The Pinocchio Theory

I first encountered the writing of Philip Pullman in 1979 or 1980. My friend Barry Schwabsky had discovered Pullman’s novel Galatea (1978) on the new books shelf in the library; after reading it, he passed it on to me. I read it too, and found it utterly remarkable. Galatea was (and still is) is sui generis, not much like anything else I have ever read. It’s a fantasy novel for adults, but very different from Tolkien or any other fantasy that I know of. At the start of the book, the narrator’s wife leaves him, and in order to find her again — though he never does — he embarks on a strange journey that takes him to Amazonia, where he encounters strange ruined or unfinished cities, and strange beings, some of whom have supernatural powers, and much of the time whose gender and sexuality do not fit into our usual binaries. Magic and imagination seem to be tied up with money (or more properly I should say with capital), and vicarious experience — the sort you get through literature and music — is just as vivid and present as ‘real’ experience. The narrator is evidently quite naive, but the beauty of the book comes in great measure from the way that, although most of what happens exceeds the scope of the narrator’s own abilities to perceive and understand, his initial naivete itself is never destroyed, mocked, or overthrown. It is something entirely refreshing, although, but also because, it offers such a weird perspective on our actual world of (what had not yet been called) capitalist realism.

I was delighted with Galatea, and I passed it off to other people just as Barry had passed it off to me. For a good while, I never encountered anybody who had read the novel, or even heard of Pullman, independently of the route of occasions, or the thread of acquaintances, that had started with Barry’s discovery of the book. Evidently Galatea did not sell very well; in the early 1980s, there were stacks of remaindered copies, available for a dollar or two, at used bookstores (such as, I most remember, The Strand in lower Manhattan). I would buy extra copies just to give them to people. I wrote about Galatea in my 1990 book Doom Patrols, though I fear I failed to do the book justice, because it was shoehorned into my own tendentious assertions that unfortunately characterize that book.

It took me a while to hear anything more about Philip Pullman. He had in fact written a novel prior to Galatea, but it was hard to find and turned out to be nowhere near as good. He subsequently, through the 1980s and early 1990s, wrote and published a good number of young adult novels, as well as short works for very young children. It took me a good while to find out about these (I did not have children of my own at the time). But I endeavored to read whatever I could find by him. I had read enough science fiction and fantasy pitched to younger readers, that the non-adult categorizations did not bother me.

Pullman became world-famous with the trilogy His Dark Materials, the first volume of which (The Golden Compass) was published in the United States in 1996. I was excited by these volumes, which constituted Pullman’s most ambitious work — the most complexly articulated and developed since Galatea, and far more ambitious in scope, since they constituted an epic spread across multiple worlds, including our own as well as the alternative Earth where most of the action takes place. [Sidenote: I have no liking for the “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics, which seems to me to make dubious and arbitrary metaphysical postulations in a futile attempt to conciliate quantum randomness with physical determinism; but many worlds has been a gift of inestimable value to science fiction and fantasy writing]. His Dark Materials deals with questions of freedom and tyranny, good and evil, and the relations between parents and children; it mounts a Blakean and Shelleyan defense of the imagination, of sexual liberation, and of moral autonomy, in opposition to the reductive Christian moralism of, most notoriously, C S Lewis. I note that Pullman published a scathing critique of Lewis at one point, accusing him of religious bigotry, misogyny, and narrow moralism. I find Puillman’s criticisms to be entirely justified, but the article caused enough controversy that he was forced to backpedal his assertions a bit. Pullman is no naive idealist about human character and human agency, but he always pushes against the assumptions of our contemporary hyper-atomized capitalist culture.

His Dark Materials came out at around the same time as J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, which overshadowed them but which at the same time made the literary world in general more open to “young adult” fiction, which as a result became increasingly legitimated for adults as well. I was living in Seattle at the time Pullman’s books came out, and he made American book tours for all three volumes, which allowed me both to meet him and to see the growth of his audience. He gave a reading from The Golden Compass at Elliot Bay Bookstore; there were barely a dozen people in the audience, and I was the only person there who was neither a child nor an adult accompanying a child. His reading from The Subtle Knife was held in the University Bookstore, with an audience of fifty or sixty. For The Amber Spyglass, they had to move the reading from the bookstore to a larger auditorium (ironically enough, given the novel’s opposition to traditional Christianity, a church down the street from the University Bookstore), which accommodated several hundred people, with more not able to get in.

At all three of these readings, Pullman signed my copies of his books, but I didn’t get the chance to talk with him for more than a couple of minutes. That was enough to give me the sense that he was a genuinely kind and generous human being. My personal impression of him somehow synergized with my love of his novels; somehow his personal warmth (behind a level of entirely justified reserve) goes along with the psychological insights of his novels, which range from Galatea‘s chamber of wonders to his depictions of the ways that people interact with their daemons, or embodied souls, in His Dark Materials and related works. I have come to consider Pullman one of the rare sources of wisdom in our age, even if I do not always agree with him, and even though I much of the time lack his faith in the redemptive possibilities of storytelling. (I should note that he has supported the rights of trans people, in opposition to the bigotry of his better-known contemporary J K Rowling).

Pullman wrote several other books after completing the trilogy of His Dark Materials, in addition to a few short pieces set in the world of the trilogy. But he only returned to the world of those novels in a big way two decades later, with a new trilogy, The Book of Dust. The first volume, La Belle Sauvage, came out in 2017. The second volume, The Secret Commonwealth, was published in 2019. And the third and final volume, The Rose Field, just came out today — which is what has occasioned my discussion here. Pullman has now published six volumes concerning his heroine Lyra Belacqua, aka Lyra Silvertonge. At age 11 or 12, she was the protagonist of His Dark Materials. In the new trilogy, the first volume went back to her infancy, while the second and third volumes re-introduce her to us as a college student, age 20. I am now about to start The Rose Field, which begins just where The Secret Commonwealth left off, with its cliffhanger ending.

I know that I have not said very much here about the intricate details of Pullman’s vision, which brings the Romanticism and radicalism of poets like Blake and Shelley into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And I still have to start reading The Rose Field, which I pre-ordered and which showed up on my Kindle this morning. Philip Pullman is not the only contemporary author whose writing I love — I just completed reading Thomas Pynchon’s wonderful new short novel, for instance. But there is a way that, unlike any of my other favorites or fan obsessions, Pullman has seemed to me to be like a companion, a wise guide, someone whom I have had the privilege of walking alongside of, ever since I first encountered Galatea forty-five years ago: which is to say for more than half of my life. Pullman is seven and a half years older than me — he recently turned 79 — but I hope that he will continue to write more books, and I will get the opportunity to read more of his words, in the years to come. Nonetheless, the publication of The Rose Field, the sixth and probably last of the volumes featuring Lyra, feels like a culmination of some sort, a stopping-point (even if not the ultimate end) of the journey I have taken with Philip Pullman for all these many years. Which is why I felt impelled to write about him today.

I scarcely have the words for this stupendous novel, whose visceral horror is only matched by its eloquence. (I should probably say, “elegant eloquence”, because its power comes in part from the way its gross splatter in terms of content is recounted in so artful a prose style). I have read horror fiction by Cassandra Khaw before — she is Malaysian, but currently lives in Canada; her day job is as a game designer — but she surpasses herself in this new book.

I guess you can say that Hellebore, where the novel takes place, is the anti-Hogwarts. It’s a school for young practitioners of magic, only the magic here is entirely violent, destructive, and feral. The narrator and protagonist, Alessa Li (a name with the same syllabic pattern as the name of the author), has the magical power of tearing bodies apart: a power she first discovers when she uses it in self-defense against her stepfather, who tries to molest her. But there is no innocence in the world of this novel: Alessa has no sense of being a victim, and she sees no distinction between self-protection and aggression. She claims that all the people she killed deserved it, but not that she was always defending herself. It is almost as if the novel is telling us: ‘oh, you say that there is no such thing as society, but only individuals and families? You say that the world thrives through competition, all against all? Well, I will show you what that is really like’.

We get a backstory for the novel, contemptuously dumped by the narrator in a single page, telling us how magic thrived in the older world, but was driven underground by the rationalism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. These years were characterized by people’s craving to “cut the cosmos open and see what was inside.” This led to what we know as modernity, “a revolution in human thinking. We went from soothsayers to science, gods to generating electricity. Our lifespans grew; childbirth stopped being a macabre lottery.” The narrator’s point is that this flourishing of rationality, involving the absolute rejection of an earlier world of magic, for all its benefits was itself a sadistic drive to dominate the world. Rationalism and enlightenment were as barbaric as magic itself. And so, after “these years of frenzied development, interspersed with decades of war”, by a sort of inevitable backlash the magic returned. It quickly became a problem, because “this plague of global re-enchantment led to a decimation of the workforce… Capitalism was unsustainable without bodies to feed to the machine”.

What I have just summarized is passed over quite quickly in the novel. But it seems important to me because it sets up everything that follows. Alessa is not admitted to the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted by some owl messenger; rather, she is brutally kidnapped, and finds herself there against her will. She tries to escape, but discovers that this is impossible. The students are nasty, and continually bicker with one another; but the faculty is even worse. I think this resonates with the actual world in which I live, and in which I read the novel: what Fredric Jameson once called “the bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital” is extremely difficult to grasp in objective, cognitive terms; rather, it is experienced on the subjective, individual level in the form of neofeudalism (as Jodi Dean and many others have argued). Although social relations are, in their overall structure, highly abstract and highly mediated, we experience these relations in the most immediate, visceral, and personal or sub-personal terms, through vast hierarchies of mastery and subordination. While the social world as a whole may be governed by ineluctable and inscrutable laws, as is envisioned and explored in Kafka’s texts of a century ago, today my individual experience of these structures is a partial and extremely localized one: the power to which I am unwillingly subjected is embodied, immediate, and directly branded into my flesh.

Khaw only intimates this historical background. For the most part, The Library at Hellebore narrates body horror as it fills the register of immediate experience. Everybody at Hellebore, student or faculty, is a monster: “someone with the potential to destroy the world three times over, and still have time for a good long brunch”. Put a lot of such people together, and they will both ally with one another and brutalize one another. Everything horrific about them will be cultivated and drawn out by the faculty, intent on shaping them into their worst selves.

But there’s even more. The novel mostly takes place at a crisis point. At the end of the school year, when the students graduate, the faculty devour them in a cannibalistic orgy. Many of the novel’s chapters are marked as “Before”, and give an account of the entire year Alessa spends at Hellebore. But these sections are interspersed with chapters set in the present: a few students have escaped being consumed, and they barricade themselves in the school library, doors locked so the faculty cannot enter. (They still have to deal, within the library itself, with the Librarian, a monster with the face of a human woman, but with a long caterpillar-like body). As the students try to defend themselves, and also fight among themselves, Khaw’s glittering prose (I can only call it that) details a seemingly unending series of wounds and aggressions, spillings of blood and gore and internal organs. But these are accompanied by subtle internal, affective shifts: moments of fear, but also moments of caring and (strange as it may seem) intimacy.

The realm of fear and violence is also, subtly, a realm of affection and sensitivity, in which Alessa and her peers experience surprising moments of otherness-contact, or what the philosopher Joseph Libertson called proximity. These moments are expressed in prose that is surprisingly delicate and subtle, even as it describes sheer atrocity. For instance, at one moment Alessa describes experiencing “a vertiginous sensation half like food poisoning and half like the worst migraine ever…” Something like this is as much excitingly unfamiliar as it is excruciating; and this is the way that the prose of the novel moves us forward, although what it describes is unremittingly horrific and bleak. Even at its most caustic — as when Alessa says that “years spent around men who believed that their dicks were reliquaries taught me how to smile despite the wave of nausea rolling through me” — the novel’s language is carefully exploratory, and illuminating in its precision and lack of pretense.

This extends even to the strange intimacy and recognition that sometimes passes between Alessa and the other monsters:”Minji smiled thinly and we sat then in a new silence, aware we had, very companionably and without a shred of animosity in our hearts, declared, in fewer words than perhaps were merited, that we would eventually be at each other’s throats. Whether such a time would come to pass was irrelevant. The words couldn’t be taken back and a sliver of me would always regret our honesty in that moment.”

Such quivering sensitivity at the heart of brutality is what really makes the novel work for me. I would not want to live in the world imagined by Khaw; but the really disturbing thing about the book is how insidiously it insists that, most likely, I already do. The few vestiges of saving grace the novel offers us only make sense in the context of its overall frightening vision; this is what is most deeply disturbing about it. Monstrosity is not an intervention from the Outside (as it is, for instance, in Lovecraft’s stories), rather, it is as intimate as my relation to my neighbor, or even as intimate as my relation to myself.

Charlie Jane Anders’ new novel, LESSONS IN MAGIC AND DISASTER, is a fantasy novel with a light touch — sufficiently light that it is barely fantasy at all. The fantasy element — the practice of magic — is barely an extension of the actual world we live in. Jamie, he narrator/protagonist is a trans woman: a graduate student in English writing her dissertation on British women writers in the 18th century. She is involved in a difficult relationship with somebody who I presume is also a woman — though this is never explicitly stated; since this person uses they/them pronouns. The narrator’s other most important (and difficult) relationship is with her mother, who is mourning the death of her own partner (another woman). So this book is really about queer families, and about personal connections: those we cannot help being part of, and those we construct for ourselves. We all need, and most of us have, family relationships of one sort or another, though this is true without necessarily privileging the heterosexual nuclear family, and without denying the difficulties of such relationships (William Blake once wrote that “A man’s worst enemies are those/ Of his own house and family”).

In addition, the narrator is a practitioner of magic. Here, magic is understood as a way to manifest one’s own intentions. It involves finding a place that exists in between nature and culture, like human refuse left in the woods or some other natural spot, and leaving in that spot several objects: something that symbolizes or references what is being wished for, and something that is given up as a sacrifice. There can also be additional adornments. Jamie explains, somewhat dubiously: “it’s about knowing what you really want, in your fucking secret heart, and putting your wishes into the world in a way that can be heard.”

In the course of the novel, Jamie teaches her mother how to do magic, in an attempt to cure her mourning for her late partner. Over the course of the novel, magic sometimes works, but not always. It can have unanticipated consequences (as all forms of desire can have). And it sometimes blows back on the practitioner. Also, since one’s wishes generally involve relationships with other people, there are problems with what those other people — lovers, family members, friends, enemies, innocent bystanders — might themselves want and need.

Though personally, I do not believe that magic, as defined in the novel, actually works in the real world, it makes powerful sense in the novel as an intensified form of all the delights and dangers that come up when we negotiate our desires with other people (whom we may desire, love, or hate, and who in their own turn have their own equally complex desires). The workings of magic are also depicted as liminal (in between nature and culture, in between what we feel consciously and unconsciously, and so on), which makes it impossible to draw clean lines between realms as we all too often want to do. And the practice of magic also occurs within a world that, like the world we actually live in, involves both individual and collective dimensions, both the personal and the political, if only because bigotry is real, and homophobes interfere with the lives of people who just want to continue doing what they do.

The hardest thing for me to describe about this novel is its mood or tone, which is delicate and hopeful, but also all too aware about the obstacles other people and the very structure of the world place in our way, as well as the ways we harm ourselves and others, make mistakes, treat other people (even our loved ones) unfairly, and generally have difficulty separating joy from pain, generosity from selfishness, or satisfaction from regret. In a way, this is therefore a mundane novel, or a ‘realist’ one; except for how the existence of magic in the narrative, and in the lives of its characters, serves as a form of self-therapy, and a way to connect with others. This other-directed dimension is what distinguishes it from the more common first-person realist narrative, and what allows it, ever so lightly, to access, and use to its advantage, the subjunctive dimension (as Samuel R. Delany might call it) of non-naturalistic fiction.

SHROUD is a look at alien sentience, by the (alarmingly prolific) science fiction writer Adrian Tchaikovsky. Two engineers are stuck in their spacecraft (which is actually more like a bathysphere) on the surface of an alien planet they call Shroud. Shroud is actually a moon of a gas giant in some solar system far from ours; but it is larger and denser (and hence with greater gravity) than Earth. It is enclosed in a thick hydrogen/methane/ammonia atmosphere, so thick that atmospheric pressure at the surface is twenty times that of Earth at sea level, and also so thick that no light can get through. Even the searchlights of the spacecraft can only cut through the murk for small distances. The astronauts are stranded; they have to travel halfway across the planet to reach the space elevator cable, dropped by the spaceship they originally came in, which is the only point from which they can be rescued (and indeed the only point from which any message they send can reach space beyond Shroud’s atmosphere at all). It turns out that Shroud is filled with rich and abundant life, which gets its energy from “planetary radiation, vulcanism, and a tiny greenhouse effect” (in this respect, Shroud is similar to some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn). As the protagonists struggle to move across the surface of Shroud, they interact in multiple indirect ways with the native life, which is blind (since there is no light on Shroud) but which senses its surroundings by emitting radio waves (radar sensing, communication, and thought, all in the same medium). The human protagonists’ survival involves interacting with these native life forms in all sorts of ways. The novel is both an adventure story, and a sort of philosophical meditation on the possibilities of sentience.

I just finished reading C J Cherryh’s novella WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE (one of the three texts in the collection ALTERNATE REALITIES, available on the Kindle for $9.99). WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE is a brilliant work of science fiction. It takes place on a planet where powerful men (more often men than women) believe that they create their own reality and impose it on anybody “weaker” than themselves. They simply deny the existence of what is not within their will, learning to not even notice the existence of others who are excluded from their social arrangements (such others include both human beings who have been shamed and demoted or expelled from society, and to non-human intelligent beings). (This reminds me a bit of the way in which, in China Mieville’s THE CITY AND THE CITY, the people of the two cities have learned to ignore their mutual co-existence, each person unseeing the people of the other city).

The protagonist of WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE, Herrin, is a sculptor who is fatuously confident of his own superiority and genius; the only person he recognizes as perhaps an equal is his frenemy, Waden Jenks, the dictator ruling human society on the planet. Herrin makes a huge statue of and monument to Jenks; this project is a clash of the two men’s will-to-power, since Herrin is both glorifying Jenks and solidifying his tyrannical rule; and yet at the same time Herrin is asserting his own superiority over Jenks, since the implication of the piece is that Jenks needs Herrin’s artistic genius in order to claim supreme status. It is a prototypical example of how society is grounded in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, or perhaps of Nietzsche’s vulgarization of this dialectic in his vision of hierarchies generated by conflicts of clashing wills-to-power.

Once the statue and monument are finished, Jenks understands that he has been both elevated and consigned to his place. In order to reinforce his dominance, he has his goons beat up Herrin and especially break all the bones in Herrin’s hands, so that the artist will never be able to sculpt again. There is a lot in the novella about how Herrin’s mastery is concentrated, not just in his ability to see and imagine, but above all in his manual dexterity in shaping clay and stone to his will. (This reminds me of the scene in Tarkovsky’s movie Andrei Roublev, where an aristocrat has artisans blinded so that they will never be able to construct a house more beautiful for the one that they made for him).

I won’t discuss the later twists of the narrative, except to say that Cherryh plays out the consequences of the collapse of Herrin’s worldview, and his being forced to understand that others exist — both human beings and aliens. Reality is capacious and contradictory; it contains many forces, and nobody can think to dominate and control them all. The way I have expressed it, this seems like an obvious point to make; but in asserting it, Cherryh undermines and deconstructs the pernicious myths that are central to our cultural imaginary, and that have been asserted not only by the most obvious creators and mythmakers (like Ayn Rand and Leni Riefenstahl), but much more widely in the literary and cinematic fictions that we consume and swear by.