Harry Potter's Bookshelf

by John Granger

  With the spiritual and intangible taking such precedence in a society centered around the Church and scripture, medieval people saw this world as a “shadowland” existence. There was a greater life to come that sometimes revealed itself in the saints, in nature, and in art, and it was this life toward which, culturally and nominally at least, minds and hearts were oriented. Medieval folk, consequently, looked to the theatre, the plastic arts, story, and song for clarification about how they were to achieve salvation and eternal life.

  D. W. Robertson, Jr., explains that characters in medieval dramas, then, are not to be understood as realistic portraits, individual personalities, or even types per se. They are instead exempla, “stories with an implication,”3 or exemplars of vice or virtue. They are allegories, or the alieniloquium, in which we are meant to see pictures for our reflection and edification.4

  This is easier to see in the morality plays and novels of the English tradition than it is in the wider-read works of Chaucer or Shakespeare. Everyman (c.1480) is typical of this purely allegorical genre. In it, God sends Death to call the character named Everyman to judgment. Everyman begs Death for time to put his life in order but only gets permission to seek companions who will testify to his merits before God. He seeks out Fellowship, Kindred, Good Deeds, and Knowledge, among others, and after confessing, receives the jewel of Penance. This animates Good Deeds sufficiently that she is able to accompany Everyman to Heaven. In case anyone in the audience missed the point, a Doctor (“learned man” in Latin) explains the importance of good deeds in spiritual life at performance’s end.

  Perhaps the most important written work in English letters (having never gone out of print) is also pure allegory. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678) follows Christian on his pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Christian is a figure like Everyman; he lacks individual quirks or personality but represents humanity in toto on his spiritual quest. Like Everyman, he encounters figurative characters as both guides (Hopeful, the Evangelist) and as characters representing the challenges, opportunities, and points of passage along the way from the fallen world to heaven’s paradise.

  Rowling uses similar allegorical devices that at once reference the preceding works and help build the depth of her own series. Remember in Sorcerer’s Stone when Harry and Draco are in the Forbidden Forest at night serving a detention with Hagrid? They stumble onto a unicorn that has been killed and a man in serpent form who is drinking its blood. Firenze, the centaur, rescues Harry from what we learn later was Quir reldemort and explains to him why anyone would drink unicorn’s blood.

  The brilliance of this is in its allegorical meaning, which, sadly, a medieval audience might understand better than Rowling’s own. It’s a fairly straightforward dramatization of St. Paul’s teaching in his First Letter to the Corinthians on receiving the blood of Christ properly. The snake man is a stand-in for fallen man or even the devil in the Garden of Eden. The unicorn in the Western tradition is a symbol of Christ. The life-giving blood of the unicorn is the Blood of Christ in the Eucharist. Paul writes about those who receive the Blood of Christ unworthily that they are damned: “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body” (1 Corinthians 11:29, KJV). Rowling here drops a biblical mystery play into her postmodern drama to make vivid the godless horror and desperation of Harry’s enemy.

  A “mystery play” is the term given for a depiction of a story acted out straight or very close to the scriptural account; think “Passion dramas” or just a staging of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden or the Nativity in Bethlehem. A “morality play,” in contrast, is a depiction like Pilgrim’s Progress and Everyman in which a person representing all humanity or “man” meets characters representing challenges and opportunities on what evangelicals call the “Christian Walk.” Ms. Rowling gives us two of these, one at the end of Chamber of Secrets, the other in Harry’s walk into the Forbidden Forest in Deathly Hallows.

  The Chamber of Secrets drama is a morality play because the hero, Harry descending into Slytherin’s long-closed basilisk berth to save the fair maiden, is in large part an Everyman drama. All men and women, like Harry, are called to make a choice to confront the demons in their basements and to act sacrificially and lovingly for what is true, good, beautiful, and sacred. The mystery play component is that Harry’s defeat of the basilisk and Tom Riddle, Jr., like the adventure with the centaur and unicorn, is a staging of biblical teaching in dramatic, allegorical form. Harry’s victory because of his faith and his ascent from the depths of the Chamber cavern, the satanic serpent’s lair, to the heavenly Hogwarts via the Resurrection phoenix is a transparency of how a Christian finds salvation in Christ.5

  Deathly Hallows, as we’ll discuss in chapter nine, is built on a scaffolding of alchemical events laid over the Christian calendar. Key events happen in Harry’s transformation on Christmas Eve, Theophany, and Easter. The climax of the story takes place, not on the calendar date for the Crucifixion but in a depiction of it in story form. Ms. Rowling has said several times that Harry’s walk into the forest in Deathly Hallows (chapter thirty-four) was the most difficult and rewarding chapter of the books for her. It is largely a retelling of the Crucifixion of Christ.6

  In essence, chapter thirty-four, titled “The Forest Again,” is simultaneously a retelling of the Crucifixion and a story of the death of a Christian Everyman. Harry’s choices, and successful struggle to believe, have transformed him into a transparency of the God-man in whom he believes. “The Forest Again” tells us how:• Harry has Garden of Gethsemane desires and chooses to act in obedience as savior.

  • Harry walks the Via Dolorosa, stumbles, and is helped by Lily, his mother.

  • Harry dies sacrificially and without resistance to defeat the Dark Lord, as Christ died on the Cross.

  Ms. Rowling inevitably tells Harry’s story in language resonant with the Passion gospels. The chapter following it is titled “King’s Cross,” in case we missed the Calvary message, and, when Harry returns to the forest from his conversation with Dumbledore, we get even more. Narcissa Malfoy’s “nails pierced him,” so we are left with a fallen savior pierced by nails, a Cross, and despairing disciples. Other than a plaited crown of thorns, I’m not sure how she could have made her allegorical point more obvious.

  Perhaps it is having Harry, her Everyman figure, in imitation of Bunyan’s Christian throwing off his pack of sins at the “Place of Deliverance,” losing the scar/Horcrux by having died to himself and offered his life as a sacrifice to save his friends. This death to self, an interior victory resulting in resurrection and eternal life, is a story echo of Matthew 16:25, “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” and of John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

  The Allegorist’s Tale: Harry Potter as a Canterbury Pilgrim

  Bunyan’s characters, as he tells us plainly in his Apology or preface to Progress, are allegories and metaphors but no less “solid” in meaning or value for being story transparencies.7 Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales (c.1400) predates Bunyan by two hundred years and Everyman by the better part of a century, is, if anything, more allegorical in intention though with more developed and literal characters. Chaucer was famous even in his day for his poetic achievement in Tales and for his use of “sentence,” which, as Robertson explains, is the “solidity” of allegorical meaning beneath the surface story and morals. A book’s “sentence” is what we arrive at “as the result of allegorical interpretation”8 and is Chaucer’s claim to fame.

  If Ms. Rowling hadn’t pointed to Chaucer herself and to “The Pardoner’s Tale” specifically as an influence on her last novel,9 we might have guessed as much from the frequent departures she makes within her narrative for characters to tell stories themselves. We have Hagrid explaining his extended v
acation among the giants, Kreacher detailing how Master Regulus had died, and Helena Ravenclaw’s gothic romance about the Bloody Baron. If we still miss the Chaucer connection, Ms. Rowling gives us four chapter titles that end with “Tale” as a specific hat-tip toward the Canterbury Tales.10

  That Ms. Rowling suggests “The Pardoner’s Tale” was an important influence invites greater attention. Not too surprisingly, there are surface, moral, and allegorical correspondences between “The Pardoner’s Tale,” Ms. Rowling’s “Tale of the Three Brothers,” and Harry Potter’s story arc viewed as a whole.

  The surface story told by Chaucer’s “Pardoner” is about three men, disgusted by the death of a mutual friend, who head out to find Death and destroy him. They meet an Old Man who says he just saw Death in the graveyard under a tree. At the tree in the graveyard, the three friends find bags of gold rather than the enemy they expect. Long story short, two of the men kill the third to split his share of the gold. The third man has his posthumous revenge because he had poisoned the two men’s wine. All three set out to destroy Death but were brought to their own deaths, spiritual and physical, by greed.

  “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.

  Soul Allegory: The Brothers Karamazov; Star Trek; and Harry, Ron, and Hermione

  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 an
d 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.

  The Struggle to Believe in Tennyson’s Idylls, Dostoevsky’s Brothers, and Deathly Hallows

  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.