Margaret Cavendish and Philip Pullman

If you search for ‘Philip Pullman Margaret Cavendish’ on google the number one hit will be a brief conversation that I had on twitter with Pullman which began with me asking:

(I’m pretty sure it was the sparkly emoji that caught his attention.)

And here’s Pullman’s reply:

I’m fairly smug about this, but it is odd. As others on twitter also noted (see the replies to my tweet) there are quite a number of similarities between Pullman’s His Dark Materials stories and Margaret Cavendish’s proto-sci-fi novella The Blazing World (I’ll come to those similarities in a moment).

I started to consider these similarities properly when I had a pitch accepted to write a short chapter in a popular philosophy volume on His Dark Materials (it’ll be released later this year, the title of my chapter is ‘From Pantalaimon to Panpsychism’). I premised the pitch on the assumption that Cavendish’s novella from the seventeenth-century was one of myriad pieces of early English storytelling that played a role in inspiring Pullman’s own writing (from what I can tell, others have made the same assumption in the past too). After all, HDM is littered with quotes from Blake, Milton, and faerie stories from the Middle Ages. But when I sat down to research the piece and entered the google search above, all that came up was an undergraduate dissertation from the University of Utrecht. ‘Weird!’ I thought, and more troublingly, ‘what the hell am I going to write about?’ (It’s fine, I thought of something eventually).

Here’s some reasons to think this is odd. To begin, consider these (admittedly, somewhat gerrymandered) synopyses of Pullman’s Northern Lights and Cavendish’s The Blazing World:

(i) A young girl, Lyra, is swept up in an adventure which leads her North, where she encounters a society of talking polar bears, before walking into a “blazing sky” (that’s a direct quotation from the end of Northern Lights) and passing through a portal into another universe.

(ii) A young woman (who is nameless but comes to be known as ‘The Empress’) is kidnapped and taken aboard a ship which heads North, eventually passing through a portal into another universe where she encounters a society of anthropomorphic polar bears.

Now, in both cases, a lot more happens that that (there are two subsequent books in the HDM trilogy, and this only takes us about five pages into The Blazing World). But it does strike me as very odd that Pullman would claim not to have even heard of Cavendish and The Blazing World, even now.

There are other reasons to think this is odd. For one, Pullman has recently expressed considerable interest in the philosophical position known as ‘panpsychism’, which is the view that all things (from microscopic molecules to people like us) are either conscious or have some form of experience. For example, he had a public discussion with the philosopher Phillip Goff, one of the best-known advocates of panpsychism, in Oxford a few months ago.

I get the impression that what appeals to Pullman about panpsychism is that it is a philosophical view that puts life and knowledge back into the world around us; in stark contrast with ‘reductionist’ or ‘eliminativist’ approaches in the philosophy of mind which seek to ‘explain away’ conscious experience and reduce it to the mere operations of the physical brain (I’m probably (definitely) being unfair to some physicalists there… but they can be pretty unfair to panpsychists too). This is particularly clear in Pullman’s latest addition to the HDM canon, The Secret Commonwealth, in which two fictional philosophers defend this kind of view. Lyra, now an undergraduate in Oxford, is enamoured with their philosophy (both sound a bit like ‘illusionists’ about the mind, such as Keith Frankish). Pan, her daemon (her soul manifest in the form of an animal), is concerned.

What is striking to me is that this kind of attempt to put life and knowledge back into the world around us is also at the heart of Cavendish’s writing (both philosophical and fictional) in the seventeenth-century. Cavendish could plausibly be characterised as a panpsychist herself — although usually, to avoid anachronism, she’s described as a ‘vitalist’. In contrast to most of her contemporaries, ‘mechanistic’ scientists like Descartes and Galileo who compared the natural world to a great big clockwork machine, Cavendish believed that each and every part of nature has knowledge of the world around it and acts in accordance with it’s own will. While ‘mechanists’ saw actions in the world around us as akin to the falling of dominoes (everything is ‘pushed’ by something else), Cavendish believed that there is life and knowledge down to the very level of atoms. I think Cavendish would have enjoyed all the talk of ‘Dust’, mysterious particles which permeate all the universes and turn out to be the source of consciousness, in Pullman’s stories.

I’m not sure what the point of all this is, other than to simply point out that there are notable similarities between both content of their stories, and the kinds of worldview endorsed by both Cavendish and Pullman. I suppose I simply think it is all a bit odd.