Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v030.n120

From: Alice Turner <pei047 at attglobal.net>
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 21:27:09 +0000

Bear growled:

> At 20:56 2001-05-24, algawrote:
> > Virtually
> >everyone--no, strike that, every grown-up person--feels the failure
of
> >the third book. We're trying to make it work, and I am specifically
> >struggling with how to explain Dust (and the Specters) in terms of
> >Manichaean Light and Dark and a logical world-view (pretty damned
hard
> >to do when there are infinite worlds).
>
> [waves to Copperhead thread!]
> It doesn't need to be Manichean, does it? The Authority doesn't
> have the power of Creation that he claims, after all. The Spectres
> are kind-of believable, as is Dust leaking into the abyss through
> the windows. I'm not sure a strictly logical world-view is helpful,
> because then you might wonder whether Dust could cross between worlds
> (and if so, how) or if not, why the window from the land of the dead
> couldn't open onto a world without intelligent inhabitants. It will
> be interesting to see how the Book of Dust copes with all this!

It will indeed be interesting. And maybe I'll have to wait. Your points
are completely apt, and why the book's structure is so hard to cope
with. Perhaps I'm being too hardline in trying to match Dust with
Zoroastrian/Manichaean Light/Dark. I think, though, that the Authority
did create the world (this world--which?); he is the Demiurge, who is
nowhere given much credit for anything good. The difficulty comes in
then saying, with Nietzche, that God is dead. Which god, then, and if he
is dead, is this not a good thing? (I sound like Martha Stewart.)

> Another loose end is the super-Dickensian-and-Wolfian-put-together
> degree of coincidence required for the plot of The Subtle Knife.
> Will just happens to find that window? Then happens to walk into
> the one room in a deserted city in the particular world where Lyra
> is hiding? Clearly not coincidence, but I don't recall anything being
> said about it - apart from them remarking on the unlikelihood! It must
> be something like the shaman summoning Lee, or Bilbo finding the Ring,
> but it would be nice to be told.

Well, Lyra, from the beginning, is known to be Predestined, though she
must also exercise Free Will (the latter being another thing I feel is
not resolved well enough). The Master of Jordan, the gyptians and the
witches all know of her cosmic predestination, and that she must choose
eventually and fatefully. So Will's arrival falls under that plan, which
I think is okay. What bothers me far more is that though she makes the
choice to part from him ostensibly under Free Will she seems actually to
be bullied into it. And I *really* don't like the implication that
Original Sin is averted by the physical impossibility of loving young
sex. (Much as the kids on the fan fiction site thrill to the romantic
sadness of it all.)

> >The kids seem to adore it in a
> >tearjerker way. Is that because my daemon has settled and theirs have
> >not?
. That's confirmed by Pullman himself at the readerville
> site Adam posted, in the message that breaks off "She is the one who
> will tell him how to imagine his way into o". It's quite an
interesting
> site. He says that Will and Lyra have to be parted, and some readers
> agree that it brings closure to the story.

[She is Mary.] Yes, I read this, and it is indeed interesting. But I
still do not see why they must be parted except in the more distasteful
religious terms. As an adult. I wonder what the kids who love the
romantic sadness are thinking. If they are thinking. Pullman is such a
good writer that I suspect he has them feeling without thinking. Just
Say No is an awfully stupid slogan and I hate to see it applied to
Original Sin.

Eli wote:

> That didactic purpose I can appreciate, but he weakens it by forcing
the
> story.  He tried to set up "Cold Equations"-style plot mechanism which
> threatens global disaster to _coerce_ Will and Lyra's decision --
rather
> than letting us see what their own wisdom leads them to decide.
That's
> a lesser story.

Yes, and all the hoohah about Lyra's having this cosmic decision to
make, which must not be influenced in any way, becomes trivial if she
*is* influenced, which she certainly is.

> I remember that my reading experience when I hit this was not one bit
> high-mindedly didactified, but was on the same mechanical level as his
> setup: but but but the Dust ecology is not at risk, because brief
> openings don't leak on the scale of the natural influx we've seen, and
> creating Specters is no problem with a little help, since the angel
has
> said she can deal with those.  If it had occurred to Will and Lyra
that
> the obstacles were not absolute, they could have gone on to ask more
> interesting questions: what if everybody did it?  are we special, to
> justify it?  And the question Pullman didn't dare to ask them: even if
> we can, should we?
>
> In a way, he did quite right.  I don't know that they would have
> answered the way he wanted.  The honest story, I want to call it
though
> I really shouldn't, might be a tragedy.

I'm not quite clear on what you mean with the above. Who is "he?"
Pullman? Or "they?" And "ecology" is difficult when you are dealing with
multiple worlds. Oh, dear.

-alga

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 08:41:05 +0000

on 5/25/01 8:27 PM, Alice Turner at pei047 at attglobal.net wrote:

> I think, though, that the Authority
> nowhere given much credit for anything good.

No.  "Balthamos said quietly, '...He was never the creator.  He was an angel
like ourselves--the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed
of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter
begins to understand itself....He told those who came after him that he had
created them, but it was a lie.'" (TAS, 31-32)  So the Authority is not the
Demiurge, because matter pre-existed him.

Actually, the Authority is "lower" even than that.  Dust is not the first
conscious matter, as I mistakenly stated in my earlier post; it is brought
into existence by conscious living beings.  (TAS, 451; this is the passage I
couldn't locate in my previous post about how the vanishing of Dust would be
the end of consciousness.)  So the angels, including the Authority, are
dependent for their existence upon fleshly consciousness already existing.
Angels are lower, not higher, than humans in Pullman's cosmology, reflecting
his high valuation of matter (see TAS, 375; also a passage I can't find at
the moment, where somebody talks about how much the angels wish they had
bodies).

> The difficulty comes in

As far as I can tell, there is no God in Pullman's world.  The Authority
dies on pp. 410-11, and yes, it's a very good thing (even for the
Authority).  And the absence of God also seems to be portrayed as a good
thing.
> 
> What bothers me far more is that though she makes the
[snip]
> But I

Okay, now I see what you meant by saying you objected to the Eve thing on
moral and religious grounds.  But I think you have hold of the wrong end of
the stick.  The cosmic choice, the choice it is Lyra's destiny to make and
must make freely, is not the choice to give up Will.  It is her choice to
love Will and show her love.  The Church's values are the opposite of
Pullman's, but the Church can read the alethiometer; and according to the
Church, it is Lyra's giving into "temptation," not her rejection of
temptation, which will lead to the triumph of "Dust and sin." (TAS, 68)  And
since Dust is good, and the Church is bad, Lyra's "temptation" is good.
Recall also that the Dust, speaking through Mary's computer, tells Mary she
must "play the serpent," which she does by telling Lyra of her love affair
and awakening Lyra's sexuality.  Original Sin is not "averted": in Pullman's
metaphysics, it doesn't exist.  The "Fall" is good, since it leads to
greater consciousness: recall the mulefa's story of the serpent.

Granted, Pullman muddies the waters by requiring Lyra and Will to make
another decision later, in which they do have to resist "temptation"; but,
as I discuss below, if they make the wrong decision at that point, it will
not destroy the world.  And reading the end of Chapter Thirty-Five, in which
Lyra and Will express their love (TAS 470), it's clear that _this_ is when
the world is saved.

>> than letting us see what their own wisdom leads them to decide.

[snip]

>> I really shouldn't, might be a tragedy.

But the decision that Lyra and Will have to make at the end is not to close
up all the windows: the angels tell them to do this.  The decision they have
to make is to resist the temptations, first for one of them to go to the
others' world and have ten years of happiness and then death; and then to
use the extra Dust they will create to keep a window open for themselves
instead of keeping their promise to the dead.  These decisions they do make
without being coerced by threats of cosmic disaster.

(I'm not saying I find this part of the book well worked out.  Your
objections are valid.  Also, it makes little sense for Xaphania to first
tell Will that there is a way he can learn to travel to other worlds, which
will take him a lifetime to learn; and then say that they can't leave any
natural windows open because if they did, Will would spend a lifetime
searching for it (TAS, 494-495).  And come to think of it, couldn't Xaphania
leave one natural window open, and then tell Will where it is?  I'll have to
go back and look at the readerview discussion, because the more I think
about it, the stranger Pullman's insistence on their separation seems.)

--Adam

---

From: eli+ <eli+ at gs211.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 19:57:23 +0000

Alice Turner wrote:
> Pullman? Or "they?"

I meant "he" to be Pullman, and "they" to be Will and Lyra.  That is,
I think Pullman brute-forced the ending because if he hadn't, Lyra and
Will wouldn't have stayed apart the way he wanted them to.

-- 
     Eli Brandt  |  eli+ at cs.cmu.edu  |  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/

---

From: eli+ <eli+ at gs211.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 20:50:49 +0000

> without being coerced by threats of cosmic disaster.

I'd forgotten the details, so I reread it, and yup, they did.  Though
as Will said, the first temptation isn't much of one, since how could
one suffer the other to do that.  And the second is contrived: if Lyra
and Will help everyone in their worlds to be wise and kind and patient
and curious and other good laundry, it will balance the Dust lost
through precisely one (1) window?  Pullman did leave them with a
decision, but it's so narrowed and so rigged....

(The quibbler in me is now thinking that if the angels can so easily
handle the Specter created with each door, you could set up a
schedule, whereby 0.1% of the time you close the Hades window and then
open one between Will's and Lyra's worlds, maintaining the one-window
invariant.  I'm consequently picturing the little sign you'd hang up
then next to the out-of-order endpoint in Hades.)

> Also, it makes little sense for Xaphania to first
> leave one natural window open, and then tell Will where it is?

Yeah.  I imagine Pullman wanted the two ways of traveling to stand in
for some other pairing he made a moral distinction between -- creative
imagination versus fantasy, nah, I really don't know.  But whatever
the logic is at _that_ end of the metaphor, it doesn't translate to
the in-the-story end.  We're left with this distinction and no
apparent difference.