Philip Pullman
1946-
Life
Pullman’s father was
in the Royal Air Force, so the family moved quite a bit in his early childhood,
mostly in southern Africa. After his father died when Philip was
7, his mother remarried to another pilot and the travels continued (Australia
now) until he was about 11. This was when a lot more travel was done
by boat, and he credits the long boat trips with stimulating his imagination
and giving him a sense of how large the world is. Finally, they settled
in a small village in North Wales for much of his adolescence.
He spent a good part of
his youth living with his grandfather, an Anglican rector. He was
pretty well steeped in traditional religion, but says that as an adult
he has lost faith in the Church:
I no longer believe in the God I used to believe in when I was a boy. But I do know the background very well, and I will never escape it. So although I call myself an atheist, I'm certainly a Christian atheist and even more particularly, a Church of England--what would you say, Episcopalian?--atheist. (Odean)He attended Oxford University, studying English, and still lives in Oxford. He worked as a librarian, then taught middle school until 1986. He would tell his classes stories – in particular, the stories of Greek mythology, the Iliad and the Odyssey – which, through repetition, he came to know quite well, and which he credits for developing his knowledge of storytelling.
The Golden Compass
Daemons:
Pullman explained the daemons’ gender in an interview with School Library
Journal: “If I had a spirit companion, if you'd like to call it [that],
I would like to think that it was the opposite sex because there's a completeness
about the relationship between [the] two sexes in that way.”
Just exactly what the daemons
are is hard to state. They appear at the least to be an external
manifestation of the psyche (soul) of the individual – note how the particular
animal each adult’s daemon settles into reflects that person’s character.
Servants’ daemons are often dogs, the ferocious warrior Tartars have wolves,
and some sailors have dolphins. The brilliant and aggressive Lord Asriel
has a regal snow leopard as his, and the clever and manipulative Mrs. Coulter
has a golden monkey.
For children, whose personalities
are as yet unformed, the daemons shift as the occasion seems to warrant.
Only at puberty does the form of the daemon become permanent.
Daemons are integral to
the individual’s sense of self. They cannot wander far from the human
to whom they are attached, and it causes pain in both parties if the separation
becomes too great. When a human dies, his or her daemon also dissolves;
and in the rare case of a daemon being directly attacked and killed, the
human also dies at the same moment.
Because in most cases daemons
are opposite in gender to their humans, it is tempting to see them as expressions
of the Jungian concept of the anima. I.e., each personality
is formed from certain dominant archetypes, which together form in males
the animus (in females, anima), the major traits that form the individual’s
character. Opposing the dominant archetypes are complementary types
– like the balancing of opposites in the yin-yang – which constitute the
anima (for males; “animus” for females). Since “anima” is an ancient
word for the soul, the concept of a balance between these two aspects suggest
that one must have both to have a complete person – hence the great trauma
involved in severing daemons from their humans, thus creating a “divided
soul.”
The shifting character of the daemons, and their stabilization at puberty,
make them essential to the development of some of the author’s themes:
it ties the soul intimately to the universal forces that are either feared
or embraced by Lord Asriel and the church, and expresses a central observation
about human nature:
Pullman brilliantly exploits the strange appropriateness of his invention. He has found a potent way to embody the human dilemma adolescents feel particularly strongly: We fear being alone, but dread still more the disapproving gaze of others. The daemons in Lyra's world always comfort, never burden. (Jacobs)Dust: “Dust is the embodiment of either Original Sin or the creative energy of humankind, which may be the same thing in Pullman's world.” (Jacobs) “Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.” (Pullman, The Subtle Knife)
Lyra’s journey: Lyra’s story is in some ways an inversion of they typical adolescent mindset. While many young adults tend to think of themselves as the center of the universe, when in fact they play no greater or lesser role in life than anyone else, Lyra is in fact the most important figure in her world – as the masters of Jordan College, the witches, and others know, Lyra has a central role to play in the great events taking shape around her, but she can only play that role if she remains ignorant of it. So she embarks on various journeys in pursuit of her own purposes (curiosity about the North, an attempt to rescue first Roger and then her father, Lord Asriel), seemingly on the periphery of events. But coincidence then places her, repeatedly and inevitably, exactly where she needs to be – captured at the Experimental Station and thus able to operate as an inside agent in its destruction; innocent deliverer of Roger to her father’s intercission blade.
SOURCES: Alan Jacobs, “The Devil’s Party,” Weekly Standard
Magazine, October 23, 2000 (Online); Kate Kelloway, “A Wizard with
Words,” The Guardian, October 22, 2000 (Books Unlimited Online);
Kathlean Odean, “The Story Master,” School Library Journal, October
1, 2000 (SLJ Online)
A. Waller
Hastings
Professor
of English
Northern
State University
Aberdeen,
SD 57401
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Page last updated May 3, 2002