Harry Potter's Bookshelf (26 page)

As you’d expect in an alchemical writer, Ms. Rowling knows her Shakespeare, and it was Shakespeare who unleashed a flood of alchemical references into English literature. A quick look at
Romeo and Juliet,
the Shakespeare play most familiar to American readers and moviegoers, illustrates this point.

The play has five acts but the three colored stages of alchemy are hard to miss. You remember Romeo’s melancholic beginnings, his black bile, and the strife and division in the streets of Verona.
Nigredo!
The white stage begins when the young lovers meet. The agonizing, violent division between Capulets and Montagues is joined when this couple is bound by the sacrament of marriage in Friar Lawrence’s chapel. The story is essentially over when they’re married in the church service and the marriage is consummated. But the accomplishments of the white stage that are hidden have to be revealed on a larger stage in the crucible of the red stage. Through the deaths of Romeo and Juliet in the Capulet tomb, greater life comes to Verona. Juliet’s parents and Romeo’s father promise to erect golden statues of the star-crossed lovers and the city is at peace at last: black depression and division, wedding white, blood red, and gold statues.

The quarreling couple is Mercutio (Mercury, right?) and Tybalt, the two reagents whose combat and death act as catalysts to the resolution of the drama. And it is love, the resolution of male and female contrary identities and individ ualities, that becomes the star-crossed sacrifice of the drama. Neither Romeo nor Juliet is either Capulet or Montague as they profess in the balcony scene but the union of these contraries. Check off “Resolution and Transformation in Sacrificial Death.”

Is this sort of thing obvious to audiences at the plays? Hardly. But it is a large part of the uplifting spiritual punch that the play delivers. Identifying with this couple (as their parents do in the end), with their love and sacred union, we are made less partisan in spirit. We aren’t turned into gold statues, figures of solid light, as Romeo and Juliet are, but we have experienced vicariously and alchemically their love and light.

I don’t recall ever reading or hearing of a remark by Ms. Rowling about
Romeo and Juliet.
Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities,
on the other hand, is a book that she mentions frequently.
¹⁰

There is a connection here between Rowling, Shakespeare, and Dickens, especially his
Tale.
Dickens was a Shakespeare lover, and there was a London Shakespearean revival in the early nineteenth century at a time when Dickens was in love with the stage. He even produced, directed, and played a major part in an amateur production of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
.

In
A Tale of Two Cities
, one of his shortest, most theatrical works, Dickens attempts alchemical drama in the manner of Shakespeare.
Tale
has all the hallmarks of
a Shakespearean presentation
of the “resolution of contraries.” It has the five qualities of literary alchemy I noted above, in spades.

Three Stages of Transformation:
Dickens presents his
Tale
in three books and each corresponds to a stage in the work. The first book, “Recalled to Life,” is about the recovery of a man, Dr. Alexandre Manette, who was “buried alive” in the Bastille and about the darkness in both England and France of the time. The second is about the doppelgänger of Darnay and Carton and how each loves Lucie Manette, the doctor’s doting daughter, who is almost always dressed in white and whose hair gives the second book its title: “The Golden Thread.”
Tale’s
third book is the crucible of revolutionary Paris, and contains Carton’s spectacular and sublime sacrifice to save the wedded Charles and Lucie. It’s a play in three acts about the resolution of contraries, a play featuring a wedding in the second act and a sacrificial death that “saves” a city in some fashion in the third. Dickens is writing according to strict alchemical formula.

Dominant Contraries:
There are three lines from Dickens that most everyone knows, and two of them are the first and last lines of
A Tale of Two Cities
(
Christmas Carol’
s “God bless us, every one!” is the other). The famous opening announces that the book is about contraries and contrasts, in case the title slipped by you: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” As the title tells us, the novel is about London and Paris in conflict, both on the grand political scale and on the domestic scale of the principal characters.

In addition to creating double-natured individuals, Dickens pairs up characters to highlight qualities of each as foils to one another. Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay are good likenesses of one another but inversions in spirit: Darnay the French aristocrat who has abandoned his caste rather than accept injustice, and Carton the brilliant English lawyer whose drinking and sloth prevent his rise in station. Miss Lucie Manette and Madame Defarge are contrasted as French women of light and darkness to illustrate the possible responses to barbarous times.

The marriage of Lucie and Charles is the alchemical wedding, but the more important and substantial pledging of troth and sacrifice is made by Carton to Lucie:

Carton may not be Lucie’s husband, but his confessing his love to her and his willingness to die, not only for her, but to save a life she loves, is his transcendence of self and ego. He is a new man because of love.

Throw a rock at a lineup of the characters in
A Tale of Two Cities
and odds are pretty good you’re going to hit a character who could be said to have died and risen from the dead. The first book is titled “Recalled to Life” because Dr. Alexandre Manette is rescued from his living death in the Bastille. Charles Darnay is rescued from almost certain death, too, by a bizarre legal stratagem of Carton’s that discredits a lying witness.

Jarvis Lorry describes the effect of his association with the Manettes as being like a Lazarus raised from his tomb. Jerry Cruncher is a grave robber, the meaning of which Dickens is sure to drill home by calling him a “Resurrection Man.” Miss Pross, believe it or not, achieves something like an apotheosis in her sacrificial hand-to-hand combat with Madame Defarge.

But it is Carton that both rises from the death of his dissipation and drunkenness in anticipation of a greater reward and life that we remember. Having purchased the vapours he needs to sedate Darnay to change places with him, Carton walks the streets of Paris and recalls his hope of resurrection in Christ, his illumination at dawn.

Dickens closes
A Tale of Two Cities
with the prophetic vision Carton experiences at the guillotine. It includes perhaps the most famous single exit line in all literature: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” The end of the
Potter
epic reflects this—the ending Ms. Rowling says is the best in all literature.

Like the Darnays, Ginny and Harry name one of their sons for the two men who sacrificed themselves literally and figuratively to save and serve Harry, as Sidney Carton did Charles Darnay. Albus Severus Potter’s bipolar name, serpentine initials, and concerned questions to his father at King’s Cross station in the
Deathly Hallows
epilogue suggest that he, too, is a Gryffindor/Slytherin union. Albus Severus reflects the greater interior victory of Harry, Severus, and Albus in the last book of the series.

How does the alchemy in
Deathly Hallows
bring us to Harry’s final “All was well?”
Deathly Hallows,
as the last, is the red book or
rubedo
of the series. As in
Romeo and Juliet
and
A Tale of Two Cities
, a wedding has to be revealed, contraries have to be resolved, and a death to self must lead to greater life. We should expect to see a Philosopher’s Stone and a philosophical orphan, as well. The
rubedo
of
Deathly Hallows
is the crisis of the whole series—and it is everything alchemical we could have hoped for.

We start with Bill and Fleur’s alchemical wedding, in which France and England again are married, here in the
sitzkrieg
before the shooting war with Voldemort’s Nazis begins. The first seven chapters of
Deathly Hallows
lead up to this union of opposites, of choler and phlegm. As you’d expect, the wedding itself is a meeting of contraries, of solar and lunar. That’s why, in addition to the Gallic/Briton jokes, we have the lunar Lovegoods show up in sunlight-bright yellow. Luna, the moon dressed as the sun, explains that it’s good luck to wear gold at a wedding. This isn’t just loony Luna; everything at the wedding is golden: the floor, the poles, the band jackets, the bridesmaids’ dresses, even Tonks’s hair.

We have a long way to go, though, before the Slytherin and Gryffindor opposites are united in Harry’s son. The wedding breaks up when Kingsley’s lynx Patronus arrives with the message that Rufus Scrimgeour is dead and the Death Eater blitzkrieg has begun. With this wedding and the death of the first character whose name means red, the real action of the alchemical work in
Deathly Hallows
begins.

The rest of the book can be interpreted in black, white, and red stages. The
nigredo
stage stretches painfully from chapter nine, “A Place to Hide,” to chapter eighteen, “The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore.” Harry’s purification and illumination begin in chapter nineteen, “The Silver Doe,” and end with the trio’s return to Hogsmead in chapter twenty-eight, “The Missing Mirror.” The crisis of the book, and of the series, is in Harry’s return to Hogwarts, the destruction of the remaining Horcruxes, and victory over Lord Voldemort, as told in the last eight chapters of
Deathly Hallows
.

The ten
nigredo
chapters are as dark and gothic as any reader could want. We get a trip to the House of Black, we visit the Orwellian “Magic Is Might” black statue in the new Ministry (accessible only by flush toilet . . . ), and we go camping, where, for some reason, it’s always night, or overcast, or the three friends can’t get along. Ron finally leaves, in a painful dissolution. Ask anyone what the longest part of
Deathly Hallows
is. The answer is always “the camping trip.” It lasts eight chapters (fourteen through twenty-one) but three are agony, the three after Ron departs.

The chapters about Harry’s trip with Hermione to Godric’s Hollow are the climax of the
nigredo
and end with Harry’s crisis of faith. We left Harry at the end of
Half-Blood Prince
proclaiming that he was “a Dumbledore man.” In
Deathly Hallows
, he has his private agonizing doubts. He reads one article by Rita Skeeter and his faith is shaken. He talks to Aunt Muriel and Dogbreath at the wedding, and his faith takes another blow. And now he is struggling to believe in Dumbledore at all.

At the end of the
nigredo
, when Harry reads
The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore
, he denies Dumbledore, denies that he loves Albus, denies that Dumbledore loved him, etc. Harry’s holly-and-phoenix wand has been broken in battle with Nagini and he is left with a broken wand, a broken piece of mirror, and shattered faith. He keeps these fragments, though, in a bag around his neck and close to his heart. He denies Dumbledore, denies his mission, and, in something like despair, he keeps these remnants or relics of the person who once was close to his heart.

And just when despair is closing in, the
nigredo
ends with the brilliance reflecting off the Silver Doe in the snow-covered Forest of Dean. This chapter, a meeting of Christian, alchemical, and Arthurian images in one spot, is probably the height of Ms. Rowling’s achievement as a writer. Ron the Baptist saving Harry, Ron’s exorcism in destroying the Horcrux, Harry’s death to self and discovery of remorse, repentance, faith, and love in Dobby’s grave on Easter morning, and the pale dragon in Gringott’s are all images of purification, with water on hand or nearby.

The white stone on the red earth of Dobby’s grave and the dragon’s “milkily” pink eyes are chromatic signs of the story’s movement from white to red. The
rubedo
of
Deathly Hallows
begins, I think, when Harry refuses to listen to Aberforth’s complaints and criticism of his brother, Albus. When Harry shows his faith and his choice to believe, Neville appears to take him into the castle, and the battle for Hogwarts begins. You could say the red stage really begins when Rubeus, the half-giant whose name means “red,” flies through the window of Hogwarts Castle.

In this battle, which includes Harry’s sacrifice in the Forbidden Forest and his ultimate victory over Voldemort, the contraries are resolved and all the houses sit down at one table. The battle also causes the creation of the “philosophical orphan” when Nymphadora and Remus Lupin are killed. And we get a Philosopher’s Stone, too; Hermione and Ron’s daughter, we learn in the epilogue, is named “Rose,” which is another name for the Stone.