Harry Potter's Bookshelf

by John Granger

  According to Dumbledore, the entire conversation at King’s Cross “happens inside [Harry’s] head.” He also insists via a rhetorical question that this experience has been “real.” Ms. Rowling’s putting her finger on this exchange as essential brings up the questions of how this is possible and what Dumbledore means by “real.”

  When Harry asks, “Is this real?” the word “real” means something we have understood from information we have acquired via our physical senses or pictured and abstracted out of that information. Harry asks the question “is this real?” because his experience at what he thinks of as King’s Cross Station (but which looks nothing like it!) has been in several important ways unreal. From the cloudy vapor becoming his surroundings and items he wants to his having a lively chat with a radiant, certifiably solid, and brilliant dead man aren’t the stuff of energy and matter quantities or even the magical curriculum at Hogwarts. The trick is, if it’s not “real” the way both Muggles and Magical folk think things can be real, what else can it be? Given Harry’s track record at Hogwarts in being stunned by how little he understood of what was really going on, it’s little wonder he asks the equivalent of “Did this really happen or have I mistaken what’s only happening in my thinking for reality again?”

  Dumbledore’s response reveals that he thinks Harry has created a false dichotomy. There is another option to account for his experience rather than just either scientific knowledge or delusional opinion, either objective or subjective thinking. Harry, like the rest of us, is a de facto materialist. If he cannot touch, see, smell, taste, or hear it, he thinks it is less real than something he can know by sense perception. Because abstraction, thinking, feeling, fancy, imaginings, and dreams—the things that “happen in our heads”—are immaterial by definition, they are not dependable ways of knowing the hard and therefore “real” facts.

  Prejudices, limited views, unfounded speculation, and private animosity can distort our thinking, so, like Harry, we don’t count “inside our head” experience as real. Harry asks Dumbledore the skeptic’s question and gives Dumbledore the empiricist’s only two options: namely, objective “real” knowledge and subjective “unreal” knowledge. Dumbledore’s answer asserts there is another answer—a union or conjunction between “what is real” and “what is happening in our heads” beyond sense perception.

  Ron Weasley asks Harry incredulously when he pulls Harry out of the pool in the Forest of Dean—and again when he is disappointed that Harry decides to forsake the Elder Wand—“Are—you—mental?” But if we understand that Dumbledore is telling Harry that what happens inside your head is, indeed, real, then yes, we must concur that Harry is mental. The unity of existence as Logos means we all—Muggles, wizards, all created things—are mental.

  C. S. Lewis said this was one of the most important things he learned from his friend Owen Barfield, that “the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos.”6 Lewis discusses this idea most directly in his essay “The Seeing Eye,” which argues that conscience is “continuous with” the unity of existence.7 His story version of the Logos reality beneath the surface, the “inside that is bigger than the outside,” is much more well known because it appears at the climax of the Narnia novel The Last Battle. There King Tirian has been driven into a stable by the wicked Calormenes. Once there, he is surprised to find himself in Paradise:He looked round again and could hardly believe his eyes. There was the blue sky overhead, and grassy country spreading as far as he could see in every direction, and his new friends all round him laughing.

  “It seems, then,” said Tirian, smiling himself, “that the stable seen from within and the stable seen from without are two different places.”

  “Yes,” said the Lord Digory, “Its inside is bigger than its outside.”

  “ Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.” It was the first time she had spoken, and from the thrill in her voice, Tirian now knew why. She was drinking everything in even more deeply than the others.8

  The not especially opaque reference Queen Lucy makes here is to the stable in Bethlehem in which Jesus the incarnate Logos lived as a newborn. Lewis is explaining in his story that the “inside greater than the outside” is the Logos within and beneath everything existent and the substance of minds; the universe as Logos is mental.

  Hence Dumbledore’s response to Harry at King’s Cross. “Of course this is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?” Harry’s Kings Cross is the Logos reality inside his head that is the substance of the lesser reality outside his head. Harry, as a symbol of Logos mind or our spiritual faculty, creates his robes and the palace of King’s Cross just by thinking of them and is able to answer every one of Dumbledore’s and his own questions there because he is in Logos-land and relatively omniscient.

  Ms. Rowling prepared her readers for this meaning both in locating her Wizarding world within and behind Muggle reality, invisible for the most part, and the several times the “inside” of magical things is much “bigger than their outside.” Think of the magic cars, the Knight Bus, the Sorting Hat (with a Sword-in-Hat!), the tent that is a cabin, Hermione’s beaded bag holding more than a U-Haul truck, the veiled archway in the Department of Mysteries, and the Room of Requirement, which expands indefinitely as necessary. The Room of Hidden Things seems even larger than Hogwarts in the search for the Ravenclaw Diadem and consequent firestorm. That the palace of King’s Cross is inside Harry’s head and real is only confirmation of the hidden, greater reality we have been living in for seven books.

  Ms. Rowling, in her commencement address at Harvard in June 2008, told the graduating class and their families (quoting Plutarch) that imagination is important because “what we achieve inwardly will change outward reality.” In the anagogical level, this refers to our experience of our spirit’s purification via our identification with Harry and love’s victory over death. By choosing to suspend disbelief and change our inner reality by identifying with the light within us, we are changed inside and out.

  The use of a mirror and eye to see something beyond reality—onto a spiritual level—and to know our higher selves or Logos within isn’t something that begins with Ms. Rowling and Deathly Hallows. In The Little White Horse Maria twice sees her perfected image in a mirror, first in Loveday’s burnished silver glass where she has a halo and her hair is “silvery gold,” the color resolving all contraries (Horse, chapter seven, part four), and then in the well where she finds the pearls of the Moon Maiden (chapter ten, part five). When readers of fantasy literature read about Harry’s magic mirror and its connection to something more than just reflecting appearance, they are most likely reminded of Lewis’s Narnia and, most especially, of Tolkien’s magisterial Lord of the Rings. For mirrors, light, and seeing eyes, Galadriel alone is a virtual warehouse of magical objects; Tolkien lovers reading about the Mirror of Erised that reveals the heart’s desire, the Pensieve, and Sirius’s mirror fragment showing Dumbledore’s eye think of Galadriel’s reflecting pond that shows what might be and contains the light of the Evening Star. That is just the beginning of the Lewis and Tolkien correspondences and the echoes within Ms. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Her relationship to them, though, is a fitting place to close this discussion of her books’ anagogical meanings and her place in the pantheon of great English writers.

  Lewis and Tolkien vs. Rowling: Traditional and Subversive Symbolists

  When reporters ask the author about novels influencing her work, the only books and authors they routinely ask about by name are Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It should be said that Ms. Rowling, however, embraces neither Tolkien nor Lewis as an influence. But because of Rowling’s place in the canon of great and widely read fantasy series as well as pop culture, the ties with her fantasy predecessors are unavoidable.

  Both Lewis and Tolkien were e
nthusiastic Christians whose faith permeates their work, both are best known for the seven-part series of edifying fantasy each wrote,9 and both are beloved if not worshipped by their loyal readers. Ms. Rowling’s series, as different from Narnia and Lord of the Rings as those series are from each other, also comes in seven parts, contains Christian parallels and symbolism that she has described as “obvious,”10 and has a fan base at least as fervent and worshipful as any among Lewis and Tolkien idolaters.

  If the similarities weren’t enough of a connection, Ms. Rowling has included significant echoes and direct allusions to Narnia and Middle Earth. Harry’s journeys are “portal-quest fantasies,”11 like those of Tolkien’s and Lewis’s heroes. The books sometimes even seem stocked with Lewis’s taste in food and Tolkien’s Hall of Monsters and characters. This goes beyond Butterbur/Butterbeer and Wormtongue/ Wormtail assonances. The mere presence of Ms. Rowling’s dementors has the same effect on people as Tolkien’s Ring Wraiths. The effect of the One Ring on the Ring Bearer is much like that of the locket Horcrux on the trio in Deathly Hallows. Sauron cannot be killed, in fact, because so much of his power is invested in the One Ring, which is reflected in Voldemort’s faux immortality achieved by investing parts of his soul into Horcrux objects. Not to mention that many readers visualized Tolkien’s Gandalf the White when they first met Albus Dumbledore, whose name means “white.”

  And there are more connections: Old Man Willow and the Whomping Willow, the Mirror of Galadriel’s reflection in both the Mirror of Erised and the Pensieve, and the great spiders Shelob and Aragog the Acromantula.12 Tolkien scholar Dr. Amy H. Sturgis of Belmont University notes that the similarities between The Lord of the Rings were more than superficial plot points; they touched on the core meaning of each series of books—that Harry Potter is Tolkienesque fantasy, pure and simple.13

  Ms. Rowling, though, over the years, despite the testimony of those who knew her in college and when she began writing Harry Potter that she was a serious reader of Lord of the Rings, has increasingly distanced herself from Tolkien. Each individual report of Ms. Rowling’s thoughts on Tolkien and the progression of her memory about the importance of Lord of the Rings in understanding Harry only becomes louder and clearer with time; this author is not a Tolkien reader or fan and thinks it would be best to shelve the Shire as a place of great influence on her creative imagination. Dumbledore is no Gandalf shadow, etc. As Maureen Lamson has explained, given the obvious story echoes in Potter that strike any Tolkien reader, these denials are mind-boggling.14

  The situation with Lewis is, if anything, even more bizarre. Ms. Rowling before the year 2000 confesses only unbridled admiration of Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia. In 1997, she said she “reveled in Narnia” as a child.15 He is a “genius” to whom she is flattered to be compared;16 she cannot be in the same room with a Chronicles novel and not rush over and pick it up;17 she loves the series, especially Eustace Scrubb.18 Voyage of the Dawn Treader is her favorite Chronicle.19

  But in 2005 she said that she never read the Chronicles’ last book.20 That same year, Lev Grossman, of Time magazine, reported:There’s something about Lewis’s sentimentality about children that gets on [Rowling’s] nerves. “There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex,” Rowling says. “I have a big problem with that.” 21

  Lewis readers scratch their heads over these comments. Beyond the contradiction with Ms. Rowling’s previously stated admiration for Lewis, it would be difficult for her to take issue with this particular plot point because it is only mentioned in the end pages of The Last Battle, the series finale, a book she has said she has not read.

  Why does she embrace the hermetic writing of Burnett and Nesbit and exalt in the “direct influence” of Goudge but balk at acknowledging the popular fantasies of Lewis and Tolkien that are obvious influences on her writing? For me, the way to come to some understanding of Ms. Rowling’s simultaneous discomfort with and admiration for Lewis and Tolkien is in Colin Manlove’s essay “Parent or Associate? George MacDonald and the Inklings.”22 Manlove distinguishes between two types of fantasy or symbolist writers: the subversive and the conservative. The subversive writer “aims to undermine his reader’s assumptions and ways of seeing the world” either “for the sake of broadening our perspective on life” or “for the purpose of leading us toward God. His or her fantasies are full of paradoxes, riddles, and other reverses to point us to a new and transcendent level of discourse.”

  Speaking about MacDonald as a subversive, Manlove says his fantasies “are founded on words, scenes, and events that continually reverse one another, pushing a deeper knowledge beneath a shallower one; and characters frequently change shape, according to their inner natures, or the spiritual nature of the person looking at them.” He could, of course, be describing Ms. Rowling’s work here.

  Conservative fantasy writers, in contrast, “seek to preserve something, to keep things as they are.” Manlove says this is especially true of Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Narnia. Rowling and the Inklings Lewis and Tolkien are all Christian symbolist writers, but as “subversive” and “conservative” authors, their works differ in tone and posture. Perhaps Rowling is hesitant to claim a connection to Tolkien and Lewis because she sees those books as being so fundamentally different from hers.

  All of the writers that we’ve discussed share a worldview and an argument against the empiricism and materialist perspective of our times. A group including Swift, Shakespeare, Austen, Sayers, Shelley, Nesbit, Stoker, Goudge, Dante, Homer, Dickens, Burnett, Hughes, Lewis, and Tolkien couldn’t be much different from one another. They wrote in different ages in genres and styles as diverse as epic poetry, alchemical drama, ribald satire, and detective fiction. Many of them are Christians, certainly, but, more to the point, all of them who write on an allegorical and anagogical level share an understanding of the human person as essentially spiritual, or, as Barfield, Lewis, and Ron Weasley would have it, “mental.”

  Whether on the subversive or conservative bank of this symbolist stream of writing, all these writers, like Austen and Shelley, are arguing against the scientists and secularists that would restrict reality to the world we know and measure. Each points to a greater, invisible reality, beneath, behind, and within the surfaces of things known by us via that same metaphysical reality that is in us, our Logos spirit.

  Ms. Rowling writes in a tradition that works to Apparate readers out of the cavernous Shadowlands for an experience of the sunlight and the light that is in them and all things. Her special accomplishment is not her popularity so much as it is in the artistry of anagogical alchemy and allegory that created Potter mania. She has sewn a seamless garment of ten genres on four levels of meaning combining the best of hero’s journey, mystery, schoolboy fiction, gothic settings, postmodern morality, and Christian fantasy her readers wrap themselves in as we would Harry’s Invisibility Cloak. Transcending ourselves and having an imaginative experience of what is most real, we are transformed, the greater “inner reality” changing the outer. Her books serve as a gateway to the great books, certainly, but, more important, to the world outside our egotistic selves and Plato’s Cave that these books all call us to. Pepperdine professor and Repotting Harry Potter author James Thomas says Ms. Rowling’s books seem “too juvenile, too current, and too popular” to many academics for them to qualify as works of art that will be read and savored for generations. In addressing and offering some experience of truly human life, however, I have no doubt of her inclusion among the greats. Whatever the judgments of academics or literati, however, Harry has won his sure place in that divine part of the hearts of Rowling’s readers that is the still point of King’s Cross and the origin and center of all that is.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 Renton, Jennie. “Wild About Harry.” Candis Magazine, November 2001. See http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2001/1101
-candis-renton.html.

  2 Renton, Jennie. “The Story Behind the Potter Legend: J. K. Rowling Talks About How She Created the Harry Potter Books and the Magic of Harry Potter’s World.” Sydney Morning Herald, October 28, 2001. See http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2001/1001-sydney-renton.htm.

  3 “Magic, Mystery, and Mayhem: An Interview with J. K. Rowling.” Amazon.com, early spring 1999.

  4 Crawford, Brad. “J. K. Rowling: On Setting Priorities—J. K. Rowling Discusses Her Influences, Secrets About Harry Potter, and How She Makes Writing a Priority.” Writer’s Digest, February 2000.

  5 “Magic, Mystery, Mayhem.”

  Chapter One: Narrative Drive and Genre: Why We Keep Turning the Pages

  1 Anelli, Melissa, and Emerson Spartz. “The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet interview Joanne Kathleen Rowling: Part Two,” The Leaky Cauldron, July 16, 2005. See http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2005/0705-tlc_mugglenet-anelli-2.htm.

  2 Gerritsen, Tess. “No romance, please. We’re mystery readers.” February 24, 2007. See http://tessgerritsen.com/blog/2007/02/.

  3 I am indebted in this discussion to John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1977). I urge the reader to read his brilliant exposition of the cultural and psychological factors that fostered the formula and success of detection fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (chapter four, pp. 80-105) as well as his exploration of Christie and Sayers.