Harry Potter's Bookshelf (16 page)

Frankly, I understand this skepticism. It isn’t every author who deserves such serious digging. Every story has surface hooks, story formulas, and narrative drive—and all of the stories written in the past forty or fifty years have a postmodern moral or two. But allegory and beyond? Believe me: Very few bestsellers reward a look under the hood in search of their hidden political criticism and philosophical meaning.

The original title of Ms. Rowling’s first book,
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,
was changed to
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
for the American publication. Her publisher was certain that no American reader would buy a book with the word “philosophy” in the title. But the truth is that it’s hard to get a grip on literature in general and
Harry Potter
in particular without a little Plato.

The good news is that Plato was a great storyteller. Plato even insisted in the
Seventh Letter
that he had never written a word of philosophy in his life. His genre of choice was the dialogue, after all, the ancient world equivalent of a screenplay, rather than dry treatises. Plato wrote philosophical dramas featuring Socrates, his teacher, in dynamic question-and-answer sessions with fascinating people, many of whom were well known Athenians. Plato is more like Shakespeare and Steven Spielberg than Spinoza or Speng ler. He doesn’t dictate doctrine; he tells stories and asks his friends what they think (and then some more questions about what they think . . . ).

One of his better stories and probably the most famous is the Cave Allegory (
Republic
, VII, 514a-520a). It goes something like this: Imagine human beings who live deep down in a cave with their heads and necks bound in such a way that they can only look straight ahead and at a wall opposite the entrance. They have no idea they’re living in a cave. Their light doesn’t come from the entrance but from a fire “burning far above and behind them.” In front of this fire there is a wall that acts like a puppet-show box. On the top of the wall, people who are not chained down carry figures of men, animals, and other things so their shadows are projected on the far wall. These shadow projections are the only things the cave prisoners can see and know. The shadows are their reality. “Such men would hold that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of artificial things.”

Socrates, who tells the story, then describes a prisoner who is liberated by force, that is, freed from his chains and dragged out from the wall of shadows past the fire and wall over which the figures are held, and up to the cave entrance and out into the light. This is not a happy man. At first, he is unable to see things in the light as they are because he only recognizes image-shadows as reality.

Then, in the light outside the cave, he is all but blinded, “. . . his eyes full of [the sun’s] beam and . . . unable to see even one of the things said to be true.” Slowly, though, his eyes will adjust to the light and he will be able to see shadows, reflections, objects, people, and finally the stars, moon, sunlight, and the sun itself. Finally, he could understand the sun is “the source of the seasons and the years, and the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions [in the cave] had been seeing.”

In the previous chapter, Socrates has explained a “metaphor of the Sun” in which the sun is a natural cipher for “the Idea of the Good” or God, “what provides the truth to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows.”
¹
The prisoner able to see and know the sun in the Cave Allegory experiences the illuminating truth that is the “real reality” behind the shadow images in the cave’s darkness.

Socrates also makes it clear that this “enlightened” or “illumined” prisoner is in for a very hard time. He’s quite happy now that he sees things as they are and feels nothing but pity for his friends back in the hole. But what happens if he goes back into the cave?

First, it’s clear that this return would be something he’d try to avoid at all costs. Better a slave in the sunshine than a king in what C. S. Lewis called the “Shadowlands.” But if he did go back, he’d be in a fix. While his eyes adjusted, for one thing, he’d seem a moron whose eyes were damaged by his time outside the cave. If he tried to free the other prisoners and help them escape, Socrates is confident that the slaves would kill him rather than question the reality of the shadows.

“Don’t be surprised,” therefore, that the prisoners who have come back “aren’t willing to mind the business of human beings” who think shadows are reality and truth. “Their souls are always eager to spend their time above.”
²

Socrates finally spells out what the Allegory is about.
We
are the people in the cave. Our understanding of reality, the ephemeral quantities of matter and energy we think of as “real things,” are just shared beliefs about shadows projected up on the cave wall. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful, the greater reality of things, are only knowable in escaping the cave and knowing the Idea of the Good itself, “what provides the truth to the things known.”

What does this have to do with literature?

Good question.

The first part of the answer is in realizing that this isn’t just Plato’s otherworldly fantasy. This story for shadowlanders like you and me about the nature of reality and how we know (or don’t know) is pretty much the Christian consensus. Since much of English literature, from
Beowulf
to Joyce’s
Ulysses
, was written by Christian writers for Christian readers, it almost has to be understood in light of Plato’s Cave Allegory.

Stories in the Western tradition can be sorted pretty much into two piles: a heap for those that reinforce the delusions of the shadows projected on the cave wall and another for the ones that make us feel our chains, stretch our necks, maybe even give us an imaginative experience of the noetic reality in the sunlight. Reading books is either an enlightening and liberating experience (and, yes, the Cave Allegory is one of the reasons we talk about “enlightenment” the way we do) or just entertainment to distract us from the darkness, smoke, and discomfort of life underground.

Either way, uplifting or dissipating,
everything
written is more or less an allegory. The words on the page, the stories, sentiments, and sentience of them are not the things referred to but signs that make us recall or imagine them. And finding meaning in everything written involves going deeper into the allegory and reflecting on what the story is calling up within us.

If you’re reading an average bestseller, the search pretty much ends when the roller coaster action comes to a stop; beyond story and moral (or lack of morals), it’s time for another book. The “good stuff,” though—what we call “classics” or “great books”—on second, third, and fourth readings reveals political and social commentary or allegory and, in real treasures, an escape from the cave via a truly mythic experience. Mircea Eliade, the great historian of religion, said that all reading in a profane culture like our own serves a mythic or religious function because of our “suspension of disbelief ” while reading or watching a movie. This disconnecting from our selfish concerns lifts us to a better place, something like the place religious ritual and sacraments are meant to take us.
³

He’s right, of course. But there are writers who deliberately take us up to the mouth of the cave and force us to look out, who make us return again and again for a refresher course. The books we will be talking about in this second half of
Harry Potter’s Bookshelf
to illustrate the allegorical and mythic layers of meaning are the greats. We’ll be looking at them because Ms. Rowling has built on them as models, and the
Harry Potter
novels achieve the same resonance in the heart that thrills and engages readers profoundly.

Plato is right, at least in my experience talking to readers, even to
Harry
’s biggest fans. Once we move beyond the shadows on the cave wall Ms. Rowling has given us, the surface and moral meanings we’ve explored so far, most of us don’t have the tools, experience, or beliefs to look further. We need an easy and fun stepping-off place to see what’s beneath the story. Political criticism or satire is a great place to start. “The main purpose of any satire is to invite the reader to laugh at a particular human vice or folly, in order to invite us to consider an important moral alternative.”
⁴
Satire is about laughing; who doesn’t want to laugh, especially at folks who deserve to be laughed at?

To step us into reading
Harry Potter
as allegory, then, I want to start on the straightforward tit-for-tat level of satire. Satire is barely disguised allegory with real-world correspondents—individuals, institutions, and ideas—we’re meant to recognize without much effort. Satire is also meant to be ironic.

I start peeling back the allegorical layer of meaning in Ms. Rowling’s work this way, then, because the person, organization, or belief being mocked is relatively easy to see and because it’s meant to be and
is
very funny. Satire is quite a bit like a political cartoon that shows the faults of a politician, a political party, or a failed policy in the worst possible light. Recognizing her satire makes us more receptive to the less amusing but much more profound and challenging meanings that come with the allegory and symbolism in Ms. Rowling’s work.

I also like starting with satire because there is a very long tradition of satire in English letters. From
The Canterbury Tales
to
Harry Potter
, writers have been taking their readers on a journey to a different place to reveal the underside or neglected aspects of the reality we live in. Sometimes this journey means a trip to a “strange new world,” as with Gulliver’s Lilliput, Butler’s Erewhon, and Baum’s Oz. As often the journey, like Alice’s adventures down a rabbit hole or
Through the Looking Glass
and the Narnia adventures, takes us inside, beneath, and behind the world of appearances and reflection. Or we discover a secret life of animals, say, the esprit de corps of a cadre of the
Watership Down
male rabbits in exodus or the history of the proletarian revolution in
Animal Farm
. Or a combination of all these trips that we get in
The Phantom Tollbooth
and
Harry Potter
: a trip far away as well as “further up and further in” with a menagerie of magical anthropomorphic or just beastly creatures.

The meat of satire is portraying a real-world goon or menace as a laughable caricature in story. The disguise has to be clever enough to be seen through easily enough for those with eyes to see, but not so transparent that there is no pleasure or sense of gleeful accomplishment in the discovery. But the masquerade isn’t just for providing puzzle lovers with a challenge. The hidden quality of satire, historically, has been a life insurance policy of sorts for the author, and, as important, it restricts the message to readers for whom the taunt is meant.

Swift is supposed to have said that satire is a mirror in which “everyone can see anyone’s face but their own.”
⁵
What better place could there be, then, than in satirical fiction to conceal criticism of those in power?

But
Harry Potter
as political satire? Isn’t it just a book for kids?

Harry Potter
has quite a thick layer of political allegory in the form of satire, in fact, and that it comes in the guise of a book for children only makes that more credible. As one historian of children’s literature has noted,
“
Many books we shelve as ‘children’s literature—Grimms’
Fairy Tales
or
Gulliver’s Travels
or
Huck Finn
—were born as biting political satire, for adults.”
⁶
And Ms. Rowling has made it clear that she is writing in “political metaphors” for those with the discernment to see it.

First, she insists that she wrote the book for “obsessives” who would turn over every detail for meaning.
⁷
She also is quite open about the political content of her fantasies—“What did my books preach against throughout? Bigotry, violence, struggles for power, no matter what”
⁸
—she’s quite open about the satire, what she calls “metaphor” instead of allegory.

Rowling points frequently to the importance of reading the text hidden inside the text. Riddle’s diary is smuggled into Hogwarts between the covers of a textbook. The marginalia of the Half-Blood Prince’s Potions textbook is Harry’s life preserver in that class his sixth year. And Dumbledore leaves Hermione, the smart character, a copy of
Beedle the Bard
with confidence that she will be able to figure out its greater meaning in symbols, not to mention the fate-of-the-world relevance of that meaning, whereas the Ministry would not.

Hermione’s cat, Crookshanks, is another pointer to the “smart reader” being asked to look for political metaphor and satire especially in the story. Hermione buys the furry ginger cat, with its bowed legs, grumpy and “oddly squashed” face that gave it the appearance of a cat who “had run headlong into a brick wall” (
Prisoner of Azkaban
, chapter four), almost as an act of charity (“the witch said he’s been [in the Magical Menagerie] for ages; no one wanted him”). Given that its first act in the story is to jump on Ron to get at Scabbers, it seems cause for buyer’s remorse. But it’s a good purchase. Sirius spells it out for Ron in the Shrieking Shack: