qui tollis peccata mundi
Sep. 23rd, 2014 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotessethe thing that gets me about the way Pullman has it all end up in His Dark Materials - more than the muting of Lyra, the generic alterna-afterlife stuff, the gratuitous heterosexuality – the thing that really gets at me is the narrative insistence on children's obedience. imo that's a hard conservative value, and gives the lie to Pullman's self-positioning as a humanist alternative to Christian fantasists, C.S. Lewis in particular.
Because there is a lot of aptness in the transposition of the Christian god-problem onto the problem of disempowerment and modern western childhood: both are cases where one is ruled over despotically by an incomprehensible being of greater power than oneself, without voice or recourse. cf The Pevensie children, who don't get to decide where they reside at any given moment; parents porting them about to Professor Kirke's house or harmful schools or American holidays or Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta's, or Aslan snatching them away to Narnia and then deporting them back again, it's not much different from their points of view. Lewis doesn't give you an alternative, but he does present it with sympathy and resignation – it's shit, but there's no changing it. you just have to make the best and go on.
I would argue that the place where HDM actually does initially succeed in subverting anglo xtian values is Lyra's unwillingness to submit to this sort of thing, and the way that the early parts of text don't punish her for her resistance and disobedience. Lucy Pevensie is expected to bow her head and accept Aslan's judgment of where and how she ought to be, but Lyra Silvertongue, she don't accept jack shit. and it's fantaaaastic, because for a good run there Pullman totally backs her on it. It's why I was willing to go with Lyra=Eve, despite my disinterest in xtian iconography, because disobeying authority, succumbing to temptation, getting caught, and wiggling out of it are such ttly Lyra things to do. Lyra succumbs, Lyra always always ALWAYS disobeys, and Lyra always gets away with it in the end
except for the one time that she really weirdly and wrongly doesn't, at the end of the whole shebang, with the window-closing "back to your own time" business that retroactively warps her entire character and the entire character of the world of the text.
As soon as the fate of the universe is hung on the Lyra/Will Thing, which anyway puts a weird amount of cosmic pressure on the emergent libidos of a pair of pre-teens but I have a soft spot for youth romance so whatever, the text starts scrambling toward this absolutely bizarre erasure of it. Suddenly, it seems, it's Really Important for nu!Adam and Eve to be sent to their own respective corners. The business about the worlds and closing all the portals is MacGuffinry at its finest. Why do all the doors suddenly have to be closed? An angel said so. How does that fit in with the use of Dust as a metaphor for developing human consciousness, anyway? Does the impulse toward exploration=the heat death of the universe? It's too neat an ending, so isolationist, and awfully disciplinarian. Lyra gets put in her box and told to stay there by a figure of divine authority.
Not the Authority, but really what's the difference?
And she just DOES IT. WHAT THE HELL NO>
For all his posturing about being more progressive and ethical than Lewis, Pullman leaves a girl-child reader even higher and more dry. Not only is Lyra cut off from inter-world travel against her will, she's expected to be EVEN MORE ACCEPTING of this than the Pevensies are of Aslan's dictates. They at least got to grouse at god; Lyra is expected to swallow her character development like a good girl and to like it, too. It's like that Foucauldian difference between externalized punishment systems and internalized discipline systems. The tightly-laced corset punishes your body, yes, but when corsets go out of fashion you're expected to discipline your figure into the same old shape, just substituting diet and exercise for grommets and whalebone. And, unlike a corset, you can never take your discipline off, or articulate dislike of it, because you have to take it into your own heart as Right and Best. Lyra gets shoved into a limiting, narrow discipline system by a combination divine mandate and authorial fiat, and I'm damned if I can see how that makes her some kind of new and improved Eve.
Biblical flavor Eve, though, yeah, she def. had to put up with that shit. Which means that Pullman, intending to do more to radically transform and question the Eden myth than his anglican kidlit predecessors, actually only managed to recapitulate its commonly-received themes with even greater and more singular intensity.
Because there is a lot of aptness in the transposition of the Christian god-problem onto the problem of disempowerment and modern western childhood: both are cases where one is ruled over despotically by an incomprehensible being of greater power than oneself, without voice or recourse. cf The Pevensie children, who don't get to decide where they reside at any given moment; parents porting them about to Professor Kirke's house or harmful schools or American holidays or Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta's, or Aslan snatching them away to Narnia and then deporting them back again, it's not much different from their points of view. Lewis doesn't give you an alternative, but he does present it with sympathy and resignation – it's shit, but there's no changing it. you just have to make the best and go on.
I would argue that the place where HDM actually does initially succeed in subverting anglo xtian values is Lyra's unwillingness to submit to this sort of thing, and the way that the early parts of text don't punish her for her resistance and disobedience. Lucy Pevensie is expected to bow her head and accept Aslan's judgment of where and how she ought to be, but Lyra Silvertongue, she don't accept jack shit. and it's fantaaaastic, because for a good run there Pullman totally backs her on it. It's why I was willing to go with Lyra=Eve, despite my disinterest in xtian iconography, because disobeying authority, succumbing to temptation, getting caught, and wiggling out of it are such ttly Lyra things to do. Lyra succumbs, Lyra always always ALWAYS disobeys, and Lyra always gets away with it in the end
except for the one time that she really weirdly and wrongly doesn't, at the end of the whole shebang, with the window-closing "back to your own time" business that retroactively warps her entire character and the entire character of the world of the text.
As soon as the fate of the universe is hung on the Lyra/Will Thing, which anyway puts a weird amount of cosmic pressure on the emergent libidos of a pair of pre-teens but I have a soft spot for youth romance so whatever, the text starts scrambling toward this absolutely bizarre erasure of it. Suddenly, it seems, it's Really Important for nu!Adam and Eve to be sent to their own respective corners. The business about the worlds and closing all the portals is MacGuffinry at its finest. Why do all the doors suddenly have to be closed? An angel said so. How does that fit in with the use of Dust as a metaphor for developing human consciousness, anyway? Does the impulse toward exploration=the heat death of the universe? It's too neat an ending, so isolationist, and awfully disciplinarian. Lyra gets put in her box and told to stay there by a figure of divine authority.
Not the Authority, but really what's the difference?
And she just DOES IT. WHAT THE HELL NO>
For all his posturing about being more progressive and ethical than Lewis, Pullman leaves a girl-child reader even higher and more dry. Not only is Lyra cut off from inter-world travel against her will, she's expected to be EVEN MORE ACCEPTING of this than the Pevensies are of Aslan's dictates. They at least got to grouse at god; Lyra is expected to swallow her character development like a good girl and to like it, too. It's like that Foucauldian difference between externalized punishment systems and internalized discipline systems. The tightly-laced corset punishes your body, yes, but when corsets go out of fashion you're expected to discipline your figure into the same old shape, just substituting diet and exercise for grommets and whalebone. And, unlike a corset, you can never take your discipline off, or articulate dislike of it, because you have to take it into your own heart as Right and Best. Lyra gets shoved into a limiting, narrow discipline system by a combination divine mandate and authorial fiat, and I'm damned if I can see how that makes her some kind of new and improved Eve.
Biblical flavor Eve, though, yeah, she def. had to put up with that shit. Which means that Pullman, intending to do more to radically transform and question the Eden myth than his anglican kidlit predecessors, actually only managed to recapitulate its commonly-received themes with even greater and more singular intensity.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-24 09:20 pm (UTC)