Philip Pullman gets it wrong
by and published in Edition Three of Pomegranate
Any major public intellectual can expect to be asked about the dominant issues of our time. However, one thinker’s entry to the climate change debate was noticeably odd. He announced, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, that the idea of carbon trading was flawed: ‘We should have a fixed limit and if you use it all up in October, then tough, you shiver for the rest of the year. That’s what I reckon.’ Even more outspoken were his views on keeping polar bears in zoos: ‘It’s worse than slavery’.
Philip Pullman is now the UK’s most prominent Milton scholar, which should perhaps be upsetting but is far too funny, as with his intervention on the side of the polar bears. ‘Most prominent’ means something different from ‘most distinguished’; but Pullman bangs on about Milton in public, in articles, interviews, and now in his introduction to the new Oxford University Press edition of Paradise Lost.
Pullman’s pronouncements on Paradise Lost rather lack variation. Every time it comes up, he quotes William Blake’s famous suggestion that ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ It’s possible that Blake, the anti-church anarchist, might have had his own axe to grind here; but leaving that aside, let’s see how Pullman interprets it.
It’s obviously an attractive idea for a campaigning secularist like Pullman, that Milton couldn’t stop himself cheering on Satan. And in his introduction to the poem, he makes the point again.
This is a story about devils. It’s not a story about God. The fallen angels and their leader are our protagonists, and the unfallen angels, and God the Father and the Son, and Adam and Eve, are all supporting players.
This is just wrong. It’s wrong because the poet tells us so, frequently. What’s the first line of the poem? ‘Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit’ – ‘fruit’ as in ‘result’, but also as in the fruit on the Tree of Knowledge. It’s a wonderful opening line – simultaneously momentous and playful – but above all, it tells us that the poem is about man. And in the Argument to Book I, Milton refers to ‘the whole subject’, which is ‘man’s disobedience and the loss thereupon of Paradise’. There are parallels between the devils’ situation and that of Adam and Eve, essentially that both have lost paradise, but there is no question which story takes precedence.
We can make the same point by looking at simple numerical weight. If we split the story into humans, devils and angels, then we can see that Books I and II are dominated by devils, Book 3 by angels, and Books IV, V, VIII, IX and XI by humans. The remaining two books consist of stories being told to Adam and Eve. It is clear that mankind is the most important group in the poem. But if your impression of Paradise Lost was focused disproportionately on the first two books – maybe because, like Pullman, you studied those two in the sixth form – you might forget this. Pullman starts to go wrong here: his idea of the Fall is different from Milton’s idea, because he does not give enough attention to the later parts of the poem. There is a difference between the rebel angels’ exile from heaven and Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden. Pullman, as we shall see, can’t admit this because it would mean giving credit to God.
But Pullman is convinced that Milton is rooting for Satan. He thinks it’s subconscious – ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’ – but not that subconscious: Pullman has a suggestion for why the poem begins with Satan and the fallen angels. He quotes Alfred Hitchcock saying that if a film starts with a shot of a burglar in a house, and then we hear a car drawing up outside, our reaction is ‘Hurry up! They’re coming!’ So we instinctively sympathise with the first characters we see. Milton is already letting us know that Satan is the good guy.
I’ve got three problems with this ingenious reading. Firstly, a seventeenth-century audience would not have been accustomed to supporting devils – they couldn’t have viewed it as objectively as we do. So Milton’s appeal to human instinct wouldn’t have got very far. Secondly, there is a far better explanation for the poem starting where it does, which is that, as Milton says, it ‘hastes into the midst of things’. The debate between the fallen angels is exciting, so it’s a sensible place to begin. Thirdly, if Satan really is Milton’s hero, he’s not very kind to him, describing a figure of ‘obdurate pride and steadfast hate’.
I’m not entirely sure whether Pullman’s even got the Hitchcock quote right. He doesn’t give his source, and since he completely misremembers Housman elsewhere in the introduction, we can’t rely on his memory. (For the record: Housman avoided thinking about poetry while shaving because ‘my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act’, says the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Not, as Pullman believes, ‘in case he cut himself’.)
Philip Pullman might have got confused by Hitchcock’s observation (to be found on zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/interviews/alfred_hitchcock.htm) that
The average person looking at someone doing evil or wrong wants the person to get away with it. There’s something that makes them say, “Look out! Look out! They’re coming!” I think it’s the most amazing instinct – doesn’t matter how evil it is, you know… The audience can’t bear the suspense of the person being discovered. “Hurry up! Quick! You’re going to be caught!”
This is much more relevant to Paradise Lost. You have to assume that in their unfallen state, Adam and Eve wouldn’t have felt this instinct to side with wrongdoers. Pullman does touch on a significant point: we find it easier to empathise with devils than with God, just as we find it easier to imagine Hell than we do Heaven. That’s a consequence of eating from the Tree of Knowledge. But it’s not the same as approving Satan.
In fact, it’s pretty hard to warm to Satan, the more you think about it. His declaration
in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.
might look like admirable bravado, but really it’s unimpressive. All Satan cares about is hierarchy, and his place in it. As long as he can be at the top of the pile, he doesn’t mind where he is. It’s not a speech which endears ‘the lost Archangel’ to us. He may not even be fooling himself: ‘Farewell happy fields / Where joy for ever dwells’) doesn’t sound like a breezy rejection of heaven.
Pullman asks: ‘Suppose the Fall should be celebrated and not deplored?’ He suggests that we need a new humanist take on the myth:
The end of human life, I found myself saying, was not redemption by a nonexistent Son of God, but the gaining and transmission of wisdom. You can play it this way if you like; but Paradise Lost doesn’t. Pullman misses how much the Fall colours everything in the poem. The Fall overshadows even the action which takes place beforehand, because the scenes of innocence remind us that innocence will be lost. So, for example, in Book IV, Adam and Eve are described eating:
to their supper fruits they fell
Nectarine fruits which the compliant boughs
Yielded them…
These lines are full of foreboding: ‘fruit’ and ‘fell’ are linked, as it will be taking fruit which causes the Fall; and that is down to ‘compliant’ Adam and Eve, who ‘yield’ to temptation. Yet it is also an idyllic description. This is the point: everything idyllic is marred by the knowledge that it will not last.
In the next book, the angel Raphael comes down to warn Adam and Eve of the threat posed by Satan:
…that thou art happy, owe to God;
That thou continuest such, owe to thyself,
That is, to thy obedience…
Raphael goes on to describe the fallen angels:
…some are fall’n, to disobedience fall’n,
And so from Heav’n to deepest Hell; O fall
From what high state of bliss into what woe!
The following line tells us everything, while only telling us that Adam speaks next:
To whom our great progenitor…
When we read this, we automatically link Adam to the ‘fall / From what high state of bliss into what woe’. Again, Milton doesn’t make a big deal out of it; and that makes it even more haunting. ‘Great progenitor’ is double-edged; Adam is ‘great’ as in ‘significant’, but not necessarily ‘great’ as in ‘laudable’, since he is partly responsible for throwing Paradise away. He has not done so yet; Milton reminds us that mankind was unfallen once.
Pullman ignores this aspect of the poem because it implies a sense of regret which gets in the way of his theory. William Blake’s line about Milton being ‘of the devil’s party’ was a comment about the style and tone of Paradise Lost; but Pullman wants to take it further. He has no doubt that the Fall had more gains than losses – he is fond of saying that we should be putting up statues of Eve, and that eating the forbidden fruit ‘was the first thing that led us away from being the pets of God, so to speak, the little creatures who were allowed to run about and have fun in his beautiful gardens, and to become sort of fully autonomous human beings.’ (humaniststudies.org/podcast/philippullman.html)
This is how I imagined Paradise Lost before I read it. I thought that after eating the fruit, Adam and Eve were overcome with shame at their nakedness, but soon dealt with that. They were struck by a sense of new understanding and maturity. However, they realised that God would be angry with them, so they hid.
This version would fit with Philip Pullman’s depiction of the Fall as a liberation. Paradise Lost tells the story very differently. Adam and Eve also think it will allow them to stop being ‘the pets of God’ – Eve looks forward to ‘life / Augmented, opened eyes, new hopes, new joys’.
But when they have both eaten from the tree, it is not liberation that they feel but ‘Carnal desire’. They immediately go and have sex, and then fall asleep. When they wake up, it is not to a new dawn of freedom and wisdom, but to self-disgust and angry regret. The two of them fall to recrimination and bickering. Adam rages against Eve, and condemns the serpent’s promises. His words should be pondered by Pullman, because they contradict the rosy view of the Fall:
that false worm…true in our fall,
False in our promised rising; since our eyes
Opened we find indeed, and find we know
Both good and evil, good lost and evil got,
Bad fruit of knowledge…
Adam twists Satan’s words with enraged irony: yes, our eyes our opened, but only on what we don’t want to see. ‘True in our fall, / False in our promised rising’. So much for liberation.
But something saves Adam and Eve. Something makes a difference between the fallen angels and fallen Man. The rebel angels, don’t forget, are condemned to live in torment and misery; but God will not punish Adam and Eve in the same manner. God wants it ‘to be seen that I intend / Mercy colleague with justice’, and asks Christ to intercede. Christ, crucially, does not only give Adam and Eve something to wear, but also clothes ‘their inward nakedness, much more / Opprobrious, with his robe of righteousness’. This is an echo of Isaiah 61:10 – ‘He hath covered me with the robe of righteousness’. So here is the beginning of God’s gift of grace to mankind. Adam and Eve and their descendants could not bear their shame but, quite literally, for the grace of God. So we see that Adam and Eve have not broken free, as Pullman would like them to. They are dependent on God’s grace, on Christ’s intercession, and on the promise that the Son of God will come to die for their sins. Without this, the Fall is only a fall downwards, not up into a new glorious world.
The introduction to this new edition of Paradise Lost misses out all of this, and presents a view which is simplified to the point of untruth. It’s also crammed with clichés – in a cursory section on Milton’s influence, the author comments that when Wordsworth makes a reference to Milton, it’s ‘as if he’s taking hold of a torch passed by Milton’. How, you wonder, did he think up a phrase like that?
I should point out that I see Pullman firstly as an ally: we’re both atheists with no impressive academic qualifications who have found something worth celebrating in Paradise Lost. Only one of us, though, wants to push a radical new reading. Doubtless at least one reader will come to Milton’s poem who wouldn’t have done without Pullman’s intercession – to this point there is no response. But you can popularise and praise without misrepresenting; and since Philip Pullman is now a name instantly associated with Paradise Lost, he ought to know his limits.
Writing a commentary for the Oxford University Press, on Milton’s quatercentenary, is a serious task which has to be approached carefully. Unfortunately, the publisher’s chosen critic isn’t up to the job. He writes badly, he quotes everyone wrongly, he rants, and worst of all he provides an interpretation of Paradise Lost which is totally inadequate. Alas, it’s not hard to work out why Pullman accepted the OUP’s offer: made fashionable by his modish atheism, he’s got used to having people treat him like a serious intellectual. And it’s easy to see why the OUP picked Pullman: he’s a proper celebrity whose involvement adds to the attractiveness of the book, just as Thierry Henry is currently adding to the attractiveness of Gillette razors. This is not an inspiring state of affairs. Although it’s not as bad as slavery.
Daniel Hitchens
Dan Hitchens was a Foyle Young Poet in 2006, and won second place in the youth category for The Times Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation 2007.