Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman – Essays 5 and 6
This is the third post in a series on Philip Pullman’s Daemon Voices covering Essays 5 and 6 (The Origin of the Universe: The Storytelling of Science and Religion A Response to a Lecture by Stephen Hawkins and The Path Through The Wood: How Stories Work).
Daemon Voices is a book containing a collection of 32 nonfiction essays on storytelling written by Philip Pullman, author of the best-selling series, His Dark Materials.
This blog post is unique because it is not going to be a traditional blog post. It is going to be a literary discussion. As an avid reader and top ranking GoodReads book reviewer, I also have some strong ideas about storytelling, and I will share my reaction to Pullman’s statements. Shall we begin?
The Origin of the Universe
At the beginning of the essay, Pullman states that the questions, “Whey are we here?” and “Where did we come from?”, are good ones. In regards to this statement, I wholeheartedly agree.
One of the things that I really enjoy about Pullman’s writing is that there are really big issues and themes throughout. There isn’t just a battle; there is an epic good-versus-evil showdown.
“The trouble comes when fundamentalists insist that there is no such thing as analogy or metaphor, or else that they were wicked or Satanic, and that there must only be a literal understanding of stories. The Bible is literally true. The world was created in six days.”
– Philip Pullman in Daemon Voices
In this essay, Pullman has an interesting discussion of metaphors and analogy. Even Jesus used parables!
At the end of the essay, Pullman poses some additional thought-provoking questions: Where are we going? What shall we do?
These are also some hard-hitting thoughts. Can stories be more intellectually daring? Are authors pushing intellectual boundaries? Are authors telling original stories never told before? Can we write new stories with unique formats, extraordinary characters, and exploring different narrators?
The Path Through The Wood
“I have friends who write books, and it always surprises me how differently we work.”
– Philip Pullman in Daemon Voices
Pullman references Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Road Not Taken, focusing on the last three lines:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Pullman advices writers to never leave the path or the readers will be bored. And this is why I love Pullman. When I read Tolkien, author of The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit, I wanted to pull my hair out, and I kept falling asleep. Drowsiness would set in anytime I even thought about the book.
This essay changed my life because I will never read another piece of fantasy again in the same way. I will always be viewing the work through the lens of: Did the author stick to the path or did they get lost in the wood?
In this essay, there is a discussion about the development of characters in The Amber Spyglass, the mulefa. However, I didn’t care for that portion of the book because it wasn’t interesting. Pullman went too far into the wood on that one. The best part of the mulefa was listening to Pullman narrate The Amber Spyglass. He has so much enthusiasm and wonder in his voice. Listening to him is enchanting and magical.
Pullman also wrote about attending science fiction and fantasy conventions: “Another reason for my slight feeling of dissociation is that I seem to be regarded, while there, as a writer, of fantasy, whereas I’ve always maintained that His Dark Materials is a work of stark realism.”
My very first BookTube video covered The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. In the video, part of the commentary included some criticism that the fantasy is a touch underwhelming, that it isn’t as fantastical as Tolkien.
Two weeks after I published this video, Pullman wrote an article in The Guardian, commemorating 25 years of His Dark Materials. In the article, he wrote, “To some extent, my story was protected from awkward changes because I set it in a world that was not ours. It was like ours, but different, so I could take account of the real-world changes that helped my story, and ignore those that didn’t. I didn’t want to write a pure fantasy of the Tolkien sort, unconnected at any point with the real world…”
“However, I’ve never been a games player of any kind – computer games and card games and chess and Monopoly have never had the slightest attraction for me – so maybe it’s the games-playing cast of mind you need and I haven’t got.
– Philip Pullman in Daemon Voices
This might be why Pullman and I get along so well. I also hate card games and chess. If someone forces me into playing, I try to lose right away because it bores me so much.
If you are a writer or want to learn more about storytelling, be sure to pick up Daemon Voices! Check out the links below for the other parts of the Daemon Voices series:
Introduction through Essay 1
Essay 2 through Essay 4