It's Professor Marino here, with my
helpful daemon, Ezra -- Say hello, Ezra. Say
hello! Be cute! -- to talk a little bit about
Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. Oh
daemon, don't knock over the camera. So
he's very helpful. and named after an
academic. He's named Ezra Stiles after a
former president of Yale. I wanna, I want
to put Pullman's The Golden Compass in
dialogue with one of his great
forerunners, CS Lewis, because this novel,
and the whole trilogy it comes from, is
very much in dialogue with CS Lewis -- and is
in fact conducting an argument with Lewis.
CS Lewis, famous twentieth-century
popular theologian -- I think the Christian
term is he's an apologist (He doesn't
have a degree in theology; he's an
English professor ) --- and fantasy and
science fiction writer, who is an
evangelist for a certain kind of
traditionalist Christianity and
specifically a a traditional Church of
England, English theology version of
Christianity. He is also -- and this is not
a coincidence -- CS Lewis was also a
Milton scholar and this work,  His Dark
Materials, as you see from the quotation
beginning the trilogy, takes its title
from Milton's Paradise Lost a work with
which Lewis was very concerned, and often
published, and even rewrote part of in a
science fiction novel called Perelandra.
This is not CS Lewis's Oxford. It
is a kind of dream of Oxford it is set
in an Oxford that seems to be
between the world wars, in terms of
technology and culture. The religion in
the Golden Compass, the version of the
church is in a way CS Lewis's dream Church
whether there's actually not a split
between Catholicism and Protestantism and
where the great Calvinist thinker Jean Calvin  -- John Calvin -- became Pope and
abolished the papacy and created
something like the establishment church,
like the establishment church that
maybe Lewis would want in his ideal
world. On the other hand Pullman is not
interested in backing an orthodox,
traditionalist, organized Christianity
identified with the Anglican Church. Far
from it. He dislikes but more importantly
distrusts Lewis's, Lewis's patriarchal,
professorial, traditionalist approach to
morality and religion. In many ways this
book is, and the trilogy is, very much a
counterpoint, an anti-C-S-Lewis. Lewis's
most famous work of fiction is of course the Narnia series, in which children
from England, living in a traditional
kind of between the wars England find
their way to a magical enchanted land
called Narnia where they get to be
monarchs, and where animals talk to them,
and in which they play out pretty clear
Christian allegories with a lion who's a
very clear Jesus figure. If you read the
Narnia books and you didn't see it as a
Christian allegory, I'm sorry to ruin it,
but that lion is a very clear Jesus
figure. One of the things that this does
is create, in Lewis, a very clear and
stark division between good and evil. The
good guys and bad guys are not hard to
tell apart for very long. You might be
occasionally fooled but evil's gonna out
pretty much. Mrs. Coulter in a way is a,
kind of modern update on the evil witch,
witch queen in The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe. And if you doubt that The Lion,
the Witch, and the Wardrobe is in play it
is in play
in the first and last chapter of this
book. This book begins with our child
heroine
hiding in a wardrobe, in a very
traditionalist English place, an
imaginary Oxford College that has been
written into, that Pullman has written
into the genuine Oxford. Hiding in a
wardrobe is where Lewis's fantasy series
starts. But the thing here, this wardrobe
doesn't have a back. It's not a passage
to another kind of world. It is a passage,
you are stuck in this world, and you
have to deal with it. The end of the book,
the end of this book does do what the
beginning of The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe does. It takes our child across
a boundary into a different world. It is
what is called in the trade, if we're
going to get very specific about kind of
micro genres, the term for this is "portal
fantasy," where there's a portal by which
human beings, especially children, often
find their way into magical lands,
usually kingdoms. But this is reversed.
First it is, it is the adult
characters who create that portal. The
creation of the portal is at least
somewhat sinister, is a, arguably a
mistake, and it takes, actually --
spoilers -- it takes Lyra not to a world
that's more magical than her world but one that
actually resembles ours more. If you're
trying to cheat on the reading by
watching the HBO series, it conflates the
first two books of the series together.
So if you think Will is in this book,
Will is not in this book. What can I tell you?
In CS Lewis the good guys and bad guys
are very clearly demarcated. There is not
a lot of moral ambiguity. In a way Lewis
is on a cru-- ..., Lewis uses the tools of
science fiction and fantasy to remove
moral ambiguity, to imagine worlds where
morality, moral choices, are simpler and
clearer
than they are in the phenomenal world in
which we live.
Pullman clearly is not interested in
setting his fiction in a world where
morality and moral choices are simpler
and clearer. He is interested in a world
that is as fully morally complex as ours,
where -- as in the world where we live --
people are neither good nor wholly good
nor bad but a real mix. Now you may feel
Mrs. Coulter is very close to
fundamentally wicked and evil. 
(Fundamental wickedness: a John Calvin
reference. Brit Lit I students, you're
welcome.)
But what about Lord Asriel? Look
at that first chapter. In our first
chapter the master of Jordan College
sets out unsuccessfully to poison Lord
Asriel. This seems to be a clear bad guy
versus good guy thing. I mean it's pretty
stark. It's an easy commandment: thou
shalt not kill.
The guy who's doing the poisoning has to
be the bad guy. And Pullman will not tell
you that poisoning someone is a good
thing to do. But the Master of Jordan
College turns out not to be a villain.
The Master of Jordan College turns out
to be, turns out to be attempting to
protect our heroine Lyra,
who in turn protects her "uncle" Lord
Asriel. Is Asriel a good guy or bad guy?
Yes.
Asriel is a good guy and a bad guy. He is
certainly...  It's also the case that like
the fact that where in some simpler
fantasy the good guys and bad guys are
easily aligned on clear teams -- all the
good guys over here versus all the bad
guys over here -- the adults in this world,
the morally complicated adults, are
sometimes at odds with each other but
that doesn't mean the one ... Being Mrs.
Coulter's enemy doesn't actually make
you -- (who is evil) doesn't make you good. It
makes you ...
something. It makes you opposed to Ars.
Coulter. Most of the time Lord Asriel is
willing to do, in fact planning to do,
exactly the same vicious, immoral thing,
mutilating a child's soul, that Mrs. Coulter
does. Mrs. Coulter is evil because she
doesn't want moral complexity. The issue
with dust is, the adults in this novel
are obsessed with the idea that children
becoming adults become morally
complicated and hence sinful peopl,e and
they're looking for ways to get rid of
that moral ambiguity, to prevent the move
to a sinful, imperfect but experienced
and wiser experience of life. Mrs.
Coulter wants what CS Lewis wants. Ars.
Coulter wants to prevent moral
complexity and adulthood,  to keep people
pure and childish, but what she actually --
childLIKE, but what she actually does is
make everything evil. This is not CS
Lewis's Oxford.
