by John Granger
The Ultimate Underdog: The Dickensian Orphan
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:A problem you run into with a series is how the characters grow up . . . whether they’re allowed to grow up.
I want Harry Potter and his friends to grow up as well as older, though I’ll keep it all humorous, well within the tone of the books. I want them eventually to be truly seventeen and discover girlfriends and boyfriends and have sexual feelings—nothing too gritty. Why not allow them to have those feelings?12
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.
Story Type, Story Drive
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
Pride and Prejudice with Wands
How Jane Austen Haunts the Heart
and Soul of Rowling’s Artistry
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.
It’s All a Matter of Perspective
The first five Harry Potter novels end in almost identical fashion. Before the trip to King’s Cross St
ation 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.”
The perspective of these books splits the difference between the first person and third person omniscient perspectives. What this split means in practical terms is that we see all the action in the books as if there were a house-elf sitting on Harry’s shoulder with a minicam. This obliging elf can also tell us everything Harry is thinking and feeling in addition to showing us what he sees around him. We don’t see any more than Harry sees (hence the “limited” in limited omniscient), but because we’re not restricted to Harry’s narration, it seems as if we’re seeing a larger bit of the story than if Harry just told it himself.
Emma is told from the same perspective, if we less obviously identify with Emma. The house-elf in this story is always in the room or on the grounds with Emma but isn’t necessarily looking over her shoulder. (Sometimes we get to view the drama or conversation from the ceiling, for instance.) We do get to peer in her ear, however, and know her mind, so the effect on us is much the same, only even stronger than in Harry Potter. We think we’re seeing everything because Emma isn’t telling us the story, but what we’re not seeing—namely, what is happening outside of Emma’s view or of her understanding—is, alas, where the real story is happening.
This last bit of seeming is critical because it is our confusion on this point that allows for what literary geeks call “narrative misdirection.” All “narrative misdirection” amounts to really is our being suckered into believing—because the story is not being told by Harry himself—that we are seeing the story as God (or as the omniscient, plotting writer) sees it. Of course this isn’t the case, but over the course of the tale as we look down on Harry and friends (and enemies) from “on high”—even if “on high” means only from a few feet over Harry’s head—we begin to think we have a larger perspective than we do.
This trick works because we like Harry and sympathize with him and his struggles. In short, we begin to identify with how Harry thinks and feels, and, because Harry is not telling the story, we think we have arrived at this position of sympathy and identification with the hero because of our unprejudiced view.
When you’ve arrived at this position—and, we all do—Rowling has you wrapped up. She can take you anywhere she wants to take you and make you think almost anything she wants about any character because, by and large, what Harry thinks is at this point what we believe.
Did you think Professor Snape was a servant of the Dark Lord in Sorcerer’s Stone? I did. I swallowed Harry’s conviction that Snape was evil and made it my own belief. I had all the information that pointed to Professor Quirrell as the black hat—Ms. Rowling plays by the rules—but I shelved that information as I rushed through the underground obstacles with Ron and Hermione in support of Harry to get to the Mirror of Erised and Snape. Severus, of course, wasn’t there; and he turned out, in the world-turned-upside-down denouement (when Dumbledore tells us how God sees it . . . ), to have been a white hat, despite appearances.
This was possible because of our identification with the orphan boy living under the stairs who was horribly mistreated by his aunt and uncle. We sympathized with him and took his view as our own, though it wasn’t his view or an all-knowing one. Pretty embarrassing, but Ms. Rowling uses this same trick in every book—and nowhere more brilliantly than in Half-Blood Prince, which we will come back to shortly.
Reading Emma, the “best twist ever in literature,” we’re snookered the same way. Unless you’re much better than I am at this sort of thing, you believed that Frank Churchill was very much in pursuit of Emma and that Mr. Knightley had some kind of interest in Harriet Smith. When we learn about Frank and Jane’s secret wedding, because we’ve been wrapped in Emma’s musing while thinking we are seeing the scene as it really is, we’re floored.
Rowling uses this misdirection trick most brilliantly in her sixth novel because by the time Half-Blood Prince opens we’ve been fooled five times. How she did it is fascinating. First, she turned off the voice we’d become used to hearing. Instead of a house-elf with minicam on Harry’s shoulder, we had an elf on the Muggle Prime Minister’s shoulder reading his mind in chapter one and another on Bellatrix’s shoulder in chapter two. By the time we got to Harry in chapter three, we were ready to resume our comfortable position on our friend’s shoulder—a perspective from someone we like.
But for you hard-core readers determined not to identify with Harry, Ms. Rowling had another hook to suck you into delusion with the rest of us. For twenty-eight of the thirty chapters, everyone thought Harry a nutcase for believing Draco was the Death Eater and that Snape was helping him with his mission from the Dark Lord. If we were resistant to believing Harry to be right in these beliefs, we were in good company: Ron, Hermione, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, even Albus Dumbledore also thought Harry just as determined to believe the worst of Malfoy and Snape.
But then, of course, events confirm everything Harry thought since the book’s beginning! Malfoy was on a suicide mission from the Dark Lord! Snape was his willing comrade and a man capable of killing the beloved headmaster who appears more than a little Christlike! And everyone in a wave in the infirmary conclave around Bill’s broken body ends up apologizing to Harry for doubting him and for believing the best of others like Dumbledore when they should have been hating Snape and Malfoy. Harry is a prophet!
You’re a better reader than I am if the traction of this current didn’t pull you off your
feet and send you downstream. This isn’t just “narrative misdirection.” This is literary judo, and Ms. Rowling has a black belt, third dan, in this martial art, I think.
The Judo Throw at the Finish of Half-Blood Prince
If you don’t know anything about judo or its cousin aikido, let me explain what I mean. The point of these martial arts is to use the force or direction of the opponent to subdue him or her. If someone tries to punch or kick you, the judo response is to “encourage” him to continue in his unbalanced direction and lock him up. Ms. Rowling’s judo move is to get us leaning exactly the way we want and then push us over in that direction.
We began the sixth story as careful readers who had been duped by and large five times. We’d all taken oaths, publicly and privately, not to be fooled a sixth time. Everyone else in the book was on our side. “Sure, Harry,” pat on head, shared glance with Dumbledore and Hermione, “we know. Draco’s the youngest Death Eater ever and you know best about Snape—like all the other times you’ve been right about Snape. Which would be ‘never, ever, right about Snape.’” As much as we love Harry, we were not going to kick ourselves again at book’s end for buying into Harry’s jaundiced view. We leaned way back from Harry.
But he was right! And everybody that was with us in leaning away from Harry was on the floor apologizing for not trusting in his discernment. This is the crucial difference between the ending of Half-Blood Prince and every previous Harry Potter book. In every other book’s finale we swore we wouldn’t identify with Harry’s view again. We took solemn oaths that next time we’d be more like Hermione and we’d see this as one of Harry’s mistakes, his “saving people thing.”