Harry Potter's Bookshelf (2 page)

My job in selection, consequently, has meant less sifting through the historical record to find things Ms. Rowling has admitted reading and liking and more exploring the various streams of the English literary tradition in which she lives and writes. That meant, inevitably, making controversial inclusions and omissions; I look forward to reading your thoughts on my biggest blunders and better catches. (Before you write to share your disappointment, yes, I wish I could have included Tennyson, Chesterton, and more Dante and Shakespeare!) The selection argument is one of the more powerful engines of the “Potter as literature” conversation, and I’m not offering my choices as anything but a fresh beginning to that discussion.

Organization of the choices I have made, as I mentioned, fell naturally into ten genre and story element divisions based on those Ms. Rowling uses. I decided fairly late in the assembly of the book, though, not to write this up as simply “Here are the choices Ms. Rowling makes for setting (or voice or allegory, etc.) with the most important historical giants that are echoed in her books.” Not only would that be a boring book to write, it wouldn’t challenge readers who want to gain a larger perspective on what literature is and what reading does to them. I decided, consequently, in addition to producing a book that simultaneously opens up both
Harry Potter
and English literature, using one as key to the other, to try to provide a model for thinking about great books and to provoke you with a controversial thesis about the intention of a large part of better literature. I’m confident that most readers will find the model and thesis helpful, if only because they will define the field of battle for spirited disagreement.

There are books available online and at your local bookstore that offer to help you learn
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
or
How Fiction Works,
and I don’t doubt that there is great value in these guides. I suggest, though, that such introductions do more to take us
out of
our reading experience for objective knowledge rather than
deeper into
that experience for our transformation. I wonder, too, if books like this do more than confirm the prejudices and blind spots of our age, i.e., how we think already.

The thousands of
Harry Potter
readers I have met and spoken or corresponded with during the last nine years love the books because of the way the meaning resonates within them. They want to learn more about Ms. Rowling’s artistry, not for credits toward a general studies or English degree but to understand and amp up that experience. Postmodern aesthetic surveys or deconstruction exercises throw a wet blanket on the fire driving their transformation. Yeats is supposed to have said that education is lighting a fire not filling a bucket; the model and thesis of
Bookshelf
are kindling for the fire rather than just more information for your cranial data files.

The model I’ve chosen is what Northrop Frye called the iconological school of literary criticism. In a nutshell, we’ll be looking at
Harry Potter
as a text like all great art with four layers of meaning: the surface, the moral, the allegorical, and the anagogical or spiritual.
Bookshelf ’
s chapters are divided into four sections corresponding to these layers. Voice, drive, and setting, for example, are the subjects of the surface meaning section in the first few chapters and in which I discuss the important influence of Jane Austen, Dorothy Sayers, and Enid Blyton on Ms. Rowling’s surface meanings.

The controversial aspect of iconological layered reading, and the reason it has largely disappeared from the modern academy, for instance, despite being the default model until the twentieth century, is that it assumes writers are writing for the readers’ edifying transformation rather than for pure, mindless entertainment. That books work to “baptize the imagination”—to overturn our mistaken view of reality—is the heart of iconological criticism.

Which brings me to the thesis I offer for your consideration and our continuing conversation. What I found when reading the authors featured in this book was that they were writing on multiple levels, certainly, and that they had a larger purpose in writing than storytelling for storytelling’s sake. I think this diverse group of writers, from Austen to Lewis, from E. Nesbit to Elizabeth Goudge, were writing with a shared, subversive purpose that Ms. Rowling has picked up and run with. In brief, beginning with Swift’s Ancients versus Moderns “Battle of the Books,” and defined largely by the natural theology of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Romantic vision, great writers seem to believe that materialism and reductive thinking are dehumanizing, and thus are arguing against and undermining by parable the modern materialist worldview. Austen is dueling David Hume, Gothic writers like Shelley and Stoker the amorality of science, and Goudge and Lewis with their unicorns and lions campaign as Platonic idealists and Christians against the empiricists and Marxists of our age. The better poets, playwrights, and novelists, in brief, of the last few centuries have been waging an under-the-radar war to “baptize the imagination” and overturn our mistaken view of reality.

So, how then can you get the most out of this book? First, take a look at the table of contents to see how the four sections correspond with the four layers of meaning in iconological criticism and how I’ve divided up the ten genres and tools Ms. Rowling weaves into the Hogwarts adventures. You can start anywhere you want, of course, though the book was written to be read front to back as the argument builds to the finish in chapter ten.

Next, I hope you’ll take notes while you’re reading of examples you think are better than the ones I chose or which contradict my thesis. I make the case that Ms. Rowling is only the most recent warrior in the centuries-old subversive resistance to Dursley-an “normalcy” and conventional materialism and scientism. I do not believe for a minute that my argument is in any way final or demonstrative. It is meant to be only engaging, perhaps even goading, to stimulate you to think about what reading does to us and what layered meanings writers are sharing with readers who are willing to do the “slow mining” and meditative reflection to get at the subversive, spiritual heart of better books. That mining and meditation may draw you out of the story occasionally, but we won’t, as Wordsworth says in his poem
The Tables Turned
, “murder to dissect” or deconstruct. The step back will only be to enter the books again and, as Lewis’s heroes in
The Last Battle
chant as they enter paradise, to rush “further up and further in.” I’m hopeful that both the iconological model I provide and the thesis I use to provoke your thinking will help you have a more profound and rewarding experience of Harry’s adventures and apotheosis.

I hope, too, as I said, that you’ll write and tell me what you think or just join in the conversation serious readers like you have already been enjoying online at HogwartsProfessor. com. Thank you for purchasing and reading this book, and, in advance, for your correspondence, comments, corrections, and questions.

Gratefully,

 

John Granger
[email protected]

CHAPTER ONE

 

 

 

 

 

In this literary companion to Harry Potter I’m attempting Olympian multitasking, as we descend layer by layer from the surface meaning down to the more profound depths of
Harry Potter
. Starting at the surface, we’re obliged to be clear about what specific tools Ms. Rowling chose to tell her story because her decisions about how to move the plot along, the voice in which to tell the story, as well as the stage setting for the drama determine in large part how much any reader will be engaged enough to read the book. As counterpoint to that discussion, I’ll talk about other authors and the books in which they made similar decisions, immersing us in English literature via
Harry Potter
.

To begin, let’s talk about what genre the
Potter
novels fall into. It turns out they don’t have one. Believe it or not, there are at least ten different types of stories being told in the
Harry Potter
novels. If it hadn’t been confirmed by reporters and biographers, I would suspect Ms. Rowling’s surname was a cryptonym, as are so many of her characters’ names. Her books are a gathering together of schoolboy stories, hero’s journey epics, alchemical drama, manners-and-morals fiction, satire, gothic romance, detective mysteries, adventure tales, coming-of-age novels, and Christian fantasy.

So how do we know where to start? Well, one easy way is to figure out what keeps you turning the pages. Literature professors call this the
narrative drive
, but you can think of it as the novel’s conveyor belt. When we think about Harry and his adventures, what is it that moves us along from page to page to learn how the story turns out?

Despite our fascination with Hermione’s love choices (Ron or Harry?), the Potter epic is not the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, lovers-unite romance formula. It’s also not a hero’s epic: We are not caught up in mythic history, as we are in the
Aeneid
and
The Lord of the Rings
, in which we travel along to learn Aeneas’s and Frodo’s fates and their ultimate destinations.

We have some idea of what Ms. Rowling thinks about the stories she has written because of the following comments made in an interview with two very young fan-website leaders in 2005:

Ms. Rowling says her
Harry Potter
epic is “not really a detective novel, but it feels like one sometimes.” With respect to how the story works and what keeps us turning pages, however, it certainly is a detective mystery. Exploring how Harry’s years at Hogwarts are and are not formula mysteries will introduce us to a wonderful (and currently neglected) writer of detective fiction and point us to the second power driving the conveyor belt of Ms. Rowling’s stories.

There is a simple formula for detective fiction and accepted rules by which most writers abide. Tess Gerritsen tells us the crime novel detective formula: “A crime is committed. An investigator seeks out the truth. The truth is revealed.”
²
In the classic formula from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, essentially the first fifty years of the twentieth century, this involves an English country estate, characters from the Edwardian minor gentry, a murder, a brilliant detective, stumbling policemen, and a drawing room finale in which the whodunit is resolved with an explanation of the hows and whys, not to mention a confrontation with and the confession of the guilty party (“Colonel Mustard in the library with the revolver!”).
The Mysterious Affair at Stiles
and
The Murder at the Vicarage
, the mysteries in which Agatha Christie introduced Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, respectively, are mysteries of this type.

Harry Potter
is clearly not a mystery according to this Country Estate murder formula, but it does hold to the narrative drive elements of a good mystery well told. Those elements are reader mystification, the detection of cause, and restoration of order.
³