The Good liberal and the scoundrel Author: Fantasy, Dissent, and neoliberal subjecivity in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Fantasy, Dissent, and Neoliberal Subjectivity in His Dark Materials CHANGE Stephen Maddison Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, has acquired an impressive criical reputaion and acquired a favored role in Briish culture as a social commentator. This essay atempts to link the pleasures associated with the trilogy with the poliics inscribed in them, and consider both in the context of Pullman’s role in the civil society. The essay suggests that The Northern Lights ofers pleasures in fantasical and metaphysical possibiliies, and social confederacies that potenially ofset the afecive privaions of neoliberalism. These possibiliies are set in the context of recent theories of the “enterprise society.” The essay draws atenion to a number of disconinuiies that unfold as the trilogy progresses, and suggests that these undermine the possibiliies inherent in the irst novel. These disconinuiies throw the role of fantasy and alternaive universes into quesion, and reveal the limitaions of Pullman’s icion. The essay considers the limit and scope of Pullman’s poliical vision, both as a funcion of his icion and his public engagement with social issues, and suggests that he exempliies Raymond Williams’s concept of “bourgeois dissent” in which poliical criique and a coninuing investment in tradiional insituions and class hierarchy can be mutually reinforcing. In September 2012 Philip Pullman published a new book, a re-telling of his ifty favorite stories by the Grimm Brothers. News of the publication caused much excitement amongst book critics and academics alike: Alison Flood writes “Pullman, with his blend of myth and legend, his willingness to see the world in shades of grey, strikes me as the perfect author to be marking the 200th anniversary of the Grimm tales irst publication,” while Bill Gray, professor of English literary history at the University of Chichester, enthuses “This is really exciting. Philip Pullman is the right man; he tackles this stuff supremely well” (quoted in Clark “Philip Pullman to Publish New Adaptations of Grimm’s Fairy Tales”). Reporting the impending publication, The Independent reprinted a quote from Pullman’s website: “I’m not in the message business; I’m in the ‘Once upon a time’ business” (Clark “Philip Pullman to Publish New Adaptations of Grimm’s Fairy Tales”). On the moment of the publication of this new collection, it seems timely to relect on Pullman’s position in culture, in order to question the nature of his Extrapolaion, vol. 55, no. 2 (2014) Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 199 doi:10.3828/extr.2014.12 30/04/2014 12:12:40 200 Stephen Maddison critical reputation, and highlight some of the contradictory ideas about genre, the imagination, and ideology upon which it rests. Pullman protests that he is “not in the message business,” yet maintains a powerful public presence speaking out on issues of education and liberty. His supporters and fans laud his supreme facility with fantasy, and his reputation rests upon the popularity of the His Dark Materials trilogy, supposedly the greatest work in the genre since Tolkien. Yet Pullman is dismissive of fantasy as a genre, and of respected authors who have established its presence, like C. S. Lewis and Tolkien himself. In commenting on his interest in retelling the fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers, Pullman suggests that his “interest has always been in how the tales worked as stories,” where the story “is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration” and storytelling “is an art of performance,” which for Pullman is superstitiously animated by the “sprite” that gives his story a voice (“Listening to the Sprite”; emphasis in the original). Three key elements about Pullman seem striking here: his public engagement with civil society; his disavowal of fantasy whilst writing within its terms; and his value for the transparent neutrality of the author, symbolized by his “sprite”—a state which may never be achieved, but which nevertheless authenticates and reiies the story as artifact. This essay will explore the political implications of Pullman’s stature, and attempt to map the relationship between the author’s social activism and his iction, drawing attention to the contradictions and pleasures therein. How can we understand the social world of Pullman’s iction, and the agency of Lyra, the orphan girl who makes the republic of heaven on earth? I will be proposing an account of His Dark Materials that suggests that the affection with which it is held derives not from its refusal of fantasy, nor from its dislocation from the speciic cultural moment, but instead from the unevenly executed political dissidence of its author, a political engagement that critiques the privations of the enterprise society, but which demonstrates the limitations of bourgeois dissent. Philip Pullman has achieved a remarkable position in Anglo-American culture, and in British society. Whilst his economic success pales beside that of J. K. Rowling, like her, he is a children’s author who has achieved substantial crossover appeal to an adult audience. Recently, he was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize, which recognizes a writer’s “overall contribution to iction on the world stage” (“Fiction at its Finest”). Unlike Rowling, he maintains a powerfully inluential presence with regard to a range of cultural and political debates about secularism, childhood, commercialism, and freedom of speech. Sally Vincent, writing in the Guardian, Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 200 30/04/2014 12:12:40 Fantasy, Dissent, and Neoliberal Subjecivity in His Dark Materials 201 suggests that Pullman soars “into the metaphorical […] but there’s none of that lazy nonsense about magical spells, potions and wands.” Pullman’s thoughts on modern culture continue to be both solicited and circulated with little reservation or caveat (Rabinovitz “His Bright Materials”). And whilst the reception of Pullman’s work is by no means consistently uncritical, his work is feted by an impressive spectrum of academic and cultural commentators from Margaret and Mike Rustin and Nick Tucker to Christopher Hitchens (Rustin and Rustin “Where is Home?”; Rustin and Rustin “A New Kind of Friendship”; Rustin and Rustin “Learning to Say Goodbye”; Tucker, Darkness Visible; Hitchens “Oxford’s Rebel Angel”). It is for his seemingly contradictory position on the question of organized religion that Pullman attracts most criticism: Andrew Stuttaford is frustrated by the quest-like nature of the narrative of His Dark Materials, and points out the extent to which the author relies on Christian motifs and themes, despite his avowed atheism; this is an argument developed by Elisabeth Gruner, who suggests that Pullman invests in the very myths he seeks to undermine. This may explain the seemingly paradoxical view of former Archbishop Rowan Williams, who has suggested that Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy should be taught in all schools. Notwithstanding the tolerability of Pullman’s ambiguous and over-determined preoccupation with religious themes to those with or without faith convictions, unsympathetic perspectives on the author are hardly culturally prevalent: The Times has named Pullman one of the ifty greatest post-war writers, and he is recipient of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Book of the Year, and numerous other literary prizes. In 2010 he was a prominent signatory to a letter published in the Guardian protesting against Pope Benedict’s state visit, whilst in early 2009 he gave a high-proile speech at the Convention on Modern Liberty that was published in The Times (“We Are Better People”; Pullman 2010) [AQ1]. In 2006 he was one of the signatories of a letter to the Telegraph that linked rising levels of childhood depression with poor diet, stressful educational demands, and “sedentary, screen-based entertainment” (“Press Letter on Toxic Childhood”). Typical of the terms in which the author and his work have been understood is one Guardian critic’s suggestion that Pullman’s writing “keeps you grounded in an immutable moral and intellectual integrity” (Vincent “Driven by Daemons”). There are a number of interesting issues at play in this proposition about Pullman’s integrity. Firstly, the author’s public persona and conscious intervention into civil society (“I’m not going to argue about this: I’m right. Children need art and music and literature […] human rights legislation alone Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 201 30/04/2014 12:12:40 202 Stephen Maddison should ensure that they get them”) becomes synonymous with the literary works themselves: in some sense the power of the novels is straightforwardly animated by Pullman’s political preoccupations (Pullman “Theatre—the True Key Stage”). To accept this slippage is both to naturalize the cultural capital articulated through the circuit of publishing, broadsheet literary criticism, public relations and marketing, and the taste preoccupations of the chattering classes, as well as to obfuscate the critical innovations of cultural materialism, which suggest that “the social order cannot but produce faultlines through which its own criteria of plausibility fall into contest and disarray” and that “the task for a political criticism, then, is to observe how stories negotiate the faultlines that distress the prevailing conditions of plausibility […] No story can contain all the possibilities it brings into play; coherence is always selection” (Sinield, Faultlines 45–47 [AQ2]). Even if Pullman’s moral integrity is unassailable, we cannot overlook either the value of such a proposition to his status as a producer of commodities, nor the inevitable faultlines that will emerge in his output, not because of his limitations as a writer, but because he necessarily strives for narrative and ideological plausibility in uneven and contradictory conditions. Of course, I am precisely questioning Pullman’s moral integrity, not because he is especially worthy of opprobrium, but because of what can sometimes appear to be a consensus of sycophancy in the media hype surrounding him, and often in academic criticism too, which points to larger, urgent questions that movements like cultural materialism have been preoccupied with posing. Literary culture may have been regarded as effeminate (Sinield, Literature, Politics and Culture 60–84), but otherwise it does not necessarily occupy a dissenting or subordinate position in the culture; rather, it exerts considerable symbolic power, and commands institutional prestige (despite its relatively modest economic signiicance). As Sinield and others have pointed out, the task of professional literary criticism (including cultural commentary in the quality press) is about “getting the text to make sense,” that is, to help resolve the unevenness and contradictions it will necessarily manifest, in order to apprehend its ideological project (Faultlines 50). This apprehension, and the interpretative work that produces it, is about making a claim for the authority of a particular worldview. In claiming Pullman’s unassailable moral integrity, Vincent is producing it, producing his status in public culture, and in the process authenticating her own worldview and that of her social and cultural constituency. Secondly, there is the question of reading pleasure and its connection to “moral and intellectual integrity” and to questions of genre: what claims are Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 202 30/04/2014 12:12:40 Fantasy, Dissent, and Neoliberal Subjecivity in His Dark Materials 203 being made here about Pullman for the kinds of social and cultural worlds Pullman offers in his iction? Pullman has suggested that “The Lord of the Rings is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don’t like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with” (Edelstein “The Art of Darkness”). What answers does His Dark Materials come up with, and what questions is the author answering? Is there a connection between the political interventions made by Pullman and the construction of alternative universes in his novels? Pullman himself describes literature as a “school of morals” whilst seeking to distance his work from genre iction, and fantasy in particular: “I’m trying to do something different: tell a story about what it means to grow up and become an adult […] I’m telling a story about a realistic subject, but I’m using the mechanism of fantasy. I think that’s slightly unusual” (Weich “Philip Pullman Reaches the Garden”). How can contemporary iction help us shape visions of social change or improvement, how can it “school” our morals, and how can genre enable or inhibit such a project? Pullman claims to have established a new generic space, in which “fantasy” becomes more or less a cover story, a fantasy overlaying, but not ultimately overtaking, a iction of what it “really” means to grow up. There is no hint from Pullman, however, that stories about “realistic subjects” are also generic, or that realism itself is a literary convention that “presents its practice as a neutral, innocent and natural one, erasing its own artiice and construction of the ‘real’” (Jackson, Fantasy 83). Thirdly, the question of Pullman’s immutable “moral and intellectual integrity” suggests a consistent and coherent project for His Dark Materials. Notwithstanding the insights of cultural materialism, a key starting point of my consideration of the trilogy is a disturbing recognition of the fundamental discontinuities across the three novels. Anecdotally, this is played out in accounts of reading pleasure. Most fans of Pullman’s trilogy, including published critics, focus attention on the irst book; Harriet Lane is exemplary of this trend: “Pullman’s trilogy, following a scrap of a girl called Lyra as she makes an epic journey through a succession of worlds lit by naphtha, traversed by zeppelins and sledges, and animated by daemons, gypsies and witches, was one of the greatest reading treats I’ve had in adulthood” (“Pullman’s Progress”). The troubling domestication and feminization of Lyra in the second novel, The Subtle Knife, and her subjugation in the inal novel, The Amber Spyglass, to the very authorities against which she dissents in Northern Lights, are rather less foregrounded in much of the critical canon on Pullman, and from readers’ affective response to the Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 203 30/04/2014 12:12:40 204 Stephen Maddison memory of His Dark Materials. As is any account of the extent to which the trilogy loses its sense of wonder and excitement, its investment in fantastical concepts and challenges, as it progresses, seeking instead to resolve them in increasingly banal ways. On the eve of the release of Peter Jackson’s ilm The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, Jenny Turner offered a reconsideration of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy in the London Review of Books. Her essay treads a witty and erudite path between the poles of uncritical adoration, traditional litcrit condescension, and adolescent psychosocial obsession that she identiies as having characterized discussion of Tolkien’s trilogy. She suggests that her aim is not to defend or attack, but to “describe how the strange power of [Tolkien’s] book casts a spell over readers, as children, as pubescents, as adolescents, as adults” (“Reasons for Liking Tolkien”). To this end, Turner poses a recurring question: what do we learn on reading these books? Her question implicitly acknowledges that in his iction Tolkien “created a machine for the evocation of scholarly frisson,” where “the thrills are the thrills of knowledge hidden, knowledge uncovered, knowledge that slips away.” The nature of this knowledge may be “ictional” the “lore […] self-referential,” but its effect in “locking-on […] the hungry imagination,” a locking-on that makes it “possible for readers to live their whole lives through Tolkien’s universe,” is profound. Turner suggests that, alongside Tolkien and Lewis’s Narnia books, Pullman’s “magniicent” trilogy is one of the “three great works of modern English fantasy” (“Reasons for Liking Tolkien”). Taking Turner’s question as a starting point would therefore seem like a useful way of entering the world of His Dark Materials, and questioning the pleasures and pains therein. Here we ind not only a work that, like Tolkien’s, offers a ictive universe in which readers can live their lives, but which evokes a scholarly frisson. This frisson derives in part from the signiication of Oxford (ours and that of Lyra’s world), and from the place of inquiry and academic knowledge in the narrative. This essay aims to instate a materialist analysis of the production of knowledge in His Dark Materials, by considering the political rationality informing the ictive events and the universes in which they take place. I want to consider the importance of this rationality for reading pleasure, and for the cultural plausibility of the idea that Pullman as a public igure is morally unassailable. My starting point is Pullman’s: I will offer a detailed reading of the irst scene of the trilogy, working to set the knowledge gained from it in the context of His Dark Materials. Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 204 30/04/2014 12:12:40 Fantasy, Dissent, and Neoliberal Subjecivity in His Dark Materials 205 “A universe just like ours, but diferent” At the beginning, famously unexplained, we learn that Lyra, a mischievous girl intent on eavesdropping on the conversation of the scholars of Jordan College, has a daemon called Pantalaimon. The irst scene of Northern Lights, which largely takes place in the opulent and atmospheric retiring room of Jordan College, is spread across two chapters. This world is partially familiar and partly fantastical. It is a world of scholars and servants, all men, and of ritual and luxury, where learning and enquiry are matters of national and political signiicance. In this irst scene, Lyra becomes trapped in the retiring room by her antics, and inadvertently witnesses an attempt on the life of her uncle, Lord Asriel (who we later learn is her father) by the Master of the College. Having foiled the murder attempt, Lyra is solicited by Asriel to spy on his meeting with the Master and the other scholars, a meeting in which we (and Lyra) learn much about the political, scientiic, and philosophical matters that shape the universe of His Dark Materials and which will organize the trilogy’s narrative. A number of profound ideas are introduced, but unexplained: “severed” and “intact” children; “Dust,” a mysterious particle that falls from the sky and which affects adults and children differently; trepanning; and the northern lights, which, when photographed in a particular way, reveal the image of an alternate world that exists alongside that of Lyra, Asriel, and the scholars (Northern Lights 22–24). Some of what we learn seems to relate to “real” knowledge familiar in our world (for instance, the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics), and some offers disturbing, intriguing pointers to the ictive world Pullman entreats us to enter, our curiosity aroused by the “scholarly frisson” of Jordan’s retiring room. Pullman includes a note at the beginning of the book that tells us that “the irst volume is set in a universe just like ours, but different in many ways.” We learn from this irst scene that the world of Northern Lights contains a city called Oxford with a university as steeped in tradition and cultural and political power as our own, and that the society of the book is post-industrial: the retiring room is lit by naphtha lamps, but electric, or “anbaric” light is used elsewhere (Northern Lights 10). Later we learn that the world of Northern Lights is pre-postmodern, even pre-capitalist, and that whilst there is social stratiication, there is no commodity culture or attendant structure of commodity fetishism. In Northern Lights money is liminal: at no point in her quest to rescue her friend Roger from the Gobblers is Lyra’s mission compromised by her lack of access to, or even her need for, money. Yet, Asriel has come to meet the scholars in the irst scene “to Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 205 30/04/2014 12:12:40 206 Stephen Maddison ask for funds” for his expedition to the North and his research into what is referred to as the “Barnard-Stokes business” (Northern Lights 20, 24, 31), and Pullman tells us that “Jordan College was the grandest and richest of all the colleges in Oxford” (Northern Lights 34). Despite the failure of money to limit Lyra’s mission, there is clearly some sort of economy in the universe of Jordan College, which is, after all, the richest college. Where does this money come from? The economy of this novel seems to map onto Pullman’s liberal intellectual values: money is simply a property of cultural capital: Jordan is prestigious and elite, and therefore rich. In short, Lyra’s world offers the civilizing comforts of bourgeois liberalism: elite institutions, scholarship, luxury, a rigid class structure, opportunity for personal expression and advancement; but it critically lacks the politico-economic rationality that in our world has come to deine the entire ield of social relations in the form of what Foucault has described as the enterprise society (Foucault 147; Venn 211). This is a proposition I will return to shortly. “Behave yourself” In this irst scene we also learn a lot about the character of Lyra. We learn that she’s not a scholar or a maidservant, and that she has lived in the college most of her life, formally looked after by the scholars, but more emotionally connected to the servants. In this we learn that she’s a character derived from classic nineteenth-century realism: she is an Oliver Twist igure, apparently orphaned, displaced from her rightful inheritance and place in the social hierarchy, but, in the end, rightfully restored to her position and privilege in a way that fails to effect a wider fragmentation of the hierarchy (Moretti Signs Taken for Wonders). We learn that Lyra is excited by danger, and by transgressing rules (unlike her daemon): hiding behind the chair in the retiring room “she was pleasurably excited” (Northern Lights 6). We learn that she isn’t frightened of punishment: “could put up with that” (Northern Lights 6). We learn that she is driven both by curiosity about the world (which leads her to the retiring room in the irst place) and moral courage. The latter requires that Lyra stay in the retiring room after she has witnessed the Master poison the Tokay: “How can I just go and sit in the Library or somewhere and twiddle my thumbs, knowing what’s going to happen? I don’t intend to do that, I promise you” (Northern Lights 9). Both drives invoke risk, but it is her impetuous need to prevent Asriel’s murder that reveals that she has been snooping, and exposes her to the anger of her uncle, who hurts her as he grabs Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 206 30/04/2014 12:12:40 Fantasy, Dissent, and Neoliberal Subjecivity in His Dark Materials 207 her: “it might have been enough to make her cry, if she was the sort of girl who cried” (Northern Lights 15). We learn, gradually, that Lyra is a child, but that this is less important than the other things we learn about her. Our irst clear indication comes when Pantalaimon chides her: “hiding and spying is for silly children” (Northern Lights 9). Lyra ignores him, and this irst indication of her age installs an ambiguity: hiding and spying may be for silly children, but Lyra isn’t silly and if she doesn’t hide then we as readers won’t ind out what’s going on, and we are by no means being treated like silly children by the narrative. Our identiication with Lyra, with her curiosity, and her ierce, headstrong sense of agency, troubles the notion of childhood passivity and obedience. Her reward for saving Asriel is license to spy further, and access to the knowledge he shares with the scholars. In the process, Asriel makes Lyra an ally. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in the irst scene of the trilogy we learn that Lyra and the other characters have daemons. The igure of the daemon is uncanny in that it is familiar—seemingly a part of oneself, inside thoughts and feelings—and yet external, material. We learn that Lyra’s daemon can change form but that the daemons of adults not only don’t change but are related to social status and character: we learn that the Butler’s daemon is “a dog, like almost all servants’s daemons” (Northern Lights 5), but that the Steward is “a superior servant” whose daemon is therefore “a superior dog” (Northern Lights 7). The notion of a daemon appears bound to a number of important concepts that shape the universe of His Dark Materials, most notably the mystery of Dust. Daemons have distinct physical form, and interact independently with the material world, but share sensory perception and affect with their human counterpart (“the fox-daemon tore at […] Pantalaimon, and Lyra felt the pain in her own lesh” Northern Lights 103), and at death they become incorporeal: “what had happened to the dead men’s daemons? They were fading […] drifting away like atoms of smoke, for all that they tried to cling to their men” (Northern Lights 105). For Asriel, Dust is original sin, and he plans to travel to the other worlds to destroy its source and triumph over death. Later, we learn that Dust is consciousness: it is what makes the alethiometer work, and what gives Lyra her supernatural powers to read it. The relationship between Dust and daemons appears to hinge on the question of puberty, at which point daemons “settle” in one form, and Dust no longer interacts with them in the same way. This connection invokes the idea of sexual repression, in rather conservative terms. But narratively it also intensiies the mystery of Dust and of daemons: both are potentially linked to the nature of existence, the organization of the universe, and the multiple worlds within it. Thus daemons embody the potential not only to Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 207 30/04/2014 12:12:40 208 Stephen Maddison invoke the uncanny but to represent a wider and more radical transformation of our sense of a self, deriving from quantum mechanics and metaphysics: in their connection to Dust, a mysterious and yet fundamental particle, daemons animate the possibility of fantastical expansions of our idea of what it means to be human. Yet this radical potentiality is foreclosed by Pullman in a number of ways that offset and contradict daemons’ uncanny and metaphysical possibilities. Firstly, as we have seen, daemons are mundanely connected to predictable social stratiications, and to a conservative morality of sexuality and the boundary between childhood and adulthood. Most daemons are cross-sexed, with only a very few humans having daemons of their own sex (“Bernie was a kindly, solitary man, one of those rare people whose daemon was the same sex as himself,” Northern Lights 125) which reinforces the naturalness of the hetero-patriarchal cross-sex grid: when Mrs. Coulter bathes Lyra, her treatment of Pantalaimon makes him look away from Lyra’s naked body and feel shame for the irst time (Northern Lights 78). Despite their connection to consciousness and private thoughts, daemons do not manifest polymorphous repressed and unconscious desires; rather, Pan acts as Lyra’s super-ego: his irst words to her in Northern Lights are admonishing: “you’re not taking this seriously” and “behave yourself” (Northern Lights 3), whilst later, when Lyra insists they have to stay hiding in the wardrobe to “prevent a murder” (Northern Lights 8), Pan tells her that “I think it would be the silliest thing you’ve ever done in a lifetime of silly things to interfere” (Northern Lights 9). We learn, at the very end of Northern Lights, that severing a child from its daemon releases great power, and it is this power that Asriel exploits in order to build a bridge to the alternative universe he identiies in the aurora. But the nature of this power seems narratively unclear, and is grounded as much in the horror of child murder as it is in the metaphysics of daemons, and certainly this supernatural power isn’t developed as an idea elsewhere. Furthermore, daemons are physically manifested by animals, and almost exclusively by mammals and birds (only occasionally insects, as in the irst scene when Pan takes the form of a brown moth). The form of these animals is usually a metaphor for adult character traits: thus, Mrs. Coulter’s golden monkey daemon is physically striking, but cruel, quick, and devious. Daemons never take the form of mythological, dream-like, or marvelous entities, nor do they ever act to trick, deceive, or confuse their own human. They are, on the contrary, unwaveringly loyal, dependable, and loving. As such we could see the daemon as part invisible friend, and part luffy pet: they manifest potential for the marvelous that is stunted by Pullman’s resistance of fantasy. Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 208 30/04/2014 12:12:40 Fantasy, Dissent, and Neoliberal Subjecivity in His Dark Materials 209 As the narrative of Northern Lights progresses, Lyra learns that intercision, the severing of human from daemon, makes people docile and obedient, and she understands this as a great and unnatural horror. But the affective force of her horror is less a function of ontological consternation, or political terror, and more connected to a sentimental identiication with the idea of what it might mean to be truly alone. Coming across the pathetic igure of little Tony Makarios, severed from his daemon Ratter, and clutching a piece of dried ish in its stead, Lyra swallowed hard to govern her nausea […] she had to go out of the shed and sit down by herself in the snow, except that of course she wasn’t by herself, she was never by herself, because Pantalaimon was always there […] The worst thing in the world! She found herself sobbing, and Pantalaimon was whimpering too, and in both of them there was a passionate pity and sorrow for the half-boy. (Northern Lights 214–15) Whilst Pullman’s realization of daemon metaphysics may conservatively foreclose some of the radical potential inherent in his uneven conceptualization of them, his narrativization of the plot to sever children from their daemons willfully exploits the fault line potential of the adult/child distinction. Northern Lights is a story about child abduction and torture which offers a seductive, charismatic, and engaging characterization of one of the most abhorred and demonized subject positions in our culture. Mrs. Coulter, a Myra Hindley igure, seduces and abducts children en masse, having set up an organization for the purpose of exercising her sadistic drive to “sever” children, and as the Bolvangar scientists note, she takes a morbid interest in the cruelty of the process of intercision. This organization, the General Oblation Board (Gobblers), undertakes covert but systematic abduction and traficking of children as an industrial process that evokes Nazi death camps and the attendant crisis of Modernity. Lyra’s empathy with Tony Makarios not only expresses the horror of being truly alone, but gives extraordinary visceral power to her moral purpose in undertaking her journey to the North to defeat Coulter and the Gobblers. “You’re never alone with a daemon” What are the implications of the knowledge we gain from this irst scene of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy? Kristine Moruzi has suggested that the lack of a conventional family helps Lyra (and later, Will) become more Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 209 30/04/2014 12:12:40 210 Stephen Maddison independent (“Missed Opportunities” 58). This may be true, but is too simplistic. In Northern Lights Lyra’s lack of conventional family constitutes her as both more social and more Other than she might otherwise have been. One of the great pleasures of Northern Lights is the igure of Lyra herself, a ierce, determined, resourceful, and imaginative character who is both entirely social, and yet decidedly strange, alien, and fantastical. Familiar with the world of Jordan’s scholars, and with its servants, she belongs to neither; we cannot easily read her class identity: she’s described in the narrative as a “wild” child, but behaves with the entitlement of someone of high status (rather like Oliver Twist, in fact). Able to understand the rules and conventions of a prestigious institution like Jordan, she nevertheless breaks them to suit her purposes. She can read the alethiometer, a feat that deies the greatest minds of her world, in ways that exceed rationality, and she inspires conidence and awe in ways that trouble the notion of the obedient child at the same time as making her super-heroic. In each stage of her quest to rescue Roger, oppose the Gobblers, explore the North, and deliver the alethiometer to Asriel, Lyra is constituted as a heroic subject at the head of a confederacy. Her journey is only possible, and only meaningful, in terms of the shifting and complex sets of social constituencies that form around her. Each set of afiliations (the Oxford scholars, the street gang of children, the Gyptians, Lee Scorsby, and Iorek Byrnison, the child inmates of Bolvangar, the witches of Seraina Pekkala’s clan) is constituted as a series of rich images of confederacy, community, and decision making. Nowhere is this stronger than in the depiction of the Gyptian “roping,” which offers a vision of a fully formed process of social action, planning, decision making, and debate, all of which takes place in a context richly marked by wisdom, morality, and interpersonal warmth. This utopian vision relies heavily on the racialized and subaltern associations of the Gyptians—a romantic idealization of Roma culture. Gradually we understand that Lyra is a child, but only after we have understood her as a protagonist, an agent, someone who takes moral responsibility in the face of personal risk and discomfort, and someone who is curious, problem-solving, and adventurous, a hero with special powers, an Other. As Clare Walsh points out, “in spite of her gender, Lyra is an activein-the-world heroine, thereby challenging the assumption that female quest narratives should be fundamentally different in kind from the traditional male quest” (“From ‘Capping’ to Intercision” 241). After Asriel’s meeting with the scholars, he tells Lyra that he’s going back to the North. She immediately tells him she wants to come, and Asriel “looked at her as if for the irst time […] But she gazed back iercely” (Northern Lights 29). As a child, Lyra commands Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 210 30/04/2014 12:12:40 Fantasy, Dissent, and Neoliberal Subjecivity in His Dark Materials 211 the respect of adults who are themselves feared by other adults. And perhaps most importantly, Lyra is never alone. Nicholas Tucker has suggested that most contemporary iction for children and adolescents privileges the idea of romantic attachments as a way of negotiating a social environment in which children have “ever-moredemanding schoolwork” and less time spent outside the nuclear home; against this backdrop “the idea of a personal daemon offers all the consolations of the closest and most intense friendship without any of the possible disadvantages” (Darkness Visible 142–44). I would articulate this idea more strongly. In the context of a world, very much like our own, but lacking many of its potentially alienating and anti-social structures and institutions (inance capital, commodity culture, aggressively privatized social institutions, mass media and telecoms infrastructure), Pullman offers readers the fantasy of having a daemon as a way of offsetting the privations of neo-liberalism. David Harvey (2005) suggests that neoliberalism is a political ideology that revives nineteenth-century liberalism, and which prioritizes the role of the private individual. In his analysis of neoliberalism Jeremy Gilbert (2008) stresses the competitive nature of this individualism, along with the importance of the acquisition of private property, in conditions supported by state governments, and where corporations are relatively undisciplined authorities. The consequences of the dominance of this set of political strategies have been diverse, but often coalesce around extreme social alienation, privatization of life resources, the dismantling of state services and welfare provision, and the increasing commodiication and corporate mediation of not only the public sphere, but of the practices of identity and sociality. Drawing on the inluential publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in 1978 and ’79, in The Birth of Biopolitics, Couze Venn suggests that contemporary neoliberal capital, operating as a “zero-sum” game, and withdrawing the concessions to social democracy established in the postwar settlement, is generating greater conlict and thus “requires new mechanisms that attempt to ensure relatively docile, if not compliant, populations in the form of massively intrusive surveillance, [and] new forms of subjugation using new tools for the government of conduct” (Venn, “Neoliberal Political Economy” 225–26). Drawing on the same lectures, Lois McNay articulates a central implication of Foucault’s analysis of the question of personal freedom: there are many social pathologies that can be seen to ensue from the reconiguration of self as enterprise but one troubling political consequence is that it throws into question conceptions of individual autonomy that commonly underpin much political thought on freedom, resistance and political Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 211 30/04/2014 12:12:40 212 Stephen Maddison opposition. If individual autonomy is not the opposite of or limit to neoliberal governance, but rather lies at the heart of disciplinary control through responsible self-management, what are the possible grounds upon which political resistance can be based? (“Self as Enterprise” 56) I would suggest that the pleasures offered by Northern Lights reside, in part, in its imaginative and fantastical formation of an alternative to this profound antagonism at the heart of neoliberal subjectivity: that to articulate personal choice and freedom is to reproduce the very conditions of our alienation and social deprivation. Thus, I would suggest that Northern Lights offers two mutually reinforcing utopian images. Firstly, the notion of a society “much like our own” with recognizable pleasures, ambitions, and rationalities, but critically lacking a concept of the individual as a living being “premised on the universalization of property and competition as founding principles of society […] pursued through the commodiication of everything [… and] in which self-interest is seen as the motor of human endeavor” (Venn, “Neoliberal Political Economy” 226). This utopian image is a function of both the absence of governmental dispositifs through which neoliberal biopower is exercised, and of the presence of highly romanticized, but nevertheless detailed, alternative visions of social organization (Gyptians, witches, and so on). There is no culture of money or commodity exchange, and thus no structure of social networking, competition, and self-management. There is no telecommunications infrastructure, no mediatization, and no digitization in Lyra’s world, and thus no practice of representation, or of the rationality of wealth acquisition. There is no systematized, digital form of data collection and data mining, no structure of what Venn describes as “intrusive” surveillance, and little suggestion of central government or of biopolitics—management of the population. Instead, there are urgent moral quests that provide opportunity for the articulation of values distinct from self-interest and self-promotion, and which, moreover, provide the conditions for the formation of communities and confederacies. Secondly, as both a symbol of this lack of alienation in Lyra’s world, and as its instrumental materialization, everyone has their own daemon, a companion who is part luffy pet and part uncanny super-ego, but which may also embody fantastical metaphysical possibilities: as Vincent suggests, “you’re never alone with a daemon,” and in Lyra’s world “you must be on your guard […] because the world is full of insatiable power-mongers who want you to be less resistant to their wickedness than you are when you’ve got a good daemon in tow” (Vincent “Driven by Daemons”). I would thus suggest that one of Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 212 30/04/2014 12:12:40 Fantasy, Dissent, and Neoliberal Subjecivity in His Dark Materials 213 the considerable achievements of Northern Lights is how it works, ideologically, narratively, and affectively, to offset the privations of neoliberalism and stand as a critique of the currently prevailing form of social, economic, and cultural organization. In this context, the almost unquestioning approval of Pullman in scholarship and the liberal press articulates the affective power of the pleasures offered by such a critique. However, the question remains, exactly what kind of critique is Pullman offering, and what kinds of political and cultural rationality does it underwrite? “The books are sill in the Bodley’s library” At this point it is important to assert the importance of both the discontinuities to be found across His Dark Materials and the speciic set of ideologies Pullman upholds in his public pronouncements. However remarkable the irst novel is (and I would argue that it is), as the trilogy proceeds, Pullman increasingly rejects the imaginative space he has established, and makes his creation subject to a didactic discipline that subordinates Lyra (and Will) as children, as Moruzi argues (2005). The shifting subject position occupied by Lyra is one of the key discontinuities of His Dark Materials. Lyra’s status as child, as heroic agent, as female, as emergently sexual, as magical, is uneven and contradictory throughout His Dark Materials, but becomes increasingly so as the trilogy progresses towards its conclusion. In the inal scene of The Amber Spyglass, Lyra returns to the luxurious rooms of Jordan, no longer as a dissident spy, but as a guest invited to dine with the Master and Dame Hannah. Scholars who for Lyra were once “dim and frumpy” now seem “cleverer […] more interesting, and kindlier by far than […] she remembered” (The Amber Spyglass 541). Here, Lyra is alone in a way she wasn’t in the irst scene of Northern Lights: there is no mention of Pantalaimon, no private discourse with him, no shared purpose; it is as if she has been subjected to intercision, “severed” from her daemon and become calmly docile as a consequence. After the upheavals of the wars across the worlds, the colleges of Oxford are “settling back into the calm of scholarship and ritual,” but “the Master’s valuable collection of silver had been looted” (The Amber Spyglass 541). Thus, we learn that this is a world impervious to cross-dimensional crisis, an environment more immutably real than those we glimpsed through the windows opened by Asriel’s quantum experimentation. Lyra has lost her magical ability to read the alethiometer, and laments the loss of “all those thousands of meanings” (The Amber Spyglass Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 213 30/04/2014 12:12:40 214 Stephen Maddison 543) but Dame Hannah tells her, “they’re not gone, Lyra […] the books are still in the Bodley’s library. The scholarship to study them is alive and well” (The Amber Spyglass 543). Where once Lyra’s agency functioned through her anarchic and passionate assembly of social constituencies, animated by curiosity, adventure, and moral purpose, by her super-heroic agency, now her subjectivity becomes framed by bourgeois preoccupations: she worries about not having any money (“I suppose I’ll have to work,” The Amber Spyglass 543), and where she’ll live; she agrees to become a student at Dame Hannah’s boarding school until she’s old enough to become an undergraduate. She will diligently make a life’s work of studying, in order to recapture her lost ability to read the alethiometer. What do we learn about the world Lyra inhabits here? This is not a world of fantastical metaphysical possibilities, shimmering with new paradigms: all the knowledge Lyra could need is already known, and resides in the Bodley library. This is a world of deference to authority, of educational achievement marked by the rationality of institutional hierarchy, where imagination and creativity are regimes of truth circumscribed by the sin of “lying.” The angel Xaphania tells Lyra that it is possible to travel between the worlds without cutting windows with the subtle knife, but that to do so “uses the faculty of what you call imagination. But that does not mean making things up” (The Amber Spyglass 523; emphasis in the original). Like regaining the ability to read the alethiometer, learning the particular kind of imagination necessary to travel between the worlds will take “a whole lifetime to learn” but Xaphania tells Lyra that “what is worth having is worth working for” (The Amber Spyglass 523). Here the very supernatural itself, in the shape of an angel, stands as guarantee of bourgeois ideology. Sociality as coalition, distributed decision making, and shared purpose steadily gives way to domestication and the regime of the nuclear couple as the trilogy proceeds. In The Subtle Knife Lyra’s social relations are deined either by interaction with her mother (who drugs her into a coma) or with Will, with whom she forms a monogamous couple. Her relations with Will are highly gendered, feminizing her in sharp contrast to her character in the irst book; this feminization recasts her earlier willful rebelliousness as a tomboy phase rather than a deining character trait. In The Amber Spyglass Lyra’s parents re-establish their role in her life, and become morally redeemed by saving her, thus diminishing the scope of her heroic achievements. Will increasingly becomes the extent of Lyra’s social engagement, and eventually displaces even Pantalaimon as her super-ego (“she would have reveled in showing it off to all her urchin friends […] but Will [had] taught her the value of silence and discretion,” The Amber Spyglass Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 214 30/04/2014 12:12:40 Fantasy, Dissent, and Neoliberal Subjecivity in His Dark Materials 215 546). There is no shortage of vivid characters in The Amber Spyglass, but these are distributed through the narrative as atomized pairings, rather than nodes in a complex confederacy: Barusch and Balthamos are monogamously committed homosexual angels, Mary Malone and Atal the Mulefa become cross-species latmates, Coulter and Asriel declare their love for one another and die in each other’s arms, Parry and Scoresby form a heroic homosocial partnership, Tialys and Salmakia are married secret agents. In each case, the couples function autonomously, alienated in purpose and in decision making: there is kindness, self-sacriice, and courage here, but a fundamentally different mode of sociality from that offered in Northern Lights. Conclusion: “what is worth having is worth working for” Northern Lights solicits affective delight in its (implicit) critique of neoliberalism, and in its images of alternatives to the entrepreneurial society that draw on the fantastic for their power, the concluding books of His Dark Materials illuminate the particular nature of that political critique. At the very end of the trilogy, Lyra embraces loss—loss of love, loss of agency, loss of knowledge—in exchange for a vision of what needs to be built: “the republic of heaven” (The Amber Spyglass 548). This republic resonates not with provocative, imaginative, and progressive ideas, but with reactionary ones: this is not a republic to be striven for, but recuperated. Pullman’s utopia is a tradition to be recovered and protected: Lyra’s Oxford, with its university, its library, its hierarchies, is Pullman’s utopia. At the end, the Master still has his servant, Cousins. In the irst book Cousins and Lyra were enemies, but in the inal scene he greets her with affection: he accepts his place, as he accepts hers [AQ3]; like Oliver Twist, eventually Lyra is restored to her rightful place. In Will’s Oxford, he and Mary Malone will be friends, but this Oxford, our Oxford, is less comforting: Mary is in trouble with the police and the university authorities, Will needs to negotiate the healthcare and welfare bureaucracies to get his mother properly looked after. Utopia, apparently, lacks a state apparatus, but retains elite institutions. Is this the “immutable moral and intellectual integrity” ascribed to Pullman? In his public statements, such as the celebrated address to the Convention on Modern Liberty in 2009, or his more recent speech to a small group of library campaigners that went viral and became a social networking “sensation” hailed as a “classic piece of oratory,” Pullman decries the absence of curiosity, courage, and modesty in the organs of the state, and derides the “clammy hands” of “market Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 215 30/04/2014 12:12:40 216 Stephen Maddison fundamentalists” (Pullman “This is the Big Society”; Page “Philip Pullman’s call”). He has suggested that: A modest kingdom […] would have to think for a moment or two whether or not it was a republic, because its royal family would be small, and its members would be allowed to spend most [of] their time in useful and interesting careers as well as being royal, and because their love affairs would remain their own business; and people would always be glad to see them cycling past. (Pullman “We Are Better People than our Government Believes We Are”) Such propositions seem emblematic of what Raymond Williams has described as “bourgeois dissidence,” a trait he ascribed to the Bloomsbury fraction: Bloomsbury was […] against cant, superstition, hypocrisy, pretension and public show. It was against ignorance, poverty, sexual and racial discrimination, militarism and imperialism. But it was against all these things in a speciic moment of the development of liberal thought. What it appealed to, against all these evils, was not any alternative idea of a whole society. Instead it appealed to the supreme value of the civilized individual, whose pluralization, as more and more civilized individuals, was itself the only acceptable social direction. (“The Bloomsbury Fraction” 165) Bourgeois dissidence offers a platform from which to decry the idiocy of bureaucrats forced to make budgetary decisions favoring libraries over social care for the disabled (or vice versa), or the “clammy hands” of “market fundamentalists,” whilst preserving the privileges of entitlement. Pullman’s investment in bourgeois dissidence allows him to draw, sentimentally and with great power, on richly evocative images of wealth and power for his iction, where that wealth and power serves the virtuous purposes of curiosity, courage, and enlightened advancement of the individual. But the fault line conditions of this vision, in the irst book, lie in its investments in fantasy and magical powers (Lyra reads the alethiometer, daemons express the metaphysical potential of human beings), and the animation of marginal constituencies of beings (Gyptians, bears, witches, urchins, abducted children). Such investments in “lazy nonsense” (Vincent “Driven by Daemons”) for Pullman represent the “sub-Tolkien thing” (Weich “Philip Pullman Reaches the Garden”) and do not constitute appropriate terms for the construction of a political program intelligible to bourgeois dissent: they are, by deinition, the property of iction. And thus, in inverse proportion to Pullman’s growing fame and celebrity, and his emergence into civil society as a respected orator, so His Dark Materials plots a dismal path away from the marvelous and Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 216 30/04/2014 12:12:40 Fantasy, Dissent, and Neoliberal Subjecivity in His Dark Materials 217 towards a reactionary resolution consistent with Pullman’s rational defense of libraries and his championing of freedom, courage, and curiosity. The republic of heaven is possible, but “what is worth having is worth working for.” If Northern Lights delights us with its images of agency, sociality, and confederacy, we must nevertheless recognize Pullman’s attempts to foreclose such radicalism in its sequels; inally, Lyra’s world is circumscribed, not by the enterprise society—Pullman remains opposed to that—but by petit bourgeois suburban values: hard work, compliance, obedience. Pullman’s apologists may deride the magic spells, potions, and wands of Rowling’s creation, but it’s ironic that at the climax of His Dark Materials Lyra Belacqua has become a muggle, even a Dursley at that. Acknowledgements Thanks to Andrew Blake and Debra Benita Shaw, who commented on earlier drafts of this essay, and especially to Christine Butler, whose critical friendship gave rise to the ideas here. Works Cited Clark, N. “Philip Pullman to Publish New Adaptations of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” The Independent 20 March 2012. Web. 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Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. —. Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Print. Stuttaford, A. “Sunday School for Atheists.” National Review 25 Mar. 2002. Web. Jan. 2013. <http://andrewstuttaford.com/2002/03/25/sunday-school-for-atheists/>. Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 218 30/04/2014 12:12:41 Fantasy, Dissent, and Neoliberal Subjecivity in His Dark Materials 219 Tucker, N. Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman. London: Wizard Books, 2003. Print. —. Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman. London: Wizard Books, 2007. Print. [AQ4] Turner, J. “Reasons for Liking Tolkien: The Hobbit Habit.” London Review of Books 15 Nov. 2001. Print. Venn, C. “Neoliberal Political Economy, Biopolitics and Colonialism: A Transcolonial Genealogy of Inequality.” Theory, Culture & Society 26.6 (2009): 206–33. Print. Vincent, S. “Driven by Daemons.” Guardian 10 Nov. 2001. Web. Sept. 2011. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/nov/10/booksforchildrenandteenagers. philippullman>. Walsh, C. “From ‘Capping’ to Intercision: Metaphors/Metonyms of Mind Control in the Young Adult Fiction of John Christopher and Philip Pullman.” Language and Literature 12.3 (2003): 233–51. Print. Weich, D. “Philip Pullman Reaches the Garden.” 2000. Web. <http://www.powells. com/authors/pullman.html, accessed September 2011>. Williams, R. “The Bloomsbury Fraction.” Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays. R. Williams. London: Verso, 1989. Print. Extrapolation 55_2 Summer 2014.indd 219 30/04/2014 12:12:41