THE WAY TO DUSTY DEATH:

The titanic struggles of Tolkien and Pullman put pantomime in the shade (Sam Leith, 06/12/2003, Daily Telegraph)

On December 17, people will queue in their thousands outside cinemas to see The Return of the King, the third part in Peter Jackson's enormous adaption of J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. And, from this week, the National Theatre is previewing the first part of Nicholas Hytner's two-part production of His Dark Materials, based on Philip Pullman's trilogy of children's books.

It will be a titanic struggle of titanic struggles. That is: one titanic struggle of good against evil, versus another titanic struggle of good against evil, struggling titanically for the Christmas family entertainment market. Both number among the most ambitious projects in the history of their respective forms: and both cater to what seems to be an unprecedented revival in the public appetite for grand narrative. Taking the kids to a panto at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre, this year, may not cut it. Epic is back.

[E]ach trilogy offers an account of worlds in which good and evil, though clearly intelligible, stand in a far more complicated relation to religion than, say, the Christian Narnia fantasies of C S Lewis (or even the rather quaint theology of The Matrix). One is the work of a devout Catholic university don; the other that of a former schoolteacher seen by many as having written what amounts to an "atheist polemic".

The Lord of the Rings, as any GCSE English student would tell you, is an allegory about power. That shiny McGuffin - the one that rules them all - has turned Gollum into what he is and given the evil Sauron his strength. Getting to the Crack of Doom and chucking in the ring is the key objective. This is forbidden fruit which wants composting, not eating.

Tolkien tends to mystify, to leave irreducible the origins of Sauron's evil, and mysterious the nature and purpose of the place beyond the Grey Havens, to which Frodo finally travels to rest. Pullman's instinct is the opposite. Tolkien writes primarily about the corrupting effect of power; Pullman primarily about the liberating effect of knowledge.

In His Dark Materials, the struggle of good against evil is not so much metaphysical as to do with the control of understanding. "Dust," writes Pullman of the apparently magical particles in his universe, "is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. The first angels condensed out of Dust, and the Authority was the first of all. He told those who came after them that he had created them, but it was a lie." The enemy, then, is a mendacious God, bolstered by a church that uses obscurantism and menace. "Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."

Michael Oakeshott may as well have been describing Mr. Pullman

There are some minds which give us the sense that they have passed through an elaborate education which was designed to initiate them into the traditions and achievements of their civilization; the immediate impression we have of them is an impression of cultivation, of the enjoyment of an inheritance. But this is not so with the mind of the Rationalist, which impresses us as, at best, a finely tempered, neutral instrument, as a well-trained rather than as an educated mind. Intellectually, his ambition is not so much to share the experience of the race as to be demonstrably a self-made man. And this gives to his intellectual and practical activities an almost preternatural deliberateness and self-consciousness, depriving them of any element of passivity, removing from them all sense of rhythm and continuity and dissolving them into a succession of climacterics, each to be surmounted by a tour de raison. His mind has no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature; his intellectual processes, so far as possible, are insulated from all external influence and go on in the void. And having cut himself off from the traditional knowledge of his society, and denied the value of any education more extensive than a training in a technique of analysis, he is apt to attribute to mankind a necessary inexperience in all the critical moments of life, and if he were more self-critical he might begin to wonder how the race had ever succeeded in surviving. With an almost poetic fancy, he strives to live each day as if it were his first, and he believes that to form a habit is to fail. And if, with as yet no thought of analysis, we glance below the surface, we may, perhaps, see in the temperament, if not in the character, of the Rationalist, a deep distrust of time, an impatient hunger for eternity and an irritable nervousness in the face of everything topical and transitory.

Now, of all worlds, the world of politics might seem the least amenable to rationalist treatment--politics, always so deeply veined with both the traditional, the circumstantial and the transitory. And, indeed, some convinced Rationalists have admitted defeat here: Clemenceau, intellectually a child of the modern Rationalist tradition (in his treatment of morals and religion, for example), was anything but a Rationalist in politics. But not all have admitted defeat. If we except religion, the greatest apparent victories of Rationalism have been in politics: it is not to be expected that whoever is prepared to carry his rationalism into the conduct of life will hesitate to carry it into the conduct of public affairs.

But what is important to observe in such a man (for it is characteristic) is not the decisions and actions he is inspired to make, but the source of his inspiration, his idea (and with him it will be a deliberate and conscious idea) of political activity. He believes, of course, in the open mind, the mind free from prejudice and its relic, habit. He believes that the unhindered human 'reason' (if only it can be brought to bear) is an infallible guide in political activity. Further, he believes in argument as the technique and operation of reason'; the truth of an opinion and the 'rational' ground (not the use) of an institution is all that matters to him. Consequently, much of his political activity consists in bringing the social, political, legal and institutional inheritance of his society before the tribunal of his intellect; and the rest is rational administration, 'reason' exercising an uncontrolled jurisdiction over the circumstances of the case. To the Rationalist, nothing is of value merely because it exists (and certainly not because it has existed for many generations), familiarity has no worth, and nothing is to be left standing for want of scrutiny. And his disposition makes both destruction and creation easier for him to understand and engage in, than acceptance or reform. To patch up, to repair (that is, to do anything which requires a patient knowledge of the material), he regards as waste of time: and he always prefers the invention of a new device to making use of a current and well-tried expedient. He does not recognize change unless it is a self-consciously induced change, and consequently he falls easily into the error of identifying the customary and the traditional with the changeless. This is aptly illustrated by the rationalist attitude towards a tradition of ideas. There is, of course, no question either of retaining or improving such a tradition, for both these involve an attitude of submission. It must be destroyed. And to fill its place the Rationalist puts something of his own making--an ideology, the formalized abridgment of the supposed substratum of rational truth contained in the tradition.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 6, 2003 1:01 PM