Harry Potter's Bookshelf (21 page)

Harry is counseled by both Elphias Doge and Hermione to “choose to believe” in Dumbledore. He finds the idea of choosing what you believe so nonsensical that he “could simply
choose
not to believe” (
Deathly Hallows
, chapter eight, emphasis on “choose” in original). Ms. Rowling draws our attention to choice and belief again in chapter ten, “Kreacher’s Tale,“ when Harry and Hermione argue about whether to believe like Doge or join the Skeeter skeptics like Auntie Muriel: “There it was again: Choose what to believe. He wanted the truth. Why was everybody so determined that he should not get it?” To Harry at this stage, “choosing” a belief means turning a blind eye to reality. He wants to know facts, not choose beliefs.

Harry decides, however, after the events in the basement at Malfoy Manor, that he must choose to believe or not to believe because he doesn’t have and can’t get the facts he needs to know for sure. On Easter morning, in a grave that he had chosen to dig by hand to honor Dobby’s sacrifice, he chooses to believe in Dumbledore and put aside his doubts. He recalls later:

And it is this choice to put aside doubts, to trust and believe, that makes all the difference. His Easter decision to trust in something greater than himself is the cause of his consequent transformation, ability to walk into the woods as a Christian Everyman, to rise from the dead and defeat Lord Voldemort. That allegorical mystery play, though, at story’s end is just part of the modern struggle to believe allegory that is the heart of the book.

What if you don’t get the meaning or see the correspondents of this sort of allegory? Well, don’t feel bad. Most people don’t pick it up on their first or second pass. If we don’t see Harry as an Everyman or as a Christ figure, we can still experience the sacrificial love he shows and the purification he experiences during his willing death in the forest. If we don’t “see” Christ, we can still understand that he acts out of love for his friends.

Believe it or not, though, allegory is just the stepping-off place for the real depths of reading experience, the anagogical layer and mythic meaning. Grab your branch of Gubraithian Fire and your indestructible goblin helmet, gifts you picked up from Ms. Rowling’s Giants after discovering the allegorical elements of “Hagrid’s Tale” (
Order of the Phoenix,
chapter twenty), to explore what legendary art and literary critic John Ruskin called the jewels available only to those doing the “deep mining” of meditative and close reading,
¹⁹
our experience of the Hero’s Journey, literary alchemy, and magical, spiritual core reality beneath the surface of everything existent in Harry’s adventures.

CHAPTER EIGHT

 

 

 

 

 

I’ll admit that the first time I opened each Harry Potter novel I wasn’t reading for substance or to find any deep, hidden meaning. I turned the pages as fast as I could because I was on the edge of my seat with excitement about how Harry and friends would solve the mystery and survive the inevitable confrontation with the Wizarding world’s forces of evil.

But even on the initial speed-reads there are what seem to be fascinating and inexplicable comments or events in the story line. I always fold a page corner to mark these passages so I can find them easily after putting the children to bed. (My first readings of the last four books were to my children after “Midnight Madness” parties at local bookstores.) Here are three examples:

These mysteries do not have surface, moral, or allegorical explanations. They require the meditative “slow mining” that John Ruskin says is rewarded by the best art and literature with jewels of meaning.

Ruskin is the giant of iconographical criticism, and this remark of his about the deepest meanings of art is worth unpacking. He says first that the teaching or “didactic” quality of art in its “purest” sense isn’t overt teaching at all but something hidden, even occultic. Mark Twain, in advice to writers, urges them to this kind of covert meaning: “If you would have your fiction live forever, you must neither overtly preach nor overtly teach; but you must
covertly
preach and
covertly
teach.”
²
Further, discovering this meaning, Ruskin suggests, is not so much a function of cleverness or prior learning as it is a measure of the reader’s intention and acceptance. You will be able to “forge the key” to unlock the covert meaning of a writer’s work “if you are already hard at work bettering yourself.” Grasping this meaning will be less an “aha!” or “got it!” epiphany than something analogous to our assimilation of food: a “constant and subtle” and largely unconscious transformation.

The artistry here will not be surface fireworks; just the contrary. As Lewis wrote in
The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version,
“An influence which cannot evade our consciousness will not go very deep.”
³
Expanding on Ruskin’s gustatory analogy, Martin Lings, the Shakespeare scholar, says great art is not teaching at all; instead, it is offering a sample of nourishing food that is wisdom each receives to the degree their intentions and capacities allow:

But Ruskin adds that there is some effort involved in this process beyond a willingness to receive it. We readers need to become sensitive to the clues in the text that the author leaves as pointers for those with eyes to see—little mysteries like the Ravenclaw door’s questions and the marble bag of eyeballs rolling around in
Deathly Hallows
.

As we begin the three-chapter anagogical section of
Bookshelf
, in which we will be looking for the hidden spiritual wisdom of these stories (“anagogical” literally meaning “uplifting” or “edifying”), let’s start with the door questions and Luna’s answer: “A circle has no beginning.” Circles, it turns out, are in all literature the preferred esoteric shape for “hero’s journey” stories—including Harry’s, and are the setting of his most dramatic confrontations with Lord Voldemort. Ms. Rowling didn’t make this up herself but lifts it from her favorite writers, ancient and modern.

When asked at the dawn of Potter-mania about the possibility of
Harry Potter
movies, Ms. Rowling revealed her familiarity with the best-known books of Frances Hodgson Burnett:

Though to my knowledge she has never mentioned Ms. Burnett or her children’s classics as sources or inspiration for
Harry Potter
, this remark reflects her intimacy with each book. She knows them well enough to have been impressed with the changes a movie production made as departures from the original. Even without this comment, though, there are sufficiently substantial echoes of
Secret Garden
in
Harry Potter
that the connection can be made without the author’s drawing our attention to it.

Secret Garden
’s cast of characters is a model for Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Both adventures are the stories of two young boys and a girl—in
Garden
the boys are Colin and Dickon, and the girl is Mary.
Garden
takes place in a single year, early spring to late summer, and involves three children ten to twelve years old. The
Potter
adventures, though seven years long, begin when Harry, Ron, and Hermione are eleven years old and are largely the tale of this “terrible trio,” as Snape calls them.

Colin and Harry both own mansions, and both houses feature the painting of a mother behind a curtain that is disturbing to the son. Colin and Mary repeatedly describe the manor as a “queer place” and Colin has covered the picture of his mother’s smiling face because “sometimes I don’t like to see her looking at me. She smiles too much when I am ill and miserable. Besides, she is mine and I don’t want everyone to see her” (chapter thirteen, “I am Colin”).

Later, Colin pulls back the curtain in the moonlight and leaves the painting for all to see; “I want to see her laughing like that all the time. I think she must have been a sort of Magic person perhaps.” In correspondence, the House of Black that Harry inherits at Sirius’s death is certainly an odd place, and the painting of Sirius’s mother in the entry hall is kept behind moth-eaten velvet curtains. She is definitely “a sort of Magic person,” albeit the worst sort.

The most obvious and persuasive echo-pointing-to-influence in Burnett’s stories, however, are in the eyes of her lead characters. Sara Crewe in
Princess
has “big, wonderful” and “solemn” green eyes that everyone admires and notes on first meeting her in that book. Colin Craven’s eyes, though gray rather than green, repeatedly and by almost every character in
Garden
, are said to resemble the eyes of his late mother, Lilias, the woman in the portrait. Lilias’s death precipitated Colin’s birth and it is suggested several times that she is watching over him still. Harry’s mum was named Lily, of course, his green eyes are always said to be “ just like his mother’s,” her death saved Harry’s young life from the Dark Lord, and she walks Harry to his destiny in the Forbidden Forest.