by John Granger
Before talking about the story she writes and Rita’s further adventures, it’s probably best to unwrap the meaning of her name. The photographer accompanying her to Hogwarts on this visit is called “Bozo,” and the reporter with the acid-tipped Quick-Quotes-Quill has a tag that is just as disparaging and revealing. In brief, “Rita Skeeter” should be said aloud: “Read-a-Squiter,” i.e., “Read a Mosquito.” The cameraman is a buffoonish clown and the journalist is a blood-sucking parasite that, at best, is a nuisance, and, as often as not, spreads diseases that could be fatal. If the insect analogy seems far-fetched to you, Rita is revealed in later chapters to be an Animagus who turns herself into a bug.
Not a name you’d give someone you liked, right? And Rita is not someone we’re meant to like.
The article she writes, as you’d expect, has little to nothing to do with what Harry said and everything to do with a story Ms. Skeeter knew would be a “wow.” She makes up “facts” and quotations whole cloth (e.g., that Harry was the only Gryffindor champion, cried about his parents at night, etc.), which proves to be the source of teasing and embarrassment for Harry. Because everyone seems to believe everything they read in the Prophet, though they know it is a rag.
Rita writes stories in Goblet of Fire about Hagrid being a half-giant, about Harry’s being “disturbed and dangerous,” and about Hermione as something of a tart who toys with the affections of both Viktor Krum and Harry Potter. This last bit was a mistake on Skeeter’s part because Hermione figures out how Rita listens in on their conversations unseen via a “bug.” She captures Skeeter, an unregistered Animagus, in her beetle form and exacts pledges of journalist abstinence from her to “see if she can’t break the habit of writing horrible lies about people” (Goblet of Fire, chapter thirty-seven).
Ms. Rowling, however, is only warming up in her story-portrait of the press as evil. In Order of the Phoenix, by innuendo, asides, and suggestion as well as in written reports, the Prophet becomes the voice of the Ministry in doing everything possible, even without their star reporter, to diminish the respect witches and wizards feel for Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore. The Ministry doesn’t want to acknowledge that Voldemort has returned, so those who have seen that he has come back have to be discounted as witnesses. The Prophet obliges both in disparaging the boy and his headmaster and in not covering any news of Voldemort’s rebirthing or Cedric’s death at the Tournament.
Incredibly, the strategy works. When Harry returns to school, he finds that he has very few friends, even in Gryffindor. All have been seduced and hypnotized by newspaper reports questioning his honesty and portraying him as a braggart and attention seeker. Hermione decides to go on a media-manipulation campaign through Rita Skeeter and The Quibbler. Rita’s comments about journalism in their conversation about an interview with Harry are telling: “There’s no market for a story [about the truth],” said Rita coldly.
“You mean the Prophet won’t print it because Fudge won’t let them,” said Hermione irritably.
Rita gave Hermione a long, hard look. Then, leaning forward across the table toward her, she said in a businesslike tone, “All right, Fudge is leaning on the Prophet, but it comes to the same thing. They won’t print a story that shows Harry in a good light. Nobody wants to read it. It’s against the public mood. This last Azkaban breakout has got people quite worried enough. People just don’t want to believe You-Know-Who’s back.”
“So the Daily Prophet exists to tell people what they want to hear, does it?” said Hermione scathingly.
Rita sat up straight again, her eyebrows raised, and drained her glass of firewhisky.
“The Prophet exists to sell itself, you silly girl,” she said coldly. (Order of the Phoenix, chapter twenty-five)
The media, in a nutshell, tells people what they want to hear, and reporters and editors will sell the truth down the river any time to make money. Ouch. When the Ministry goes under the Dark Lord’s control in Harry’s seventh year, the Prophet falls into line as well. “Don’t trust the establishment or the press to tell you the truth.” The media, in Rowling’s satirical treatment, is joined at the hip to the powerful, to bozos, and to parasites on the body politic that are to be used, if necessary, but kept at arm’s length if not farther. “The Prophet is bound to report the truth occasionally,” said Dumbledore, “if only accidentally” (Half-Blood Prince, chapter seventeen).
The Book Most Like Harry Potter
Ms. Rowling offers Hermione’s aggressive approach to media as the best way to deal with this beast. Rather than suffer its poisons patiently, it is better, she suggests, to use new or alternative media to better control your story and to foster relationships with journalists you can trust (or blackmail!).
Ms. Rowling’s political and social allegory within and beneath her story line are not as dark as Orwell’s picture of 1948 reality projected into his nightmare 1984 or even his relatively comic portrayal of political revolution in Animal Farm. These are bleak satires compared to Harry Potter because the arrows travel much deeper into their subjects and the wounds are mortal.
A book that is a mean between dark Orwell and light Lewis Carroll, whose Alice adventures are delightful but whose satirical bite has almost completely evaporated with time, is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726. When I am asked what other books most remind me of Harry Potter, the top three are Emma, A Tale of Two Cities, and Gulliver’s Travels—and, of those three, the satirical journeys of Lemuel Gulliver are probably the closest match to Harry’s.
Why? First of all, it’s funny in ways Emma and A Tale of Two Cities, as set pieces, cannot be. If you’re not amused by Swift’s various stories, it’s time for a sense of humor transplant. Gulliver, in his seriousness and the variety of voices in which he speaks fluently and convincingly (scientist, lawyer, world traveler, doctor, philosophical disputant, courtier, etc.), is a cartoon character for the ages.
Travels, too, is a book written like Harry Potter, as a mélange of several genres. On the surface, it is a parody of the travel books that were so popular in its day. Because it is obviously fantasy, it invites shelving with children’s books as a harmless fairy tale, but it has been read as a novel, as science fiction, as philosophical treatise, and, of course, as political and social satire.
But it is the satire for which Swift is famous, even if few people outside the Ivory Tower read it except as entertainment. Funny as it is, Swift meant the book to be a poke in the eye both to his targets in their specific foolishness and to his readers just as human beings. Gulliver’s comment in text that “. . . my principal Design was to Inform, and not to amuse thee” (Travels, XII) echoes Swift’s aside in a letter to Alexander Pope (September 29, 1725), that “the chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it.”
And vexatious he certainly is! Like Rowling, Swift caricatures historical individuals and events, institutions of power and prejudice, as well as types of people and specific attitudes or beliefs. I don’t intend to write a “Hidden Key” text to Gulliver’s Travels (not very surprisingly, given its popularity on publication, explanations to the satire were in print within months) but just to give you an idea of the variety of Swift’s targets:• In “The Voyage to Lilliput,” part one of the book’s four parts, he tells in allegorical form the history of the War of Spanish Succession. Lilliput and Blefuscu are England and France, the Big-endians and Little-endians are Catholic and Protestant partisans, and the high heels and low heels courtiers are Tories and Whigs, respectively.
• In “The Voyage to Laputa,” part three, Swift mocks both the Royal Society of Science and the court of King George I in his description of the floating island of Laputa. The ridiculous experiments and scientific investigations Gulliver describes as Laputan Academy concerns are not Swift inventions; incredibly, almost all have been confirmed by historians of science as activities of the Royal Society in Swift’s day.21
• In almost every country, Swift takes aim at a
ristocrats, lawyers, courtiers, scientists, medical doctors, and soldiers. In Lilliput and Laputa, these types are despicable and shown in the worst satiric light. In Brobdignab and the Land of the Houyhnhnm, parts two and four of Travels, in contrast, we see their ideal equivalents. Brobdignabians are giants, and the Houyhnhnm are noble, almost otherworldly horses exclusively guided by their reason.
And it is with these enlightened horses that Swift delivers his version of the Cave Allegory.
Houyhnhnm and Yahoos: Enlightenment Reason and Romantic Fancy
Gulliver sets sail on his fourth adventure as captain of his own vessel but suffers the terrible fate of a mutiny among his scurvy crew and is put ashore on an unknown shore with nothing but clean clothes and a short sword. Gulliver is set upon by savage, hairy creatures on all fours who back him up against a tree—then climb the tree to avoid his sword and to defecate on him. He is rescued by a horse.
The horses in this world are rational animals, much more rational and noble than anything human of any size Lemuel has met so far, and the savage animals are Yahoos, wild human beings the horses use as work animals (though they are difficult to train and control). The Houyhnhnm Master who adopts Gulliver despite his Yahoo appearance teaches him the language and the truly civilized ways of the Houyhnhnms.
The horses, in fact, are citizens of Plato’s ideal country in his Republic. They have no money, they have strict castes, and they raise and educate their children in common. Gulliver’s dialogue with the horse he calls his Master with the greatest possible deference is an echo of the dialogue in the Republic during which Plato describes the best form of government.
Gulliver, the cave dweller who has seen the Sun in the land of the Houyhnhnms, cannot forget what he has seen truly and experienced with his Master when he returns to the “cave” of his home in Britain. He decides to live in the stable in seeming cruel disregard for his family—a rational, almost laudable choice, when we understand that Gulliver’s Travels is only an extended and more involved retelling of Plato’s Cave Allegory. Swift is savaging the “rationalists” and “humanists” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who are proud of their “scientific discoveries” in the cave and imagine themselves more enlightened than their “superstitious” contemporaries of traditional faith and classical virtues. Even for a world traveler, life in a confined stable with honest horses is far preferable than the company of the proud Yahoos.
Harry and the Houyhnhnms: Satire as Stunning Blow, Warning Shot, and Dark Zebra
Swift takes no prisoners in Gulliver’s Travels. In what one writer has called “second person satire,” he is trying to bring the reader to Gulliver’s epiphany that he is a Yahoo who, while capable of reason, has very little to be proud of with respect to the attainment of reason. “Pride” for a Yahoo is death, or, worse, acceptance of a life sentence chained in the cave.
“[Gulliver’s Travels’] prevailing tone is quarrelsome and dis orienting, programmed to vex rather than to divert, and it is the antithesis of more conventional satirical styles which purport to engage the reader’s solidarity.”22 Ms. Rowling, as we learned in our chapter on Austen and narrative misdirection, has chosen to tell her stories from a specific perspective that will draw the reader in, rather than poke him or her in the eye. Rowling and Swift as allegorists have very similar goals in mind for their heroes; how they tell their stories reflects the different relationship we are meant to have with their heroes. If every satirist is painting a picture of man as a zebra, Swift is with those satirists who think man is a black horse with attitude on which you can paint white stripes. This is usually called a Menip pean satire and is a specific category of allegory in which the “story” is essentially a vehicle for scenes in which the ridiculous are shown to be stupid or, better, they sound off à la Gilderoy Lockhart and reveal themselves in outrageous speech. It’s more like Saturday Night Live than a coherent drama; but the knives are all buried, quite humorously, in their targets.
We could call the satire Ms. Rowling uses, in contrast, “Cruikshankian.” It isn’t the focus of the books; it’s largely incidental to the central story arc. The Cruikshankian satire’s man-zebra is a white horse on which the artist paints black stripes. Ms. Rowling satirizes, even ridicules teachers, politicians, judges and jailors, and Fleet Street reporters in stories told in her “distorted mirror” but only, perhaps, because they were features in her story already. Unlike Gulliver’s adventures, which clearly were designed to deliver blows on specific targets, the Harry Potter books don’t have satire as the main focus. Her hero’s story, unlike Swift’s, isn’t about human inability to transcend ourselves; Harry’s apotheosis is about man reaching his destination rather than falling short of it.23
That is the larger story of Harry Potter, which, though it shares the traditional or at least antimodern view of Swift’s Gulliver in its satirical depiction of individuals and types as proud Yahoos from the shadowlands, is an allegory without visible or one-to-one correspondences. And it is this parable or fairy-tale quality of Ms. Rowling’s Hogwarts adventures that we turn to next.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Harry Potter as an Everyman Allegory
Harry, Hogwarts, and Company as Medieval
Types for Reader Reflection and Edification
Latin, that most magical of languages, has a single word that defines and explains what allegory means: alieniloquium , literally, “saying one thing to mean another.” C. S. Lewis defined “allegory” as:By an allegory I mean a composition (whether pictorial or literary) in which immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects, e.g., a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love (which in reality is an experience, not an object occupying a given area of space) or, in Bunyan a giant represents Despair.1
We started down the road to allegory with satire because both are devices that employ literary language to refer to something else, be they specific individuals, ideas and ideologies, or types of people holding certain beliefs. Both provide the reader with something to interpret, a puzzle even, and allow the reader a certain sense of triumph once they have decoded the author’s potential message. But while satire is often used to be critical of someone or something specific, allegory has its greater power in nonspecific referents that draw the reader into the message and meaning of the book.
Allegory can extend and deepen the moral meaning of the story and point to something greater. For an example of this larger view, let’s look through the allegorical lens at the gothic setting and devices of Harry Potter. Without straining our eyes, we should be able to make out a world of antimodern, even traditional religious meaning in that castle with ghosts and suits of armor.
Subversive Texts Dressed Up in Fairy-Tale Garments
Like the Harry Potter series, many, I dare say “most,” great children’s fiction, and books often labeled as such, are, as Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker, “utterly bound up in the medieval.”2 From Tolkien to Lewis, from Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth to Brian Jacques’s Redwall series, the fantasy setting of these books resembles the Middle Ages more closely than it does our modern day.
It doesn’t take more than a moment’s reflection on favorite books to recognize this trend. Alice’s trip through the looking glass and her adventures with the chessboard characters there are essentially a side trip into feudalism-kings, queens, knights, and knaves. And each escape and sojourn into Narnia with the Pevensie children and Eustace Scrubb, like The Lord of the Rings epic, is another journey into an imaginary Middle Ages that is set as a critical foil to our own age.
There is a pattern here that I hope you are catching: the Battle of the Books between life, love, and laughter against the forces of antiseptic reason and scientism.
The medieval backdrop as a critical foil set up against our technological times is an echo of Jane Austen’s subtle critique of Hume’s empiricism (see chapter two), of the “fallen man” morality of gothic romance and horror opposed to humanism and materialism (ch
apter four), and Swift’s broadsides and satirical swipes against the Enlightenment thinkers (chapter six). The poets and Romantic visionaries since Swift have retreated behind the high barricades of popular fictions and poesy to carry on the traditional critique of the mores and advances of their time, a subversive war against the dominion of scientific, analytical reason shorn of love, conscience, virtue, and imagination.
What is it about a medieval setting-the castles, monks, and feudal trappings-that makes it the vehicle it is for critiques of modernity? Two things.
First, to scientists and nonbelievers (to simplify and generalize), medieval Europe, focused as it was culturally (at least relatively speaking) on matters of faith, was an age of superstition and subjective nonsense. The Romantics chose the medieval setting, in other words, as the stage for antimodern dramas because the scientists whose inhuman rationalism they were fighting had chosen the “Dark Ages” they decided were “dark” as their enemy and counterpoint. Second, the medieval period serves as an excellent literary foil because of that time period’s art and literature. Unlike modern naturalist paintings and realist novels that are largely devoid of poetry, the art of the Middle Ages is suffused with the sacred and spiritual and song. The people’s worldview and the art corresponding to it were relatively otherworldly, which is the reason, of course, that the rationalists consider it a “dark” time and the Romantic reactionaries thought it a fitting place of resistance.
Biblical Allegory in Harry Potter: Medieval Mystery Play, Everyman, and Pilgrim’s Progress
The castle and technology-free setting of Hogwarts have an obvious medieval message contra modernity. It’s nothing, though, compared to the stories themselves, which several times seem to be allegorical entertainments written in imitation of the plays, poems, and prose of the Middle Ages.