Harry Potter's Bookshelf

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

 

This book is not authorized, prepared, approved, licensed, or endorsed by J. K. Rowling, Warner Bros., or any other individual or entity associated with the HARRY POTTER books or movies. HARRY POTTER
^®
is a registered trademark of Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P. HARRY POTTER
^®
is a registered trademark of Warner Bros.

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Copyright © 2009 by John Granger.

 

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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / July 2009

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Granger, John, 1961-
Harry Potter’s bookshelf : the great books behind the Hogwarts adventures /
John Granger.—Berkley trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13313-2

1. Rowling, J. K.—Knowledge—Literature. 2. Rowling, J. K.—Sources.
3. Rowling, J. K.—Themes, motives. 4. Potter, Harry (Fictitious character) I. Title.

 

PR6068.O93Z676 2009
823’.914—dc22
2009011708

 

 

 

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INTRODUCTION

 

 

 

 

 

This is the fourth book I’ve written on
Harry Potter
, believe it or not, and, as in all the others, my e-mail address is at the end of the introduction with an invitation asking you to write to me with your comments and corrections. The only real compensation for being a Potter Pundit is conversation with serious readers like you about books you love and the ideas you have—and I have been richly compensated with conversation and far-flung friendships. I hope very much that you will write to me to share your thoughts as you read and when you finish reading this book.

The most common request I get in my in-box is for “further reading.” A common ambition of the books I have written is answering the question, “Why are the
Harry Potter
books so popular?” and my response is always a variation on “It’s the literary artistry that engages and transforms readers that is the real magic of the books.” That answer involves discussing the usual English literature topics like narratological voice and setting, as well as the more bizarre and less well-known devices and story scaffolding that Ms. Rowling uses, like literary alchemy and vision symbolism.

Take alchemy as an example. The requests I get for “further reading” are for books that use literary alchemy as Ms. Rowling does (Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet, Perelandra
by C. S. Lewis, Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
) and for books about literary alchemy per se (
Darke Hieroglyphicks
by Stanton Linden, Lyndy Abraham’s
A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery
). These requests, which I get from serious readers, as well as from teachers, students, and librarians, usually come with one note of delight about understanding and experiencing an unexpected dimension of storytelling and another note of disappointment that their studies hadn’t ever mentioned something that spans English literature from
Canterbury Tales
to
Harry Potter
.

I taught a
Harry Potter
online course from 2003 to 2005 and started writing this book then because of the interest expressed in learning more about
Harry Potter
as English literature. My hope at that time was to write a fun and inviting text that would simultaneously open up the meaning and magic of Ms. Rowling’s novels while revealing how much of her artistry has its roots in the traditions of great writing. That hope continues to be the heart of what
Harry Potter’s Bookshelf
tries to do.

Writing
Bookshelf
has been, to risk a cliché, a labor of love. It has also been more than a little frustrating over the years it has taken to put it together, with stops and starts to work on other projects. The big problems I ran into were selection and organization. I knew, for instance, that the book would have ten chapters from the first time I outlined it. There are ten genres that the author “rowls” together seamlessly from hero’s journey and alchemical drama, to satire and Christian fantasy. But how was I to select what specific authors and works to choose and leave out? Certainly I’d be obliged to include the five or six authors and books Ms. Rowling has mentioned in ten years of interviews as important influences on her work, but what about those subjects she rarely if ever mentioned?

Taking alchemy again for illustration, Ms. Rowling said in 1998 that she read a boatload of books on alchemy before she started writing
Harry Potter
and that it sets the magical parameters and logic of the books. She hasn’t been asked or said a word about it since, so your guess is almost as good as mine about what books she read and which alchemical authors she found helpful and meaningful. Shakespeare? Dickens? Charles Williams? Blake? Yeats? The Metaphysical Poets? That’s quite a range.

And Ms. Rowling has mentioned quite a few authors and books that she loves that I don’t think influenced her writing of the
Harry Potter
adventure stories as much as others she hasn’t mentioned or downplays when asked. She has said more than once that her “big three” favorites are “Nabokov, Collette, and Austen”; that her favorite living writer is Rodney Doyle;
¹
and that she loved Noel Streatfield’s
Ballet Shoes
, Paul Gallico’s
Manxmouse,
²
Clement Freud’s
Grimble
,
³
and Roald Dahl’s books. Jane Austen overshadows much of Ms. Rowling’s work certainly (see chapter two), but Lewis and Tolkien, with whom Ms. Rowling has a bizarre love-hate relationship, are obvious influences in a way Nabokov and Collette are not, and Jonathan Swift, whom Ms. Rowling hasn’t mentioned, is a bigger part of
Harry
than Doyle or Clement Freud, acknowledged or not.

It may strike you as a bit snooty and bizarre not to focus just on the authors Ms. Rowling has mentioned in interviews (Nabakov, Collette, etc.), but
Harry Potter’s Bookshelf
is not
Joanne Rowling’s Library—
and the author herself has made it clear that she is skeptical about tracking point-to-point influences from her reading list and history. It isn’t a mechanical one-way process, in which the writer reads a book, enjoys it, and writes a book very much like the first. As she says, it’s a more organic, human thing than that.

Speaking with
Writer’s Digest
in February 2000, she listed several authors she admired but added quickly, “But as for being influenced by them . . . I think it [may be] more accurate to say that they represent untouchable ideals to me. It is impossible for me to say what my influences are; I don’t analyze my own writing in that way.”
⁴
In an interview with Amazon in 1999, though, she explained that “it is always hard to tell what your influences are. Everything you’ve seen, experienced, read, or heard gets broken down like compost in your head and then your own ideas grow out of that compost.”
⁵
Writers read books, and the best writers, like Ms. Rowling, have read voraciously, profoundly, and widely. These books, as she says, don’t mechanically become models for the writers’ stories. They become the soil out of which the seeds of the author’s talent and ideas can grow. The richer and more fertile the soil, the more the talent and ideas will flourish and blossom. The greater the talent and ideas, the more nutrients will be drawn from the rich soil and the more delicious and refreshing will be the fruits from this tree and vine.