Balance

Please excuse my absence from the discussion. I have read the past few weeks of discussion and have a couple points that I would like to raise for consideration.

1) The author's intent versus the reader's interpretation.
Would you buy a painting because of the way it makes you feeling or for the way the artist was feeling at the time of its creation (if you could find this out)? From my own experience and from reading the experience of other writers, sometimes the writer doesn't know the full depth of meaning that is being produced on the page. For example, Stephen King's Dark Tower series has already had two companions written by other people. He's admitted that even he didn't realize some of the symbology occurring within his books that has been pointed out in the companion volumes. I also have an artist friend. Her medium is oil paint. She, too, has been asked what her paintings mean, what she was thinking/feeling at the time of creation. When she asked me what I thought of this, I said I didn't want to know what she was feeling. It matters to me what I am feeling. This is what will allow the art to continue to resound with me.

I think it's more important what you, the reader, feels and thinks about what you are reading. Everyone will be different, including the author. No one can hope to approach the mindframe of that of the author at the time of creation. That is the beauty of written material; it is open to individual imagination.

2) Good and evil and the church and daemons.
Yes, I do see a great deal of Paradise Lost in The Golden Compass trilogy. But I also see alot of other things too, possibly derived and mutated from the Adam and Eve story (as Paradise Lost is). Some recent films, including The Matrix trilogy, Equilibrium and V for Vendetta, have pointed out the tendency of human society to block out all that is bad at the sake of good. Bad is 'bad'. Good is sacrificed to be rid of the bad. Western society, and dare I say Christianity, has a horrible habit of not seeing human nature as a whole (of not seeing anything as a whole). Eastern religions tend to accept and incorporate the wholeness of human nature as a sense of balance. Ying/Yang, God/Goddess, Earth/Air, Fire/Water, etc., without labelling one aspect as 'bad'. Both are needed to be whole. Balance is needed.

I think (if I may dare) that Pullman is illustrating Christianity's desire to separate the good from the bad in human nature. Through the creation of the daemons, Pullman has enabled the human whole to be fractured for the sake of the 'good'. It would not be easy to illustrate the urgency and intimacy that Lyra feels with her daemon if it, instead, was an invisible aspect of her soul. I believe the daemons are a writer's tool to make the reader realize the value of diversity within the human soul, to identify with the character's plight.

One last point:
Yes, Garden Girl, I, too, felt Lyra's character lacking. I was not able to identify with her. Is it her ignorance? Her stubbornness? Her uncanny ability to be incredibly annoying? Was it possible to make her stubborn and tenacious without being annoying? I don't know.
Further the discussion.....

What are Daemons and Dust?

Puddleglum has asked the question that I think is central to understanding this book. What are daemons and how are they related to dust? To answer this question, I think it is important to go back to the epigraph at the beginning of the book. An epigraph sets the theme for an entire book, so I think it reveals a lot about Pullman's intentions when he wrote the book.

The epigraph is from John Milton's Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost is an epic poem written in the 17th century about Adam and Eve's fall from grace. I have actually never read it myself. If you want to know what it's all about, I suggest the Cliff's Notes version.

The epigraph itself is taken from Book II. In Book II, Satan and the other Fallen Angels in hell have decided that in order to get back at God, they should try to corrupt God's newest creation: Man. Satan then begins his journey to heaven (in order to reach Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden). On his way, he must pass through the realm of Chaos and Night, the companions that inhabit the void that separates Hell from Heaven. The void is described as follows:

a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And CHAOS, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal ANARCHIE, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs and by confusion stand.

In the epigraph it is this void that Satan contemplates as he stands at the gates of hell:

Into this wild abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their preganant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this wild abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage...

So to my point: what is dust? I think Dust comes from the realm of Night and Chaos. The realm is described as being of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire (as in none of the four elements) but rather a chaotic mixture of all of them. The realm is also described as a place where the normal rules of nature "length, breadth, and highth, And time and place are lost." Dust is described several times as being an elementary particle, but one that does not behave in the same manner as any other elementary particle. The realm is also described as having something to do with creation. In the first quotation, Night and Chaos are described as "Ancestors of Nature" as in the parents, or creators of Nature itself. In the epigraph, the void is also described as the "womb of nature" which would also indicate that this chaotic void is the source of life and creation. It then basically says that the void is doomed to remain in confusion and chaos "Unless the almighty maker them ordain / His dark materials to create more worlds". As in, these are the materials that God used to create the world with. And let us not forget the title of the series: "His Dark Materials..." So the entire series is about "His Dark Materials..." aka "Dust" aka the source of all life.

Now we should not forget about what the rest of Paradise Lost is all about: the fall of Adam and Eve. Basically, that's what the Christian church comes down to, isn't it? Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge and they were no longer naive: they knew about sex and love, those wonderful things, but they also knew about hate and jealousy and shame, and all those bad things. Now, I personally think that the whole Adam and Eve story is a misogynistic piece of crap (yeah, women are the cause of all sin in the world, we are evil, not to mention easily influenced by smooth talking serpents). BUT, I think it says something interesting, if you choose to interpret it in the way that I think Pullman chooses to interpret it. If you go back to the epigraph, it says the void is "The womb of nature and perhaps her grave" [emphasis mine]. Now, I can't speak for Milton, but what I think Pullman means is that Dust is life, but also death: the good and the bad. Dust is like the fruit of the tree of knowledge. You gotta take the good with the bad. If you're going to live, then there will be death. Before Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge, they were like those nurses and doctors at Bolvangar. They were living, they were thinking, but they couldn't really feel anything. No passion, no moral outrage at what they were doing, nothing. They were just obediant little puppets. This is what Adam and Eve were before the fall.

Now the church has figured that Dust is the physical evidence of original sin. Children are innocent and naive (like Adam and Eve were) before puberty. But when puberty arrives, they begin to experience passions and feelings that were not there before, they begin to think for themselves, and their true personalities emerge for better or for worse (this being represented by the final form of the daemon). This is when they begin to know things. Now, because this is when Daemons choose their final form, the Church figures that these two things seem to be linked. Perhaps if they sever the linkage, then it will be as if original sin never happened. And I think they're right; BUT what the church doesn't get, is that original sin is LIFE. Without the Daemon, and hence without Dust, the person is like an empty shell, devoid of anything, good OR bad.

So that's my take on it. I'm not sure if I quite understand in my own mind exactly what part of us that a Daemon is supposed to represent, but that's a start anyway. What do you all think?