Daemon Voices

by Philip Pullman

  So I believe in science. But I don’t think scientifically when I write. When I’m writing a story, the only thing that matters is whether something helps, or whether it hinders. I welcome anything, any form of superstition, even, that will help me when I sit down with a pen in my hand; and I still use a pen, because I have a lucky one. What I need at that point is not a theory of human nature, or a theory of evolution, but a theory of ghosts, demons, spirits, hobgoblins, magic rituals and diabolical possession.

  And since the only thing I know about with any authority is what it feels like to write a story, I’m going to focus on that, because I think that if you’re looking closely at one thing, you can see other things faintly at the edge of your vision, which flee away if you try to look at them directly. And there are a couple of things hovering there in the semi-darkness, which I think might have a bearing on this human nature business. I’ve got twenty minutes, I’m told, which is just time for one question, one observation, and one epitaph.

  So here goes. The question is this: how is it that I know when a story’s going wrong? If I’m making up something new from scratch, how can there be a right way and a wrong way of doing it, a right shape and a wrong shape? Because this sense is very clear and strong; there’s no mistaking it. I can think of several origins for this feeling, and here are five of them.

  Firstly, it might be that there is a sort of Platonic realm of absolute perfection for every story that could ever be told, and that in some mysterious way, when I write I can experience it directly, and sense when I’m getting warm or cold with regard to the “pure” story, close to it or further away.

  Secondly, it might be cultural conditioning—the experience of hearing and reading a lot of stories of a particular sort, and coming to think that that’s the only natural way for a story to be, and feeling uncomfortable unless I’m with something familiar. In other words, what the right shape is could be purely arbitrary, and it’s just that we’re used to that sort of shape.

  Thirdly, it might be the faint apprehension of something that’s definitely below the level of conscious perception most of the time. We’ve heard about experiments that show how our muscles begin a movement before we consciously decide to do it. Maybe my writing hand has already decided what the story should be, and my satisfaction or unease with the way it’s going is a result of either getting close to what’s already been decided or it going away. So my sense of the right shape and the wrong shape might be an awareness that what I take to be my conscious decision-making life is an illusion, and that in fact I’m determined or programmed by something below my conscious perception.

  Fourthly, as a variation on that, I might be being guided by a higher power. I was recently told by one person, expert in her field, that I was channelling truths from the spirit world, and then by someone else, equally expert in hers, that my work clearly showed evidence of the unconscious working out of Oedipal conflicts. In neither case, apparently, was I—the conscious I—greatly responsible for it. So the feeling I’m talking about, as I say, might come from the fact that I’m being guided.

  Fifthly, it might be the fact that my own narrative nerves and muscles are wonderfully developed, that—like a football player who has practised and practised until he can kick a ball into the corner of the net every time—I am just good at what I do. So my sense of No, that’s wrong and Yes, that’s right are the sort of semi-automatic adjustments and reflections and calculations that any practitioner of any complex activity makes all the time, and that get better with practice.

  Anyway, my sense that something is going wrong and, elsewhere, or later, my sense that this is the right way to do it could be due to any of those things. For reasons of amour propre I prefer some of them to others, naturally. I also think some of them are simply more likely than others.

  But if I don’t know where it comes from, I can describe roughly what it feels like. It feels like the satisfaction we get when we hang a picture in the best place on a wall. There are places that simply look better than others. There’s a sort of harmony or balance about them, and often we sense that before we learn about such things as the Golden Section—a system of balances and ratios often called the Divine Proportion and noted by artists and architects since the days of the ancient Greeks. The interesting thing about learning how the Golden Section works is that it doesn’t feel like learning something that might just as well be otherwise, such as the rules of the road. That we drive on the left is arbitrary; other countries drive just as successfully on the right. Learning about the Golden Section feels different from that: it feels like learning a truth that until now we had sensed but not clearly seen.

  A similar thing happens with sound: when you learn to hear the beats that tell you that two strings are not perfectly in tune, or the harmonics that govern the intervals of a fourth, a fifth, and so on, you’re not learning something arbitrary and then imposing it on otherwise unstructured or inchoate matter; you’re learning how to perceive an order that already exists in nature. These things are there.

  Well, my point about narrative is that it’s like that. Some narrative shapes are better than others. The shape of classical tragedy—great hero rises to glory and then is brought low by fundamental flaw in character—is a case in point. It’s a very good shape for a story. There might be a small number of these good shapes, and a much larger number of shapes that aren’t so good, and you just get to know what they are. It feels like that. When you’re actually doing it, it feels non-arbitrary.

  But I still don’t know where it comes from. However, that isn’t the point. I’ve been sneaking up on the point while looking at something else. This is the point: I don’t know where that sense comes from, but it doesn’t matter, because I like being in the state in which I believe all of those things at once. I don’t know if that’s a state of mind in which you can write theories, but it’s by far the best one in which to write a story. You have to learn how to be in several contradictory states of mind at the same time, not this one for a while and then that one, and not this one a lot and that one just a bit, but all of them, and many more, simultaneously, to the full, without judging between them. In fact, you have to be like Schrödinger’s cat, which is both alive and dead until you look at it.

  So what helps me most to write stories is the ability to be profoundly sceptical and profoundly credulous, to be in utterly contradictory states, at one and the same time. Whether or not that’s a theory of human nature I have no idea, but cats can do it.

  That was my question. Here’s my observation: you should go with the grain and not against it.

  You see, I spent a lot of time and effort when I was younger trying to write stories of a kind that I wasn’t good at. I tried to write the sort of thing that’s called literary fiction, and I didn’t do it at all well.

  It wasn’t until I was teaching twelve- and thirteen-year-old children, and writing plays for them to act in, that I found something I could do with freedom and exhilaration. The sort of stories I wrote for them were melodramas and fairy tales and Gothic romances. And I loved it. Eventually I made one of them into a novel, and then another, and another, and I found I was a children’s author, to my surprise.

  But then I found myself in another corner of the same trap I’d been in before. I thought that I ought to write realism, because that was a higher sort of thing than the fairy tales and the melodrama. So I wrote a couple of novels of that sort, and they’re still in print, but they were nothing special.

  And it was hard work—a particular kind of hard work. Now I’m not going to pretend that writing novels is ever easy, but I wasn’t enjoying it either. Nor do I want to give the impression that every moment of a novelist’s life is a riot of happy fun; but something just wasn’t right at a basic level.

  I didn’t realise what that was until I began to write His Dark Materials. Here was a story that—whether you call it fantasy or not—is at least n
on-everyday-realistic. And what I felt at that point was that I was coming home, that something in my nature leaped towards this way of imagining things, so that I felt a happy and confident ease when I wrote about dæmons and little people six inches high with poison spurs who ride on dragonflies. This was native to me in a way that realism, much as I’d have liked it to be, wasn’t.

  In fact, the way I felt was very similar to what I’ve felt when carving wood. The wood might be straight-grained and free from knots, the chisel might be as sharp as twenty minutes of dedicated honing can make it—but if you’re going against the grain, you’ll have an extra layer of difficulty to cope with. Turn the work-piece around and carve the other way, and the chisel will cut with nonchalant accuracy, and curls of smooth wood will obediently lift themselves from the surface.

  It’s a question of finding the grain of your own talent and going with it, not against it. You have to observe yourself closely and honestly, and see what you’re good at, and what you enjoy, and what you can do with the imagination you have. Some writers are like boxwood; their talent has a tight and perfectly uniform grain that cuts as happily in one direction as another, so they can turn from history to comedy to tragedy without faltering. Others are like construction softwood, coarse-textured, incapable of taking fine carving, easily splintered. They can only do one kind of rough structure, which may be very large, it may be strong and robust; but we’re talking about carpentry and nails rather than cabinet-making and dove-tailed joints.

  But whatever your talent is, you have to discover its nature and go with the grain of it. Otherwise, not only will you be perpetually frustrated and dissatisfied, because making the will do the work of the imagination is a melancholy business; but the work you produce will not express the nature of what it’s made of. A jewel-box made of deal will be a poor jewel-box, either too flimsy or too clumsy; and to make the rafters of a house out of ebony is to waste the beauty of the costly wood by putting it where it won’t be seen.

  I said I’d end with an epitaph. You’ll find this one on a tomb in the church of St. Peter Mancroft in Norwich, and whenever I go to that city I make a sentimental pilgrimage to see it. It’s the tomb of a young woman. The inscription reads:

  This Stone is dedicated to the Talents and Virtues of Sophia Ann Goddard, who died aged 25 March 1801 aged 25. The Former shone with superior Lustre and Effect in the great School of Morals, the THEATRE, while the Latter inform’d the private Circle of Life with Sentiment, Taste, and Manners that still live in the Memory of Friendship and Affection.

  I don’t know any more about Sophia Goddard than her epitaph tells us, but clearly she was greatly loved and admired.

  But you can see what I’m going to focus on. The great School of Morals, the THEATRE—it’s not easy to imagine anyone using a phrase like that today. It belongs to a particular time in the history of the theatre, and by extension in the history of fiction and narrative generally. I think of Jane Austen’s famous and exactly contemporary comment about the novel in Northanger Abbey: that it’s a work in which you find “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties,” and so on. Audiences and readers at that period saw narrative as a proper vehicle for moral enlightenment, for instruction as well as delight. The Puritans who closed the theatres down a hundred and fifty years before Sophia Goddard died would have had a quite different view.

  Or perhaps not all that different, after all; because both the Puritans who abhorred the immorality of the theatre, and the late-eighteenth-century audiences who applauded Miss Goddard, took seriously the idea that narrative art had a true and meaningful connection with human life. They took for granted that the behaviour of human beings, in all its variety, could be depicted faithfully in stories, and that stories would have a moral effect—whether good or bad—and an emotional and intellectual effect, for that matter, on those who read them.

  As a matter of fact, so do I. Together with pretty well everyone else who has ever read a book, I find that an entirely natural way of reading. As for nature, and what that means: I think that human nature is what we have made ourselves as well as what we were given to start with, and that culture, which includes both technology and narrative art, is the way we do the making. What we are now is partly a result of our remote ancestors’ mastery of fire, for example, which meant that they could migrate into colder regions and evolve different body shapes and skin colours to cope with different climatic conditions, and adjust to different diets; and also partly the result of enjoying, and pondering on, and emulating—or avoiding—the models of human behaviour set out for us by Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, etc., not to mention the great fairy tales, and passing on what wisdom we gain from it to our children.

  So, finally: do you need a theory of human nature in order to write stories? I think you need a theory of your own nature. But that’s not so easy to come by as you might think. You can spend years, for instance, thinking that you’re interested in something, only to discover eventually that you were never really interested; you just thought you should be. Self-knowledge is hard-won.

  And I think you need the capacity to take other people’s theories very lightly indeed. Steal what you need, play with them, fool around with them, but don’t whatever you do become a slave to them. Remember the cat; sometimes in order to be freely and fully human we have to be a little feline too.

  THIS TALK WAS FIRST DELIVERED AT THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS ON 8 MAY 2004 IN THE SYMPOSIUM “SCIENCE, LITERATURE, AND HUMAN NATURE.”

  Apart from anything else (and I still stand by everything I said in this piece) “The Cat, the Chisel and the Grave” is the best title I’ve ever thought of.

  “I Must Create a System…”

  A MOTH’S-EYE VIEW OF WILLIAM BLAKE

  On “systems”—religious, theoretical, mythological, scientific and other sorts—and whether they are necessary

  I see that the title of this lecture is given as “Blake’s Dark Materials.” Now in the lecturer’s handbook, the second rule says: “You need take no obsessive notice of the title that has been announced in advance.” Whether Blake’s materials are dark or not I couldn’t really say, but I am going to talk about Blake, partly, and partly about religion.

  Appropriate, perhaps, in a place like this, but you might think not appropriate from someone whose reputation is that of a scoffer or mocker or critic of religion; but I haven’t come here to scoff or mock. Nor have I come here to recant, as a matter of fact. I’m profoundly interested in religion, and I think it’s extremely important to understand it. I’ve been trying to understand it all my life, and every so often it’s useful to put one’s thoughts in order; but I shall never like God.

  I should also say that I’m delighted to be giving this lecture for the Blake Society, which is an excellent organisation of which I am the entirely undeserving President. Having done nothing to justify my occupation of this exalted office, I was very glad to say yes when they asked me to come and give this lecture. William Blake, as we know, had such extraordinary and penetrating insights into the nature of religion, and expressed them with such force and clarity, that it’s always worth looking at what he has to say on the question. So I’m going to flutter around Blake like a moth around a lamp, trying not to burn my wings, and trying to see with my moth-eyes what the lamp illuminates; because this particular moth is like the drunk man who has lost his keys over there, but is looking over here because this is where the light is. This moth is also slightly like a butterfly, and slightly like a bee, but I shall come to his uncertain insect-hood at the end, when I describe what he believes, in the form of seven axioms.

  But I’ll start with an odd thing that happened to me a few years ago. At that time I was deep in writing the novel The Amber Spyglass, which is the final part of a trilogy called His Dark Materials. Because I’d stolen the name of the trilogy from Paradise Lost, and
because the view I’d formed of Milton had been influenced by Blake’s, I was naturally interested in anything that spoke about the two of them. So when I saw a new book called The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton and Blake, I bought it at once. It was the word Gnostic that attracted my attention as well. I thought I had the Gnostic thing clear in my mind, but it was always good to have a new point of view.

  The book was by A. D. Nuttall, who was Professor of English and Fellow of New College, Oxford, and a very good book it was. It was so good that I began to read it at once and found myself fascinated. But as I read, I was conscious of a faint grinding sound from somewhere, a slight but distinctive shudder in the structure of something, an almost subliminal unease in that part of the ear that deals with balance. In fact, I felt as if I was on board a very large and massively moving vessel whose keel had encountered, on the sea bottom, an equally large and massively immovable rock.

  What Nuttall does in this book is to look at his three authors and the tension displayed in their work between orthodox Christian doctrine and that tendency of thought called Gnosticism, especially the branch of it known as the Ophite heresy. The Ophites (the name comes from the Greek ophis, serpent) emerged in Egypt early in the Christian era, and according to an authority quoted by Nuttall, they believed that “the serpent by which our first parents were deceived, was either CHRIST himself or Sophia [wisdom], concealed under the form of that animal.”

  Well, that’s the sort of thing I like to hear.

  As a matter of fact, that was the very sort of thing I was writing. The scene with the serpent and the temptation was exactly what I was leading up to, but I hadn’t got there yet. I stopped on the way to read Nuttall’s book. And I found myself reading this fascinating account of the underground survival, as it were, of the Ophite serpent-wisdom idea as it manifested itself in Milton and in Blake. And that was when the grinding sound and the deep shuddering feeling and the uncertain loss of balance kicked in.