Harry Potter's Bookshelf (4 page)

You get the picture. All the bad guys are pureblood psychopaths, too, or over the top in pursuit of power. But they are
normal
in terms of fitting in with every accepted convention. Like the Dursleys, they take conformity steroids and are on constant watch for folks who are different just in order to despise them. Why do we hate their guts? And I mean really despise them, however hypocritical, for their despising our misfit heroes?

One of the core beliefs of our times is that “prejudice is evil,” the flip side of which is that “tolerance is good.” I’ll come back to this in chapter six but, for now, just remember that Ms. Rowling, by celebrating the underdog, is playing what politicians call the “identity card.”

Ms. Rowling, though, doesn’t just make Harry a sympathetic character or underdog to win your sympathy and enlist you in his cause. She pulls the ultimate empathy-winning card in English literature and plays it to the hilt. Harry Potter is an orphan, and, not only does he not have loving parents, he is saddled with relations who are almost unbelievably cruel to him. Game. Set. Match. Every reader not on heavy medication for psychoactive disorders is on Harry’s side and wants the Dursleys locked up in the room under the stairs.

Quite simply, there is no one to care for the orphan. The reader can step right in, at least imaginatively, and do the human, caring, right thing—namely, adopt and embrace him as one of our own. He has no one, so we identify him as one of us.

If you struggle to see this and imagine I’m overstating the importance of Harry being an orphan in our engagement with his story and this fascination carrying us through his oversized adventures, I plead “Dickens.” A finalist in any “greatest novelist of all time competition”—not one of whose books has ever gone out of print—Charles Dickens changed the English novel almost single-handedly from gentry diversion to popular entertainment, agency for social change and personal transformation, and vehicle of profound meaning.

And he did all that with orphan novels.

From
Oliver Twist
(1837) to
David Copperfield
(1849) to Pip in
Great Expectations
(1860), Dickens created orphans who won readers’ hearts. In fact, if you survey Dickens’s complete portfolio, you find sixteen leading-role characters in the fifteen novels without surviving parents or parents known to them, two novels featuring title characters with only one parent, and only Dickens’s first book,
The Pickwick Papers,
an ad hoc collection of stories, does not feature an orphan or a neglected and estranged child.

I want to come back to Dickens and his influence on Rowling in chapter nine, where we’ll cover Shakespeare, Dickens, and alchemical drama with a close look at
A Tale of Two Cities
. Here, though, we need only note the importance and impact of Ms. Rowling’s choice to follow Dickens’s lead and write an orphan novel. It is so much a part of Harry—the first thing other than “boy wizard” we remember about Harry—that the meaning and effect of his being an orphan is neglected. Harry’s orphan status, like the meaning of his remarkable name (see chapter nine), is overlooked for being hidden in plain sight.

Harry’s helplessness as an orphan left on the Privet Drive doorstep of the Dursleys and their borderline sadistic treatment of him lock in our sympathy and our curiosity about how he will turn out. In this fashion, Ms. Rowling has fixed a ring in our noses and can lead us anywhere she likes. She wants to give us the experience of watching Harry grow up with all the attendant changes of adolescence and young adulthood. As she said in a 2001 interview about the differences between Harry’s adventures and other children’s literature:

And we do see changes in Harry. In each book, as I’ll explain in chapter nine, Harry goes through an alchemical transformation and the reader does, too, because of our identification with him. Ms. Rowling also delivers on her promise to show us the changes Harry, Ron, and Hermione experience as they grow older beyond their few snogging episodes. The depth of their studies, their growing awareness of the world and their responsibilities, and their heightened sense of injustice is handled masterfully so it is both believably realistic and light enough to be welcome change.

I doubt very much that anyone would care much about Harry’s growing pains from story to story, though, if the narrative drive didn’t own our attention the way Class 5 rapids grab a canoe or kayak. This is why Ms. Rowling’s decision about what sort of story she was going to write was as important as in what voice she would tell it. The story type sets the drive, which determines our engagement.

It’s no accident that the most popular stories in English literature—the classic mystery, the orphan novels of Charles Dickens, and, now, the hybrid orphan-mystery of the
Harry Potter
adventures—use the most engaging drives. Drive is what gets us hooked and keeps those pages turning. The insoluble mystery that awakens our desire for revelation and resolution as well as our sense of injustice, combined with the ease and surety that an orphan novel uses to win our identification with and interest in a sympathetic character, is a story that acts as a conveyor belt in overdrive.

By understanding the importance of story drive—the first aspect of a story’s surface meaning that draws us out of our ego concerns and into what Coleridge called the “primary imagination”
¹³
in which we can experience more profound meanings—we can begin to appreciate the difference the right choice of voice can make. Ms. Rowling’s voice is taken from her favorite book and favorite author, it turns out. I hope you’re sufficiently engaged by that mystery to go on to the next page.

CHAPTER TWO

 

 

 

 

 

J.K. Rowling has said in many interviews that the single writer she admires most is Hollywood’s hot property, a woman who never published a book in her own name, who died at forty-one, unmarried and childless, and whose books are anything but magical fantasy. This woman is Jane Austen, the parson’s daughter and anonymous author of the world’s favorite manners-and-morals novels.

Ms. Rowling has said she read Austen’s
Emma
“at least twenty times” and that she “rereads Austen’s novels in rotation.”
¹
If we didn’t have Ms. Rowling’s testimony in her interviews, the direct allusions in the text might be sufficient to bring us to the same conclusions about the importance of Jane Austen in understanding Harry Potter. The caretaker of Hogwarts Castle, Mr. Filch, has a cat named “Mrs. Norris,” the name of a busybody aunt in Austen’s
Mansfield Park
; Percy Weasley’s letter to his brother Ron in
Order of the Phoenix,
in which he advises him to break off relations with Harry Potter (
Order of the Phoenix
, chapter fourteen), is almost dictated from Mr. Collins’s letter to Mr. Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice,
in which Mr. Bennet is advised to “throw off your unworthy child from your affection forever” (
Pride,
chapter forty-eight). Mr. Knightley’s comic change of heart about the villainous Frank Churchill as he learns that Emma will consider and accept Mr. Knightley’s proposal of marriage (
Emma
, chapter forty-nine) is mirrored in Harry’s change of heart about Cedric Diggory in
Goblet of Fire
(
Goblet of Fire
, chapter twenty-two).

Jane Austen is remembered for her style and for her message. Her style is an unaffected lightness that penetrates the surface and reveals the heart. Her message is a middle-class critique of the upper classes and the pride and prejudices that characterized this group. Though considered light satire, Austen’s novels are an indictment of snobbery and affectation—and a celebration of right manners and morals—that can be both cutting and inspiring.

As different as Harry’s magical education and Jane Austen’s English countryside may be on the surface, Austen does reveal two big secrets in understanding Harry Potter, namely, narrative misdirection and the theme of “pride and prejudice.” Rowling herself has said that Jane Austen’s
Emma
ends with “the best twist ever in literature.”
²

Let’s look at the “twist” Ms. Rowling employs and especially the choice in voice she makes that tricks the reader. This “twist” is what we recognize as the Rowling signature surprise ending—and she pulls it on us, as you might have guessed, exactly as did her mentor in
Emma
.

The first five Harry Potter novels end in almost identical fashion. Before the trip to King’s Cross Station on the Hogwarts Express, Harry does battle underground with an agent of the Dark Lord Voldemort himself, dies a figurative death, is saved by a symbol of Christ, and learns from Albus Dumbledore what really happened in that year’s adventure. This denouement is usually a forehead-slapping experience.

“How did I miss that?” It is in this conversation between headmaster and disciple at story’s end each year except the last that we learn alongside Harry about the good guy we’d thought was a bad guy and the bad guy (or gal) we’d thought was on the good guy’s side (at least nominally). Every single year, it seems, we are suckered into believing what Harry believes—and find out how foolish we have been by book’s end.

How we are hoodwinked or caught in Ms. Rowling’s annual story twist is a plotting finesse that the author picked up from Jane Austen. The fundamental and most practical point of influence between Rowling and Austen is the perspective in which the
Harry Potter
novels are told and how this perspective lulls the passive reader into traveling down the erring path (and far away from the solution of the mystery).

Writers have choices. One of the first choices they have to make when beginning a story is the “voice” they will use when writing: Who will be telling the story? These are the two big options an author has when writing a novel: “Do I tell it from a narrator’s experience of the tale à la Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes cases? Or do I tell it as God sees it unfolding in time?” Open up any anthology of detective fiction and quickly check to see whether a story is told by a fictional narrator in the “I saw this” and “then we did that” perspective or if the story comes from the author in the role of an all-seeing God.

There are a few variants on these two options, of course, and the one relevant to our getting beneath the narrative surface of Harry Potter is the perspective in which Jane Austen wrote
Emma
. This particular “narratological voice” is called “third person
limited
omniscient view” and telling the story this way allows Ms. Rowling to pull off her stunning end-of-story surprises.

Think for a minute about how the
Potter
novels are told or flip open any of the books. With very few exceptions (most notably, the first chapter of the first book and the opening chapters of
Goblet of Fire, Half-Blood Prince,
and
Deathly Hallows
), the stories are told not from Harry’s perspective talking like Dr. Watson: “Ron and Hermione and I then pushed our way through the door and saw a wild three-headed dog!” The stories aren’t told by God floating above the Astronomy Tower, seeing and telling all: “Then Draco went back into the Room of Requirement to pick up where he left off on Vanishing Cabinet repair.”