Dialogues with the Dead III
The Golden Compass, The Underworld River, The Truth.
Shiyoun Kim (Liz)
An orphan, her mysterious guardian and an assassination attempt overheard. The giant talking polar bears in splendid armours. Journey across Oxford Colleges and gyptian boats in parallel worlds, aurora-lit.
To some, Philip Pulman’s Carnegie Medal winning, genre-defining fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials conjures up images of the recent BBC serialization. Older folks might have watched its first movie adaptation in the 2000s, which was rather poorly received. But those of us who grew up with the paperbacks of the trilogy may remember the glorious cover illustration showing curious objects used by the characters in the novel. In Northern Lights, the first instalment of the trilogy, we see our protagonist Lyra Silvertongue laying her hand, for the first time, on such curious object of magnificent significance:
“It was very like a clock, or a compass, for there were hands pointing to places around the dial, but instead of the hours or the points of the compass there were several little pictures, each of them painted with the finest and slenderest sable brush.”
We are soon told that this compass-like object (hence the misleading title of the movie adaptation: The Golden Compass) has the nickname ‘symbol-reader’. As it makes prominent appearances throughout the trilogy, we see the object often performing a crucial role in the unfolding of the plot. Our young Lyra can intuitively interpret its needles spinning around the thirty-six symbols, ever reactive to the Dust (the elemental particles in Pulman’s fictional universe), highly redolent of Democritus’ theory of atoms or Lucretius’ idea of the Swerve in De Rerum Natura. Later she learns that the device has a more profound ability than that of a simple pathfinder or lie detector; it can show the user ‘the truth’. This device is called alethiometer.
Pulman’s naming of the object is particularly illuminating. Those initiated in Ancient Greek would recognise the writer’s cocktail of two Greek nouns in the name ‘alethiometer’: αληθεια (aletheia), often translated as ‘unconcealedness’ or ‘truth’, and μετρον (metron) - ‘that by which is measured’ or ‘the measure’. In a linguistically ingenious way, the writer gives hints to the readers about the true power of the object, much before Lyra herself finds out about it. Throughout the years, our protagonist realises that the alethiometer as a measure of truth gives her as many questions as the answers she hoped it would offer. We find a similar sentiment spoken to and shared with The Boy Who Lived (what an epithet) in another beloved fantasy bildungsroman of our era:
“The truth.”
Dumbledore sighed.
”It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.””
What is the nature of this thing called ‘truth’, that is both so desirable and devastating? Scholars of philosophy may consult Heidegger and his discourses on Aletheia in his magnum opus Being and Time for an answer. As a student of classics, I turn to Ancient Greek.
The word αληθεια is a complex compound of different prefix, suffix, and verbal derivative. Much has been said of its etymology, but according to the German scholar Leo Myers and his Handbuch der griechischen Etymologie (1901), an influential study on Etymologicum Gudianum from the antiquity, the noun can be dissected thus:
Αληθεια = α + ληθη + -ια
The α is the alpha privative which conveys the sense of negation, functioning like the English prefix ‘un’. The - ια is a suffix commonly attached to abstract nouns. That leaves us with ληθη (lethe). A linguist would trace this back to ληθω (letho), the ionic and (highly likely) older form of the verb λανθανω (lanthano): ‘to escape the notice of the other’, ‘to do something without knowing’, ‘to cause to forget’. On the other hand, the readers of Ancient Greek literature would recognise ληθη as the name of one of the five rivers flowing in Hades’ Underworld, that the dead must cross: the River Lethe.
It is, in fact, the River Styx that makes more frequent appearances in the Homeric epics Iliad and Odyssey, largely thanks to the grand, very exciting fashion of the gods and heroes swearing upon Styx, which divides the land of the living and the land of the dead. Yet like its fellow rivers of the Underworld, River Lethe is equally a part of the Greek mythology deeply embedded in classical literature and ethos, as its memorable appearance in Virgil’s Aeneid demonstrates. In Book 6 of the poem, our pious hero Aeneas finally makes his katabasis (the journey down to the Underworld) and faces the ghost of his dead father. The words of his father Anchises, as he observes the pale, wretched shadows wandering on the shore, most hauntingly describes the nature of the River Lethe:
corpora debentur, Lethaei ad fluminis undam
securos latices et longa oblivia potant.
(The souls of the dead, from whom the new bodies are held back by fate,
drink quiet, unconcerned floods and long oblivion at the River Lethe)
Now we have all the pieces of the puzzle. By deconstructing the suffix, prefix, and verbal derivative, we can finally see a glimpse of what the Ancient Greeks understood as the truth, as α-ληθε-ια. To them, it is un-forgotten-ness. It is un-concealed-ness. It is un-River-Lethe-drink-ness.
In our contemporary world of post-truths, fake news, anti-vaccine misinformation, cancel culture, defamation, et cetera, the notion of ‘truth’ increasingly means different things to different people. One’s truth is easily another’s falsehood. Our relationship with what we deem as the truth also differs significantly depending on what kind of person we are, what situation we are in, and even what kind of person we aspire to be. Truth, regardless of with or without the fancy capital ‘T’, appears difficult to grasp and hold onto, due to ignorance or cowardice. It is a confusing time, after all.
Yet nevertheless, as we live in the era where the word ‘truth’ is thrown around with ease, we need to return to the roots of aletheia. Remembering the word’s etymology, we need to reevaluate our own little and big, beautiful and terrible ‘truths’ - is our ‘truth’ something so absolute that it transcends the boundaries of time and space, life and death, ‘us’ and ‘them’? Does our ‘truth’ have such weight to ourselves, so profound and all-defining that we would never forget it, not even after drinking the water of the River of Oblivion in order to be reincarnated? Only when we can fully ascertain our ‘truth’, its indestructible absoluteness, only then I dare say we should call it the ‘truth’. Only then, our ‘truth’ shall guide us like a golden compass in the time of chaos.