by John Granger
Harry Potter as a Dickens Orphan and
the Hero in a Sayers Mystery
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:There’s a theory—this applies to detective novels, and then Harry, which is not really a detective novel, but it feels like one sometimes—that you should not have romantic intrigue in a detective book. Dorothy L. Sayers, who is queen of the genre, said—and then broke her own rule, but said—that there is no place for romance in a detective story except that it can be useful to camouflage other people’s motives. That’s true; it is a very useful trick. I’ve used that on Percy and I’ve used that to a degree on Tonks in this book, as a red herring. But having said that, I disagree inasmuch as mine are very character-driven books, and it’s so important, therefore, that we see these characters fall in love, which is a necessary part of life.1
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.
Hercule Poirot, Meet Harry Potter
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
From Poe to Chandler
From Poe to Chandler, the characters and action of mysteries are largely the same. We are given a disturbing, seemingly insoluble situation, usually involving a murder, preferably in a closed room in which the murderer could not have entered or exited. The essential players are the detective, the individual who needs his help (often but not always the one accused of the crime or not satisfied with the official explanation of it), the victim, and the criminal, with a supporting cast of Dr. Watsons and incompetent, empiricist gendarmes. The insoluble problem is set, the narrator presents the clues, the detective resolves the mystery, the criminal is confronted in a dramatic denouement, and the moral order returns to one degree or another.4
The essential part of this formula with respect to its ability to keep us turning pages, however, doesn’t involve the players or the murder. It is our confusion. We are engaged first and foremost by the mystery involved, the insoluble puzzle confronting us. Our desire to learn what we don’t understand, how what couldn’t have happened did in fact actually happen, not to mention why it happened, all but drags us headlong into and through the story—from beginning to resolution.
Harry Potter’s adventures do not feature a private detective like Sam Spade, Sherlock Holmes, or Poe’s Auguste Dupin. Every year at Hogwarts, though, a puzzle or mystery unfolds that Harry, Ron, and Hermione team up to solve. One by one:• In Sorcerer’s Stone, the U.S. title, the trio are desperate to learn about what Hagrid picked up at Gringott’s bank and brought to Hogwarts. Most of the story turns on their search for the Stone and the identity of Nicolas Flamel.
• In Chamber of Secrets, Harry is all but accused of being the Heir of Slytherin responsible for the mysterious attacks on Hogwarts students. The gang teams up again to discover who really is the Heir and the location of the Chamber.
• Prisoner of Azkaban’s mystery is the identity, location, and “crime” of Sirius Black.
• Harry’s agonies in Goblet of Fire during the three tasks of the Triwizard Tournament are all consequent to his mystification about who put his name into the Goblet and why they would have done it.
• Order of the Phoenix turns on both the dementor attack on Harry and Dudley in Little Whinging and the visions Harry has of a corridor ending in a door that fascinate him sufficiently that he does not shield his mind from them—with tragic consequences.
• The mystery of Half-Blood Prince is the question of who the “Half-Blood Prince” is or was.
• And the series finale’s puzzle, besides the question of what sort of man Albus Dumbledore really was, is how the trio understands the “triangular eye” Hallows symbol correctly and why Dumbledore left them this puzzle to solve.
Harry, as we’ll see in chapter two, is anything but the razor-sharp incarnation of deduction and induction that we look for in heroic detectives or even sad sacks like Columbo. For the most part, as earnest as he is in the search for clues and answers with Ron and Hermione, our boy hero is at least as clueless as the mystery formula’s affable sidekick-narrator and as often as not is the suspect of the crime or the aggrieved party seeking relief—hence Ms. Rowling’s assertion that Harry is “not really a detective novel, but it feels like one sometimes,” as well as her mention of Dorothy Sayers and her belief that her stories differ from detective novels in being character driven. The detective fiction of Dorothy Sayers is the mystery model for Ms. Rowling’s work precisely because of the depth of the development of her characters.
Dorothy Sayers: Rule Maker, Rule Breaker
Dorothy Sayers’s mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey hav
e fallen out of popular taste today, but during her lifetime she was famous for her detective fiction. Her Peter Wimsey work includes fourteen volumes of novels and short stories, but Sayers was also known for her work with the Detection Club. The detective writers’ equivalent of the more celebrated Inklings, the Detection Club had members who were the brighter lights of the age, including G. K. Chesterton, the club’s first president, and Agatha Christie, president for nearly twenty years. Sayers was a founding member and a club president, too, from 1949 to 1958, and it was in this role that Ms. Rowling probably thinks of her as a detection rule maker.
The Detection Club’s rules are the definition of the classical formula. They prohibit any concealing of essential clues, any servant murderers, or unimaginative mystery clichés like an unknown evil twin, the dog who does not bark, and “the bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.”5
The Detection Club’s idea of the detective fiction puzzle is essentially that it must be a fair puzzle and just about the puzzle. Hence:A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action, and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.6
Sayers, however, thinks there can be more to good mystery writing and that the formula as proposed by the Detection Club is ultimately limiting.
We also took occasion to preach at every opportunity that if the detective story was to live and develop it must get back to where it began in the hands of [Wilkie] Collins and [Sheridan] Le Fanu, and become once more a novel of manners instead of a pure cross-word puzzle. My voice was raised very loudly to proclaim this doctrine, because I still meant my books to develop along those lines at all costs and it does no harm to let one’s theory act as a herald to one’s practice.7
Which, of course, means “no romance.” As Wright requires in Rule #3:There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.8
Sayers, however, thinks that Collins is the model for good mystery writing and that the formula as proposed by Wright is ultimately “a literature without bowels”9 and the last thing she wanted to be writing. She prefaced her Wimsey play, Busman’s Honeymoon, consequently, with this apology for its romantic interest:It has been said, by myself and others, that a love interest is only an intrusion upon a detective story. But to the characters involved, the detective intrusion might well seem an irritating intrusion upon their love-story. This book deals with such a situation.10
Ms. Rowling is correct in saying that Dorothy Sayers breaks the “no romance in detective fiction” rule but not in saying that she “broke her own rule”; it was Wright’s rule and the Detection Club’s, not hers. And this is no small thing because J. K. Rowling breaks the strict rules of mystery fiction for precisely the same reason as Sayers did: for the sake of full-blooded characters rather than cardboard cutouts or Clue board game figurines. Sayers is known, in fact, as a “character-driven” mystery writer and this is what distinguishes her from the more formulaic whodunit writers of the Golden Age, like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr.
J. K. Rowling shares the outlook and much of the experience of Sayers. For starters, both had a classical education with modern language studies at university, a spell of single motherhood, and remarkable if not proselytizing Christian faith. To that mix add, as I’ll argue in later chapters for Rowling, a taste for Dante, hermetic writing, and a penchant for delivering layers of meaning in stories that on the surface are light reads for diversion. At least half the narrative drive in the Harry Potter novels comes from the mystery Harry, Ron, and Hermione are trying to solve. Ms. Rowling follows Ms. Sayers’s lead in using the genre and its formulas only until such obedience to literary convention makes it harder to deliver the story’s intended meaning.
What sort of meaning was Sayers smuggling into her stories? A sacramental worldview, certainly, from her upbringing and education as an Oxford Platonist and “an existence on a totally different plane,” a non-local eternity within mundane reality but invisible to Muggles:One must remember that though in one sense the Other World was a definite place, somewhere beyond the Atlantic Ocean, yet in another the kingdom of gods was within one. Earth and fairy-land coexist upon the same foot of ground. It was all a matter of the seeing eye . . . The dweller in this world can become aware of an existence on a totally different plane. To go from Earth to faery is like passing from this time to eternity; it is not a journey in space, but a change in mental outlook.11 (Emphasis added.)
Remember “the seeing eye” and the Oxford Platonists; we’ll be running into them repeatedly as we work through Rowling’s greater influences to get to the many “seeing eyes” in Deathly Hallows. It is the heart of the subversive attack of Romantic writers in English literature on the soulless scientism of the modern era.
As mentioned above, the mystery element is “at least half ” of the narrative drive of the Harry Potter novels. Ms. Rowling gives us the clue we need to find the missing half that powers her literary conveyor belt. She points to it in her claim that Harry’s adventures are less mystery than “character-driven books.” What is it about the lead character that keeps us reading through books that are up to eight hundred pages long? It cannot be romance; Harry’s romantic life doesn’t begin in earnest until Phoenix, the fifth book, and Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book.
It’s not anything Harry says, has, or does; it’s what Harry is. An orphan.
Loveable Underdog
When I first got out of college, I taught Latin at a small prep school in western North Carolina called the Asheville School. I think it was there I first heard a teacher say, “They won’t care how much you know ’til they know how much you care.” It’s true in the classroom and on the playing field with high-school age students, certainly, but it also is something of a guideline for writers. Until the reader cares about the characters in the story, really identifies with them, drops the disbelief, and experiences the story as if he or she had passed through the looking glass into Wonderland, nothing else matters.
Write majestic prose like Philip Pullman or J. R. R. Tolkien. Baptize the imagination like Bunyan, Spencer, and Lewis. Create locked-door and chilling mysteries like John Dickson Carr and Edgar Allan Poe. If the reader doesn’t care for the character involved like he or she would for a dear family member in need (assuming the reader isn’t at war with his or her family . . . ), it won’t matter. No one will read the book to its finish.
Beyond believability, then, an author has to do whatever is possible to get the reader on board with the characters. There are tricks that can be done with narratological voice. As we’ll see in the next chapter, choosing to tell the story in the “third person limited omniscient” view—sitting on a character’s shoulder and sharing his or her perspective—fosters sympathy. Another way to grab the reader by the heart is to trigger the trip wire tied to the reader’s sense of fairness or justice. This is the “gotcha” of mystery writing, truth be told. When presented with a crime and a messy set of clues, not to mention the stray corpse or two, our conscience flashes a red light, especially if there is someone unjustly accused or a murderer escaping without punishment. I don’t know if we are hardwired this way (I suspect we are) or if this is a conditioned response from childhood training. Whatever the cause, it’s a rare reader who doesn’t want to have the pieces to the puzzle assembled and justice served for the innocent and the guilty. Who won’t read to the very end to learn the solution and hear the confession of the bad guy?
Take this one step further and you have Rocky (the boxer, not the squirrel). Readers love the underdog, th
e nobody who fights all odds and comes out on top. The traction of this kind of story is in our immediate sympathy for the little guy, the disadvantaged person, the poor, the minority, and the disenfranchised. Unless the marginalized protagonist is a real loser, just the fact that he or she lives on the periphery, outside of an in crowd, means the reader will wave pom-poms on the sidelines of the playing field.
No one gets this better than Ms. Rowling: All of her good guys are misfits. Hermione is a Mudblood. Ron and the Weasleys are dirt poor and blood traitors. Hagrid is a half-giant. Sirius is an escaped prisoner and convicted murderer looking at a Dementor’s Kiss first thing if he is caught. Remus? Werewolf. Tonks? Metamorphmagus. Firenze is a friendly centaur who might as well have a red shiny nose like Rudolph. Mad-Eye has gone round the twist with “constant vigilance.” Mundungus is a thief and coward. Severus . . . well, where do you start with the Potions Master? Dumbledore seemed the only Boy Scout in his army but we learn in Deathly Hallows he has a Machiavellian streak as big as the Room of Requirement.
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.”