Philip Pullman, a well-known author and polemical atheist, has claimed in interviews that the trilogy of children’s fantasy novels for which he is so famous – the His Dark Materials cycle – is meant to be something of an “antidote” to C.S. Lewis’ infinitely more popular (and let us be candid, far better) Narnia series. It has been Pullman’s contention that the Narnia books, and to a degree Lewis himself, were at best hopelessly muddled and worst willfully malicious when it comes to issues of race, sex and religion. Of course he would think this, but these are his contentions and I see no reason to distrust them even if I wholeheartedly disagree with them.
There seems also to be a link between Pullman’s series and Lewis’ more advanced cosmic trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), as both series have a number of the same issues at the forefront, sex, theology and travel between worlds being most notable among them (and also dust, though I don’t want to get into that just now). This is not commonly discussed, though, so far as I’ve seen.
And then there’s something else that I noticed a few days ago. I might even claim to have discovered it, if nobody else can say as much, and of course depending on if it really turns out to be the case. Coincidences are certainly possible, even highly suggestive ones, and the dangers of making definite critical pronouncements about the genesis of a literary work while the author is still living are notoriously great. But here it is:
Some of the most fundamental elements of the His Dark Materials books have seemingly been purposefully designed to sicken and/or insult C.S. Lewis on a personal level.
He’s dead, of course, and has been ever since the motorcade in which he and John F. Kennedy were riding was suicide bombed by Aldous Huxley, but it is not inconceivable that even a atheist like Pullman might take some manner of satisifaction in sticking it to him from beyond the grave, as it were. This time, though, it’s a less typical side of the grave doing the sticking.
My suspicions along these lines first formed while reading the text of a talk Lewis gave to the Cambridge University English Club in November of 1955 on the subject of science fiction (the talk is appropriately titled “On Science Fiction”). As Lewis made his way through the different types of science fiction and fantasy, as he saw them, he seemed to speak negatively of certain trends that could be seen cropping up in Pullman’s books. But these were broad strokes, and could apply to dozens of works, so I thought little of it until I happened upon the next-to-last page. Lewis writes:
Do not criticise what you have no taste for without extreme caution. And, above all, do not ever criticize what you simply can’t stand. I will lay all the cards on the table. I have long discovered my own private phobia: the thing I can’t bear in literature, the thing which makes me profoundly uncomfortable, is the respresentation of anything like a quasi love affair between two children. It embarasses and nauseates me. But of course I regard this not as a charter to write slashing reviews of books in which the hated theme occurs, but as a warning not to pass judgement on them at all. For my reaction is unreasonable: such child-loves quite certainly occur in real life and I can give no reason why they should not be represented in art. If they touch the scar of some early trauma in me, that is my misfortune.
This very thing is at the heart of Pullman’s trilogy; indeed, the sexual liason between the two young protagonists in the third book (The Amber Spyglass) is portrayed as both a refutation and a reversal of the fall of Adam and Eve, and the scene is written with unsettling relish.
“That,” I thought, “is pretty interesting.” The implications of Lewis’ admission in relation to Pullman stewed in my mind for a little bit, mostly idly, and then for no reason that I can articulate (you know how thinking goes sometimes) my mind flashed to the word “Pitesti.” Things suddenly started to fall into place.
The Pitesti Experiment, as it is sometimes called, is named for the notorious Romanian prison in which the regimen of psychological and physical torture that the phrase describes took place. Prisoners, sent to the prison for “reeducation,” were subjected to an endless and indescribable battery of abuse in every possible way. One facet of this torture included a sort of gross parody of aversion therapy whereby prisoners were subjected to profound blasphemy in an effort to weed stubborn religious convictions out of them. They had to watch the destruction of icons and such, listen to pornographic parodies of hymns and liturgy, and were themselves forced on pain of torture to perform such acts as well. They were fed a stream of disgusting lies about family, friends and admired figures, punctuated also by torture. Some were forced to dress in priestly garb or even take on the role of a crucified Christ while the other inmates insulted and beat them. The hoped-for and frequently attained result of all this was that even if these beliefs were not forcibly suppressed, the prisoners who held them could no longer look upon holy objects or participate in religious life without what they had experienced in Pitesti forcing itself upon them in memory. It was fiendishness on a level rarely attained outside of Hell.
Now, what could this possibly have to do with Philip Pullman?
First, let me be perfectly clear that in no sense am I accusing him of consciously emulating such barbarism. I have provided the above illustration both to explain how my thinking worked with regard to what follows, and as a sort of template to describe the potential practical results of Pullman’s actions if not, perhaps, his intentions.
One of the great ironies in the Pullman/Lewis divide is that, while Pullman hates Narnia with a visceral passion, Pullman’s trilogy is just the sort of thing Lewis himself liked. In the same essay as I quoted from above he notes that his favourite sort of science fiction was of the fantastic sort wherein people travel to new and astonishing worlds, with a particular focus (for Lewis) on the use of such travels by the author as a vehicle for the exploration of spiritual questions. Lewis wasn’t especially concerned with whether he agreed with the spiritual conclusions reached when considering the quality and merits of such work; indeed, he cites David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus (1920; a “shattering, intolerable, irresistable work”) and “The Last Judgement” from J.B.S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds (1927; a “brilliant, though to my mind depraved, paper”).
Whatever Philip Pullman may be or argue, he is not a bad writer by any means, and as such we have, as a result, a trio of well-written and (it must be admitted) inventive novels of the sort Lewis most prized in which the whole thrust of the narrative leads, unbeknownst to the reader until it is too late, to just about the most lurid variation on Lewis’ most severe dislike that could be perpetrated without resorting to pornography. The knife is only driven deeper with the inclusion and importance of anthropomorphized animals of the sort so important to Lewis in his childhood and later work, the subversive engagement with Lewis’ favoured Milton, and the use of an alterdimensional variant of Lewis’ beloved Oxford as one of the settings.
All of this seems very possible, though I’ll say again that I’ve no reason beyond the evocations suggested by the passage I cited above to think that Pullman has ever read Lewis’ “On Science Fiction.” If it’s a coincidence, though, it’s a damned curious one.
