This is one of the books that made me: The Kingdom Under The Sea And Other Stories by Joan Aiken, Pictures by Jan Pieńkowski. I was given this copy of the book 30 years ago, in 1989, when I was university, trying to decide what to do with my life.
It was instantly familiar. I felt a deep shock of recognition when I saw those silhouetted wolves and horses; those stunning washes of dream-like colour. I was transported directly back to my childhood, and some of my earliest memories.
Because I'd had another copy of this book back then; a childhood copy, long since lost. I'd spent hours and hours looking at those pictures as a child. They weren't the kind of pictures you usually found in children's books. They were genuinely magical – the kind of wild, unpredictable, dangerous magic I wanted, which was seldom allowed into children's books, where things were more often safe, comfortable, and just a little bit dull.
But these pictures suggested
that anything was possible; anything was allowed. They seemed to take me seriously as a reader,
as a viewer, and trusted that I could handle it. They made no concession to the fact that I
was a child. They just opened doors to infinity,
and invited me in.
Well, encountering this
book again at university, I remember thinking this was it: children's
literature was the kind of literature I wanted to make myself!Because this seemed to be a book beyond age,
or time, or any categories at all.
That, to my mind, is
one of the hallmarks of great children's literature.I believe children's books are really books
for an audience that includes children, but excludes no-one.They are books for everyone, and that is what
Jan has dedicated his life to making.
But it was startling
for me to realise that these images actually existed, out there in the world; that
somebody else had made them. Because looking
at them as an adult felt rather like re-living a fever dream I'd had as a
child. I had taken them inside me so
deeply, they'd become part of my inner life, helping to shape my imagination,
and the way I saw the world.
Again, I think that's
a mark of great children's literature.Because
it's children's books, more than any others, that make us who are; that shape
us, and stay with us forever.And Jan's books
have done that again and again and again.
It was astonishing to
think that the same person who made these pictures also made the pictures in
Meg And Mog, Haunted House, Robot, so many classics.I don't think I'd put that together, as a
child.But I do remember being
fascinated by his name.
As someone with an Arabic
name that's so difficult to pronounce if you don't speak Arabic, I've ended up
using initials, to make it easier - I felt something unusual, looking at that
name. I couldn't tell how to pronounce
it, or where this person might have come from, or even what gender they
were. Was it Jann? Yann? But I knew immediately
that they were different in some way; they were a little bit like me.
And as I looked at
that name again as an adult, trying to find my path in life, something lit up
in my mind.The idea that maybe you
could be different, you could have an unpronounceable name, but you could still
make books; books that might become part of people's lives.It was so empowering and inspiring for me to
think that someone who came from somewhere else could become an integral part
of British culture.
I think everyone
here today feels that way about Jan's work.It really is a vital part of British childhood; it's impossible to
imagine it without him.He has shaped
our culture at the deepest levels.And
that ability to shape a whole culture, across multiple generations – that, I
think, is something that only the very greatest children's literature can do.
And because that is precisely what Jan Pieńkowski has been doing for over 50 years now, I can't think of a more worthy winner of the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award.
And as I personally
have spent most of the 30 years since I was given this book writing children's
books, reading them, talking about them – I would like to thank Jan on behalf
of all of us who love children's literature for his extraordinary lifetime of achievement,
and for his extraordinary example; for showing me that a migrant child could do
anything, and that a children's book could do anything, too – absolutely anything
at all.
Thank you very much, Jan.
Lucy Mangan, Diana Gerald, Smriti Prasadam-Halls, Jan Pieńkowski, SF Said, Nicolette Jones & Ed Vere
Peter Dickinson (1927-2015) was a giant of children's literature, once described by Philip Pullman as "the greatest of us all". He won the Carnegie Medal twice and wrote more than 50 books in all, including The Changes trilogy, Blue Hawk, Tulku, City of Gold, Eva, AK, and The Kin – a series of four books about early humans, set in Africa 200,000 years ago. The Kin is one of my favourite books of all time, a hugely ambitious attempt to make modern myth from evolutionary science, and I was lucky enough to interview Dickinson not long after its publication.
SFS: I think The Kin is a profound exploration of what it means to be human. How did the idea for it come about?
PD: I wrote a book about a very early hominid, called A Bone From A Dry Sea. An American publisher asked if I would write four shorter books for younger children on that theme. My brief was short sentences and an adventure in every chapter. I started on it as a pot-boiler but it got hot, and really took hold of me. Ideas can't help creeping in!
The first book is setting the thing up, and the second book and third book are meeting other peoples, and bringing out the question of what it is to be human. I wrote the last book in six weeks. It all came together. It was all there, ready, waiting to be unpacked. I hadn't planned it that way, but it's got architecture and everything, it's extraordinary – it's not my doing! I feel as if it wasn't. It ends on the line: "It was people stuff." I thought of that line two pages before I got there. I said to myself, "God, that's where it's been going all this time!"
Some books are given and some are earned. My visual metaphor for this is that some books come freshly out of the mountain, all you've got to do is collect the water; other books you have to dig a well for. The Kin came out of the mountain.
SFS: The fact that the characters always speak in the present tense has interesting implications for human perceptions of time and memory, imagination and so on.
PD: Well, this is what I mean by ideas. They asked for prehistoric books. I realised that these people had to speak, therefore they had to be in the early stages of language. So I thought, "This is interesting – I wonder what the early stages of language are like?"
I was working to a brief in that I was trying to simplify my sentence structure. I started writing very simple sentences. Then, after writing the first section, I thought to myself, "I'm not quite sure what the grammar of this is – what they can and can't do – so I'd better have some rules! So no inflections of verb to make time..." My publishers and I had to go back through the first volume, spotting the bits which were not in Kin-Speak.
Then, just to get the plot moving, I made one of the children a shaman, and found that I was dealing with the early stages of religion as well. I didn’t say to myself when I started, "OK, we’re going to have the early stages of religion and language!" But you cannot keep the ideas out.
SFS: Tell me about the myths that come between the main story.
PD: They were enormous fun! They were lovely to write. I particularly like the last story. It seemed to me to be a way of explaining what they believed. You get a feeling of depth; although this is early mankind, you get the feeling this has been going on for some time.
SFS: What kind of research did you do?
PD: I’d researched quite a lot on the early stages of language, and I knew about the research into mitochondrial DNA, which demonstrates statistically the point at which the first humans like us came into existence, and what a remarkably short time ago it was. I'd read a lot and talked to a lot of people about early hominids. But I tend to write a draft and then say, "What do I need to know?" and do the research at that stage. Because you can waste an awful lot of time doing research which turns out to be no use, and you can also misdirect the book by finding out something fascinating and thinking, "I must get that in!"
SFS: I often notice environmental and ecological elements in your books. PD: Yes. My very first books, The Changes, they're ecological. I didn't write them to be ecological; I wrote them because I had a nightmare, which is the first chapter of The Weathermonger, and I told myself a story. And then you say to yourself, "If machines are wicked, what is the moral basis behind all this?" And it all just comes out. In the science fiction I used to read when I was a teenager, nearly always, the hero was the person who got the machines going and restored the march of progress. I think I'm instinctively much more ambivalent. The last line of The Weathermonger is: "The English air would soon be reeking of petrol."
PD: It started with a programme on the World Service about child guerrillas, which included to my ear a hair-raising sentence: "Even a hardened government soldier will hesitate that crucial half second before gunning down a child." And I thought, "What can this be like?" I think it's probably my best book – though I always have to explain to children that there's no such thing as a best book. But I think it goes somewhere; does something. It's alive and moving.
I'm told there were two judges who wanted it to win the overall Whitbread [now Costa Book Of The Year] in its year, and it was said that if ever a children's book was going to win it, that would. Immediately after that, they decided not to have children's books on the list. I think that was partly because the authorities were outraged at the possibility that a children's book might win. I happened to talk to one of the judges, a great grand-dame of letters, and it became clear to me that she had no intention of reading it. She misunderstood what the book was about, thought it was in praise of guns, and I could see from her face that she didn't intend to read it.
SFS: AK has a double ending; an open ending, really.
PD: Right. My original notion was that the boy would go and dig up his AK and smuggle it into the palace and he and his pals would create a diversion while Michael, his patron, shot his way out. And the more I got into it, the more I realised – not for aesthetic reasons but moral reasons – that I couldn't write yet another book in which physical force is undone by physical force. That is the obvious solution, and I had to find another solution. The solution I found involves a lot of wishful thinking – the OAU being in the capital at exactly the right moment – but on the other hand, it came together extremely well.
SFS: That kind of politics is unusual in children's books.
PD: I wanted to try and get readers to feel what it is like to be in that situation – not what should be done about it, but how people can behave like this. What are the passions and motives. This is what fiction is for. It is not to tell you what ought to be done or to preach messages, but it is about understanding, and this includes the understanding of how people can be so beastly to each other.
SFS: You've written across many genres in the course of your career. PD: One of the beauties of writing for children is that you can try anything. There are quite a number of people working in children's books now who would have been writing adult stories a generation ago. I also write adult novels, and if I had to give a kind up, I would give up the adult books. There's more freedom in children's books. They're not easier to write, but from a writer's point of view, it's a lovely field to work in. I've written 50 books since 1968. Several of my books began as stories I started to tell my children in the car, to stop them fighting. Blue Hawk and Tulku were like that.
SFS: There's often a difference between what children like to read and what adults think they should read.
PD: You aren't allowed to bore children. You've got to keep the story cracking along, and you mustn't preach to them either. But children's books are enormously mediated by people for whom they're not primarily intended – librarians, teachers and so on. I myself have benefited very much from this; I've won the Carnegie Medal twice [for City of Gold and Tulku]. But I think there is a danger of Carnegie Medals being given to books which are good for you. I've won prizes which the kids would not have given me, because I write the sort of books which adults think children ought to read. This is certainly true with City of Gold and Tulku. With The Kin, for the first time in my life, I wrote the sort of book which children wanted to read.
SFS: What do you think of CS Lewis's Narnia books?
PD: I think there's an awful lot wrong with them, but they have great imaginative power. His capacity for finding strong visual symbols for particular states of moral dilemma is... I would say that the Narnia books and Pilgrim's Progress are the only things in our language of that kind. The Narnia books are a failed but very, very interesting attempt. Failed for a whole number of reasons, not merely the unpleasantness of his outlook on certain things, but also the uncertainty. I believe in his heart he was not a joyful Christian. His baddies are so much better than his goodies. There are some appalling lapses in tone, especially when Aslan comes onto the scene.
Peter Dickinson 1927-2015
SFS: Why do you think human beings have this endless need for stories?
PD: What distinguishes the giraffe as a creature is its long neck, which has evolved to make it a giraffe. What distinguishes us is our imagination. We need it for two purposes. You have this population of modified apes from a very warm country, spreading across the world, moving into new habitats, and they've got to learn to exploit those habitats. They can't afford to do it by trial and error; they've got to imagine what would happen in such and such circumstances, imagine futures and so on. Also, because they're a pack animal and they're adapting very fast, they cannot rely on pack instinct to keep the pack together. They've got to imagine what other members of the pack are feeling, they've got to make allowances for each other, and so on.
You need to practice this. Fiction is practice. That's the reason why, when you put down a good book, you breathe a sigh of satisfaction. It's the same kind of satisfaction you feel after you've come in from a healthy walk, except it's an intellectual satisfaction rather than a physical satisfaction. The organism, the body, the mind needs this to stay healthy, and so nature gives you this reward of feeling, "Ah, that was good!" I seriously believe this is what we do – we give people exercise in something that is good for them, that stretches their evolutionary nature. In the same way that fox cubs playing outside their den are learning the skills they need in order to survive, we need to stretch our imaginations.
If you're interested in reading The Kin, there will be a group reading on Twitter starting on Friday 2 November 2018, with one book a week being read through the month. Follow the hashtag #PeterDickinson to join in!
I was very sad to learn that the great Richard Adams passed away recently. Watership Down was a book that changed my life; as I've written before, there would be no Varjak Paw without Watership Down.
I had the pleasure of meeting Adams in 2002, to interview him for an article I was writing. When I heard he'd passed away, I re-read the transcript of our interview, and found some fascinating material I hadn't been able to use at the time. We talked about how inspiring he found the work of mythology scholar Joseph Campbell; discovered an unexpected connection between Watership Down and Star Wars (another big influence for me); and discussed his views on writers including Alan Garner, Ursula Le Guin and Philip Pullman. So as a tribute to Richard Adams, I've decided to publish this material now.
=============================================
SFS: How did the idea of the rabbits having a mythology begin?
RA: Well, one of the happiest things that has happened to me is my friendship with Joseph Campbell. I think it was the proudest moment in my life when I was invited to New York to speak at Joseph's 80th birthday. That really chuffed me. I had a lot of talks with him; sometimes he would take me to the Museum of Mankind and show me war canoes and totem poles.
SFS: How did you meet him? One of the epigraphs in Watership Down quotes his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces; had you met him already when you wrote it?
RA: I'd bought The Hero With A Thousand Faces when it came out in 1949, and I read it straight through twice, and on and off ever since. Then, when I was in New York and had a day or two to spare, I discovered Joseph Campbell's address; he lived in Greenwich. I just went and rang the doorbell and told him who I was. He couldn't have been more friendly. We spent the whole day together, although he'd never met me before, and we had a splendid dinner at his club at the end of the day. I told him how much I'd enjoyed it, and I told him all about Watership Down.
SFS: What did he think of it?
RA: Of course it's very like some of Joseph Campbell's stories; it was very much up his street. He thought it was marvellous! What he specialised in was folk tales, he knew all about folk tales. There's a 3-volume work, The Masks Of God, it's wonderful. He was by far the most interesting person I think that I've met in the course of my life.
SFS: Campbell was also a mentor for George Lucas, who made Star Wars.
RA: I know. Well, there were three speakers at that dinner, and they put me first. So I thought, "I'll do something special." And I did, although I say it myself! I gave a marvellous speech; I was in tears when I sat down, and so were several other people. I finished up by saying, "That's why I've travelled 5,000 miles to be here tonight, and that's why I'm enormously glad to be speaking at this dinner. Really, there's only one thing that I've come to say, and I say it now with all the force at my command and all the sincerity of which I'm capable: thank you, Joseph, thank you." And with that I sat down.
SFS: Who were the other speakers?
RA: One was a lady teacher at a university. But the third speaker, and very bad he was, was the director of Star Wars.
SFS: George Lucas?!
RA: Yes. He obviously hadn't prepared a speech at all – it was full of ers and ums. My speech was much the best, if I say it myself.
SFS: Watership Down and Star Wars were two of the biggest phenomena of their time – and they were both made by people who were avid Joseph Campbell readers.
RA: Yes, I suppose so. Well, The Hero With A Thousand Faces hit me like a bomb when I read it. I was in a great muddle at the time about my religious ideas, and trying to make sense of the cosmos. The Hero just sorted that out for me. Religious ideas made sense now; you could see how they occurred in similar format in all nations and all races. And the conception of the cosmos for the first time in my life made sense. Oh, it was a wonderful thing to know Joseph Campbell, and I re-read that book every now and then.
SFS: Did it also influence the main narrative of Watership Down – the way in which Hazel becomes a rabbit hero; the way Fiver is really a shaman?
RA: Yes, of course, it's closely modelled on the ideas of The Hero. Hazel, and Bigwig of course becomes very important as the book goes on – well they all do, Blackberry, Dandelion… Yes, I certainly owe that to Joseph Campbell.
SFS: Around the same time that you were writing Watership Down, in the 1960s, writers like Alan Garner were also using mythology in their work.
RA: I've got a great respect for Alan Garner. I think he's a marvellous writer. I've got all his books.
SFS: There was a whole wave of children's literature that was very ambitious in that way – Ursula Le Guin, too.
RA: Ursula Le Guin is a great friend of mine. I've got all her books, and I've corresponded with her frequently all along. I've got a very high opinion of Ursula Le Guin. The Left Hand of Darkness: I think that's marvellous work. And the Earthsea trilogy. Another big influence is Mary Renault. The Mask of Apollo, The Last of The Wine. The best one I think is the one about Theseus: The King Must Die. Although she is not widely known and popular as she ought to be.
SFS: How about more recent authors? I heard you'd enjoyed Philip Pullman's Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife? They have that mythic feel, too.
RA: Yes, they certainly do. The highest ability that a novelist can show, in my opinion, is quite simply the power of invention. A novelist who can invent things like you'd never think of for yourself – and carry the story along because you become so fixed on the marvellous powers of invention – well, that's one reason why I'm so much in favour of Ursula Le Guin. Her power of invention is very strong.
SFS: How about JK Rowling – have you read any Harry Potter?
RA: I've never read a Harry Potter book. I ought to have, oughtn't I? I haven't really had the time for Harry Potter, but I wish the lady well. Anybody who can get a book published, I wish them well!
When I first read Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, they were a trilogy about a hero in his prime. In A Wizard Of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs Of Atuan (1971) and The Farthest Shore (1972), she told the story of Ged, also known as Sparrowhawk, as he grew from Gontish goat-herd to world-saving wizard: a classic children's book narrative.
That seemed to be the end of it. But then she found new stories to tell. In Tehanu (1990), she showed Ged living a life without magic, learning to take satisfaction in the pleasures and pains of an ordinary existence with Tenar, the priestess who shared his greatest adventure. The book follows her story as much as Ged's.
Then in The Other Wind (2001), Le Guin showed Ged near the end of his days: still wise, but almost an absence now, reconciled to his irrelevance. The story was about other characters finding their way without him.
Le Guin wrote a new story whenever she had something new to say. That seems to me exactly right. I've never wanted to give my own characters new adventures in which nothing changes. Repetition seems to me a much bigger risk than letting them grow.
So in my first book, Varjak Paw (2003), Varjak is a kitten: a very young character who learns a secret martial art from very ancient cats. In The Outlaw Varjak Paw (2005), he is a grown-up cat, and the questions he faces are grown-up questions about law and justice, politics and morality.
I stopped there, because I didn't have another story to tell about him. And I had other things on my mind, such as my space epic, Phoenix (2013), and my current work in progress, Tyger, both of which are about young characters finding their way. But the one question I've heard more than any other since 2005 is: "Will there ever be a third Varjak Paw book?"
To my surprise, now a decade has gone by, I find myself thinking more and more about Varjak. He seems to be ageing with me. I now feel sure there will be a third book, in which the story comes full circle. Varjak will now be an old cat himself, teaching the secret martial art to much younger kittens: passing it on. That makes sense to me as the shape of a trilogy, and the shape of a life.
But to write a story about an old character, perhaps you should be old yourself, to know what it feels like. I'm getting there faster than I thought possible, but I'm not quite ready yet. I am keeping notes, though, making plans, gathering material for that time.
It's comforting to know that far greater writers have made this journey. I look at Le Guin's example. As she recently said of Earthsea: "Authors and wizards learn to be patient while the magic works." I just hope readers can be patient too.
This post is based on a talk I gave at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford on January 30 2105, about how my books are inspired by mythology, and by William Blake.
My first encounter with Blake was his poem The Tyger, which I remember studying when
I was at school. This poem just blew my
mind. It seemed so exciting, mysterious,
epic – full of huge, evocative images. Also, it's about a tiger, and I really like tigers! And it seemed mythic to me, and if
there's one thing I've always loved, it's mythology.
Back then, I had no idea that Blake had created an entire
mythology of his own, because the poems in which he did it are not nearly as
well known as The Tyger.But I took in all the mythology I could get. I remember at school, we had a teacher who would stop everything on a Friday afternoon, and read us Greek and Roman myths. Amazing stories about gods and goddesses, heroes, heroines and monsters – and I found these absolutely thrilling.
I went away and read retellings of myths, like the Puffin
Classics written by Roger Lancelyn Green. Not just Greek and Roman myths, but Norse,
Egyptian, and Mesopotamian myths… As
someone whose family came originally from the Middle East, I was delighted to
find that the very oldest written stories we have came from that part of the
world. So they were hugely important to
me.
I was also very interested in modern writers who used myths
in their books. Writers like Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, who in books like The Dark Is Rising and The Owl
Service took ancient British myths and folktales and brought them into the
modern world. Writers like Ursula LeGuin, who invented all kinds of amazing myths in the Earthsea books. Later on, I loved the way Neil Gaiman used
mythology in The Sandman comics; and what Philip Pullman did with it in His
Dark Materials.
These were all great examples of the kinds of stories I
wanted to write myself: stories that were truly mythic.Because I love the idea that myths might be
true in some deep way; that they might express something timeless about the eternal
questions of our lives: Who are we?Where do we come from?Where do we go?What does it all mean?How should we live?
These are the big questions that myths deal with.In our time, I think the place where that
happens is in writing for young readers: in children's and young adult fiction.So that's what I decided to write – although
to me, my books are books for everyone, that anyone can read, whoever they are,
however old they are…
So let me tell you a little about my books. Varjak Paw, my first one, is a book about
cats. These cats tell each other legends
about their great ancestor, Jalal the Paw: the greatest warrior cat who ever
lived, the mightiest hunter, who came out of Mesopotamia and travelled to the
ends of the earth…
Varjak grows up as a kitten hearing these legends, and
wishes he could have adventures like that.
Before he knows it, he has to leave home on his own to save his family;
he goes out into a dark and dangerous city all alone; but in his dreams he
meets the legendary Jalal, who begins to teach him a secret long-lost martial
art known only to cats: the Way. The
myths come to life, and teach him how to live.
Phoenix is an epic myth set in space, where humans and
aliens are fighting an apocalyptic war.
A human boy who loves the stars makes friends with an alien girl, and
together they discover that the stars are
dying. The aliens believe
the stars are alive, and can even come down from the sky to walk among us from time to time. When they do, people are dazzled by them and call them gods and
goddesses, but what they really are is stars.
They've come again and again through history, and these stars – known as the Twelve Astraeus – are the origins of all the ancient pantheons.
They were called different things in different times and places, but all cultures have known them. Above is Dave McKean's beautiful illustration of the Astraeus of Love. She's the origin of all the myths of Venus, Aphrodite, Ishtar and so on. Below is the Astraeus of the Sea, who has been known as Poseidon, Neptune, Njord, Apsu, Tiamat... So in Phoenix, we go back to the origins of all mythology, to try and find out what it really means.
While I was writing Phoenix, I was beginning to read William
Blake again, and to look at his later, more complicated poems. And I discovered that so many of the stories and
writers I loved had been inspired by him.
Because he was one of the first to take ancient mythologies and make
something new from them, something that spoke to his own times and the things
he cared about.
Blake loved mythical, mystical systems of knowledge. A lot of people did in the 18th century; it
was a time when people became interested in unexplained mysteries like
Stonehenge and the Druids, and the lost continent of Atlantis. Many ancient myths were being unearthed and
published for the first time – Icelandic, Germanic, Gaelic myths. For the first time, they were seen as
expressions of deep truths; not silly stories told by primitive people, but
ways of making sense of human experience, dealing with the mysteries of life,
and those big questions I mentioned earlier.
At the same time, Blake was passionately engaged with the
politics of his day, with huge earth-shaking events like the French and American Revolutions.And he was living
through massive changes in the texture of everyday life.The 18th century saw the beginnings of
industrialisation, mechanisation, mass production; the rise of science and
rationality over all things; and some people including Blake felt in response a
hunger for the spiritual, the mysterious, the mythic. In his own time, he was largely ignored, but as
those changes went further in the 19th century, Blake was rediscovered by Rosetti and pre-Raphaelite
artists, and Yeats and mystical poets.Through the 20th century, his work became
more and more relevant; and now in the digital age his reputation is bigger
than ever.
Blake explored all of these things through a mythology that
he created, which he expressed in poetry and art of incredible intensity and
beauty. I should say in all honesty: this is not easy stuff. The first time I tried to read it, I didn't get very far! But if you have patience and stick with it, keep looking at the pictures as well as the words – you do begin to enter a highly charged mythic space that is phenomenally rich and rewarding. It doesn't all make sense or tie up neatly; this is poetry and pictures, after all. But I'm going to try and talk you through some of it, to help you make sense of it, and maybe begin thinking about how you might go about making your own mythology – because I think that's something everyone can do.
If you're interested in mythology, there's a famous 20th century scholar called Joseph Campbell who analysed it in books like The Hero With A Thousand Faces. He identified many elements that are common to all mythologies, because every culture has versions of the same myths, the same stories, the same characters.
But Campbell wasn't the first to notice this. William Blake was very aware of it, and he in turn was inspired by a writer called Jacob Bryant. His 1774 book 'A New System, Or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology' was perhaps the first cross-cultural comparative mythology. Bryant argued that the Bible stories and Greek myths were inherited from an even earlier original. He believed that these stories came from a race of giants dispersed across the world, and that they were the fragments of an ancient and forgotten faith. What Blake wanted to do was to recover this lost original, through his own mythology, which drew on all the systems he knew: the Greek myths of Hesiod's Theogeny, the Roman myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Norse, Germanic & British myths – and of course the Bible.
Blake's own mythology begins to emerge in a poem called America: A Prophecy (1793), in which he writes about the American Revolution through his own set of mythic characters. The poem has historical figures like George III and George Washington, but behind them, there are giant mythic antagonists, who go by the names of Urizen and Orc. They represent spiritual and psychological states. Urizen stands for repressive rationality, while Orc stands for rebellious energy. He's the one who inspires Washington, Jefferson and Franklin to declare independence; he's the true revolutionary spirit. It's a bit like Homer's Iliad, where we see the Trojan War heroes, but behind the scenes, we also see how they're manipulated by the gods.
Blake then went much further in The Books of Urizen, Ahania and Los – all written in Lambeth in the last years of the 18th century. These books make up his so-called 'Bible Of Hell', in which he wrote his own versions of The Books of Genesis and Exodus. Just think about that for a moment: someone deciding to rewrite the Bible – in the 18th century. And that's not all; he also decided to rewrite science, and threw in a whole new theory of human perception and origins too!
The central idea is very simple, but very revolutionary. Blake believes that the material world is really a prison, and a mistake. All of matter is just spirit that's been trapped. The story in these poems is how that happened.
This idea isn't original to Blake; it has roots in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah and the Gnostic Christian tradition. But the way that Blake explores it, through the characters and images of his mythology, is absolutely his own.
In his rewriting of Genesis, in his Creation myth, the world is not made from nothing; it's actually a mistakenly limited perception of the infinity of all being. Urizen, the main character, starts out as one of the Eternals, connected with everything, and part of infinity; but then he decides he wants to be a separate being. That's the big mistake that starts everything off. Remember that Urizen stands for rationality – so this is rationality deciding it's separate from everything else that makes us human.
Urizenbegins to divide up reality. There he is above, with his compasses, measuring and limiting it. This is such a famous image, and people tend to see it as God creating the world – but to Blake, this is a spirit making a catastrophic error which leads to its own downfall, and to all the separations that we live with: self from other, subject from object, mind from matter, moral from immoral, finite from infinite, time from eternity, and so on.
It's a deeply subversive image. And in the Book of Ahania, Blake creates a sequel to the story, a sort of version of Exodus that also reaches towards the New Testament, in which Urizen's son Fuzon rises up against him, and they fight – like the Titans and gods in Greek mythology. Urizen kills his son, nails the corpse to a tree – and on that tree, the corpse is resurrected and comes back to life…
These are incredibly huge dramas. The events are elemental and primal. The forms are gigantic and heroic. You can see it in the artwork. It's not exactly realist. Peter Ackroyd has compared it to modern science fantasy comics and genre fiction. Think about, say, Marvel Comics and films: Thor and Loki in The Avengers. It's a bit like that. Blake gives us superhuman heroes and gigantic villains, with fantastic weapons. Fuzon uses a huge thunder-stone that lengthens into a kind of laser beam; Urizen has a bow made of a gigantic dead serpent's ribs.
It's amazing stuff, and if you're interested in making your own mythology – as I am – it's endlessly inspiring.
In fact, I can tell you that the working title of the new
book that I'm writing right now is actually… TYGER!I can't say very much about it, because it's early
days yet and my books change a lot as I work on them. But I can tell you that
there's a huge Blake influence in this book; there's an entire new mythology;
and, of course, there is a TYGER! So I'm going to leave you back where we began: with William Blake's amazing poem,
The Tyger.
