Harry Potter's Bookshelf

by John Granger

  Returning to the English tradition, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, employs allegory to describe the struggle with belief in both the Arthurian Idylls of the King’s conclusion “The Passing of Arthur” and “In Memoriam.” Idylls is a poem that is the photographic negative of “In Memoriam.” “In Memoriam” is Tennyson’s record of his successful struggle with keeping faith and living in faith after the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam. Idylls is the elegy of a kingdom destroyed by those not keeping faith: in marriage, as knights, or as subjects. “Both poems not only emphasize man’s essential need to believe but also those forces which make it so difficult for him to do so.”16

  In Idylls King Arthur and Sir Bedivere’s struggles, in brief, are to believe and to trust, albeit on different scales. Arthur, in the idyll before “Passing,” forgives Guinevere and is, in an otherworldly manner, reconciled with her despite her betrayal. He leaves her to lead the remnants of his Table against the forces of Mordred, a foe incapable of fealty.17 The battle is one of mist and confusion, before which Arthur comes close to despair. Sir Bedivere proclaims his fealty, however, and, moved by Sir Bedivere’s faith in him, the king attacks and slays Mordred. He receives a mortal blow himself, not unlike Harry’s battle with the basilisk in Chamber of Secrets.

  The king is taken to a chapel. There Arthur orders Bedivere to throw his sword, Excalibur, into the lake. Twice Bedivere balks and attempts to deceive the king. He hides the sword, unable to rationalize its loss because of its beauty, value, history, and because Arthur is not in his right mind. Instead, Bedivere rationalizes his disobedience and disloyalty. Arthur, however, sees through Bedivere’s lie and demands he throw the sword in the water. Bedivere at last complies, and the Lady of the Lake catches it and comes for Arthur.

  Bedivere is rewarded with the sight of Arthur boarding a vessel that sails to Avalon, the Isle of the Blessed, where the sword was forged. In the allegory of a struggle to believe, Bedivere, the surviving knight of Arthur’s Round Table, is the Christian of the end times and Arthur is the Christ. Arthur destroys Mordred in response to Bedivere’s faith but is almost allowed to die because of Bedivere’s inability to trust in his instruction to the end. Arthur survives on the thread of such halting faith.

  Similarly, Harry is an allegory of the modern struggle to believe rather than a cardboard depiction of faith. Rowling gives Harry’s first appearance in Deathly Hallows the chapter title “In Memoriam” to clarify that “my struggling with religious belief and so on I think is quite apparent in this book.”18 Harry’s trouble in Deathly Hallows, his interior agony, has less to do with Horcrux hunting or the long camping trip with Ron and Hermione than it does with his crisis of faith.

  In brief, Dumbledore serves as a stand-in for God; Harry, as he learns more about the late great headmaster, changes from the “Dumbledore man” he said he was in Half-Blood Prince to feeling certain at his nadir that Dumbledore never loved him.

  And his fury at Dumbledore broke over him now like lava, scorching him inside, wiping out every other feeling. Out of sheer desperation they had talked themselves into believing . . . that it was all part of some secret path laid out for them by Dumbledore; but there was no map, no plan. Dumbledore had left them to grope in the darkness, to wrestle with unknown and undreamed-of terrors, alone and unaided: Nothing was explained, nothing was given freely . . .

  “Look what he asked from me, Hermione! Risk your life, Harry! And again! And again! And don’t expect me to explain everything, just trust me blindly, trust that I know what I’m doing, trust me even though I don’t trust you! Never the whole truth! Never!

  “ . . . I don’t know who he loved, Hermione, but it was never me. This isn’t love, the mess he’s left me in . . .”

  . . . He closed his eyes at her touch, and hated himself for wishing that what she said was true: that Dumbledore had really cared. (Deathly Hallows, chapter eighteen)

  In the denouement of Chamber of Secrets, Dumbledore had told Harry that “it is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” Choice is clearly a major theme throughout the series but it is only in Deathly Hallows that we learn that the essential choice is not about being kind to Muggles or choosing not to kick your house-elf; it is the choice to believe that makes all the difference.

  Harry is counseled by both Elphias Doge and Hermione to “choose to believe” in Dumbledore. He finds the idea of choosing what you believe so nonsensical that he “could simply choose not to believe” (Deathly Hallows, chapter eight, emphasis on “choose” in original). Ms. Rowling draws our attention to choice and belief again in chapter ten, “Kreacher’s Tale,“ when Harry and Hermione argue about whether to believe like Doge or join the Skeeter skeptics like Auntie Muriel: “There it was again: Choose what to believe. He wanted the truth. Why was everybody so determined that he should not get it?” To Harry at this stage, “choosing” a belief means turning a blind eye to reality. He wants to know facts, not choose beliefs.

  Harry decides, however, after the events in the basement at Malfoy Manor, that he must choose to believe or not to believe because he doesn’t have and can’t get the facts he needs to know for sure. On Easter morning, in a grave that he had chosen to dig by hand to honor Dobby’s sacrifice, he chooses to believe in Dumbledore and put aside his doubts. He recalls later:Harry kept quiet. He did not want to express the doubts and uncertainties about Dumbledore that had riddled him for months now. He had made his choice as he dug Dobby’s grave, he had decided to continue along the winding, dangerous path indicated for him by Albus Dumbledore, to accept that he had not been told everything that he wanted to know, but simply to trust. He had no desire to doubt again; he did not want to hear anything that would deflect him from his purpose. (Deathly Hallows, chapter twenty-eight)

  And it is this choice to put aside doubts, to trust and believe, that makes all the difference. His Easter decision to trust in something greater than himself is the cause of his consequent transformation, ability to walk into the woods as a Christian Everyman, to rise from the dead and defeat Lord Voldemort. That allegorical mystery play, though, at story’s end is just part of the modern struggle to believe allegory that is the heart of the book.

  What If I Missed All That?

  What if you don’t get the meaning or see the correspondents of this sort of allegory? Well, don’t feel bad. Most people don’t pick it up on their first or second pass. If we don’t see Harry as an Everyman or as a Christ figure, we can still experience the sacrificial love he shows and the purification he experiences during his willing death in the forest. If we don’t “see” Christ, we can still understand that he acts out of love for his friends.

  Believe it or not, though, allegory is just the stepping-off place for the real depths of reading experience, the anagogical layer and mythic meaning. Grab your branch of Gubraithian Fire and your indestructible goblin helmet, gifts you picked up from Ms. Rowling’s Giants after discovering the allegorical elements of “Hagrid’s Tale” (Order of the Phoenix, chapter twenty), to explore what legendary art and literary critic John Ruskin called the jewels available only to those doing the “deep mining” of meditative and close reading,19 our experience of the Hero’s Journey, literary alchemy, and magical, spiritual core reality beneath the surface of everything existent in Harry’s adventures.

  PART FOUR

  The Mythic or Anagogical Meaning

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Magical Center of the Circle

  The Mythic Meaning of Harry’s Hero’s Journeys

  from Privet Drive to King’s Cross

  I’ll admit that the first time I opened each Harry Potter novel I wasn’t reading for substance or to find any deep, hidden meaning. I turned the pages as fast as I could because I was on the edge of my seat with excitement about how Harry and friends would solve the mystery and survive the inevitable confrontation with the Wizarding world’s forces of evil.

  But even on the initial speed-reads there are what seem to be fasci
nating and inexplicable comments or events in the story line. I always fold a page corner to mark these passages so I can find them easily after putting the children to bed. (My first readings of the last four books were to my children after “Midnight Madness” parties at local bookstores.) Here are three examples:• In Deathly Hallows, the Ravenclaw common room door asks two questions, “Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?” and “Where do Vanished objects go?” Luna answers the first successfully (“A circle has no beginning”), and Professor McGonagall handles the second (“Into nonbeing, which is to say, everything”). The door compliments Luna on her “reasoning” and McGonagall on her “phrasing.”

  • After Harry’s sacrifice in the Forbidden Forest, he wakes up in a palace he thinks “looks like” King’s Cross station. He asks Dumbledore at the end of their conversation there if his experience has been “real” “or has this been happening inside my head?” Dumbledore responds as he fades into the mist, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” Huh?

  • And what about all the eyeballs in Deathly Hallows? The blue eye of Dumbledore in the mirror fragment, the disembodied eye of Mad-Eye Moody, the “triangular eye” of the Hallows symbol, Snape’s love for Lily’s green eyes, and the red eyes of Tom Riddle, Jr., in the locket Horcrux. What’s up with that?

  These mysteries do not have surface, moral, or allegorical explanations. They require the meditative “slow mining” that John Ruskin says is rewarded by the best art and literature with jewels of meaning.

  [The maxim that story teaches better than sermon is true] not of the Iliad only, but of all other great art whatsoever. For all pieces of such art are didactic in the purest way, indirectly and occultly; so that, first, you shall only be bettered by them if you are already hard at work at bettering yourself; and when you are bettered by them, it shall be partly with a general acceptance of their influence, so constant and subtle that you shall be no more conscious of it than of the healthy digestion of food; and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you shall only find by slow mining for it—which is withheld on purpose, and close-locked, that you may not get it till you have forged the key of it in a furnace of your own heating.1

  Ruskin is the giant of iconographical criticism, and this remark of his about the deepest meanings of art is worth unpacking. He says first that the teaching or “didactic” quality of art in its “purest” sense isn’t overt teaching at all but something hidden, even occultic. Mark Twain, in advice to writers, urges them to this kind of covert meaning: “If you would have your fiction live forever, you must neither overtly preach nor overtly teach; but you must covertly preach and covertly teach.”2 Further, discovering this meaning, Ruskin suggests, is not so much a function of cleverness or prior learning as it is a measure of the reader’s intention and acceptance. You will be able to “forge the key” to unlock the covert meaning of a writer’s work “if you are already hard at work bettering yourself.” Grasping this meaning will be less an “aha!” or “got it!” epiphany than something analogous to our assimilation of food: a “constant and subtle” and largely unconscious transformation.

  The artistry here will not be surface fireworks; just the contrary. As Lewis wrote in The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version, “An influence which cannot evade our consciousness will not go very deep.”3 Expanding on Ruskin’s gustatory analogy, Martin Lings, the Shakespeare scholar, says great art is not teaching at all; instead, it is offering a sample of nourishing food that is wisdom each receives to the degree their intentions and capacities allow:In considering how Shakespeare conveys his message to us we must remember that the true function of art is not didactic. A great drama or epic may contain little or much teaching of a didactic kind, but it does not rely on that teaching in order to gain its ultimate effect. Its function is not so much to define spiritual wisdom as to give us a taste of that wisdom, each according to his capacity.4

  But Ruskin adds that there is some effort involved in this process beyond a willingness to receive it. We readers need to become sensitive to the clues in the text that the author leaves as pointers for those with eyes to see—little mysteries like the Ravenclaw door’s questions and the marble bag of eyeballs rolling around in Deathly Hallows.

  As we begin the three-chapter anagogical section of Bookshelf, in which we will be looking for the hidden spiritual wisdom of these stories (“anagogical” literally meaning “uplifting” or “edifying”), let’s start with the door questions and Luna’s answer: “A circle has no beginning.” Circles, it turns out, are in all literature the preferred esoteric shape for “hero’s journey” stories—including Harry’s, and are the setting of his most dramatic confrontations with Lord Voldemort. Ms. Rowling didn’t make this up herself but lifts it from her favorite writers, ancient and modern.

  The Secret Garden at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

  When asked at the dawn of Potter-mania about the possibility of Harry Potter movies, Ms. Rowling revealed her familiarity with the best-known books of Frances Hodgson Burnett:Among the things that swayed me to Warner Bros. were the movies A Little Princess and The Secret Garden . . . They treated the books with respect and made changes where it absolutely made sense.5

  Though to my knowledge she has never mentioned Ms. Burnett or her children’s classics as sources or inspiration for Harry Potter, this remark reflects her intimacy with each book. She knows them well enough to have been impressed with the changes a movie production made as departures from the original. Even without this comment, though, there are sufficiently substantial echoes of Secret Garden in Harry Potter that the connection can be made without the author’s drawing our attention to it.

  Secret Garden’s cast of characters is a model for Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Both adventures are the stories of two young boys and a girl—in Garden the boys are Colin and Dickon, and the girl is Mary. Garden takes place in a single year, early spring to late summer, and involves three children ten to twelve years old. The Potter adventures, though seven years long, begin when Harry, Ron, and Hermione are eleven years old and are largely the tale of this “terrible trio,” as Snape calls them.

  Colin and Harry both own mansions, and both houses feature the painting of a mother behind a curtain that is disturbing to the son. Colin and Mary repeatedly describe the manor as a “queer place” and Colin has covered the picture of his mother’s smiling face because “sometimes I don’t like to see her looking at me. She smiles too much when I am ill and miserable. Besides, she is mine and I don’t want everyone to see her” (chapter thirteen, “I am Colin”).

  Later, Colin pulls back the curtain in the moonlight and leaves the painting for all to see; “I want to see her laughing like that all the time. I think she must have been a sort of Magic person perhaps.” In correspondence, the House of Black that Harry inherits at Sirius’s death is certainly an odd place, and the painting of Sirius’s mother in the entry hall is kept behind moth-eaten velvet curtains. She is definitely “a sort of Magic person,” albeit the worst sort.

  The most obvious and persuasive echo-pointing-to-influence in Burnett’s stories, however, are in the eyes of her lead characters. Sara Crewe in Princess has “big, wonderful” and “solemn” green eyes that everyone admires and notes on first meeting her in that book. Colin Craven’s eyes, though gray rather than green, repeatedly and by almost every character in Garden, are said to resemble the eyes of his late mother, Lilias, the woman in the portrait. Lilias’s death precipitated Colin’s birth and it is suggested several times that she is watching over him still. Harry’s mum was named Lily, of course, his green eyes are always said to be “ just like his mother’s,” her death saved Harry’s young life from the Dark Lord, and she walks Harry to his destiny in the Forbidden Forest.

  Which brings us finally to the magic of circles. Everyone who enters the walled Secret Garden of Burnett’s story—including animals and invalids—looks around and around
and around in wonder. Colin’s “prayer-meetings” and scientific experiments to explore and invoke the Magic (always capitalized) of the place, too, are held in what Burnett calls “a mystic circle.”

  It all seemed most majestic and mysterious when they sat down in their circle. Ben Weatherstaff felt as if he had somehow been led into appearing at a prayer-meeting. Ordinarily he was very fixed in being what he called “agen’ prayer-meetin’s” but this being the Rajah’s affair he did not resent it and was indeed inclined to be gratified at being called upon to assist. Mistress Mary felt solemnly enraptured. Dickon held his rabbit in his arm, and perhaps he made some charmer’s signal no one heard, for when he sat down, cross-legged like the rest, the crow, the fox, the squirrels and the lamb slowly drew near and made part of the circle, settling each into a place of rest as if of their own desire.

  “The ‘creatures’ have come,” said Colin gravely. “They want to help us.”

  Colin really looked quite beautiful, Mary thought. He held his head high as if he felt like a sort of priest and his strange eyes had a wonderful look in them. The light shone on him through the tree canopy.