Harry Potter's Bookshelf (14 page)

As you already know from your trip through the first four chapters, Ms. Rowling is a master mixer of genres. She does it, of course, to deliver her postmodern meaning and moral message.

I hope now you can see why we needed those rewrites of
Dracula, Frankenstein, Tom Brown,
and
Jane Eyre.
You know that Creole woman in the attic was used and abused by the barely suppressed colonial and racist beliefs of Rochester. Vampires and soulless monsters, of course, are misunderstood by the common herd with their ignorant prejudices; turning the story upside-down with the accepted evil as good and vice versa is the means to our re-education in the politically correct prejudice of our time that all prejudice is bad.

Even more than
Rudolph
,
Harry Potter
questions cultural myths, demonstrates to us that we shouldn’t think we know what is really going on, and blends all literary genres more than any other work of fiction, perhaps.

Like all cultures, Hogwarts has a Founder’s Myth: the story of the Four Founders and the breakup of the once dear friends Salazar Slytherin and Godric Gryffindor. Ms. Rowling asks us to see how this story poisons the minds and hearts of all witches and wizards. This grand narrative causes not only the Gryffindor/Slytherin battle that is the good/evil axis of the storyline, but also turns each magical person into a partisan defending their quarter rather than celebrating the whole. Gryffindor is core, Slytherin is “other” from the Gryffindor side; Pure Bloods are core, all other beings are “other” and “lesser” to the Slytherins. The Death Eaters are Slytherin ideology run amok and truly evil, but Gryffindor pride and machismo are equally divisive. All of them, as partisans, share dismissive attitudes about the “Magical Brethren.”

The Sorting Hat, as the vehicle of the Wizarding world’s division, says as much about itself in
Phoenix
.

This division-in-keeping-with-legend colors and clouds everyone’s thinking or ability to see things as they are (Dumbledore aside). It is the root of Slytherin “wizarding pride” and Muggle-baiting and the inability of the other Hogwarts houses and the Magical Brethren to unite. The Wizarding world’s Foundation Myth is divisive and oppressive to the “other.” This is the core teaching of the postmodern worldviews we live with today, as expressed in the
Harry Potter
stories.

A case could be made that the Sorting Hat is the real bad guy; Voldemort and the Death Eaters are just understandable consequences of the divisive myth we confirm at the annual sorting.

The
Harry Potter
stories are largely about the many prejudices gripping the magical world of Hogwarts and beyond, consequent to the Four Founders’ Myth. Three of the larger prejudices are those against (1) magical people (and creatures) of mixed blood or blood that is otherwise tainted, (2) against the poor, and (3) against those Magical Brethren who are not witches or wizards.

Hogwarts’s blood problems, like those outside of the school, can be traced back to the “origin myth” of the Four Founders. One of these four, Salazar Slytherin, wanted only pure-blood wizards in his school house, and, though Slytherin left the school after a disagreement with Gryffindor, his house remains the bastion of wizard prejudice against those witches and wizards of mixed ancestry or those who are Muggle-born. We learned in
Order of the Phoenix
that this prejudice is not limited to Hogwarts but pervades the Wizarding world.

The “N” word among the magical folk is “Mudblood,” and Draco Malfoy, the Slytherin boy we love to hate, uses this word to describe Hermione Granger, as Severus Snape did as a student to describe Lily Evans. Other slurs used by “Pure Bloods” are “Half-blood,” “Half-breed,” and “Muggle-born.”

Draco Malfoy doesn’t restrict his prejudices to blood-lines, however, in keeping the traditions of his house and beliefs of his family. He is disdainful, too, of those individuals and families who don’t have money or worldly goods or a big house. Ron Weasley is the usual target of this prejudice against the poor—and every one of Draco’s barbs hits home, it seems, in Ron’s heart. Ron, much more than his several siblings and parents, takes his lack of spending money and his hand-me-down wardrobe as if it were a personal failing to be hidden and overcome.

As nasty as these Slytherin prejudices are, they are held by a relatively narrow slice of the population pie. The prejudices identify the evil characters of the book as surely as the Dark Mark tattoo, but they aren’t the grand narrative problem that threatens to bring down the Wizarding world.

That “otherness” is the prejudice of good and bad wizards and witches with respect to three-fourths of the world’s Magical Brethren, that is, the centaurs, the goblins, and the house-elves. The myth is depicted in the Ministry of Magic as a statue and fount called “The Fountain of Magical Brethren.”

This sculpture represents the overarching belief of witches and wizards about their fellow magical beings or creatures. First, of course, is the fealty of the “adoring” centaur, goblin, and house-elf for the “noble” wizard and “beautiful” witch. As central as this joyful subservience is to the myth, to notice those who are not depicted at all is even more telling about wizard beliefs and exclusivity. There is no giant in the fountain, nor is there a dementor. The nonhuman “brethren” in the fountain have it bad, certainly, but the real “others” in this representation of the magical world are those not even pictured.

After Harry’s hearing, he takes a closer look at the statues:

Ms. Rowling offers us this statue as something that none of the passersby even look up at because it represents the unquestioned and unconscious belief on which the magical world and government rest.

This blind spot in the consciousness of wizards—their exclusive hold of power and misuse of those they think of as “brethren” as well as the totally marginalized others—is the agony of the Wizarding world and the cause of the Voldemort crisis. Lord Voldemort, the Nazilike totalitarian madman of these books, is anything but an incomprehensible and aber rational evil. He is only the logical extension and symptom of the prejudice against nonwizards held by a great many ordinary witches and wizards.

That the statue is destroyed by the combat between Dumbledore and Voldemort at the end of
Order of the Phoenix
is telling. Dumbledore explains to Harry that this myth is a lie—and that the much-uglier truth it fails to represent will have horrible consequences.

In case we missed the point, there is a new statue in the Death Eater-dominated Ministry of Magic in
Deathly Hallows:

VoldeWar II is a war between those magical folk who are prejudiced against Muggles, and against witches and wizards with anything but demonstrable Pure Blood status, and the champions of the oppressed. The Nazi-style statuary with suggestions of bodies in Dachau showers isn’t meant to be subtle. Prejudice is the core evil, and it is a consequence of believing without question in the Founder’s Myth.

Nothing is what you think it is, no one is who surface appearances make you think they are.
We’re c
lueless
. As discussed, Ms. Rowling delivers this message by telling her stories in the third person limited omniscient view, the perspective of a house-elf sitting on Harry’s shoulder with a minicam. We see what Harry sees and know what Harry thinks, but because it’s not told in the first person, we’re lulled into thinking we know what’s going on.

Of course, blinded almost totally by our prejudices, we have little idea of what’s going on. For clues about the larger picture, we’d be infinitely better off with a house-elf on Dumbledore’s or Snape’s shoulder—or Voldemort’s! We get from Ms. Rowling a never-ending lesson on narrative misdirection. You don’t know what’s happening. Don’t trust what you believe or you’ll wind up like Harry, convinced that Snape killed Dumbledore and that he’s not coming back to Hogwarts in
Deathly Hallows
.

Ms. Rowling reinforces our cluelessness by making appearances so deceptive. Between Polyjuice Potion, double agents, and werewolves-in-hiding on the faculty, we can never be sure that people are who they seem to be. And, as with Rudolph and Hermey, it’s the freaks who are good guys. The excluded “other” our culture prejudices us against is by definition the postmodern hero. And there isn’t a good guy in the
Harry Potter
cast of characters who isn’t on the outs with the Pure Blood elites.

Check them out:

The Order of the Phoenix includes a werewolf, an escaped convict, an overtly fecund family of impoverished redheads, a common thief, a Metamorphmagus, a bartender overly fond of goats, a Squib, a half-giant, a magical negro, a Death Eater of unknown allegiance, a paranoid retired Auror with a magical eye and short fuse, all of whom are led by an arguably gay wizard with Machiavellian tendencies.

Dumbledore’s Army isn’t any closer to being invited to the right parties. You have a brainiac Mudblood, for starters, a crowd of the children from the poor Irish family mentioned above, a nutcase who “believes anything if there is no evidence for it,” the boy raised by his grandmother with memory issues and a love for plants, and, of course, they’re led by an orphan who grew up with Muggles and has a pronounced history of mental episodes.

Misfits? They make Hermey and Rudolph look conventional. They’re all misunderstood and periodically slandered by the
Daily Prophet
, imprisoned or put on trial by the Ministry, and at odds with one another.

They are, as such, the postmodern dream team: Olympic-grade freaks the Nazilike bad guys are obliged to despise and persecute, and we readers are morally bound to understand, even identify with.

As already noted, Ms. Rowling has said the books spring from a “compost pile” of all the things she has read and, as she said about detective fiction, she’s not above bending the rules of any given genre to achieve her story goals. About fantasy fiction she says openly, “I was trying to subvert the genre.”
³
She even thinks this is the English tradition: