman Jew, or a Jew and a Roman citizen, that here was a message that transcended Judaism and was for Gentiles as well, and yet there still had to be circumcision – of the Spirit! But then he’s a crazy mixed up kid, and it’s Paul who’s responsible for much of what we now have as Christian doctrine whether it’s in the Epistle to Romans and its effect on Luther and all the rest of the stuff.

And the other thing about Paul and the reason that he’s so important a figure, is that he was also a literary genius. Whereas as far as we know Jesus wasn’t a literary genius although he was certainly a very great story teller – not necessarily the same thing. Paul was great with written words but I don’t think Jesus wrote anything that we know of . . . But he told stories, and the great thing about the stories and parables that Jesus told is that they are like fairy tales, or the great myths. And it doesn’t matter in what words you put them, the story makes the same effect on us because it operates at a level below literature or above literature, or beyond words anyway.

C S Lewis, who said a lot of very intelligent and sensible and profound things about the way literature works, said something like – I can’t remember where he said it – this is the true test of a myth. If you hear the story of Orpheus and Euridice, for example, it doesn’t matter who tells you the story or what version of the story, the story still makes its viceral impression because of what happens in the story, not because of how it’s told. And that’s the difference between a myth and a work of literature. If you tried to tell Virginia Wolf’s novel Mrs Darroway in other words it would be the flattest, dullest crap you could ever possibly imagine. The important thing is not what happened in it, but the way it’s told. That’s the difference. And Paul was a genius in the Virginia Wolf sense, the way he put words together – the famous passage on love or charity – that had its affect in fixing doctrines in certain ways and making some things expressible and thinkable and rendering other things not expressible and not thinkable.

So when you look at the history of the Christian Church, of course you have to look at Jesus. But you also have to look at Paul and the other writers of the epistles, and the early church fathers and everybody else – most of them acting within, in order to support, or outside, in order to destroy, some sort of human bureaucratic organised structure. Ever since there has been a church, and ever since there have been councils to decide what was OK to believe and what was not OK to believe, and ever since we have had human authority in the form of priests and popes and so on, this has had to be a central factor in what people say about Christian doctrine. Either you’re contradicting what the authorities say, or you’re supporting it or you’re undermining it or you’re clarifying it, or what have you. The more we go on the further we get away from what Jesus said. I don’t think that Jesus had anything at all to say about such matters as the assumption of the Virgin Mary, or the infallibility of the Pope, or whether or not HIV positive men are allowed to wear condoms when they make love to their wives . . .

TW: Absolutely.

PP: . . . but the church does, and this is what I’m agin.

TW: Or parts of the church do.

PP: Well, according to me, the only true church. That’s a great problem, because the Orthodox would say that they’re the only true church, and so would the snake-handling Baptists in Alabama say ‘We are the only true church.’ The problem for someone outside like me is: one of these is probably not telling the truth. Which? How do I know? I only have things to go on like common sense and human experience.

TW: That’s an entirely reasonable criticism, which is why for me, the important thing is to be going back to source documents. This was Luther’s stroke of genius, if you lik,e to say ‘No, our understanding is in our own hands because we have this text the Bible, and this is open and should be open for everybody to interpret themselves.’

PP: Of course and the 95 theses on the door of the church were a great step forward for the human race. Undoubtedly.

TW: So when I’m preaching, I’m going back to Jesus again and again and again to hear what he said. For myself I actually tend to use Jesus and the Old Testament more than I do Paul, simply because Paul gets used quite a lot. Not because I think Paul was a mixed up kid; I actually think Paul was an extraordinarily coherent and unified in his thought, drawing very heavily on Judaism, rather than on Greek thinking. Coming back to the Platonism thing, there are elements where Plato and Paul see things the same way, but I don’t think that’s the same as saying that Paul was a Platonist.

PP: No, but Platonism is such a strong current in the thought at the time that you see it all over – very strongly in Gnosticism, for example.

TW: Absolutely. And Gnosticism and some of those early church fathers you mentioned bought into Platonism very heavily and shaped understanding of Christianity for centuries. Later Thomas Aquinas drew very heavily on Aristotle and a lot of Platonism came in then, and I think some of your criticism of the church down through history – some of which up to a point is valid although in other respects I would want to disagree with you – but some of it comes down to the fact that we’ve brought Platonism in and started looking at Paul with Platonist eyes. So when he talks about seeing through a glass darkly, we say ‘That’s Platonism.’ But maybe actually that does come from something else, and Plato had something right there, and maybe Paul’s actually drawing on a different source as I believe he is. And that’s led to the the supposed separation of body and soul, and I don’t think that that’s biblically true. I don’t think that you’d find that in the biblical texts. You criticise the church often for being anti-physical, anti-sex and so on. And again that’s something that came in with Gnosticism and Plato. I don’t think it goes back to the biblical texts.

PP: Certainly it was something that was bought into wholesale by the church.

TW: Yes, to a large extent. Wholesale may be too strong, but to a large extent at some periods of history, and should never have been – it was heresy, absolute heresy. And there I am answering questions again.

Let’s talk about heaven. What you have said in more than one interview is that the traditional idea of the kingdom of heaven has failed to deliver on certain key characteristics that you highlight. What do you think the key characteristics are, and why do you think it has failed to deliver?

PP: I’m not sure that I think that it’s failed to deliver. What I think has happened is that with the death of the king, what has happened to the kingdom? That is the question. The kingdom of heaven . . . I don’t know if you’ve read a piece of mine called The Republic of Heaven which is a sort of exploration of how and what I conceive of this notion? Because I look at it in terms of . . . well, actually it’s in a children’s literature context, so all my examples are drawn from children’s literature . . .

One of the consequences of the death of God is the absence of heaven. If God is dead, how can we believe in heaven? ‘What I’m referring to,’ – I’m just quoting from it now – ‘is a sense that things are right and good, and we are part of everything that’s right and good. It’s a sense that we are connected to the universe. This connectedness is where meaning lies; the meaning of our lives is their connection with something other than ourselves. The religion that is now dead did give us that, in full measure. We were a part of a huge cosmic drama involving a Creation and a Fall and a Redemption, and Heaven and Hell. What we did mattered because God saw everything, even the fall of a sparrow. And one of the most deadly and oppressive consequences of the death of God is this sense of meaninglessness or alienation that so many of us have felt in the past century or so.’ Myself included. So what I’m looking for is a way of thinking of heaven that restores these senses of rightness and goodness and connectedness and meaning and gives us a place in it. But because there ain’t no elsewhere, that has got to exist in the only place we know about for sure which is this earth, and we’ve got to make our world as good as we possibly can for one another and for our descendants. That’s what I mean by a republic of heaven. And we won’t ever finally get there.

TW: Why do you think it’s impossible, why do you think we will never finally get there?

PP: Because of entropy. There’s always a struggle against that.

TW: It’s a good answer for everything.

PP: The very tendency of matter to form molecules, because matter loves matter, is a struggle against entropy in a way. But we can have a lot of fun in a way before we all finally peter out in the cold and the dark.

TW: What chance do you think there is of us making a real go of it at all? Is it just a question of entropy, or do you think human beings are even up to making a good crack at it?

PP: Well, we’re making a better crack now in the liberal democracies of the West than has ever been made before. We’re making a better crack of it in terms of medical science and advances in caring for people who are sick and in pain than we ever have before; we have made progress in scientific ways. We have made progress in moral understanding too. It is now no longer acceptable for us to torture people to get answers out of them. By and large, most of the liberal democracies of the West have done away with capital punishment. By and large we now understand, for example, that it’s better to have a free press and freedom of speech than not. These are all moral advances. In parts of the world, of course, they haven’t reached it yet and they are fighting a great struggle against the forces of obscurantism in the form of fundamentalist Islam. So the odds against it are formidable, but we’re not powerless.

TW: It’s very powerful, because of the sense of responsibility that’s there.

PP: This is what I find almost most important of all. We are responsible.

TW: The progress thing is interesting though, isn’t it? You’ve commented on technological progress . . .

PP: And moral. And political.

TW: But on the technological thing, that’s very much like the subtle knife. I think the subtle knife is a brilliant invention. I remember reading in one interview you saying what a cheap trick it is using magic just to get characters out of a scrape. But at times the subtle knife is a bit like that. If it gets a bit sticky you can just cut a hole and just jump through into a nice safe world. But it is very powerful because it is so double-edged . . .

PP: There’s always a cost, and there was a cost. And the cost is that you have to use it responsibly, and the temptation is always to use it irresponsibly. You can easily escape, you can just cut a hole and steal something, which is what led to all the trouble they had in the city of Cittàgazze, etcetera. And it’s a metaphor in that sense, of course,  for every single technological advance we’ve ever made.

TW: It’s a very powerful metaphor. But there’s a lot of people around at the moment who would say that the techological progress we have made has been bought at too high a price. We have an environmental crisis. We have the nuclear threat hanging over us still – we forget it but it’s very much there – and all these other things. And the cost in terms of lives – sometimes lives that have been lost, sometime lives that have been blighted, has been too high. How do you respond to that?

PP: It is a very finely balanced thing and a very difficult thing to judge. But fears change and things happen to overcome them. I was just reading in the paper today or yesterday an example of this very thing. Just in the very recent past somebody said that in the year 2000 we would all be living in caves again because all the oil would have run out. Well it didn’t and it hasn’t. And things occur that we hadn’t predicted. Thirty, forty years ago nobody would have predicted the hole in the ozone layer. So we’re always overtaken by things that we don’t expect. But then we sort of begin to struggle to do something about them. And has our relatively pain-free dentistry been bought at the price of . . . well, it has been bought at the price of something. But maybe that was a price worth paying!

TW: Yes, maybe it was.

PP: But of course we’re never in a position to judge that and say, ‘Well, look at all the outcomes and all the consequences,’ because we’re in the middle of it rather than after it. We haven’t got hindsight, we have to say, ‘At this point, to the best of our judgement now, this seems to be working.’ In five hundred years time we could look back and think ‘I wish we hadn’t done that, but we didn’t know, we had to make the best judgment.’ And we have to bring all our knowledge to bear, all our information to bear, all our intelligence to bear, and all our wisdom to bear on these things and . . . well, you would say trust to God or providence or something, I would say keep my fingers crossed or something. I wouldn’t like to explain that to Richard Dawkins because he doesn’t agree with crossing fingers. But there is an element of chance in human life, and consequences which we don’t know ??? But we do have to act responsibly.

TW: This is an aside, but when Iorek is first examining the knife, and he says, ‘This knife has intentions that you don’t know’, did you know what they were at the point or did you just think to yourself ‘There’s something coming here and I need to work it out’?

PP: I sort of had a feeling that there were other things in it that I didn’t know what they were yet. My sense of the knife was rather like the sense one has of the system of natural numbers, namely that there are all sorts of patterns in there that we haven’t discovered yet, and once you set up a number system you’re going to discover that some of them are prime and so on. All sorts of extraordinary patterns emerge. All these things are kind of implicit in the system, and there are other things that are implicit in the idea of the subtle knife, and I don’t know – I’m sure I’ll discover more as I think about it.

TW: I’d love to ask you so much more about the process of storytelling and writing . . .

PP: Well, that’s the only thing on which I have any hope of speaking with authority to you. Most of my discourse this afternoon is pure flim flam.

TW: Going back to the progress thing again, yes, I think you’re right to say that we have made real progress in all kinds of respects. In other kinds of respects it doesn’t feel like we do make any progress – western democracies within the last few years are being torn apart by more internal tensions and lies and nationalism again and these kinds of things. And I begin to wonder, we’ve made fantastic progress down in South Africa, we’ve seen the end of apartheid, fantastic – I’m inclined to say ‘Praise God’ but that might not be appropriate in this context – and at the same time the Balkans are blowing up or whatever, and I wonder whether human being really are actually getting any better or if we’re just the same as we always were?

PP: In the first place we don’t know what we always were, what we know about is the about the last 3000 years because that’s the earliest recorded history. But 3000 years is the blink of an eye when it comes to evolution. As far as we can tell, human beings have the same sized brains and the same sorts of capacities 30,000 years ago as we do now. So we don’t know what we were like then, we have no written records of it, so to say that we’re getting worse is to [base it on] the tiniest little slither of time.

Secondly, against the ‘we’re all getting worse’ argument is the odd psychological fact that everything seems to be getting worse all the time. Food doesn’t taste as good as it did when my granny cooked it. Even in one of the earliest documents we have, The Iliad, the old king Nestor is reproving his fellow kings while they are fighting the Trojans: ‘I fought beside your fathers – they were ten times the men you are! You’re all nancy boys these days!’ So even back then there was a sense of this odd psychological constituent, of the way we’re made up, we tend to see things as not as good as they used to be. So I think we have to take account of that, in any sense that humans beings are not getting any better. Perhaps they’re not, but I don’t think we’re getting any worse.

And thirdly, the thing I haven’t mentioned, there’s the thing of affect of what you could call culture – transmitted habits and behaviour and association and the development of laws and so on. I’m just reading Stephen Pinker’s book [The Blank Slate] on human nature at the moment.

TW: Oh, what do you think about that?

PP: I haven’t got very far with it, but he’s sort of defending the view that there is a human nature . . .

TW: Yes, he’s put himself out on a bit of a limb in some ways.

PP: Well, I expect I shall find that, I haven’t got very far into it yet. But, he’s against, isn’t he, the view that there is no such thing as human nature, that human beings are incredibly plastic, and it’s all the effect of nurture. Against which he’s saying, ‘Yes there is a human nature; it’s come about through evolution and it’s like this, and it’s like that and so on.’ Obviously the truth is that they’re both right. Human nature might supply the armature, but the play on top of the armature is formed by society, by habits and customs, and stories, indeed, that are passed down from generation to generation and help to form us to a degree. So both things are important, and so my third point then is don’t ignore the effects of culture.

TW: You said in one of your interviews that we need to work at creating the Republic of Heaven as free equal citizens. I’m interested by this notion of equality. On what level are we actually equal? What does it mean to talk about equality? Because it’s a big concept in our society at the moment, and it’s a formal complex idea that many people have thought about, and I’m sure you’ve thought about it a bit more than most.

PP: Well, in one sense of course we’re not equal. We’re all different in ability, in potential, in physical gifts and so on. So we’re not equal. But that’s not the equality we’re talking about. The equality that we’re talking about, or at least when we talk in political parties, is something different. Here I like to think of John Rawls and his book The Theory of Justice with these two brilliant notions of, firstly the original position. If we could go back to the start before there was any society – lets imagine a society which started from scratch – and linked with this the idea of the veil of ignorance. What we have to do is to set up a society, but not to know in advance what place we are going to hold in that society. How can we set about in order to be satisfied with the outcome when we find ourselves where we are? Naturally, if that was the case and you really didn’t know where you were going to end up, you wouldn’t set up a society which was a religious tyranny – or any other sort of tyranny –where a handful of people reigned over a mass of Helots and slaves. So Rawls’ great notions of the original position and the veil of ignorance are a great help here I think.

TW: So when you say ‘equal citizens’ it’s very much a political equality that you’re talking about.

PP: Yes, its an equality of, for want of a better word, rights. And, of course, responsibilities. But remember, this [the republic of heaven] is a metaphor. I insist that it’s metaphor and I don’t want anyone to take it literally. I’ve had people asking me, ‘Well, who’s going to be the President?’ To which my answer is ‘Well, that’s like saying “What colour is the carpet on the stairs of the presidential palace?”’ It’s a meaningless question. This is a metaphor; this is a way of behaving to one another.

TW: It’s a very powerful metaphor, and it’s one that at some levels, because of what you’ve just outlined about responsibility and so on, it’s something that I’d go along with. On another level, it’s where that comes from – that the king is dead, or there never was a king, and therefore we need something to create the same feeling as the kingdom of heaven. And that’s where I have a difficulty, because I wonder whether that’s really what the Bible’s talking about in the idea of the kingdom of heaven.

PP: I don’t know. I think the Bible talks about the kingdom of God rather than the kingdom of heaven.

TW: Yes, that’s right. What’s your understanding of that?

PP: Um . . . I’m not sure that I have a coherent understanding of it, but what I take from it, again, is metaphorical. The metaphor of kingdom and kingship, and the notion of ‘the king is dead’; ‘God is dead’. I like that way of putting it because it does express a sense that there was something which we felt was alive, but is no more and we are bereft because of it, and we have to find a way of dealing with a world where God is dead. Nietzsche – it was Nietzsche who first put it like that, wasn’t it? –

TW: Yes. I was going to ask you, are you a Nietzschean?

PP: Given that you’ve called Hitler a Nietzschean, I don’t really think so! I don’t think Nietzsche would think Hitler was a Nietzschean! No, I’m not a Nietzschean, I’m not an anythingean. The phrase ‘God is dead’ seems to me to encapsulate a much more truthful way of looking at it than to think there never was a God. There was a time when we all believed in God – very important, a central part of all our lives. Then it became impossibile to believe in it. It’s as if God has died. That’s the feeling I have. What are the consequences of this? Well, the consequences of this is that instead of seeing ourselves as creatures, children, or whatever, we’ve . . . Well, the parents are dead; we’re in charge. We have to look after the place.

TW: Can we talk about this business of growing up, because you’ve said that that’s what His Dark Materials is essentially all about. I’ve also seen you saying that its also essentially about truth rather than fantasy with Lyra’s . . ..

PP: Well, you could say that she’s learning to distinguish between truth and fantasy . . . learning to see the value in truth rather than just spinning lies is an important part of growing up. You must always be very sceptical about what any writer says about their own work. My interpretation of His Dark Materials is no more valid or privileged than anybody else’s. The only authority I have is that of someone who knows the text fairly well. That’s all. I’m not entitled to say what it means or how you should read this bit or what that bit signifies. If it will sustain an interpretation, then that interpretation is sustainable.

TW: Sounds a bit postmodern . . .

PP: Well, up to a point, but I stop well short of saying that the text wrote itself, and I don’t exist and so on. I know full well I wrote the bloody thing. It was hard work! No, its not postmodern, or if it is postmodern then postmodernism in that sense coincides with common sense. I’m just agin [against] the idea that there is an authoritative interpretation – I would be like the Pope instead of Luther! I’m in the position of Luther saying, ‘Here it is, read it. Make your own interpretation.’

TW: Your intention – or what you’re thinking as you’re writing – is not always what goes into the text is it?

PP: No, and I was discovering a lot of what I thought while I was writing it. So I started to write it without knowing – not without knowing what the outcome would be, but without knowing what the underlying plot meant. I discovered that on the way through, with a sense that this was the right way to go and that was the wrong to go, and the story wanted to do this and not to do that, and so I followed the story.

TW: But when you write it, you’re interpreting it to yourself – and more besides – as you write. Does that interpretation find itself working its way into the text? Is there not a sense in which that is authoritative?

PP: No, I’m not sure that interpretation is what’s happening. What you’re trying to do when you tell a story is . . . Well, in essence you can describe it very simply. The main thing with a story consists of thinking about some interesting events, putting them in the best order to bring out the connection between them and then recounting them as clearly as you can. Once you start interpreting it on the way through, and telling people how to read it and what it means, you’re doing something other than telling the story, and I don’t want to do that. Firstly, because I’m not really interested in doing that. Secondly, because its awfully boring to read books that are like that. One of my favourite lines which I’ve quoted many, many times is from Isaac Bashevis Singer: ‘Events themselves are far more wise than any commentary ever made.’ Once you start saying, ‘This is the way to read this story,’ and, ‘No, that’s the wrong way to understand that, what I meant was this instead,’ and, ‘This the way you should read it,’ . . . I don’t want to get into that kind of thing. I’ve done my best to tell a clear story as clearly as I could, and people may read whatever they like into it. I think the story allows some readings and discourages others. I think the story helps you understand it in some ways and, while not actually forbidding other readings, perhaps doesn’t make them as easy. But I wouldn’t want to tell people how to read it.

TW: I’ve heard some people say that that kind of reply is perhaps a little bit disingenuous when there’s a character like Mary Malone, say, who makes these very strong statements which then may coincide with the kind of statements that you make in real life about your own position. And the correlation between Mary Malone’s views and your views makes that sense of . . . Here’s Mary Malone interpreting her circumstances, if you like, and you are saying what she says.

PP: Wouldn’t it be slightly odd if I did have a position and yet I provided no mouthpiece for that within the book?

TW: Yes.

PP: Wouldn’t it be odd if I wrote a book in which all the characters who are articulate were articulate against me rather than for me?

TW: Yes, absolutely.

PP: But that’s not at all the same thing as saying that I agree with everything that Mary Malone said. It was important for me to have a character like her who could see certain things at certain moments. Who could see, for example, that although she had felt after she ceased to become a Christian that although the world was very interesting and intricate and beautiful, there was no meaning in it, no purpose in it. It’s very important for her at some stage in the book to say, ‘Well, I thought that there was no meaning but there is now! The meaning is that I’ve got to make it explicit. I’ve got to discover what it is and make it explicit. That’s the meaning, that’s the purpose! The world is full of purpose!’ Its important for me to have a character who discovers that, and that’s a discovery I’ve made so it would be surprising if there was no character who expressed that.

TW: I found Mary Malone an intriguing character in some ways. I loved her in many ways, but there was also a sense in which I was a little bit disappointed by her because you flagged up that she was the tempter but then it didn’t feel like much of a temptation when it came to it. I thought, ‘Well, what’s wrong with this?’ She’s telling her story and Will and Lyra realise that perhaps they love each other, but wouldn’t they have realised that anyway?

PP: No.

TW: Why not?

PP: I do think that there’s a profound psychological truth in that episode of Dante in which he’s talking about the two lovers, Paulo and Francesca, who happened to fall in love because they were reading together the story of lovers, and this put the idea into their heads and they committed adultery so they ended up in hell and that’s why Dante talked about it. Somebody asked the question –  I forget who it was – ‘would anybody ever fall in love if they never read a love story?’ and I think that there’s a lot of truth in that. It’s an aspect of the general stress on telling stories which comes all the way through [His Dark Materials], and perhaps most importantly in the world of the dead sequence. We have to tell stories in order to tell the true story of our life. And Mary is telling a true story. She’s telling a story which educates, which tells Will and Lyra something they didn’t know before. After [Lyra has] heard the story . . . [Pullman reads from The Amber Spyglass]:

As Mary said that, Lyra felt something strange happen to her body . . . She felt as if she’d been handed the key to a great house she hadn’t known was there, a house that was somehow inside her, and as she turned the key, deep in the darkness of the building she felt other doors opening too, and lights coming on. She sat trembling … As for Lyra, she hadn’t moved a muscle since that strange thing had happened, and she held a memory of the sensations inside her . . . She didn’t know what it was, or what it meant, or where it had come from: so she sat still, hugging her knees, and tryied to stop herself from trembling with excitement. Soon she thought, soon I’ll know.’

Well, what’s happening there is just that – her body, her whole self, her nerves, her memory, her imagination are all stirred, are all quickened in exactly the same way that Eve felt with all her senses scrambling when she picked the apple that the serpent had told her would give her the knowledge of good and evil. That’s what’s happening at that moment, and of course it’s temptation, it’s the beginning of wisdom! When the angels, through the computer, talked to Mary the tempter using terms she would understand, they talked about Augustine and the natures of matter and spirit and so on – these are terms she will understand. She knows she has a very full and important part to play. But she doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know what. What she is doing, what the serpent in doing in Genesis, and what my Sophia and all the others are doing are bring enlightenment, bringing wisdom, helping us to go to the next [level]. They’re being fairy godmothers in the Cinderella sense.

The Fairy Godmother is a very interesting figure. The Cinderella story is more widely known throughout the world than any other story – there are four hundred, at least, different versions of the Cinderella story. Every culture in the world has a Cinderella story, and in all of them there is an equivalent to the Fairy Godmother. In some it’s the rose tree that grows on the mother’s grave, in others the doves that come down, and various other things. But always, it’s a surrogate for the parent. And the function of the Fairy Godmother in the Cinderella story is to help the girl who’s on the brink of adulthood to take the next step and become a mature grown-up, ready for sexual experience civilised by marriage, and maturity and so on. So you could say that the Cinderella story is a variant on the Adam and Eve story, and the Fairy Godmother plays the part of the serpent: ‘This is what you must do in order to go to the next stage – eat this fruit.’ Now the reason that the falling in love business is linked with the coming of wisdom, is that this is what happens to us – at the age of adolescence, when our bodies begin to change, when we have strange new, exciting, troubling, passionate feelings towards towards other people, towards members of the other sex usually, that’s also the age at which we become passionate intellectually too. We develop a passionate interest in mathematics or chess or art or science or biology or whatever it might happen to be. It’s all part of this great opening up, this great coming to maturity. That’s all I’m saying.

TW: It feels that you’re stretching it to compare that with what is going on back in Eden.

PP: Yes, because you’re looking at it from the other point of view.

TW: Yes, exactly. The Christian understanding of what Satan says is that he’s saying you’re going to be like God in what you know, knowing good and evil. In fact, they’ve already known good – they’ve known good all their lives up to that point and nothing but good. And they’ve known almost absolute freedom, just with this one restriction and by embracing that one restriction and going for that, they’re actually not finding wisdom, but they’re embracing rebellion, they’re embracing evil. They’re . . .

PP: I might say you’re stretching the truth to call it evil. I think they’re taking the first steps on the long, painful, difficult road towards wisdom. They’re leaving innocence behind and setting out towards wisdom. These are the two ends of the spectrum of human experience. Blake called them innocence and experience. I call them innocence and wisdom. Experience is what you need to get through in order to get to wisdom.

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