Ghetto, Shtetl, Or Polis? The Jewish Community In The Writings Of Karl Emil Franzos, Sholom Aleichem, And Shmuel Yosef Agnon Book

A work similar in spirit to Tony Watkins' excellent Dark Matter, in that Freitas and King situate HDM within a thoughtful Christian context, Killing the Imposter God goes a little further towards building up a scholarly theological apparatus for reading the trilogy. While the background in liberation theology, process theology, and feminist slants thereof is the book's strongest contribution, perhaps its greatest weakness is actually in how little it engages with other critical readers of Pullman, scholarly and more traditionally theological alike. Making a reading of HDM, rather than the secondary literature, their priority, though, is obviously the right move if one of the two has to be sacrificed for the sake of concision, or to appeal to a broader audience.

Their revisionist stance is announced in the authors' contention that Nietzsche's Zarathustra doesn't necessarily speak for the philosopher, emphasizing less the death of God than the birth of a new conception of God. Warranted or not, they place Nietzsche at the head of a lineage that stretches through Whitehead, Gutierrez, Boff, Keller and McFague. In short:

"Pullman wrote this trilogy during a theological era when alternative visions of the divine abound, so it is hard to understand how Pullman overlooked all these available alternatives and why he seems unable--or at least unwilling--to consider his own alternative divinity [ie, Dust] in the trilogy. Pullman has by no means killed off God in general. He has killed off only one understanding of God--God-as-tyrant--and an oddly antiquated and unimaginative one at that." (19, cf. Pullman's critique of 'epicycles' in his interview with Watkins)

Again, the argument looks at Pullman's story, rather than his public pronouncements:

"Once we are able to set aside Pullman's personal professions of atheism, it is not difficult to see how Dust takes on many qualities that are typically associated with the divine. Dust existed since the beginning. It always tells the truth... Dust is the source of all creation... And in The Amber Spyglass, we learn that Dust has yet another name: Wisdom--a name for God that many feminists have devoted much energy to exploring." (27)

"Dust holds everything together. It takes on different forms to become spirit, soul, and body, and to make a person. In this way, Dust becomes matter and the world. Even the angels and the Authority are created and formed out of Dust..." (51)

Now, surely that would imply that Dust does tell lies, starting with Authority claiming to be the Creator, all the way down to Lyra, until she learns the value of telling true stories? It may become a matter of semantics rather than metaphysics, but I wonder if the lengths to which Freitas and King take Dust might have been better informed by a brush with Rogers' vitalist monism. A similar squishiness enters in once they start talking about "agapic love" (93). All sorts of love are represented in Pullman, to be sure, but this one popularized by Lewis is probably further from his mind than Blakean (or even Dantesque) desire, which get much shorter shrift. One interesting distinction does get pushed quite firmly, though:

"This claim [by the review in First Things]--that Pullman's notion of salvation is too shallow--is itself shallow. The end of The Amber Spyglass cannot be reduced to two distinct salvific moments--one superficial and one more complex. It should be understood instead as a complicated drama of salvation in three intimately interconnected acts, all of which are linked and indispensable, and correspond to his triune vision of humanity and panentheistic understanding of the divine." (108)

Those three moments, if I have them straight, are the descent into the underworld, the romantic awakening, and the final return to their own worlds. This is the strongest stretch of the argument in the book, for me. The tail end of the series has always been the most complex and difficult for me to interpret, and while I don't go along with them all the way, Freitas and King do a great job offering some support for the position that HDM's ending, far from being a disappointment as many readers feel, is worthy of the story as a whole:

"In what may be the most powerful section of HDM (when Lyra decides to free the ghosts...) Lyra ... becomes the new Moses... Dorothee Soelle argues that humanity learns its purpose in creation through the Exodus story. "In the beginning," she writes, "was liberation." (120, cf. Soelle, To Work and to Love: A Theology of Creation)

"Many liberation theologians read Exodus as logically preceding Genesis; the Israelites have to be liberated from slavery to become a people, and only once they are a people do they ask about and remember their creation. Similarly, it is possible to read God's revelation ... to his chosen people as an act, not only of saving the Israelites but also of saving God... [Pullman's] story culminates, not in the death of God but in God's [ie, Dust's] salvation." (152)

"Pullman has come to a surprisingly Christian conclusion. Echoing the Gospel of John, he seems to conclude that the key to the universe is love and that Real Love requires great personal sacrifice for the love of others. Jesus' mission was to save people..." (156)

"If the preservation of consciousness and creativity and everything else that Dust represents requires sacrifice--even the sacrifice of erotic love, at least on a personal level--then we must be prepared to make that sacrifice, to say the goodbyes that it demands." (157)

The story of Lyra and Will becomes a new Gospel, "the grand story of salvation," complete with a creed (166).

"It is also surprisingly Greek, indebted nearly as much to Socrates and Plato as to God the Father and God the Son. In these novels, preserving true knowledge seems to be more important than preserving true love. In the end, the mind trumps the body. Consciousness trumps matter. Divinity demands the sacrifice of humanity." (158)

"Will and Lyra are asked by the force of circumstance to give up the expression of embodied love of each other, in exchange for the realization of a more ultimate love--their Love of Dust. Whether this is good news is up to the reader to decide. But there seems to be something of a Fall, even in Pullman's Gospel." (159)

Very much so! And it's an aspect of the story we'll see in a new light, perhaps, with the release of the further Book of Dust. Too much gets conflated and set into rhetorical flourishes there towards the very end for me. The interview with the author of Wicked also seems like an odd fit, though he has some interesting points. Still, Freitas and King represent an important contribution to the study of Pullman's initial HDM trilogy.