Harry Potter's Bookshelf (18 page)

Ms. Rowling, however, is only warming up in her story-portrait of the press as evil. In
Order of the Phoenix
, by innuendo, asides, and suggestion as well as in written reports, the
Prophet
becomes the voice of the Ministry in doing everything possible, even without their star reporter, to diminish the respect witches and wizards feel for Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore. The Ministry doesn’t want to acknowledge that Voldemort has returned, so those who have seen that he has come back have to be discounted as witnesses. The
Prophet
obliges both in disparaging the boy and his headmaster and in not covering any news of Voldemort’s rebirthing or Cedric’s death at the Tournament.

Incredibly, the strategy works. When Harry returns to school, he finds that he has very few friends, even in Gryffindor. All have been seduced and hypnotized by newspaper reports questioning his honesty and portraying him as a braggart and attention seeker. Hermione decides to go on a media-manipulation campaign through Rita Skeeter and
The Quibbler
. Rita’s comments about journalism in their conversation about an interview with Harry are telling:

The media, in a nutshell, tells people what they want to hear, and reporters and editors will sell the truth down the river
any time
to make money. Ouch. When the Ministry goes under the Dark Lord’s control in Harry’s seventh year, the
Prophet
falls into line as well. “Don’t trust the establishment
or the press
to tell you the truth.” The media, in Rowling’s satirical treatment, is joined at the hip to the powerful, to bozos, and to parasites on the body politic that are to be used, if necessary, but kept at arm’s length if not farther. “The
Prophet
is bound to report the truth occasionally,” said Dumbledore, “if only accidentally” (
Half-Blood Prince,
chapter seventeen).

Ms. Rowling offers Hermione’s aggressive approach to media as the best way to deal with this beast. Rather than suffer its poisons patiently, it is better, she suggests, to use new or alternative media to better control your story and to foster relationships with journalists you can trust (or blackmail!).

Ms. Rowling’s political and social allegory within and beneath her story line are not as dark as Orwell’s picture of 1948 reality projected into his nightmare
1984
or even his relatively comic portrayal of political revolution in
Animal Farm
. These are bleak satires compared to
Harry Potter
because the arrows travel much deeper into their subjects and the wounds are mortal.

A book that is a mean between dark Orwell and light Lewis Carroll, whose
Alice
adventures are delightful but whose satirical bite has almost completely evaporated with time, is Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels,
published in 1726. When I am asked what other books most remind me of
Harry Potter
, the top three are
Emma, A Tale of Two Cities,
and
Gulliver’s Travels—
and, of those three, the satirical journeys of Lemuel Gulliver are probably the closest match to Harry’s.

Why? First of all, it’s funny in ways
Emma
and
A Tale of Two Cities,
as set pieces, cannot be. If you’re not amused by Swift’s various stories, it’s time for a sense of humor transplant. Gulliver, in his seriousness and the variety of voices in which he speaks fluently and convincingly (scientist, lawyer, world traveler, doctor, philosophical disputant, courtier, etc.), is a cartoon character for the ages.

Travels
, too, is a book written like
Harry Potter,
as a mélange of several genres. On the surface, it is a parody of the travel books that were so popular in its day. Because it is obviously fantasy, it invites shelving with children’s books as a harmless fairy tale, but it has been read as a novel, as science fiction, as philosophical treatise, and, of course, as political and social satire.

But it is the satire for which Swift is famous, even if few people outside the Ivory Tower read it except as entertainment. Funny as it is, Swift meant the book to be a poke in the eye both to his targets in their specific foolishness and to his readers just as human beings. Gulliver’s comment in text that “. . . my principal Design was to Inform, and not to amuse thee” (
Travels,
XII) echoes Swift’s aside in a letter to Alexander Pope (September 29, 1725), that “the chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it.”

And vexatious he certainly is! Like Rowling, Swift caricatures historical individuals and events, institutions of power and prejudice, as well as types of people and specific attitudes or beliefs. I don’t intend to write a “Hidden Key” text to
Gulliver’s Travels
(not very surprisingly, given its popularity on publication, explanations to the satire were in print within months) but just to give you an idea of the variety of Swift’s targets:

And it is with these enlightened horses that Swift delivers his version of the Cave Allegory.

Gulliver sets sail on his fourth adventure as captain of his own vessel but suffers the terrible fate of a mutiny among his scurvy crew and is put ashore on an unknown shore with nothing but clean clothes and a short sword. Gulliver is set upon by savage, hairy creatures on all fours who back him up against a tree—then climb the tree to avoid his sword and to defecate on him. He is rescued by a horse.

The horses in this world are rational animals, much more rational and noble than anything human of any size Lemuel has met so far, and the savage animals are Yahoos, wild human beings the horses use as work animals (though they are difficult to train and control). The Houyhnhnm Master who adopts Gulliver despite his Yahoo appearance teaches him the language and the truly civilized ways of the Houyhnhnms.

The horses, in fact, are citizens of Plato’s ideal country in his
Republic
. They have no money, they have strict castes, and they raise and educate their children in common. Gulliver’s dialogue with the horse he calls his Master with the greatest possible deference is an echo of the dialogue in the
Republic
during which Plato describes the best form of government.

Gulliver, the cave dweller who has seen the Sun in the land of the Houyhnhnms, cannot forget what he has seen truly and experienced with his Master when he returns to the “cave” of his home in Britain. He decides to live in the stable in seeming cruel disregard for his family—a rational, almost laudable choice, when we understand that
Gulliver’s Travels
is only an extended and more involved retelling of Plato’s Cave Allegory. Swift is savaging the “rationalists” and “humanists” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who are proud of their “scientific discoveries” in the cave and imagine themselves more enlightened than their “superstitious” contemporaries of traditional faith and classical virtues. Even for a world traveler, life in a confined stable with honest horses is far preferable than the company of the proud Yahoos.

Swift takes no prisoners in
Gulliver’s Travels
. In what one writer has called “second person satire,” he is trying to bring the reader to Gulliver’s epiphany that he is a Yahoo who, while capable of reason, has very little to be proud of with respect to the attainment of reason. “Pride” for a Yahoo is death, or, worse, acceptance of a life sentence chained in the cave.

“[
Gulliver’s Travels’
] prevailing tone is quarrelsome and dis orienting, programmed to vex rather than to divert, and it is the antithesis of more conventional satirical styles which purport to engage the reader’s solidarity.”
²²
Ms. Rowling, as we learned in our chapter on Austen and narrative misdirection, has chosen to tell her stories from a specific perspective that will draw the reader in, rather than poke him or her in the eye. Rowling and Swift as allegorists have very similar goals in mind for their heroes; how they tell their stories reflects the different relationship we are meant to have with their heroes. If every satirist is painting a picture of man as a zebra, Swift is with those satirists who think man is a black horse with attitude on which you can paint white stripes. This is usually called a Menip pean satire and is a specific category of allegory in which the “story” is essentially a vehicle for scenes in which the ridiculous are shown to be stupid or, better, they sound off à la Gilderoy Lockhart and reveal themselves in outrageous speech. It’s more like
Saturday Night Live
than a coherent drama; but the knives are all buried, quite humorously, in their targets.

We could call the satire Ms. Rowling uses, in contrast, “Cruikshankian.” It isn’t the focus of the books; it’s largely incidental to the central story arc. The Cruikshankian satire’s man-zebra is a white horse on which the artist paints black stripes. Ms. Rowling satirizes, even ridicules teachers, politicians, judges and jailors, and Fleet Street reporters in stories told in her “distorted mirror” but only, perhaps, because they were features in her story already. Unlike Gulliver’s adventures, which clearly were designed to deliver blows on specific targets, the
Harry Potter
books don’t have satire as the main focus. Her hero’s story, unlike Swift’s, isn’t about human
inability
to transcend ourselves; Harry’s apotheosis is about man reaching his destination rather than falling short of it.
²³

That is the larger story of
Harry Potter
, which, though it shares the traditional or at least antimodern view of Swift’s
Gulliver
in its satirical depiction of individuals and types as proud Yahoos from the shadowlands, is an allegory without visible or one-to-one correspondences. And it is this parable or fairy-tale quality of Ms. Rowling’s Hogwarts adventures that we turn to next.

CHAPTER SEVEN

 

 

 

 

 

Latin, that most magical of languages, has a single word that defines and explains what allegory means:
alieniloquium
, literally, “saying one thing to mean another.” C. S. Lewis defined “allegory” as: