Telling True Stories, or The Immanent Ethics of Material Spirit (and Spiritual Matter) in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials

The World of the Dead consists of a dim and desolate, endless plain populated by the ghosts of the dead: wispy cold vapors, material certainly, but barely the memory of a body, and capable only of whispers. Within this barren, never changing landscape, the dead shuffle and murmur eternally, in uncountable, infinitely increasing number, eventually forgetting the feel of the world, the joys of their lives, and even their own names. Only their sorrows and weaknesses do they remember, and these only because they are subject to the endless torment of the Harpies—foul, flying beasts who circle the ghosts, ceaselessly taunting them with the darkest secrets of their lives. Nothing but this happens here. Nothing but this has ever happened here. And nothing but this will ever happen here. Except, perhaps, that eventually, as years, decades, and centuries drag on, the terror and shame provoked by the Harpies' shrieks fades and blends in with the gray monotony and lifelessness of the terrain.

Mary Malone nearly collapses from the sight. Some distance from her modest hut in the world of the mulefa, cut into the side of a hill she finds a window opening into another world. But it is not the window, or the existence of another world, that shocks Mary. She herself comes from our world and had passed through several such windows before settling in the world of the mulefa. No, what gives Mary the feeling that "the ground had given way beneath her mind" is what emerges from the window:

a procession of ghosts [. . .] old men and women, children, babes in arms, humans and other beings, too, more and more thickly they came out of the dark into the world of solid moonlight—and vanished. That was the strangest thing. They took a few steps in the world of grass and air and silver light, and looked around, their faces transformed with joy—Mary had never seen such joy—and held out their arms as if they were embracing the whole universe; and then, as if they were made of mist or smoke, they simply drifted away, becoming part of the earth and the dew and the night breeze.

(AS 431–2)

Before vanishing, an old woman ghost approaches Mary and whispers the following cryptic advice: "Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well. Just tell them stories" (AS 432).

What sort of a universe is this, in which the dead, consigned from time immemorial to a blank, barely material existence, should suddenly emerge into the moonlight, only to then transform and become part of the stuff of the world? And what sort of universe in which this seemingly miraculous turn of events, this passage from a World of the Dead to an animate, material World of Life, should be effected by the simple telling of true stories? It is the universe of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials and, as I shall attempt to show in the pages that follow, it is a universe that rests upon a very particular vision of material spirit and of the practical and ethical implications of such a vision.² I have found it difficult to write straightforwardly about His Dark Materials, especially with the phrase "material spirit" in mind. In part, this difficulty stems from the dizzying richness of the narrative interconnections among the various characters, worlds, elements, and ideas that comprise the trilogy. But the difficulty also arises because nearly all of these elements in the trilogy relate in one way or another to material spirit, not to mention to a variety of visions of matter and of spirit and of their relation that have been elaborated over the past twenty-odd centuries of human history. Pullman enters subtly, and above all, narratively into a philosophical conversation with many voices.

In composing my meditations on the stimulating density of His Dark Materials and on its participation in key philosophical conversations, I have constrained myself in three ways—making my...