Harry Potter's Bookshelf (20 page)

“The Tale of the Three Brothers” from
The Tales of Beedle the Bard,
and featured in
Deathly Hallows,
is also about meeting Death. Rowling’s tale involves three brothers who bridge a previously uncrossable river with their magic. Death meets them on the bridge, feigns awe at their accomplishment, and grants them three wishes. The oldest chooses an unbeatable wand, which coupled with the brother’s arrogance, results in his being murdered. The middle brother “asked for the power to recall others from Death,” which eventually causes his suicide after he is “driven mad with hopeless longing” for the shadow of a woman he had called back from beyond the veil. The youngest brother, “the humblest and also the wis est,” asked only for a gift that would keep Death from following him. The Invisibility Cloak he receives conceals him from Death until he is an old man and chooses to take it off; he greeted Death then “as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and equals, they departed this life” (
Deathly Hallows
, chapter twenty-one).

Taken as a whole, the
Harry Potter
novels are the story, too, of three men and their battle with death. Tom Riddle, Jr., pursues a personal immortality through power, murder, and dark magic. As a young man, Albus Dumbledore had pursued the Deathly Hallows to become “Master of Death.” Harry Potter, the descendant and heir of the brother who had received the Invisibility Cloak, succeeds in winning the three Hallows and vanquishing Voldemort, if not Death per se. Riddle’s megalomaniacal search to cheat death results in his death, Dumbledore’s sister is killed consequent to his fascination with power, and Harry becomes “the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death” (
Deathly Hallows
, chapter thirty-five).
¹¹
“The Tale of the Three Brothers” is, in a way, a synopsis of all seven books.

Chaucer’s story has a different ending and a different stated moral (the Pardoner is preaching that cupidity [greed] is the root of all evil), but the implicit instruction or
sentence
of the story is a match with Rowling’s: Seeking to defeat or master death willfully is the short cut to an early demise. Chaucer further highlights “the denial of the Spirit” in the pursuit of immortality and fortune by having the Pardoner himself be an allegory of its anti-greed moral.
¹²

The Pardoner’s example, the allegory alongside the allegorical sermon, is also a testimony to the need for allegory. The Pardoner understands the surface and moral meanings of his tale, not to mention Christian doctrine and scripture, but as D. W. Robertson writes in
A Preface to Chaucer,
he misses “the spirit of Christ beneath the letter of the text” and pursues “the corporal rather than the intelligible.”
¹³
“The Pardoner’s Tale,” because the narrator has clearly missed the point of his allegorical story, is an ironic argument within an allegory. Ms. Rowling, in her allegorical children’s story, “The Tale of the Three Brothers,” within her allegorical children’s series of books,
Harry Potter,
makes the same argument.

Everyman, Canterbury Tales,
and
The Pilgrim’s Progress
may be familiar to every great books geek and literature major, but I understand if you’re suspicious that their overtly Christian messages signal that their allegorical artistry may be a bit dated. Allegory and the medieval setting as a delivery for same, though, are as relevant as the greatest novel ever written and as current as the most successful science fiction television shows and movies ever made.

The novel is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov.
In brief,
Brothers
is a murder mystery involving the death of Fyodor Karamazov, the father of Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha Karamazov, three brothers who have grown up separately and seem to be from different planets with respect to their temperaments. In a writer as realistic and plainspoken as Dostoevsky, where’s the allegory in that?

Your best bet, I hope you see by now, would be to find the medieval fable told by one of the characters and work your way out from there. In the chapter titled “The Grand Inquisitor” (book five, chapter five), Ivan, the philosopher and journalist, sits down with his younger brother Alyosha, a monastery novice, and tells him a parable from fifteenth-century Seville. The story is that Christ Himself returns to Spain and reveals Himself by raising the dead. A cardinal of the Catholic Church, the Grand Inquisitor, has him arrested and interrogates him.

Ivan sympathizes with the cardinal, who explains to his unwelcome God that the Church is obliged to execute Him the next day lest He derail the mission of the Church. The cardinal, like Ivan, is a well-meaning atheist and guardian of the greater good. The Catholic Church, to him, has vanquished freedom that men could never achieve through Christ’s promises and miracles and has ensured happiness on earth via obedience.

Christ’s response? He says nothing but kisses the cardinal. The Inquisitor, stunned and shamed, releases Him and tells him to “Go and come no more . . . Come not at all, never, never!” Ivan explains that Jesus’ kiss “glows in [the cardinal’s heart], but the old man adheres to his ideas.”

Like Rowling’s use of allegory in the
Harry Potter
series, Dostoevsky’s allegory works on several levels. On the surface, Ivan’s parable about the Catholic cardinal and a church that would murder Christ lest He urge the peasants to true freedom is about the Roman Catholic Church versus Orthodox Christianity. By extension, the story is a parable decrying European ideas of socialism and the greater good that were already growing in Russia and would lead to the communist revolution. Dostoevsky is no ecumenist; he equates Catholicism with atheism and an antifaith, an opinion that was more consensus than controversy to his Russian readers.
¹⁴

At a deeper level, Ivan’s cardinal is his self-portrait, a skeptic educated in Europe; the story’s Christ is Alyosha. Ivan’s opinions are put in the mouth of the cardinal and Alyosha sits quietly in the place of Christ. Alyosha confirms that this is his understanding of Ivan’s story by kissing Ivan at chapter’s end.

More importantly and profoundly, the story of Ivan and Alyosha and the parable Ivan tells within the story are allegorical transparencies about the soul.
¹⁵
Ivan and Alyosha are stand-ins for the soul’s capacity for reason and spiritual experience, what we call “mind” and “spirit.” Add in passionate, unbridled Dmitri, and the Karamazov brothers are a triptych of the soul’s carnal, rational, and spiritual faculties and the book is the story of their relationship to each other, as well as the relationship of Russia’s military, educated class, and church.

This body-mind-spirit triptych, soul faculties of one person in three-character allegory, is not Dostoevsky’s invention. Plato, you’ll recall, is the fountain of all literature as well as philosophy, right? See the Chariot Allegory in Plato’s
Phaedrus
(246a-254e) for the originals of Dmitri (the black horse), Ivan (the white horse), and Alyosha (the charioteer). This triptych is a model for a host of twentieth-century imitators, Rowling included.

This three-part soul allegory is as evident in futuristic and fantasy storytelling as it is in ancient philosophy. Science fiction? Think
Star Trek:
Kirk is spirit, Spock is mind, and “Bones” is the carnal part of man. How about
Star Wars
? Luke Skywalker, Mr. Trust the Force, is spirit; Princess Leia is will and smarts; and Hans Solo, the he-man, is looking out for number one. The characters on Mount Doom—the hob-bits Frodo and Sam, and Gollum—are Tolkien’s images of spirit, will, and fallen passions. Rowling falls into this tradition with her own spiritual triptych: Harry as spirit, Ron as body, and brainy Hermione, of course, as mind.

There aren’t many medieval Christians or people of childlike faith in Ms. Rowling’s twenty-first-century reading audience. Even her younger readers, I suspect, are more skeptical, perhaps even jaded, than they were a mere twenty years ago. Their struggle as thinking people with spiritual aspirations is not a cut-and-dried “do you believe or don’t you?” question and answer; but, as profoundly skeptical people qua postmoderns, how do you acquire and sustain anything like traditional faith? Allegorical writing, to be relevant for these readers, needs to portray this struggle more than as a plastic morality play. The best writers have been doing just this since the dawn of the modern age.

We’ve already met Ivan Karamazov and seen him both tell a parable about the conflict of reason and spirit and act as reason in the allegory of
The Brothers Karamazov.
Ivan, as reason, struggles to believe, and, as Dostoevsky depicts him, his European and modern ideas drive him mad. Ivan is confronted by a nightmare of the devil who is “the incarnation of myself, but only of one side of me . . . of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them” (
Brothers
, book eleven, chapter nine, “The Devil: Ivan Fyodorovich’s Nightmare”). The nightmare is that Ivan at once believes the devil is only a hallucination from his delirium and believes he is the devil and can answer questions like, “Is there a God or not?” Alyosha, the spirit figure in the triptych of the brothers’ collective soul, wakes him from this intellectual atheist’s nightmare.

Returning to the English tradition, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, employs allegory to describe the struggle with belief in both the Arthurian
Idylls of the King
’s conclusion “The Passing of Arthur” and “In Memoriam.”
Idylls
is a poem that is the photographic negative of “In Memoriam.” “In Memoriam” is Tennyson’s record of his successful struggle with keeping faith and living in faith after the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam.
Idylls
is the elegy of a kingdom destroyed by those not keeping faith: in marriage, as knights, or as subjects. “Both poems not only emphasize man’s essential need to believe but also those forces which make it so difficult for him to do so.”
¹⁶

In
Idylls
King Arthur and Sir Bedivere’s struggles, in brief, are to believe and to trust, albeit on different scales. Arthur, in the idyll before “Passing,” forgives Guinevere and is, in an otherworldly manner, reconciled with her despite her betrayal. He leaves her to lead the remnants of his Table against the forces of Mordred, a foe incapable of fealty.
¹⁷
The battle is one of mist and confusion, before which Arthur comes close to despair. Sir Bedivere proclaims his fealty, however, and, moved by Sir Bedivere’s faith in him, the king attacks and slays Mordred. He receives a mortal blow himself, not unlike Harry’s battle with the basilisk in
Chamber of Secrets
.

The king is taken to a chapel. There Arthur orders Bedivere to throw his sword, Excalibur, into the lake. Twice Bedivere balks and attempts to deceive the king. He hides the sword, unable to rationalize its loss because of its beauty, value, history, and because Arthur is not in his right mind. Instead, Bedivere rationalizes his disobedience and disloyalty. Arthur, however, sees through Bedivere’s lie and demands he throw the sword in the water. Bedivere at last complies, and the Lady of the Lake catches it and comes for Arthur.

Bedivere is rewarded with the sight of Arthur boarding a vessel that sails to Avalon, the Isle of the Blessed, where the sword was forged. In the allegory of a struggle to believe, Bedivere, the surviving knight of Arthur’s Round Table, is the Christian of the end times and Arthur is the Christ. Arthur destroys Mordred in response to Bedivere’s faith but is almost allowed to die because of Bedivere’s inability to trust in his instruction to the end. Arthur survives on the thread of such halting faith.

Similarly, Harry is an allegory of the modern struggle to believe rather than a cardboard depiction of faith. Rowling gives Harry’s first appearance in
Deathly Hallows
the chapter title “In Memoriam” to clarify that “my struggling with religious belief and so on I think is quite apparent in this book.”
¹⁸
Harry’s trouble in
Deathly Hallows
, his interior agony, has less to do with Horcrux hunting or the long camping trip with Ron and Hermione than it does with his crisis of faith.

In brief, Dumbledore serves as a stand-in for God; Harry, as he learns more about the late great headmaster, changes from the “Dumbledore man” he said he was in
Half-Blood Prince
to feeling certain at his nadir that Dumbledore never loved him.

In the denouement of
Chamber of Secrets
, Dumbledore had told Harry that “it is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” Choice is clearly a major theme throughout the series but it is only in
Deathly Hallows
that we learn that the essential choice is not about being kind to Muggles or choosing not to kick your house-elf; it is the choice to believe that makes all the difference.