Harry Potter's Bookshelf (19 page)

We started down the road to allegory with satire because both are devices that employ literary language to refer to something else, be they specific individuals, ideas and ideologies, or types of people holding certain beliefs. Both provide the reader with something to interpret, a puzzle even, and allow the reader a certain sense of triumph once they have decoded the author’s potential message. But while satire is often used to be critical of someone or something specific, allegory has its greater power in nonspecific referents that draw the reader into the message and meaning of the book.

Allegory can extend and deepen the moral meaning of the story and point to something greater. For an example of this larger view, let’s look through the allegorical lens at the gothic setting and devices of
Harry Potter
. Without straining our eyes, we should be able to make out a world of antimodern, even traditional religious meaning in that castle with ghosts and suits of armor.

Like the
Harry Potter
series, many, I dare say “most,” great children’s fiction, and books often labeled as such, are, as Jill Lepore wrote in
The New Yorker
, “utterly bound up in the medieval.”
²
From Tolkien to Lewis, from Norton Juster’s
The Phantom Tollbooth
to Brian Jacques’s
Redwall
series, the fantasy setting of these books resembles the Middle Ages more closely than it does our modern day.

It doesn’t take more than a moment’s reflection on favorite books to recognize this trend. Alice’s trip through the looking glass and her adventures with the chessboard characters there are essentially a side trip into feudalism-kings, queens, knights, and knaves. And each escape and sojourn into Narnia with the Pevensie children and Eustace Scrubb, like
The Lord of the Rings
epic, is another journey into an imaginary Middle Ages that is set as a critical foil to our own age.

There is a pattern here that I hope you are catching: the Battle of the Books between life, love, and laughter against the forces of antiseptic reason and scientism.

The medieval backdrop as a critical foil set up against our technological times is an echo of Jane Austen’s subtle critique of Hume’s empiricism (see chapter two), of the “fallen man” morality of gothic romance and horror opposed to humanism and materialism (chapter four), and Swift’s broadsides and satirical swipes against the Enlightenment thinkers (chapter six). The poets and Romantic visionaries since Swift have retreated behind the high barricades of popular fictions and poesy to carry on the traditional critique of the mores and advances of their time, a subversive war against the dominion of scientific, analytical reason shorn of love, conscience, virtue, and imagination.

What is it about a medieval setting-the castles, monks, and feudal trappings-that makes it the vehicle it is for critiques of modernity? Two things.

First, to scientists and nonbelievers (to simplify and generalize), medieval Europe, focused as it was culturally (at least relatively speaking) on matters of faith, was an age of superstition and subjective nonsense. The Romantics chose the medieval setting, in other words, as the stage for antimodern dramas because the scientists whose inhuman rationalism they were fighting had chosen the “Dark Ages” they decided were “dark” as their enemy and counterpoint. Second, the medieval period serves as an excellent literary foil because of that time period’s art and literature. Unlike modern naturalist paintings and realist novels that are largely devoid of poetry, the art of the Middle Ages is suffused with the sacred and spiritual and song. The people’s worldview and the art corresponding to it were relatively otherworldly, which is the reason, of course, that the rationalists consider it a “dark” time and the Romantic reactionaries thought it a fitting place of resistance.

The castle and technology-free setting of Hogwarts have an obvious medieval message contra modernity. It’s nothing, though, compared to the stories themselves, which several times seem to be allegorical entertainments written in imitation of the plays, poems, and prose of the Middle Ages.

With the spiritual and intangible taking such precedence in a society centered around the Church and scripture, medieval people saw this world as a “shadowland” existence. There was a greater life to come that sometimes revealed itself in the saints, in nature, and in art, and it was this life toward which, culturally and nominally at least, minds and hearts were oriented. Medieval folk, consequently, looked to the theatre, the plastic arts, story, and song for clarification about how they were to achieve salvation and eternal life.

D. W. Robertson, Jr., explains that characters in medieval dramas, then, are not to be understood as realistic portraits, individual personalities, or even types per se. They are instead
exempla
, “stories with an implication,”
³
or exemplars of vice or virtue. They are allegories, or the
alieniloquium
, in which we are meant to see pictures for our reflection and edification.
⁴

This is easier to see in the morality plays and novels of the English tradition than it is in the wider-read works of Chaucer or Shakespeare.
Everyman
(c.1480) is typical of this purely allegorical genre. In it, God sends Death to call the character named Everyman to judgment. Everyman begs Death for time to put his life in order but only gets permission to seek companions who will testify to his merits before God. He seeks out Fellowship, Kindred, Good Deeds, and Knowledge, among others, and after confessing, receives the jewel of Penance. This animates Good Deeds sufficiently that she is able to accompany Everyman to Heaven. In case anyone in the audience missed the point, a Doctor (“learned man” in Latin) explains the importance of good deeds in spiritual life at performance’s end.

Perhaps the most important written work in English letters (having never gone out of print) is also pure allegory. John Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come
(1678) follows Christian on his pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Christian is a figure like Everyman; he lacks individual quirks or personality but represents humanity in toto on his spiritual quest. Like Everyman, he encounters figurative characters as both guides (Hopeful, the Evangelist) and as characters representing the challenges, opportunities, and points of passage along the way from the fallen world to heaven’s paradise.

Rowling uses similar allegorical devices that at once reference the preceding works and help build the depth of her own series. Remember in
Sorcerer’s Stone
when Harry and Draco are in the Forbidden Forest at night serving a detention with Hagrid? They stumble onto a unicorn that has been killed and a man in serpent form who is drinking its blood. Firenze, the centaur, rescues Harry from what we learn later was Quir reldemort and explains to him why anyone would drink unicorn’s blood.

The brilliance of this is in its allegorical meaning, which, sadly, a medieval audience might understand better than Rowling’s own. It’s a fairly straightforward dramatization of St. Paul’s teaching in his First Letter to the Corinthians on receiving the blood of Christ properly. The snake man is a stand-in for fallen man or even the devil in the Garden of Eden. The unicorn in the Western tradition is a symbol of Christ. The life-giving blood of the unicorn is the Blood of Christ in the Eucharist. Paul writes about those who receive the Blood of Christ unworthily that they are damned: “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body” (1 Corinthians 11:29, KJV). Rowling here drops a biblical mystery play into her postmodern drama to make vivid the godless horror and desperation of Harry’s enemy.

A “mystery play” is the term given for a depiction of a story acted out straight or very close to the scriptural account; think “Passion dramas” or just a staging of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden or the Nativity in Bethlehem. A “morality play,” in contrast, is a depiction like
Pilgrim’s Progress
and
Everyman
in which a person representing all humanity or “man” meets characters representing challenges and opportunities on what evangelicals call the “Christian Walk.” Ms. Rowling gives us two of these, one at the end of
Chamber of Secrets
, the other in Harry’s walk into the Forbidden Forest in
Deathly Hallows
.

The
Chamber of Secrets
drama is a
morality
play because the hero, Harry descending into Slytherin’s long-closed basilisk berth to save the fair maiden, is in large part an Everyman drama. All men and women, like Harry, are called to make a choice to confront the demons in their basements and to act sacrificially and lovingly for what is true, good, beautiful, and sacred. The
mystery
play component is that Harry’s defeat of the basilisk and Tom Riddle, Jr., like the adventure with the centaur and unicorn, is a staging of biblical teaching in dramatic, allegorical form. Harry’s victory because of his faith and his ascent from the depths of the Chamber cavern, the satanic serpent’s lair, to the heavenly Hogwarts via the Resurrection phoenix is a transparency of how a Christian finds salvation in Christ.
⁵

Deathly Hallows,
as we’ll discuss in chapter nine, is built on a scaffolding of alchemical events laid over the Christian calendar. Key events happen in Harry’s transformation on Christmas Eve, Theophany, and Easter. The climax of the story takes place, not on the calendar date for the Crucifixion but in a depiction of it in story form. Ms. Rowling has said several times that Harry’s walk into the forest in
Deathly Hallows
(chapter thirty-four) was the most difficult and rewarding chapter of the books for her. It is largely a retelling of the Crucifixion of Christ.
⁶

In essence, chapter thirty-four, titled “The Forest Again,” is simultaneously a retelling of the Crucifixion and a story of the death of a Christian Everyman. Harry’s choices, and successful struggle to believe, have transformed him into a transparency of the God-man in whom he believes. “The Forest Again” tells us how:

Ms. Rowling inevitably tells Harry’s story in language resonant with the Passion gospels. The chapter following it is titled “King’s Cross,” in case we missed the Calvary message, and, when Harry returns to the forest from his conversation with Dumbledore, we get even more. Narcissa Malfoy’s “nails pierced him,” so we are left with a fallen savior pierced by nails, a Cross, and despairing disciples. Other than a plaited crown of thorns, I’m not sure how she could have made her allegorical point more obvious.

Perhaps it is having Harry, her Everyman figure, in imitation of Bunyan’s Christian throwing off his pack of sins at the “Place of Deliverance,” losing the scar/Horcrux by having died to himself and offered his life as a sacrifice to save his friends. This death to self, an interior victory resulting in resurrection and eternal life, is a story echo of Matthew 16:25, “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” and of John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Bunyan’s characters, as he tells us plainly in his
Apology
or preface to
Progress
, are allegories and metaphors but no less “solid” in meaning or value for being story transparencies.
⁷
Chaucer, whose
Canterbury Tales
(c.1400) predates Bunyan by two hundred years and
Everyman
by the better part of a century, is, if anything, more allegorical in intention though with more developed and literal characters. Chaucer was famous even in his day for his poetic achievement in
Tales
and for his use of “sentence,” which, as Robertson explains, is the “solidity” of allegorical meaning beneath the surface story and morals. A book’s “sentence” is what we arrive at “as the result of allegorical interpretation”
⁸
and is Chaucer’s claim to fame.

If Ms. Rowling hadn’t pointed to Chaucer herself and to “The Pardoner’s Tale” specifically as an influence on her last novel,
⁹
we might have guessed as much from the frequent departures she makes within her narrative for characters to tell stories themselves. We have Hagrid explaining his extended vacation among the giants, Kreacher detailing how Master Regulus had died, and Helena Ravenclaw’s gothic romance about the Bloody Baron. If we still miss the Chaucer connection, Ms. Rowling gives us four chapter titles that end with “Tale” as a specific hat-tip toward the
Canterbury Tales.
¹⁰

That Ms. Rowling suggests “The Pardoner’s Tale” was an important influence invites greater attention. Not too surprisingly, there are surface, moral, and allegorical correspondences between “The Pardoner’s Tale,” Ms. Rowling’s “Tale of the Three Brothers,” and
Harry Potter’
s story arc viewed as a whole.

The surface story told by Chaucer’s “Pardoner” is about three men, disgusted by the death of a mutual friend, who head out to find Death and destroy him. They meet an Old Man who says he just saw Death in the graveyard under a tree. At the tree in the graveyard, the three friends find bags of gold rather than the enemy they expect. Long story short, two of the men kill the third to split his share of the gold. The third man has his posthumous revenge because he had poisoned the two men’s wine. All three set out to destroy Death but were brought to their own deaths, spiritual and physical, by greed.