..:: Muggle Matters ::..

Ghost-Town Gazette headline: Merlin Posts a comment on a Hog-Prof thread

2010-02-24T00:12:00.002-05:00

For anybody who visit these haunted grounds, Pauli sent CCd me on an email to John Granger about a comments thread going on on a Hogwart's Professor post, which had touched on the issue of eschatology in Harry Potter.

So for any who stumble back on this and would like to read (a long comment, but hopefully with some useful info or considerations), the link is:

http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/sacramental-world-of-harry-potter/#comments

You can't always get what you want, but sometimes ... you get what you need: Mirror bookends in Harry Potter

2009-08-25T14:59:00.004-04:00

This is just a short one.

I was just digging around in my travel bag in terrible need of some dental floss and noticing how much my travel bag (full of bandaids, old shaving, razors, a salve or two) amazingly resembles the state of Harry's trunk at the beginning of Deathly Hallows. I haven't yet found the floss and so am running to the corner drugstore, but I did notice I have a shaving mirror in there, and that reminded me of the two way mirror in DH ... and that started a thought rolling.

In book 1 we have the mirror of Erised, which is of course "desire" spelled backwards, and shows the viewer the deepest, most secret and most desparate desires of their heart. In Book 7 we have the broken fragment of the mirror Sirius gave Harry. I would say that this latter could be seen as paired off against the Mirror of Erised as, rather, that which gives you what you need ... in particular in book 7 it is the path by which Harry reaches Aberforth and Aberforth sends rescue.

I would even say that the broken mirror is sort of bookended itself in book 7. When Harry first sees the flash of blue in the beginning he thinks about what he desires ... to see and talk to Dumbledore again. and in the end of the book, with the second flash, when he is making no assumptions based in his longings, but simply crying out into the unknown (perhaps a symbol of the transcendant), then something happens. Of course there is also a possible death theme here - Harry is pining for DD, who has died and cannot be brought back, just as he pined for his family in the Erised mirror in book 1 ... and when the second mirror sends Dobby and Dobby saves them, he also dies.

I would note two other things about the pairing (and here I am just tossing out associations that I don't necessarily have tied out ... but do seem rather promising to me).

1. The useful mirror is the one that is broken; the one which could trap you into wasting your life pining is the one that is "whole"

2. Communication:
The mirror in book 7 is designed for communication whereas the mirror of Erised is not (in fact it implicitly, as told in the story, has anti-communicative qualities - namely that neither Ron nor Harry can see what each other see in the mirror). Here also there is a possible death theme in that in Book 5 Harry looks at the mirror, knowing he will not Sirius in it but still sort of hoping, the same as he does with the blue eye of (a) Dumbledore in book 7. In the end however, it is the blue eye that saves ... maybe there is a theme here of not trying to pin the dead down so that, who knows, they may be something involved when you cry out into unknown/transcendant for help (the shades from Voldy's wand in book 4 would seem to support this type of thinking - and if JKR has in fact done time in the chair and/or on the couch, as it seems from the language and imagery in many of the books, and supported by some information from public record on her life ... getting closure from the dearly departed is a very important theme there ... it is what frees one to really remember departed loved ones, as opposed to just being haunted by them [or rather our conceptions of them, how we perhaps tried to pin "them" down while they lived], and that is important for being able to grieve properly) ... but I think this would all be pretty latent stuf, a lot more of a psycho-analytic subconsicous reading of it.

PS
The mirror of Erised shares some qualities with the compass of Jack Sparrow as it gets developed in the second PotC movie - it shows you what you desire most in this world (in the first movie it is implied only that it shows the bearings to Ille de Meurta, but the screen writers said they felt they, fortunately, left enough ambiguity in the phrasing to make the transition possible). The settings are different, however. In Dead Man's Chest the problem is a person not knowing what they want ... which is a more "psycho-analytic" problem of things like the ego (in the Freudian system of Id, Ego, Super-ego) sublimated to an unhealthy level (among other things) etc

Hargid as the Rubedo

2009-08-18T14:59:00.003-04:00

Here is yet another new random Merlin Post, this time brought to you by the society of "Merlin needs something constructive to do while his scanner takes interminably long to scan selected pages from a Jon Levenson book to put up in PDF format on electronic reserves for the course he is teaching this fall"

This post sprung into my mind from something I was saying in the last one, on Gryffindor and Slytherin, and has to do with another John - not Levenson, but Granger - and alchemy in the Harry Potter series. Here particularly I am talking about Granger's notes on the last 3 books as conforming to the 3-stage description of the alchemy process: Black, White, Red. In Book 5 Black dies and in Book 6 Albus (white) dies. He wrote this before book 7 hit the stands and I was terribly afraid Hagrid was going to bite it in the final installment.

Fortunately the big guy did not exit stage left in book 7, because I really like him. But then the question comes up: When the first 2 of the 3-stage series had characters with specific names tied to the respective stage and had something decisive happen to them (dying - to be more precise), and there is a character with a taylor-made name for the 3rd alchemy stage (Rubeus Hagrid = Rubedo/Red stage) ... but he does not have as decisive of an event - to the extent that you could say he does not even have an "event" in the same way as the other two - what does that mean for the use of that structure for the last 3 books?

Well, I don't think the imbalance among the stages can be totally resolved (although, admittedly, I have not read what John Granger has on the 7th book as the Rubedo stage, and he is usually pretty insightful, so maybe he has), but I think things like that just sort of happen when a series is being composed over that long a span of time. BUT, in writing that last post some things sort of stuck out to me about Hagrid that may make him very siginificant as a characterization and as a symbol in the 7th book and the series.

As I sort of connected (more free association than really planned), Hagrid is the one who brings Harry to Hogwarts for the first time in book 1, leading the boats, and Hagrid is the one who brings his body (as he believes it to be only his body) back to the castle in book 7. But the actual physical entrance to the castle is not the only "first time" Hargid represents for Harry. In a sense Hagrid is Harry's whole entrance into the magical world. It all begins with Hagrid knocking the door in at the hut on the rock in the sea (and notice, this is specifically mentioned in book 7 when Harry is talking to the Dursleys to convince them to take the Order's protection: he says something about "and if you remember what happened the last time you tried to outrun wizards, I think you'll agree you need help" - and then JKR specifically notes a silence in which you could almost hear faint echoes of Hagrid pounding on the door). Hagrid is also with Harry the first time he visits Diagon Alley. In fact, Hagrid is the one who gives Hedwig to Harry ... and Hagrid who is there when Hedwig dies in book 7.

I believe it is John Granger who noted (in his first book) that St Hedwig is the patron of orphans. There is a sort of "openings and closings" thing with Hagrid in these scenes - an opening and closing of his life at Hogwarts; the orphan years gaurded over by Hedwig; the era of being one of "the abandonded boys" for whom Hogwarts WAS home (cf Deathly Hallows, Harry's thoughts as he leaves the castle for the woods the final time - that he wished he could go home, but this was the first and best home he ever had, him and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys). After this Harry will build a new home with Ginny. But here Hagrid is with Harry at the ending of this stage, carrying his body to the castle, pairing with his stament in the Leaky Cauldron in Book 1: "Everyone starts at the beginning at Hogwarts."

Griffyndor vs Slytherin: Bookends in books 1 and 7

2009-08-17T14:08:00.001-04:00

The following is brought to you (whoever is around who still stops by the Muggle Matters ghost-town blog) by the "Merlin needs (or at least wants) to take a break from studying for comps and prepping his syllabus for the fall" foundation.

In prepping my syllabus for teaching an intro to Old Testament class this fall, I have decided to use the Harry Potter series in the introduction of the course to help explain some approaches in studying texts by applying them to a text college sophmores will have read (the course is one of several possible for fulfilling a core requirement text course - so I have to cover some of the "basics" of how texts in general are approached).

Anyway, this has given rise to many "sideline" considerations of the material as a whole.

This one is about the whole Gryffindor vs Slytherin tension, and in particular how it functions in books 1 an 7 as sort of "bookends"

Pauli made a really brilliant observation once, to which I have been repeatedly indebted in how I think of some of the structural themes/aspects of the books (this one, dealing with the houses, which, as JKR said in interview is a straight lift from the medieval 4 elements cosmology, as John Granger reports in his books, is by nature a structuring mechanism). His observation was that Gryffindor house contains in it, precisely in Harry's year, all 4 houses, and so is a sort of melting pot. Harry (as John Granger and others, among them the sorting hat, have noted) has slytherin qualities. Ron is your straight-ahead hot-headed and fiery red Gryffindor. Hermione is the cool reason of Ravenclaw and Neville, with his knack for (and eventual teaching of) herbology, is a Hufflepuff nature.

The fact that these will be "melting potted" together is evident from book 1, where, in the boats crossing the lake (contra the movie representation), these 4, and just these 4, wind up in the same boat together. That's the book 1 opening bookend.

In book 7, after Voldy has Hargid (who also led, sort of carried, the troops across the lake in book 1) carry Harry in front of the Castle, Neville breaks through the silence spell and pushes through to shout something about Dumbledore's army forever. Voldy puts him on his knees and asks him if he wants to join the death eaters. Neville tells him where he can shove that idea and Voldy does the flaming sorting hat trick on Neville's head, which then gets transformed into the sword-in-hat trick (a thank you to John Granger here for noticing that great pun and for his pointing us to the Arthurian connections of it in book 2). The book 7 bookend here is the particular thing that Voldy says in this interchange: that there will be no m ore sortings; the house of his noble ancestor Salazar Slytherin, will suffice for all.

So, in book 1 we have Gryffindor house "sufficing" for all in the manner of a sort of an umbrella house. In book 7 we have Voldy's alternative conception of what it means for one house to "suffice for all" - which is what we here in academic jargon land call hegemony (forced submission to a cultural etc identity). In other words, Voldy's is a plan of forced homogenization (everybody becoming exactly the same). The Gryffindor model, on the other hand, provides more room for people to maintain the traits that make them unique and interesting (Luna will always be SUCH a Ravenclaw), while still upholding certain universal ideals such as bravery and loyalty.

PS: Granger had some nice stuff on Snape as the Slytherin/Gryffindor Androgyne (containing qualities of both, where we get "androgynous" from, which is the original use of the word, a character who has both male [andros] and female [gyne] characteristics) ... an interesting question would be whether or not Dumbledor would be right in sometimes "thinking we sort to soon" - Snape needs to remain a Slytherin for it to work.

PPS: on a slightly related note to the last PS, I saw on Travis Prinzi's FaceBook feed that he has something at the Hog’sHead about Snape’s love for Lily: "Devoted, Sacrificial Love or Creepy infatuation)." I don't think they're the only two options. I'm sure different people, including Travis, will be weighing in at the HH with a more nuanced position, but I hope it goes beyond some mere 'middle-point' or 'mixture' theory because I don’t think those are even the only two possible poles in the matter. I think there is a lot more in there than meets the eye. I started thinking this when reading book 3 again recently – particularly in the part where Snape fills in for Lupin and Hermione is trying to answer the questions and Snape keeps docking house points on her for 'speaking out of turn.' And in the shrieking shack he is down-right abusive to Hermione, calling her a stupid girl (yelling it at her – all caps in American text). I think Hermione reminds him a bit of Lily (she certainly connects with Lily, via Slughorn and Harry, in book 6), and that this is like an open burning and festering wound to him. What she reminds him of is that he ruined a friendship. That friendship may have had possibilities of romance and marriage, and Snape may have even had specific conscious desires for that … but Lily was more than just a 'potential lover/spouse' to him … she represented friendship to him, a connection with somebody else, somebody to talk about hopes and dreams and fears and frustrations with (as little as young Snape wants to talk about it, I think it is important to him that Lily asks if his parents are still fighting). So I would add the possibility of not just deep, but, more-over, bitter remorse and regret (at points acerbically bitter, evidenced in his treatment of Hermione as the emblem of a still-open and festering wound). I never could buy the 'completely white hat' (or black hat even before book 7 came out) view of Snape … he's not an angel or a devil, he's a human – and there is a lot of ambiguity when it comes to humans.

Anyway, that is enough of a break from studying and syllabus prep for now

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince Movie

2009-07-18T17:51:00.004-04:00

Wow ... has it really been more than a year since I posted anything on here? Life gets busy

but I have not in any way "moved on" from the Potterdom.

I just got back from movie 6 ... way too much to process. I have actually given up on trying to compare the movies with the books but I did have a few thoughts about this movie, one in particular in relation to theories I have mentioned on this site.

(well, first, the scene at the beginning with Harry and the muggle girl in the diner in the London underground station was completely gratuitous. Not gratuitous in the sense that it gets used of certain very specific types of movie scenes ... the movie maintains its PG Rating ... but it just made me go "what was THAT about or what did it have to do with ANYTHING?").

The theory I have talked about before here involves the unbreakable vow IN RELATION to marriage Imagery and THEMES (NOT that the UBV directly symbolizes marriage in a one-to-one structure). In this movie when Ron explains the UBV to Harry it is on the train going back to the Burrow for Christmas holiday (I know ... there is nothing in the book about the Hogwats express EVER being running outside of the beginning and end, but, hey, it's the movie). The convo begins and then is interrupted slightly when Lavender breathes on the glass of the compartment door and traces a heart and "R + L" .. then Ron goes on to explain that you die if you break a UBV and as he does this the message on the door is in the foreground prominently.

In movie language, as I understand that language at least, this pretty strongly connects the idea of romantic love and the UBV, or at least hints strongly at some intersection of themes.

(I realize some could say "well, that is just what the movie makers got out of it and they are botching stuff all over the place anyway, but, hey, I think it's in the book and the recent movie image provides a nice point of entry to bring in one of my pet theories about how the literary "meaning" is working ... I'm not necessarily trying to use the movie image as an "argument" for this reading of the book)

In terms of what goes on in the book, I would translate the intersection as "what is it about romantic love, and even the desire for it (like, say, Merope's desire for love and marriage, and in the end even desire for TRUE love, causing her to cease the love potion) that brings people to enter into a desire for conjugal love and using the words 'till death do us part'? and what impact does dysfuntion have on that (dysfunction like, say, Merope's state of extreme psychological duress from living her whole life under the thumb and mentality of Marvolo and Morphin Gaunt) ... AND, how does that whole question impact Tom Riddle becoming Voldemort"

If I were to put it terms of philosophical argumentation, particularly from a Catholic theological standpoint, for this set of themes being a possible question and fitting into this book (and here I am making more of an official argument"... for the possibility and fittingness), I would appeal to three things:

1. Decina and Vanhooser's talk at Lumos in 2006 where they did a very good job of tying out Voldy's character traits to anti-social personality disorder

2. the Roman Curia's instruction to annulment tribunals entitled Diginitatis Conubii (sp?), in which, while cautiously, the Curia instructs tribunals to pay heed to findings in the field of psychology and their relationship to the shape of full consent in entering marriage (particularly at issue here is the impact of personality disorders on the ability to "choose").

3 The fact related by Decina and Vanhooser that JKR has, according to public note, gone through clinical depression episode twice - one of the times being with the divorce from her first husband.

In the end, in HBP, I think these are questions the book poses, rather than "answers" it "offers." But there is something important in the asking.

A final question would be: Why Snape and Narcissa? (there is NEVER any hint of romantic inclinations there AT ALL ... not to mention the fact that she is a married woman).

I have just re-read book # 4 and there is a STRONG theme there of fathers and sons (in many different avenues, for instance: inthe pensieve Barty Crouch Sr says to JR "I have no son" and moments later DD relates to Harry that the Longbottoms do not recoginize their son. Ovviously the latter denotes what we usually call recognition, but in close conjuction with the other I think it echoes Crouch not recognizing his son in the sense of acceptance ... It all points to one thing: one of Voldy's legacies is many instances of estrangement within families .. which Harry pretty much says not too long after laying in bed thinking about Neville, that it all comes down to Voldy, he's the one who has torn all these families apart).

In HBP I think it is a tale of mothers and sons, particularly mothers in extreme psychological/emotinoal duress.

The two themes (romantic love with UBV, and mother love with UBV) may seem a bit unrelated, and I have not tied them together as tightly here as I would like (but do not have time to) ... but my final line, appealing to artisitic ways of thinking beyond strict "logic,'" would be a line from John Mayer's song "Fathers"

"Girls become lovers who turn into mothers"

(we are, after all, talking about a story written by a girl who became a mother, and a lover along the way ... not by an academic publishing for a trade journal - or more importanly I think she wrote it as more of the former, rather than trying to put out something that would tie together so nice and "logically")

A son (Tom Marvolo Riddle) was born from the union of a psychologically very duressed woman who coerced the man she "loved" into marriage and then maybe really fell in love with him and set him free and was dashed by the fact that he had no inclination to love her, so dashed she gave up living ... not even the sake of her baby could convince her to keep living.

Another mother is so desparate for the safety of her son's survival (against threats brought on by the "failure of service" of her husband - however, within a system of bigotry and violence to which she herself has willingly committed) that she willingly binds another to penalty of death to protect him.

Another mother cast down her life to save her son, but in doing so also left him without her in a cruel world.

Another mother recently cried on television upon revisiting the flat in which she lived as a single parent with her daughter after a divorce, while she took a chance on writing a book she at the time had no assurance would become even profitable, let alone one of the best selling series of recent publishing.

In the end I think the question in all of this is: where does the pain, and sometimes malady, come from and how does it affect the magic that is life (especially at its source: marriage and family)?

These things are beneath the surface, to be sure (I would be highly surprised if JKR had even heard of Diginitatis Conubii, let alone read it ... an in-house communication of guidance between juridical entities within the Catholic Church just doesn't seem like the type of thing a lay-person in the Church of Scottland is likely to have on their shelf), but I think they are there none-the-less.

Most of all just thought it was interesting that the movie makers' subconscious seems to be running in the same direction, at least in so far as making some connection between the UBV and romantic love (although, like I said, I realize that in the minds of some this may be a strike against my theory ... but, oh well, it's all good fun in the end)

Travis Prinzi's New Book: Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds

2008-11-13T13:12:00.006-05:00

So, what does someone do if he/she likes Muggle Matters but are a little bit sad that the frequency of writing seems to be about once every six months at best?

I suggest buying Travis Prinzi's new book, Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds. You can pre-order it here, and I just did. Travis is as smart as he is a dedicated Harry Potter fan and blogger, so I am sure the book is going to ROCK.

Another thing: I notice that the colors of the book cover go very well with the color scheme here at Muggle Matters. But I'm sure that is 100% coincidental....

Or is it??

Hogwarts's Ghosts

2008-11-13T12:29:00.004-05:00

This summer while our family was on vacation in Maine, I received this email from a wise Catholic friend concerned about some of the themes in Harry Potter.

I have a question. We read Sorcerer's Stone as a family we are half way through Chamber of Secrets as a family. I see that there is good, but it is hard to get around some of the dark stuff. Like last night we attended a Deathday Party. It seemed a bit creepy for creepy's sake. I am still pro-Potter but how do I get a Christian message out of it?

That's a really good question. The following was my initial response:

Note that the ghosts are Wizards who refused to move on from this earth. Later in the series they are described as "imprints". Their entire existence as it remains is suffused with vanity in all senses of the word: note Nick's desire to be a real "decapitee" and the vain attempt to derive pleasure from rotten food without a physical body. The headless hunt is nothing more than a moribund fraternity of wannabes and braggarts at having their heads lopped off. Some achievement.

Also there is undue attachment to the things of this earth, e.g., the Fat Friar is a good enough fellow, but he's fat, symbolizing an attachment to food. The ghosts play a bigger role later in the books. Ron is always shown as being "impolite" whenever he mentions the fact that Nick is dead. But he's correct in this bluntness and candor! Nick is the one who is rudely invading the world of the living.

Harry condescends to Nick's level out of respect for him and attends the party, but doesn't really enjoy it beyond an amused bewilderment. In book 5, Nick tells Harry, "I am neither here nor there," admitting that he probably made a mistake in his vain attachment.

I agree with you that it is creepy, but the question is why so. The creepiness is due to the moribund vanity of en-souled creatures who refuse to move on to the next life. I believe this can be one way of seeing the ghosts at Hogwarts.

I had meant to post on this earlier; I just thought of the email again today in reference to an idea Merlin mentioned to me once. He stated that the Potter series has an existential dimension, i.e., how the good characters become good as a result of their actions, and likewise for evil characters and those somewhere in between, that is not found so much in other mythopoeic literature (e.g., Lord of the Rings, etc.). The ghosts seem to be living out the essence of their decision to remain on this plane of existence although it is no longer their proper mode of existence.

Fear and Hope

2008-04-22T21:10:00.002-04:00

First, let me make the obligatory sponsor notice: this random Merlin thought is being brought to you by a reading of a chapter from a book one of my professor's is working on the apocalyptic book "4th Ezra" ... for a class with her tomorrow (and thus it is also being brought to you by my persistent procrastination).

Anyway, In 4 Ezra 10:38 the angel Uriel says to Ezra "Listen to me, and I will teach you about the things that you fear"

Of course, as mentioned in my last post, on my last trip to PA I listened to Prisoner of Azkaban, and so the theme of fear was running through my head anyway, in conjuction with the material from that book

(side note: to fans of the Dune series by Frank Herbert, to which Pauli introduced me the year I began a 3 year break from undergrad - I recently put back up on my wall the "fear mantra:

"Fear is the mind killer
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration
I will face my fear
I will permit it to pass over and through me
And when it has gone past me
I will turn to see fear's path
Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing
Only I will remain")

In his conversations and lessons with Harry, Lupin could well speak those same words that Uriel the angel speaks to Ezra "listen to me, and I will teach you, and tell you about the thing that you fear." For example: your boggart is a dementor and this, as a good thing, means that the thing you fear most is fear itself (I would call this a little of an inaccurate phrasing though - if what you fear most is fear itself then you are a Greek stoic - I think what he means is that fear is your biggest concern, including the fear of fear - the point is not to eradicate fear but to work towards not letting fear dominate and control you, again, including the fear of fear itself).

But this post is not going to be a big long rambling free-association post as per my usual. What I wanted to put up is one small observation from book 3 on the level of structure. I think there is an intentional pairing of the boggart and the patronus, and I think this primarily based in the concrete language of the text.

I think the thought process on this started a while ago when somebody said something about Hermione's boggart and I went back and checked the scene in the first class with the boggart in the wardrobe and thought "that must person must be off their rocker ... Hermione doesn't face the boggart." Fortunately I did not say such a rude thing ... because I was flat-out wrong. In listening to the book again I saw that Hermione faces the boggart in a wardrobe as part of Lupin's DADA final exam ... and there it is indeed (as whoever had been commenting said ... and as Ron conjectured earlier in the book) McGonnegal tearing up her work with failing grades.

The specific connection that pairs the boggart and patronus (fear and hope) in opposition to, but also, in the self-same relation, in intimate connection with, each other is the possessive pronoun "your" ("your boggart/patronus") or the possessive "so and so's boggart/patronus." I had not really noticed it before, but the boggart and the patronus are spoken of in exactly the same way in the books (and I do mean plural "bookS" - of course patronuses [actually good Latin would be "patroni" ... but whatever] are mentioned all the way through all the following books, but the boggart is specifically used again in book 5 with Mrs Weasely's boggart ... that was a really gripping scene too; Rowling is SO good at writing pathos that just sort of steals your breath in a quick punch).

I think the significance of the pairing is that both things call on and project something, in the one case our greatest fear, and in the other our greatest hope. To return to that thing of not being dominated by fear, even the fear of fear itself ... hope is not hope without a fear to hope against.

Anyway, just another random thought from the brain-pan of Merlin as he bounces back and forth between procrastination and feigned diligent study.

See you in the funny pages ...

Time trumps Space

2008-04-09T13:57:00.008-04:00

So, I am right now finishing listening to Prisoner of Azkaban read by Jim Dale, having listened to the majority of it while driving back to PA this past weekend (for the baptisms of our friends Nathan and Julie's newest child and also of another couple friends' newborn ... and a relaxing time hanging out with Paul and Lissa and my nephews, who were also at the baptism) ... and I noticed something that fits into my own thinking on the Harry Potter works, particularly in the area of my definition of narrative (as a kairotic chronology)

Basically this relates to that good ole term you hear a million times in every Sci-Fi movie or book: the "space-time continuum."

Once Harry and Hermione have saved Buckbeak and Sirius and made it back to the hospital wing and Fudge and Snape et al have discovered the escapes and Snape vehemently insists that Harry and Hermione must have been involved, Dumbledore patiently but emphatically and thoroughly rehearses the facts (the locked door etc) that dictate that they could not have been in involved ... unless they have found a way to be in two places at the same time. Of course we know that they have indeed been provided with a way to do just that, with the time-turner.

My interest lies in the fact that the "rules" of physical space can be "bent" by manipulating chronos, "clock time" - which in this case is done for the sake of kairos, the mystery laden time of special meaning (that "moment" when "time stands still" for something weighty, or to quote Marty McFly in Back to the Future, something "heavy" or in the translation used in Galations, the "fullness of time" - or to quote Paul Simon from the Rhythm of the Saints album: "you're born at the 'right time'") - in this case that of deliverance of the innocent and good.

(side note): I know that that phrase "heavy" is in no way unique or original to BttF movies ... I use that instance because, aside from my obsession with throwing in movie lines every chance I get, Doc Brown here responds with the typical scientific question of whether something has gone wrong with the earth's gravitational pull in the future - which points up the contrast between scientific "factual" discourse and poetic language, which is pretty much the same differance as that between chronos and kairos)

SO, this leads me to a sort of hierarchy of elements: Kairos highest, Chronos second and space last. There are two steps/point I want to emphasize

1. Chronos is maleable:

That is basically just what the time turner is for, to mess with Chronos. Of course, there is a certain respect due to Chronos, lest one go accidentally committing suicide (killing one's past or future self, as Hermione says). Of course there are a myriad of possible "symbolic" nuances in that whole thing, of how the past and the future are at war, or at least in tension etc. But my main point in bringing it up is to say that I am not saying that chronos sucks altogether and should be utterly bagged ... it has its place and messing with it is VERY dangerous - although sometimes the rewards of that risk are very wonderful - especially for Sirius and Bukcbeak. The point is, though, that chronos can be meddled with. And here is is meddled with in such a way that the "hard rules" of the physical space half of the whole "space-time continuum" thinga-ma-bobby are superceded ... trumped, so to speak.

2. Time Trumps Space: Descartes Debunked

The whole thing I have just said about "trumping" has a specific historical referent. Renes Descartes is known as the father of modern philosophy. He developed a very particular definition of what I will call (well, following the standard lingo in all the people whom I have had to read on the matter, all much smarter than me) - "physicality." Descartes' term is Res Extensia - or "extended reality/thing/matter." This means basically that physicality is defined primarily by the extension through the 3 dimensions (not meaning here any "other" dimensions that academics etc might talk about - simply meaning the three that we speak of in something like a 3D movie ... btw, U2-3D rocked).

This is very different than the way that physicality had been thought of before, and (in Rowling I think) since. The Jewish concept of the "body" was as a mode of relation: one relates to others through the body in speech, touch, smiles and the like; one relates to God through liturgical observance or keeping the commandments through the body; one relates to God's creation in bodily ways (tilling the ground etc) .

On the Rowling side, Steve Vander Ark (and I really hope they got all their differences sorted out) had some really good comments at Lumos in 2006 in Vegas. He talked about "wizarding logic" - the fact that by apparition and other magical means everything is about only 40 seconds away. I forget exactly how far he took that in the direction I am going here, so he might have said everything I am about to say (in which case I REALLY need to mention him, so as not to plaigerize), but the whole thing remains the same either way in how it fits into what I am saying here. Time is not ruled by space in the wizarding world: it does not take longer to get from Seamus' house in Scottland to London than it does to get to Hogwarts from Chez Finnigan (that's the specific example used by Vander Ark ... although I came up with the witty use of French :) ). Seamus takes the Hogwarts Express like everyone else because that is a part of what it means to be a student at the school. Through "wizarding logic" (magic) life on earth is freed up, in the physical side, to show so many more things, like aspects of relations etc.

Not even Chronos, clock time, is ruled by "space"; and Kairos time is ruled by neither ... it rules them. The meaning of living life, including even simply being physical, it not ruled by "scientifically verifiable extension." Kairos must also respect Chronos and scientific space, but in the end it rules them and not vice versa, and the whole thing begins by pointing up, in the instance of the time turner (as perhaps the most apt representative of Vander Ark's "wizarding logic"), that even Chronos is not ruled by space. By it's link with Kairos, both being types of time, it trumps space even though it is ruled by "special time."

PS: I should make a note here on the "debunking" of Descartes. I'm not saying "scrap the bugger and give him up as a bad job." The thing is that you can't ... to quote Riley in the first National Treasure movie: it's not just that it shouldn't be done ... it simply can't be done. We can't get back there no matter how hard we try ... our way of thinking (what Foucault would call an "episteme") is simply what it is. We may think we should "turn back the clock" but in our case, unlike Hermione and Harry's, we simply can't ... no matter how arduously we try to get back there we always approach that material as who we are where we are ... and that is as people whose thinking has been formed in a post-Cartesian world. Our better hope is to understand where we are, take the good and see if there is a way to transform the not-so-good (I think Descartes system works somewhat in so far as it goes, but to define what it means to be "in the body" or "in the flesh" solely, or even primarily, by the whole 3D extension thing is a MAJOR gype).

Rowling and Tom Waits

2008-01-19T20:45:00.000-05:00

No official news here - just something fun, and an argument in support of my once statement that the closest thing I can think of to the way the weird sisters are portrayed (as distinctly different from the banal teeny-bopper movie four punky-grungy-poppy-gothy band) is Tom Waits. I was piddling around this evening and pulled out my guitar and a sheets of Waits lyrics and chords I made up once from books of his songs I like. One that I always like to play is called "Tango till they're sore." The opening line/verse goes "well, you play that tarantella, all the hounds will start to roar, the boys all go to hell and then the cubans hit the floor, they drive along the pipeline, they tango till they're sore, they take apart their nightmares and they leave them by your door." Now the song as a whole shares certain themes with Ms Rowling's work, such as death ("make sure they play my theme song, I guess daisies will have to do, just get me to New Orleans and paint shadows on the pew"" ... but what caught my attention was that word "tarantella." I thought, I have read that recently ... while I was listening to book 2 coming back out here. And indeed I had. There is that spell Draco hits Harry with first in the dueling club in book 2 and also with which somebody (Dolohov I think but can't be sure without looking it up) hits Neville in the DOM in book 5 (remember, that is how he breaks the prophecy).

Tarantallegra.

If you look up tarantella on dictionary.com you read:
a rapid, whirling southern Italian dance in very quick sextuple, originally quadruple, meter, usually performed by a single couple, and formerly supposed to be a remedy for tarantism.

Which is pretty much what happens to Harry and Neville: Neville's legs are kind of flailing around and "the next second Harry's legs began to jerk around out of his control in a kind of two-step" (CS 192).

In connection with the theme/image-set of psychological malady, the "disease" which the tarantella was though to be a cure for, tarantism, is described thus on dictionary.com:

a mania characterized by an uncontrollable impulse to dance, esp. as prevalent in southern Italy from the 15th to the 17th century, popularly attributed to the bite of the tarantula.

In addition we all know of Rowling's love of Italian Renaissance (cf John Granger's work) ...

Now of course, for what I now refer to as the "proof-mongers" (those who focus on "proofs" instead of reading a piece of fiction/art for the beauty of the rough edges and nuances) - no, neither of these mention have anything to do with the band the weird sisters - and so I can't say "hey, everybody, I have proof that I have a real world referent for that band ... I can prove it! come and look!" - which was never my aim.

My point is ... Waits would be a good match for what the music of the Weird Sisters sounds like for two reasons: 1) compare Waits music and instrumentation with the same elements described of the Wierd Sisters in book 4 (I think DD is described as doing some funky sort of waltz with Madam Maxime at the Yule Ball); and 2) They think of the same things, like the tarantella.

My real point is ... this is damn funny. Rowling has a very wry and great sense of the humorous. A jinx that disables your opponent by making them dance a funky Italian quick-step dance ... now THAT is downright hilarious.

UPDATE 1/26/08

Ok ... so I am reading Foucault - no small task in itself lol ... and way too long to explain, but he does mention Campanella - and in trying to track down stuff on origins of Abracadabra/Avada Kedavra I came across a book tracing development of theory in medieval magic, big emphasis on Campanella, a souther Italian (like the tarantella) monk ... I have had some friends cast aspersion on whether or not Rowling is really that intelligent and eductated ... she knows her stuff ... I really have to get more into this realm

BUT, since that last was sort of not not necessarily really tightly connected with the first part of the post, this other thing presented itself to me while I was listening to book 2 while riding the recumbent bike in the gym (new years resolution, another long story) ... speaking of how funny this whole "jinx of dancing" is ... the spell that Harry hit Draco with first was "rictum-sempra" - the last part of course being the sempra we discussed so much in the Sectum Sempra as "ever cut - but here it is "ever laughing" - make the unable to stop laughing as a weapon - effing ingenious.

Pirates of the Bronx: At Semester's End

2007-12-13T19:38:00.000-05:00

Sorry, Mate ... Just couldn't resist

So, I'm a little short on sleep right now from a paper. Was going to sleep for longer today but there was the office Christmas thing and lunch with a candidate for a post on faculty (they like to have candidates have lunch with grad students in their specialty while they are here, this guys was in OT) and then I was going to come back and catch up on sleep but then realized it would be probably be a good idea for me to turn up at the talk the guy was giving at for (part of his visiting as a candidate) - was pretty drowsy during the talk but after was more awake, so ...

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End came out on DVD on the 5th and I got a copy but told me-self I could not watch it or the extras till everything was done - but then I was relatively awake, but realizing I would not be so long enough to make it worth getting started, since on this little sleep it is a better idea to catch up some on it

so ... you guessed it ... while I did not watch the movie, I did go through the extras

Quite simply: this movie rocks more every time I look at stuff from it. I highly recommend watching the extras - the work that went into that final battle in the maelstrom is every bit as over the top as the scene itself is in the finished movie (for which I have made a case, contra those who complain that the movie, and that scene was just too over the top, that that is life, especially on PoMo readings ... "Into the Abyss" is where life takes place and the Spirit is ever brooding over the chaotic face of the deep). And Hans Zimmer ... quite simply rocks - great peace on his work on the score For here, only briefly, I have four findings.

I will go through them from the shortest to the longest, since I would not want the reader to get tired out by my longer discussions (and the last point is VERY long because it gave way, contrary to my original intention, before inserting this parenthetical here, to the previously promised discussion on recent statements of "authorial intent" by Rowling), - I would not want the reader to do this if the reader is prone to do so, and miss out on having at least the reward of the shortest one, which is just a really fun factiod, so I put it up first.

1.
Gore Verbinski, the director, actually plays guitar in the movie. No, it is not an over-dub of the "Spanish Ladies" piece played by Captain Teague ... that part is actually played by Richards himself onscreen. Verbinski plays the only part in the whole movie score that is rock instrumentation: the haunting distorted electric guitar overlay in the scene where Will, Beckett and Jones meet with Barbosa, Elizabeth and Jack on the sandbar between the two armadas just before the final battle in the maelstrom (the one that sounds a little like some of the "ballad" stuff Metallica has done). Interesting too ... Hans Zimmer used to be in the rock music industry.

2.
Hoist the Colors:
The song was actually composed from scratch, both melody and lyrics, by not only Hans Zimmer, but Hans Zimmer and Gore Verbinski working together. Also on that song: I had written on here after I watched the movie umpteen times in the theater and then gotten a pirated version on Canal St in lower Manhattan, of my theory of the "meaning" of that song. In the movie Sao Fang's lieutenant sings "never SAY we die," but I was pretty sure that when the pirate chorus sings it at the beginning that it was "SHALL we die." And indeed, in the English subtitles for the extras piece on the song (where at least an original recording was done with Zimmers wife, who just happened to be in the studio that day, singing the song like a young boy), it is indeed, "never SHALL we die."

My whole original comment was that the "never" has a secondary undertone of "EVER shall we die." That word in the gallow-pirates chorus is particularly fuzzy, sounding like it could be either. It was this, after looking online and finding a consensus for "never" (probably based in using the version by Sao Feng's lieutenant as a comparison source), that first presented to me the idea to me of two meanings arising from the "fuzziness," one primary and one secondary. The primary meaning is the "never" because this is what the brethren court intended in binding Calypso. The secondary meaning of "ever" is the reality of the thing - the "being towards" death I will take up in observation number 3.

3.
Being Towards Death:
There is a line I missed in previous viewings because of the chaotic setting and the quickness of it. But it is a central line for the case I have been making (while trying not to tip my hand too much on the contents of an essay I want to write and try to get published), concerning this movie's great manifestation of Heidegger's "being towards death" (which makes it fit well with HP because I have been making a similar case regarding Deathly Hallows). The line is one of two in the pairing off of the two captains, Barbosa and Jones, against each other in the battle in the abyss. I just mentioned, in the parenthetical, Jone's line, "into the abyss" (forget if I mentioned this or not, but the abyss is also a translation for the Hebrew word in that Genesis 1 passage, "the deep," and it is a very key term for Heidegger, the "ab-ground" that is the "nothing" out into which human existence, "dasein," is constantly held, and for Heidegger this is intimately bound up in the "being towards death"). But Barbosa's pairing line, when he takes the helm after Elizabeth and Will tell him they need him, relates directly to the "being towards death": "Dying is a Day worth Living For" (which echoes with Will's central line to his father, when Bootstrap says that 10 years at sea is a heavy price to pay for one day ashore with his wife: "it all depends one day" - and speaking of creation in Genesis 1, the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, does not read "the first day," but rather "the one day" - a point out of which the Church Fathers made a great deal in developing Christian eschatology, including in relation to Sunday as the 8th day, the "ogdoad," and the 1 day beyond the created 7 day order of Genesis 1-2).

4.
The Long Awaited DVD Answer On Will's Destiny:
In regards to this "being towards death" the one thing I was looking forward to in the DVD release was a rumored 23 extra minutes of deleted footage, which contained, among other things, material pertaining to the exact nature of Will's contract with the Dutchman as her captain. Well, that 23 minutes was only a rumor. The deleted scenes include only 2 brief scenes. BUT, I was rewarded on the matter of Will and the 10 years aboard the Dutchman. Rumor had had it that what was to be revealed was that Will had only one 10 year stint to do to fulfill the terms of service, and then he could stay on land with Elizabeth for the rest of his life all the time. This is not the case, and I am very glad. Rather than extra scenes, the DVD included in the insert a list of "top questions movie goers had about POTC: AWE" ... and the second question is that of one 10 year stint or a continuing system ... and the definitive answer in the insert is the latter.

The reason I was so glad about this is actually very pertinent for recent events of public statements in Potter-land. In the "text" of the movie as it stands the best case that could be made for the shorter terms is that the text is ambiguous and leaves that question unanswered. But I do not think that position (of the text as completely ambiguous on the matter) stands up very well because it does not adequately describe the text. If one asks the question of the text, one must follow the logic in the text: Will replaced Jones, whose original accord was the longer, repeating, schema., and thus these are the terms of Will being captain. There is no going back to "normal" life. To quote Val Kilmer's Doc Holladay in the movie Tombstone: "there's no such thing as normal life, Wyatt, there's just life" ... and death (this line is spoken on Holladay's death bed).

(I am also apposed to readings of this text that view the 10 years at sea as the man "going out every day to return at night, bringing home the bacon" concept of "normal life." That leaving and returning is a part of human existence, but this thing of "being towards death" - Will's specific task of ferrying the dead is central, as are his death and resurrection - the latter term used specifically in the DVD insert. It is the same with Harry: even though he goes on with life and marries Ginny and has a family with her, it can no longer be "normal life." Those events changed him radically and definitively. The scar has not even prickled in 19 years ... but he still remembers it and his hand still goes there by instinct.)

Don't Mess With the Text: From Pirates to Potter
The logic of the recurring 10 years stands as it is in the logic of the movie's text and I am glad they did not muck things up with some statement of authorial intent outside the text that muddied the waters of the text itself. The way that the reason I was so happy connects with recent Potter statements is that the logic of the text stands as it is, on its own. If that logic is flawed or not well written then that is just the way it is ... adding "extra" material does not fix the problem with the text as it stands unless you write a new text. And even on that issue, I see no reason to say that the text as it stands has lacunae that require explanation. And I don't think the proposed answer to a supposed lacuna is anywhere near as present, if at all, in the DH text as the author sees it. I don't doubt she had that reading of the character long before, maybe from the start, but I think she let the story tell itself by its own logic and that that logic does not contain that element for that character (neither that specific form, nor the question in general, either "same" or "opposite").

"Authorial intent" versus "author providing information on details."
When sounding the war-cry of the "new criticism" (as I am apt to do) - "don't commit the fallacy of authorial intent!" - I would distinguish between authorial intent and information on details provided by the author. Under the latter I would place such material as giving the sources of images used (e.g. noting that the source directly and concretely impacting the nature of the four houses is the classical four elements cosmogony - but even in that case I would differentiate between what can be said about - such as, for example, that the four elements comprise the nature of the physical cosmos, just as the four houses comprise the English wizarding world's concept of the composition of the defining trait of their "world" as distinct from other worlds, such as the muggle world, with special emphasis on the fact that the author concretely uses the "world" terminology, which generally translates the Greek "cosmos" - from my own theories and comments, as an interpreter, of how the interaction between the individual four elements works out in the text).
As an example from the wider world of literature (and I only know this one from doing a paper on it in undergrad) I would offer the example of informing the un-informed that the dates given as the headings of the four sections of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury are the dates of the Tuesday and Thursday-Saturday of Holy Week (in the year 1938 and, for the Tuesday, the Quentin Compton section, for 1928, I believe, but I would have to look it up, the years are given in the date headings), and thus one is justified in using Holy Week as an interpretive matrix for the novel. I do not believe that the statement in question falls under the heading of such information, but properly under the improper understanding, and really inflation, of the natural role of "authorial intent."

As an example of such considerations of what is "in the text" take my comments on a possible Harry-Hermione thing, in remarks exchanged with Jo from Australia just after the release of DH. In those comments, if I remember them correctly (and if not, take this as an opportunity to edit that text of mine by here making a new text with the inaccurate material struck from the old text and this material inserted), that the presence of a real thing was ever even actually present. I think that the case is that the logic of character types and of experience lends itself to the possibility of something, but that is not the same as the thing itself actually existing between the two. I think a key element is the absence of Ron as a result of his actively leaving. I believe that it is only in this absence that logic of the character types and that of the emotionally intense common experience, without Ron there, ever even even have arisen at all, in any way shape or form, on Hermione's radar, even subconsciously (which is why I think Hermione was so upset with Ron for leaving - but on my reading it is also entirely possible that the blip on the radar is only subconscious and that Hermione could not consciously tie out this element as a contributing factor for her anger - but, as I said then, I do think that things such as the posing as a middle-aged muggle married couple so support the element as a factor in the text, at the very least in the use of the images, even if not at all on the level of the Hermione character, although I do think the latter at least possible, and my gut feeling sides with even at least probability, but how much I can "prove" is of course another matter - and here I am arguing in a different fashion from the "fun logic of images" I speak of sometimes, when I say I am not trying to proof-text or provide "evidence" for certain things, - here I am trying to provide evidence to support a certain reading of a certain possible element in the text).

I do not think that the thing itself ever actually occurred in the text, only the latent possibility according to only the logic of character types and of the common experiences in that context. And I do not think Hermione ever chose (consciously or subconsciously) to follow those logics, but simply that they did put a real strain on her emotionally in Ron's absence (a tenet I would list on the "latent" level, but still concretely in the text on that level) ... a strain to which Harry was totally oblivious (the reason you go with someone is because you actually are drawn to them not because they are "your type" or simply because there is a certain logic in sharing certain general experiences together, even if those things contribute secondarily - and obviously in the final moment it is a matter of a choice, an act of the will).

I think that is the state of the text as it stands in this case(on Harry, Hermione and Ron - the last especially evident in what Ron sees in the locket ... if it is in Ron's mind and read by the Voldy-Crux, Hermione can probably guess that it is in Ron's mind) and no statements of authorial intent would change that (the author might be able to change my opinion by their own arguments as an interpreter of the text, the same as any other interpreter might be able to by presenting arguments), just as statements that seem to me to fall distinctly under the class of "authorial intent," such as those actually made, will not change my read on that issue.

On a further matter concerning that public statement, the matter of the public reception, I do not necessarily fault the author, but I do think that giving statements of interpretation, given the fact that in this case the interpreter in question is also the author, has seriously muddied the waters on the issue.

John Granger has suggested in a post on the matter that one should heavily qualify the nature of that statement by observing the context. I don't disagree (at least not necessarily, not being in a privileged position to discern such things) with his assessment of the statement as heartfelt and honest and directed primarily to the questioner. What I disagree with in Granger's assessment is the contention that those parameters definitively define the context of the statement. This was not simply a private conversation, or even a Q&A session of a talk given in an auditorium filled with persons with a specialized interest in an academic matter, where the only audience outside the physical walls that will probably ever hear the answer are the academic readers of a peer-reviewed academic journal. The real context of the statement involves a very pervasive world wide-wide media in which often occur very heated and polemical ad-hominem campaigns (and even the original question evidences the differences: an audience interested in such academic textual matters would not generally ask a question of that nature - I do not mean to infer any ill mark on the questioner whatsoever, but such a question arises, I think, from conflating what the experience of the text means for a person, in their particular life-situation, with the text itself).

(Wow, the end of that last paragraph, before the parenthetical, sounds so much like my roommates recent paper on Augustine on "gapped" texts, that the understanding of context and its role in genre-type plays a central role in the "meaning" of texts.)

In other words, I think Granger (and probably the author, but I cannot say for sure), while calling attention to the context, have quite misunderstood the true scope of that context.

I also think that Granger does not give proper consideration and weight to that matter of heated ad-hominem arguments in the public arena. One might take a view "against" but see a need to nuance it greatly in order to convey what they believe (such as not being mistaken as implying that certain people will necessarily go to hell if they do not leave a certain lifestyle ... although here it would be a matter of further debate whether, or to what extent, the categories of "insurmountable ignorance" apply or to what extent the psychological conditioning of certain experiences can impact a person in certain areas - and those experiences can drastically effect the psychological: just two days ago I was talking to the professor I spoke of who teaches the class on Corinthians, and he told me the story related to him by a man of how the man's son wound up in a holding cell and was subjected by other inmates to certain things, in other words forced and by no means of his own free will; after six months of not telling anyone the son took his own life). But if one takes such a stance and holds such a view, as I do (and as the Church of John's active creedal affiliation does), such a statement as this by the author potentially gives rise to certain problems. Holding such a nuanced position, one might wish to exercise discretion by "choosing ones battles," and such an authorial statement might seriously limit one's ability to exercise such discretion (I personally try to exercise discretion, not simply for the matter of considering when and where a statement might or might not be effective, or to what degree, but because when making a statement I wish not to be misunderstood, for instance, on the distinction between the simple having of certain inclinations, and the acting upon those inclinations, especially if the misunderstanding meant being construed as saying "you are abhorrent and going to hell simply for having the inclinations" and I tend to gravitate towards situations in which I have more chance of being able to make such distinctions and nuances. For instance, while my roommates might not agree with me, they do know my beliefs and we are able to get along, but many others do not have that privilege of being able to say they concretely know where I stand ... unless they happen to be reading this blog post I guess). If one is of such a mind, and is a PhD student at a large university, and is known to be a practicing Catholic, and is also known to be a huge Harry Potter fan, as I am ... situations which one might otherwise avoid might become unavoidable from causes not within one's control, including, as the first such factor, the author's public statement. In such a case one will likely be written off as "phobic," without the chance to explain one's position adequately (fortunately this has not yet happened to me personally ... but given things as they are, it is not necessarily unlikely ... and the further consideration that should be added in my situation is that, if asked on the matter, I do not wish to betray my faith, I prefer to be honest).

Granger gives an example of, when he worked for Whole-Foods, a certain label being applied to himself owing to his marriage and large family (the term rhymes with "feeder"). Being so labeled does not seem to have affected him greatly, but his charitable disposition (and I mean that description of him in all seriousness of respect) does not changed the bigoted nature of someone labeling somebody else that way. Granger makes the statement that such polemicists from the "against" side (as I mention below parenthetically) wrongly take the matter to the level of "election year politics"; but I would argue that the true state of affairs in our cultural context, especially give the aforementioned pervasive world-wide mentioned above is that ... it's always an election year.

In short, I think that in trying (and I freely admit that I think he does so with the best intentions) to "pour oil on the water," Granger really just adds fuel to the fire. Better simply to say something nebulous like "well, its a thing people are naturally going to disagree on" and leave it at that (which, in and of itself would be enough to send those who are unfortunately given to agitated polemics "against" and lack of discretion in how they handle such a situation - if looking to distinguish oneself from such polemicists is the desired goal of such as statement ... such polemicists tend to settle for nothing less than very animatedly hopping on their side in no uncertain terms - but I would differentiate between such polemics and generaly being a bit perturbed by the statement, and I don't think Granger addresses this distinction sufficiently enough to justify the statements he himself make ... just my take on it). Better to make such brief and nebulous statements than to go to the lengths he has chastising those who were upset for being so vocally so (or at least that is how I read his statements, but that may just be me for the reasons I stated just now). For this reason, while I disagree with the polemicists (on both sides of the fence), I do not find the same fault as Granger seems to (at least in that one piece as I understood it) with some being agitated by the statement.

On the score of the question of whether or not the statement of "authorial intent" impacts the meaning of the text, even some decidedly, publicly, and even polemically, on the one side (the "pro" and activist side) have argued that it does not, such as John Cloud in Time, who basically said (in a piece in time days after the author's statement) "you're not doing any good for my side ... put the character back where the character was before your statement -in the ...."

All that having been said, I do think that it is a legit question to ask whether this particular author, in her particular time and life situation, would have written such a character (who we all have found genuinely VERY endearing) without such a concept (not "could this character be written without this concept" in general, but in the very particular case of this author) ... and the attendant question of whether or not any body else, period, could have given us this particular character. I do not know the answer to that question, but I do think it is a valid question to ask. It is a question that applies to the way in which the text arises, as distinct from the text itself, but I do think it a legitimate question to ask.

so, there you have it for what it is worth: Merlin's literary theory (101) and read of recent major HP events and the responses to them ... I wouldn't necessarily advise quoting it in any significant debates if I were you (not for my own sake ... for yours lol). I was not planning on making the big long statement on the recent HP developments and Granger's commentary on them. I was planning just to make a short post on Pirates the Caribbean and then put me to bed, but oh well.

Now I really am going to bed.

Harry Potter and the Gift of Death

2007-12-11T20:16:00.000-05:00

So, I just ordered a book online: The Gift of Death by Jacques Derrida. Now, being as Derrida just died in 2004, there stands a pretty good chance that he knew of Tolkien's use of that title/phrase in the Silmarillion. But my own path to the JD book was through my professor in the class I am taking on St Paul's Corinthian correspondence in the New Testament. When talking to him earlier in the day I happened to mention the direction I am taking with my paper in my other class on the History of Biblical Interpretation, in which we have been taking the history of interpretation of Genesis 22 (also known as the "Akedah" or "binding" of Isaac) as a paradigm - covering everything from second temple Judaism to, last week, Soren Kierkegaard (in Fear and Trembling). Upon hearing the direction that I was going with that other paper, Dr Welborn (the NT professor) said, "you know who has an interesting book on the Akedah is Jacques Derrida."

So, there is Derrida, as in the French father of post-modern deconstructionist theory, as in Rowling was a French major. As in Rowling was a classicist. As in just in tonight's class we were talking about how Foucault (also French PoMo, of whom I will have to read a fair bit next semester in a class on "the postmodern subject" ... meaning subjective, as in the role/place of the acting subject, not as in "I am studying the subject of theology" or "what subjects are you taking next term?" ) spawned a whole corpus of secondary literature concentrated on ancient Greco-Roman thought on the emotions.

So, what, you might ask, were we doing talking about ancient Greco-Roman understandings of the emotions? Well, I'm glad you asked. Paul devotes quite a bit of ink in parts of 2nd Corinthians to the concept of the "pain" or "anguish" he has suffered. The Greek word used here is "lupei" and generally means psychic/psychological suffering or pain. Now, cut back to just after the Lumos conference in August of 2006. I had listened to one of the CDs from the conference, a talk I had not been able to go to while there, by Kim Decina and Josella Vanderhooft, on standard disorder types from clinical psychology as present in the HP series. I think even more now than back then that their paper topic was uniquely insightful into a key element in understanding the books. Of course, coming up to book 7 release I did a long post on what I called the "insanity chiasm," focusing heavily on therapeutic imagery (particularly "being sick") in connection with key moments such as visions (revelatory in nature, as therapy is meant to be, working out "what ails you" by first getting it out in the open) and retellings of dark deeds (such retellings done under influence of substances the sort of force the revelation, like veritaserum ... as in when Barty Crouch Jr recounts his tale under the truth serum and Harry notices that McGonnegal looks a bit disgusted, as if she had just watched somebody being sick).

Now, all that is not to say that Decina and Vanderhooft saw exactly the same on all things. We didn't necessarily disagree, but they were hesitant to cast Lupin under the umbrella of psychological malady because they could not put him into a standard modern psychology category. But with this new info on his name (IE the Greek lupei as psychological pain), I feel even more confident about my reading of Lupin as, not a particular objective, classifiable disorder, but as the experience of psychological malady for the person who undergoes it. Here's an interesting fact we went through in class tonight. The Stoic system that was the most common "popular" philosophy in the Greco Roman world at the time of Paul (sometimes sort of mixed with some Platonism) had two sets of emotions they talked about, the 4 bad ones and the 3 good ones. So, why the difference in number? Well, the 3 good ones all corresponded to one each of the bads ones (so the sage is the one who has trained themself rightly and passed from the stage of being dominated by the bad ones to living only in the good ones) ... and that leaves one bad emotion without a corresponding good emotion to be turned to after becoming sagely. The reader gets 3 guesses what the name of that "bad" emotion is that is so bad it cannot be transformed into anything positive when one advances to sagehood (under the system of stoic thought, which Paul is actually arguing contrary to) ... and the first two guesses don't count. Lupei is as excluded from the life of the sage as Lupin is from the society of wizards. This is the experience of the one who is weighed down by the conception of their own illness - "My kind don't usually breed!"

(DH 213 - "It will be like me, I am convinced of it - how can I forgive myself, when I knowingly risked passing on my condition to an innocent child? And, if by some miracle, it is not like me, then it will be better off, a hundred times so, without a father of whom it must always be ashamed!")

Now, back to that mention of being sick in connection with visions ("your young men will dream dreams" - guess what one of the standard ancient texts that is connected withe the healing cult of the Greek god of healing, Asklepios, who just happened to have a VERY big branch office in Corinth, was - Artemidorus' work on the interpretation of dreams - apparently the dreams were supposed to provide clues to healing - and the symbol of Asklepios? a snake and a staff crossed or the snake wound around the staff - sound a little like the symbol for any institutions in HP - like the wand a bone of St Mungos?). In particular I am thinking of the vision from inside the snake in Order of the Phoenix.

The almost single-minded goal of stoicism was to become impervious (sound like any HP charms discussed before, especially during brutal Quidditch matches, like one against a character who will later die at the dead center of the series, Cedric Diggory?) to lupei. Paul's rebuttal is a journey to redemption that he actually describes very heavily in terms of anguish (7 specific terms in Greco-Roman world for types of it) - that the path to salvation goes by way of being led through the suffering, not becoming impervious. But my point is: where do we see in DH the image of a misguided attempt to become impervious from invasion (which is, more than anything, suicide ... the level to which one must cut oneself off from others)" ... "Dumbledore wanted you to close that connection! Dumbledore wanted you to practice Occlumency!" (and by book 6, of course, Dumbledore fully realizes that Harry can no more do occlumency properly than he can make his hair behave, but the headmaster does not seem to be at all that concerned the deficiency in Harry's , not after the pain Voldemort experienced when trying to possess Harry in the end of book 5 ... Draco Malfoy, on the other hand, who is in such a psychologically distraught state from oppression by Voldy that he can muster the loathing to use the cruciatus curse effectively on Olivander, using it on the wandmaker without even the natural righteous anger driving it that Harry has in using it on Amycus Carrow - Draco can practice occlumency quite well, well enough to stop even so skilled a legilimens as Snape)

(oh, and for the thing above on the "impervious" charm .. I am not trying to tie out a nice neat system in which the impervious charm was actually a bad thing because it is like trying to close the Voldy connection and in book 7 that is not the deal [in book 5 before the end occlumency is a good idea ... it might have saved Sirius' life if done rightly] ... I look at things more as the way certain images attune the reader to certain questions - so the impervious charm is neither good nor bad [if anything it is good as a way of keeping the rain out of your face in gale force winds during a Quidditch match], but simply meant to sort of "stick" in the reader's ear as something that is somehow meaningful in the books, meaning the issue of imperviousness, protection from invasion, psychic or otherwise etc etc)

Anyway, one last thing on Lupin and lupei. There is a classicist named William Harris who is presently at Columbia U on the upper west side in Manhattan, whom my professor, Dr Welborn, was mentioning tonight, who has done a bit of work on this subject. Harris says that in the ancient world lupei was thought of as pretty much the flipside of the same coin as "orgei." So what is orgei? Well, we get certain words in English from it, used in a, to be discrete, coital context (or being as we deal so heavily with language here, maybe "conjugational" would be a fitting pun). But this usage largely comes from the cultic fertility activities surrounding the cult of the Greek god Dionysius. On the other hand orgei can be translated "anger." The connection between the dionysian sense and the "angry" sense, can best be seen in the word "madness." We can use that word of being angry or we can use it of being deranged ... or being so angry that we "lose it" ... much as, for the stoics, to be subject to lupei was to be not in control of oneself. The dionysian sense mentioned just above derives the connection from the sort of "ecstatic" state, out of control etc, often occurring in such cultic settings of this particular nature. But, aside from that specific dionysian setting, in the more general sense of being "mad" as being "out of one's mind," in the HP series, who "loses it" once a month? Who is "stark raving mad" at the full moon?

Interestingly, the closest Greco-Roman literary form of that time for the section/s of 2nd Corinthians where Paul addresses the "anguish" is known as the "therapeutic letter" - which generally addresses both aspects of lupei, "anger" and "anguish."

... I always come out of the class on Corinthians with at least one or two good ideas or observations on Harry Potter ... which makes it make even more sense to me that Rowling used the St Paul quote for the headstone in Deathly Hallows (and there again is Derrida writing a book on "the last enemy to be overcome").

PS
... there again, maybe death conquered by being transformed into gift (although this is a very deep concept, and utmost caution must be observed in speaking of it, especially with one who has lost a loved one in death - some gifts are so sublime that they are agony) ... transformed, did you say? interesting, in 2 Corinthians 5:18 and 19 there is a verb that standardly gets translated in English "reconcile" (katalussoe) - God was "reconciling the world to himself" etc, but the sense of the Greek world itself is actually, "make other" - as in transformation, as in transfiguration - like I said, always a few good thought on HP from that class.

Death Within and Without: Being Towards Death

2007-12-01T00:36:00.001-05:00

I was taking a break from research and reading for papers and since I had recently, on the drive from the Bronx to PA and OH and back again, listened a good deal of the way through Deathly Hallows (Scholastic Version with Jim Dale), I decided to pick up DH and read the King's Cross chapter again (a few nights ago I did the same, reading the escape on the dragon, which was where I had been in the CD set when I hit the George Washington bridge on my way back into town, and selections up through the story told by the ghost of Ravenclaw's tale). As I was reading I was thinking about the specifics of the way the cloaked scene works as Harry walks down with his parents and Lupin and Sirius to face death by Voldemort's hand.

Harry walks down protected from death by the cloak, as the cloak is specifically known to do. This is the part where, in DD's words, the legend breaks down and facts become a little more relevant. The cloak may make the wearer truly invisible to the 'death' character in the tale, but, as Harry notes, it is not a protection from curses, and thus not a fail-safe protection from death (and interestingly - and I am not sure if this is a glitch/mistake or not - the cloak does not make Harry invisible to magical eyes like Moody's, which I think is somewhere in GOF, sometime when they are in the 3 broomsticks, Harry under the cloak). BUT, the thing is that while Harry is invisible in the cloak he still has the opportunity to evade death at Voldy's hand. It is his choice that decides.

What stood out to me in this reading is the image of the loved ones "inside" the cloak with Harry. They disappear when he takes the cloak off and reveals himself in the moment of choice. And they are visible to none but him. Somehow, it is accepting the company of the dead, of the dearly departed - not as ghosts or in the way of the stone and trying to "fetch them back", but specifically AS dead, as having passed through the veil ("He was not really fetching them: They were fetching him.") - is what is necessary for facing death well - and for the possibility of resurrection, and for the possibility of living well even on earth (for Harry to live on and have a family with Ginny etc). While carrying the dead with him while in the cloak, he is protected from death by invisibility if he chooses so to continue. But to make that choice would go against the whole reason for calling them with the stone in the first place, and then it would become what it was for the Peverell brother who made the stone - bringing the dead back into a wretched half-life.

Two points from past posts are relevant here. One is the "technical detail" of the missing 14 feet in the graveyard scene in GOF (Harry is six feet from the tombstone when Cedric dies, then Wormtail has to walk "some twenty feet" to retrieve Harry's wand laying by the body), on which I noted that I think it results partially from the text detail of the wand dropping near Cedric's body and then the need for the death eater symbolism that the body be outside their circle (the discrepancy comes from the conflicting material requirements of 2 "meaning" right in a row ... Voldy is cold and heartless and the "killing of the spare" could hardly warrant from him more than a passing whisper, so Harry and Ced must be no more than about 6 feet to hear it, but a circle of close to 30 death eaters is going to be more than that in diameter, and if you are going to get that body outside that circle for symbolic effect, right after the whisper scene, you're going to have to move it without explanation in the text), the departed excluded from the death eaters' considerations. The second point is related in that in the cage of phoenix song just after this, it is the death eaters who are outside while the shades of the martyrs are inside the central arena of action. Whether by conscious choice or subconsciously, Rowling's brain really goes for the "inside-outside" pairings, oppositions and reversals, especially in regards to the issues of death and the departed.

PS
That thing just now of meeting death "by Voldemort's hand" ... Really interesting phrase. Actually I have used it in Hebrew but was not aware of its existence in the Hebrew Scriptures and thus had to sort of guess at the morphology on my own (in Hebrew "by his hand" is one word: the preposition "in/with/by" is a single letter, "b", which can attach itself to the beginning of a word [a prefix] and Hebrew has a system of what are called "pronomial suffixes" - endings that can attach to nouns to show possession according to number and gender, so you attach the suffix for masculine singular ["his"] for a singular noun [there are different suffixes for singular and plural nouns, such that "his horse" and "his horses" would be different not only in the original noun, but in the suffix used - and their is yet another for "their horses" when you are speaking of masculine plural owners and another for when you are speaking of feminine plural owners, and different endings and rules for if you are dealing with a masculine or feminine possessed noun - since, as in German, French, Greek and Latin, nouns have gender - for masculine plural possessed noun, feminine plural possessed noun, basically every variation, you get the picture ... takes a while to learn ... but you get the picture: attach the prefix for "in/with/by" to the front of the word for hand, and the suffix for "his" on the end).

Anyway, I had done this for a series of handmade wedding gifts with the "Poetic Benediction" from Numbers ("The Lord Bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you, the Lord lift up his countenance on you and give you peace") in Hebrew (Masoretic Text), Greek (Septuagint), Latin (Vulgate) and English (Revised Standard Version). The inscription below had the dedication to the couple and then the Hebrew of Genesis 12:3b ("In you shall all the families of the earth bless themselves"), and then my signature, and below it that Hebrew word for "by his hand" - meaning that it was handmade (at least hand-inked, not my actual full caligraphy because I made a guide to use on a lightbox because my penmanship is even worse in Hebrew and Greek alphabet than it is with English alphabet). But the further meaning of the word was that of an oath, to put one's hand to something like putting your hand on the Bible to take an oath in court ... to pledge yourself, your very being, to good will for true well being ( I also had them blessed by a priest when I was done with them).

Well, recently in a class I am taking on the history of the interpretation of the "Akedah," the "binding" of Isaac in Genesis 22, I discovered an actual use of that Hebrew word: "in/by his hand." When they reach the mountain after a 3 day journey, In Genesis 22:6, Abraham places the wood for the burnt offering on Isaac's back and takes the fire and knife "in his hand" (meaning his own) - and "so the two of them walked on together."

I am making no claims that I think Rowling had this passage in mind when she wrote "The Forest Again" chapter - I think these things travel in our collective subconscious (more commonly referred to as "tradition") and just sort of bubble out. But take a look at the groups of images used. Harry walks to his death ("and the two of them walked on together") with his "beloved" ones ("take now your son, your only son, whom you love ..."). We have had much research and many authorial statements about the role of different types of wood ("And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son") in wands ... and in
this book especially the wand made of elder. Now, as with all analogies, the analogy breaks down (I would say it has to break down, by definition, otherwise it would be an identity and not an analogy) - so it is best not to look to tie things out so nice and neat; real literature, like real life, is a little bit messier ... and richer. And that is not really my methodology anyway - I look for clusters of images traveling together, resonating organically off of each other, and resonating also with traditions. But, if one does want to look for tighter connections (and if one has thrown up one's hands at the whole thing of the wood on Isaac and the wand in Voldy's hand and asked "so Voldy is Harry's father like Abe is Isaac's? What are you smoking?"). Dumbledore knew a lot of things, he probably knew Voldy would wind up seeking and finding that wand of elder wood, and from his own hands, even if they were dead when he took it, and we know from Snape's memory that DD sent Harry to receive Voldy's AK from that wand, to have that wood of his own death "laid across his back" as it were (meaning there also the image of a whip on the back, a scourging). Dumbledore has been very much a father figure to Harry, and in effect laid that wood on his back. Of course it was Voldy who applied it ... but look at Dumbledore's comments in "King's Cross" - his grief and heaviness when asking the question of the similarities in his own mission for the hallows and Voldy's mission.

Other things that are added in the history of interpreting the Akedah/Genesis 22 also ring in Rowling's tale here. In some later sources the element of a stone of sacrifice is added - like Harry walking with the resurrection stone. This seems to me a particularly strong resonance, especially in the context of this present post, since it is the resurrection stone that creates the situation of which I spoke in this post, of the communion of saints within the cloak ... want another nice little connection? In the Targums [Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Scriptures], the connection of the mountain of "Moriah" with the mount of the Jerusalem Temple is drawn out more, including the cloud and fire of the Shekinah of the later Temple AND Abraham is looking into Isaac's eyes and does not see what Isaac sees looking up - angels, connected with the angels believed to guard the Temple sanctuary ... just as only Harry can see his parents and Lupin and Sirius, the protectors.

Now, lest I seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill - This passage, the Akedah/Genesis 22 is a very important passage for the three largest religions of the world: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is especially relevant in the issue of religious identity. Muslims believe it was Ishmael who ascended the mount with Abraham. Jews believe the merits won in the Akedah obedience provided a guarantee of mercy for all of Isaac's descendants (this is worked in in the Targums in a prayer on the part of Abraham). The author of 2nd Maccabees saw in the story of Isaac a model with which to connect the martyrdom of those who would not defile the name of the Holy One, Blessed be He, under pressure from Antiochus Epiphanes (pressure to eat pork, defiling the dietary laws etc). Christian Patristic writers and others emphasized that Abraham's obedience lay in the fact that it was identity itself that he was willing to sacrifice (the continuance of his name in legitimate descendants through Isaac ... and for an echo of the role of names and descendants, male and female, in identity cf the comments of Ron/Hermione on certain wizarding lines being "extinct in the male line" ... this is standard "boiler-plate" language of geneological identity matters and it feeds directly into the mystery of Riddle as a descendant of Slytherin through the Gaunt line). Even down to modernity ... the book I was taking a break from reading was Soren Kierkegaard's (19th century) Fear and Trembling, a classic of contemporary existentialist philosophy - all about Abraham going to sacrifice Isaac. And as for the present day, I'll just close with the lines from Bob Dylan (my old fall-back) with which the translator of Kierkegaard's FnT opened his forward to the work (from "Highway 61 Revisited" - and also current, the movie "The Hunted" with Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro featured a page torn from a Bible with Genesis 22 on it and a Johnny Cash cover of the Dylan song):

"God said to Abraham, 'kill me a son,'
Abe said, 'Man, you must be puttin me on'
God said, 'you can do what you want , Abe,
but next time you see me comin' you better run'
Abe said, 'Where you want this killin' done?'
God said, 'Do it out on Highway 61'"

(I was walking through the reference section of the library with an armful of several volumes of Kittel's Dictionary of the New Testament, on my way to the copy room, and out of the corner of my eye, on a shelf I see "the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia" - so I look up Highway 61 because I had just learned from a girl in our program who is from Minnesota, that Highway 61 in MN runs right past Duluth, Dylan's [or I should say Zimmerman's] home town - but this guy also noted the symbolic nature of Highway 61 - It runs north-south from Canadian Border to Mississippi River Delta by way of Memphis and is standardly seen as symbolic of African American musical/cultural migration, as opposed to Route 66, which is standardly viewed as the east-west symbol of white migration in different periods of US history)

Wood, Knives, Stones, Angels seen and unseen, Fathers and Sons, Death "in/by his hand," Promises of Identity, a Via Dolorosa ("way of the rose" = "way/walk of sorrow/to death"), A Son willingly dying (in the Targums Isaac asks Abraham to bind him tightly and well, lest in a moment of panic he kick out and make Abraham's sacrifice profane and he himself be sent down into the pit of destruction ... the pleasant feeling and how everything automatically appears to meet Harry's needs in the King's Cross chapter suggests he has definitely not "gone down into Sheol" as it were) ... All just some food for thought.

Interesting Intersections

2007-11-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

I have absolutely nothing new to write (including the whole current "hot-topic," - I never got around to writing that comment I talked about ... well actually I did do a form of it that is way too cluttered in its present state and I would not put it up without some serious editing, it's not even quite a "rough draft" really, more of a big box into which you dump all of the stuff from which you would create a rough draft if you had the time), this is just absolute trivial miscellany, but fun nonetheless.

I was picking around on Rowling's website, looking at some stuff I had never really noticed before, like spell definitions etc, and on that page of "Extra Stuff" I noticed that one of the things pinned to the bulletin-board is a concert ticket for the band ColdPlay (I'm almost positive that it's a concert ticket, but hard to be sure at that size in flash, even tried print-screening it into adobe and enlarging but no real benefit). Anyway, a long time ago I referred to some lyric material from Johnny Cash in analogy to things Potter, talking about Cash as a sort of country mystic whose work enfleshed some similar themes as the Potter works. Interesting that Rowling likes ColdPlay because on their Album X&y they have a 13th track called "Kingdom Come" - really good. They wrote it for Johnny Cash to sing, and had even gone into the studio with Cash's producer Rick Rubin and recorded all of the music ... Cash died about a week before he was scheduled to come in and record the vocals. So, I thought that was an interesting confluence of tastes/interests in music.

Oh, but I did see the news on the issue with the Vanderark project ... which was kind of a sad moment. I hope they get it all resolved. Seems like a grey area to me but I can see Rowling's point. I think Vanderark could do some stuff legitimately in the "non-grey" area, IE interpretation/critique - particularly the stuff he had at Lumos in 06 on "Wizarding logic" and "Jo Logic" - but you really have to be doing your own work, or rather making your own statement (such as "It is my thesis that the way magic functions in the world of Harry Potter indicates a shift in emphasis, away from materialism and towards reality as more relationally defined" - but I'm not sure that is not more my own read of his material he presented there - would have to go back and look at the Lumos stuff, which I haven't time to do at present, I think it is there at least latently in his material, just can't remember if he drew that particular point of relationality etc, I do think I clearly remember him saying that apparition and port-keys make it such that no matter where you live, you get to Hogwarts by going to platform 9 and 3/4 and get on the express because that is how students get to Hogwarts - in any event, I am not planning to publish on it so I don't have to work out which is whose and how much to credit in text or in citation etc) ... but that is not really the draw for the publishers. Theirs seems to be a pretty distinct, and understandable draw (meaning the draw is understandable, while doing the actual thing may not be) ... given how many people use the HP Lexicon, a print version of the apparatus of being able to find all the text references to a particular character etc in one place would probably turn a pretty penny. On Vanderark's side, he has done a lot of work in the HP Lexicon. Still a grey area I guess: I would still probably grant the argument to Rowling (Warner Bros I am less sure about, that is pretty much a money-grubbing world where I have a hard time conceding terms like "right" to such conglomorations, but ... whatever), but I would love to see Vanderark with some way to be compensated concretely for what has obviously been a lot of hard work (that's why I was saying, if he were writing his own critique stuff, which I think from his talk he at least might have some stuff there ... he's already done a HUGE amount of what is more like "taxonomy" research, it would be a great way to turn the research into something unarguably legitimately gainful). Anyway, I hope they work something out.

Eeyore Moving On

2007-10-30T01:33:00.000-04:00

I was poking around old sites I used to haunt more often, recently looking to see what anybody is saying about Rowling's now-famous comments in the Q&A session on October 19, 2007 in Carnegie hall here in NYC (and I am decidedly not entering the fray on this one, accept in one comment to this post, and owing to possible various levels/ages of readership and the sensitive nature of the matter and a belief in the rights of parents to be the ones who talk to their kids about these types of things I will not be naming the content ... I can quite easily state what I think are pertinent points about the debate itself, bullets point style, without doing so ... but for a decent discussion of the matter there are recent posts and comments on John Granger's site, www.hogwartsprofessor.com ... although I find some of his content, not really "leaning in directions I am not comfortable with" as much as over examining areas of the event etc that I don't think are as at the real heart of the matter- but I still think, as my own opinion and not necessarily that of this site, not wishing to make claims for the site as a whole, that Granger gives a pretty fair discussion of the matter).

In doing so I poked onto Eeyore's reflections and noted a post from October 1st in which she states she is sort of stepping down, meaning leaving the main fray of controversies surrounding the quality of Deathly Hallows (meaning controversies before the October 19th comments by Rowling, as this post cam, as I said, on October 1 - as described below, the controversies largely surrounded dissatisfaction with book 7 and an ensuing campaign of fanfcition, I guess to try to supplant the "official story" or some such thing) and and maybe just posting up some remaining notes she has in the margins from several readings of Deathly Hallows. Having not frequented web discussion much myself in the past year or so (outside of some writings of my own, best described as "OCB [obsessive compulsive behavior] pre-release jitters," just before the release of book 7), I can totally understand and respect Pat's sadness, expressed in the post, and her move (although she has links to her live-journal on her blog and so she may be pasoting there some to in the future). I have not always agreed with her reading of things in the works, but I have always thought she was a good and fair commentator. ... and I agree heartily with her: Deathly Hallows is a great book and a great finale to a great saga of a story.

I wish I was a good enough writer to put into words the thoughts that are in my head regarding fan-fiction (one of the main areas of unrest for Pat), but I will be doing above par to get the relevant base materials from which they are currently built into the course papers in which they belong in readable form by the end of the semester. So let me begin by making a confession ... I wrote a fanfic once. The reason nobody has seen it on this site is quite simple: I utterly, unapologetically and without any shadow of doubt, ABSOLUTELY, and probably irrevocably, SUCK as a fiction plot/dialog writer.

BUT, my main point is neither to support the genre as one I have dabbled (if one can call it even that) in, nor my aforementioned supreme suckiness at creative writing. My point is what that piece was to me. A central "incident" Pat writes about is somebody making a fanfic where Snape survives and He and Harry reconcile and do great things together in the new and improve, voldy-free, world. I guess this was done emphatically as a sort of "rebuttal" to what the author considered to be the supreme poorness of Rowling's final installment. As I said, or as a corollary, I agree with Pat on the Snape trajectory in the series and on how Rowling handled it really well in keeping with the character as built in the first six books (that final look in the eyes ... what was in it? you know there is some reconciliation, but to what degree? ... Severus Snape: while, I think, "redeemed" in the final book, still every bit as inscrutable and enigmatic in death as he was in life).

But beyond this, there is the question of what this fanfic means. I have been reading a lot recently of medieval Jewish exegesis known as "Rabbah" works, compendium of classical rabbinic commentary arranged by scripture passage and book (I am, for this course, particularly studying Genesis Rabbah, probably 6th Century AD/CE, on the "Akedah," the "binding of Isaac" in Genesis 22). The thing about a work like BR (Bereshit [Hebrew of "Genesis"] Rabbah). There is alot (and I mean A LOT) that could be discussed on the relation of this type of compendium of Rabbinic literature to "alternate stories" such as what fanfic is in its best instances, so I will try not to digress. The main point is that many times the Rabbis material explanations of anomalies (and sometimes things that are anomalous to their way of thinking but you and I would go "what is strange about that?") This, however, does not cause the reader/compiler to doubt for one second the validity/authority of the respective Rabbis who are being quoted. Theirs is a different perspective from ours, and one that is not damaged by what we in our scientific mindset call "mutually exclusive facts" (the old, and much prefered, word for these types of incongruities is, precisely, much prefered not only by those like myself, but GK Chesterton was also VERY fond of it - "paradox").

Now, a second ago I refered to "fanfic at its best," and this obviously implies that the kind of controversy Pat is rightly adverse to is fanfic not at its best. So, to keep to my example (along with its noted poor quality as a work), back to that fanfic I spoke of that I wrote. It was an attempt at a narrative rendition of a pilot for a sitcom called "Godric's Howling Hollow" - in which Harry and Ginnay are married (heh, heh ... got that one right :) ... Ron and Hermione are also married but there is nothing about them in the opening pilot episode) and living with their seven kids in the 7 story ancestral home of the Potter family in Godric's Hollow.It included other hightlights such as Dobby envisioning himself as Howard Kosel type in an old sports jacket of Vernon Dursley, acting as the magical receptor for a new technology known as the "macro-oracular," based on the omni-oculars in book 4, basically a way for wizards to understand muggle culture better by adopting some of its pastimes - here, televised sports ... IE "Monday Night Quidditch" (had some funny ideas too about Trelawney heading up the "broadcast" end of the "technology" - and, thus, the newest and largest bane of Ludo Bagman's existence). It also included Fred and George as the crazy uncles from whom Harry and Ginny continually have to guard their children, the ones always trying to get the kids to act as test subjects for new magical prank items etc (the particular episode involved Fred and George apparating right in the way of Harry and Ron watching a match on the macrooraclar, having just almost escaped unharmed, such that the latter two miss the final critical snitch catch and are very put-out, Fred and George both suffering from Ginny's new and improved bat bogey hex, consisting of phantasm bogeys so that one looks like a complete imbecile ducking, dodging and scurrying from imaginary foes). Now, Fred dying in book 7 obviously throws the proverbial monkey-wrench in my fanfic being "consistent with the canon" (as does Dobby's presence), but you know what ... I don't care because that was not what I was interested in in the first place. I think such a fanfic (although written by somebody who can actually write) is a nice adaptation of character qualities that are really present in the "canon" texts, exploring them by using them in a fairly different genre, and relatively independent timeline/plot (the only thing it really assumes, at least major thing that was in question going into the final installment in the "canon," is that Harry lives through the undoing of Voldy).

(BTW: Personally, while using the "canon" terminology because I think it is accurate to an acceptable level, acceptable as the best quick handle for the issues involved, I do also think the emphasis gets a bit skewed in using the terminology - it is an emphasis of what you can "prove" and I would rather have more fun than doing that type of "prooftexting" - I loved doing logical proofs in symbolic logic, it was the funnest class I took in undergraduate - so satisfying when you finally get that last link in the chain and can justify that triangle of three little dots, that magic of the final "therefor" symbol, ask Rowling, with a minesweeper score like that [my personal best is now 144 seconds on the expert level] she is a clear sucker for games that deal in patterns of logical relationship [although, anybody notice? hers changed ... I think? - used to be 99 now it is 101]- but this level of polemical, down and dirty, courtroom style arguing just kind of leaves me dry... in the end though the "canon" is the story Rowling wrote, and, personally, as for me and mine, that is what I went to Barnes and Noble and stood in line for and paid money for - and I feel I got my money's worth ... probably a million, no, an infinite, number of times better than any enfleshment of my own points could have done, even though I still feel my observations on the text and themes and meaning are valid and insightful ... but that is he difference between a story and a discursive essay, and, any day of the week, I will put my money on Rowling above just about anybody else writing these days for a good story with really rich meaning behind it).

Now, obviously, as is more than evident in the genre chosen, I do not have the same attachment to my fanfic as those who are writing the type of thing Pat is talking about (I did it as a thought experiment mainly), but I think the approach to the realm does merit some noting in this regard. There is a backbone to the world Rowling creates (meaning the immediate world of the characters onscreen, the social network of the work, as it were) just as there is a backbone to the major plot-arc. The sets of characters and their inter-relation is a real masterpiece. and I think fanfic is a fine thing sometimes for people working out the meanings of , and in a way unique to narrative.

Back to that whole Rabbinic thing - there was a distinct move at one to a new type of interpretive literature, one that included all of the (sometimes) outlandish (at least to our ears, but I think not so much in reality) elements brought forth by the Rabbis (some making you say "that is nowhere in Biblical the text!" - but that is the point of interpration: these things are in the text for the Rabbis, just not fleshed out fully in the actual textual narrative). This new form took these elements by the Rabbis and sort of collapsed everything into a new narrative, rather than simply a listing of the Rabbinical "vignettes," such as the Rabbah works were. And there is the connector, interpreting the original through a new narrative. To the Rabbis this was what was in the original narratives of the text, but at a "higher level." For the Rabbis that higher level was divine inspiration (the Torah as "written with black fire on white fire," the true meaning dancing elusively like flames just behind the "surface"), for Rowling it is what I have called the "backbone of the world/character-network."

I think fanfic is fine. But Rowling is the author who built not only the world, but the particular story in which it is enfleshed, from the ground up, and it is she who tells us her story in book 7 (I mean some of my guesses before book 7 were pretty wild, I think that the making of guesses did flesh out some of my interpretations of the texts of the first 6 books, but thank goodness it was Rowling writing ... a much better story in the telling, believe me). I myself would say that an author like Rowling was "given" the backbone (whether you want to think of it in terms of a tradition inherited by a particularly gifted mind, or as Homer's muses visiting the poet), but that is my own particular way of putting it. And that is also a harder thing to "demonstrate" - just as is "really pinning down" the unique strata of what I have called the "backbone world." In the end, we as readers receive that world only by receiving it "enfleshed" in a story - and Rowling wrote that story, and I think she wrote book 7 fairly consonant with the first 6 books (which makes sense, since according to her she had it all planned out, including book 7, before she put out book 1). Anybody is perfectly entitled to disagree with that statement, and perfectly free to write fanfictions that they think better flesh out the themes they feel, in respectful disagreement with even Rowling herself, are the truly central ones in the narrative logic of the story (eg, Snape should have lived and been more concretely reconciled with Harry and worked in concrete ways with Harry to build a better world because this would have better fulfilled their character logics) built in books 1-6 the (but, for the uninitiated reader, from what I have seen even this approach represents a very small percentage of fanfiction ... its a very broad, and often scary world, just FYI and "reader-beware").

But when it reaches this level of "disgruntledness" and sort of "fanfic as polemics" - I think it has gone way overboard ... in other words "way" meaning not just in degree but in kind/type.

In any event, as I said, I understand completely Pat's "stepping down" (and have basically, de facto, done so myself ... I have nothing left to say at this point - "if you ever really did" they chuckle back - or I should say that my remaining and further thoughts are not such that I can put in words even remotely resembling pertinence, at least for a web-based audience), and as far as that thing in itself goes I look at it as simply a really good person stepping on to other venues and focusing on other adventures and other types of adventures (that vast array of infinite possibilities called "human life"), and I think it totally cool. But I am also, as Pat expresses in her piece, a little saddened when I see those polemics going on ... such a waste of a good story. And that's my (as ever, completely miscellaneous, grossly verbose and utterly parenthetical parenthetical to anything even remotely resembling "normal life") two cents.

"See you in the funny pages ..."

Reflections and Traces in Deathly Hallows

2007-09-07T02:53:00.000-04:00

I just wrote this in an email to my mother, to whom I had given Deathly Hallows for her birthday in early August. She had written when finishing the book that she was very pleased, especially with how Dumbledore was handled and closed out. she had been beginning reading when I gave it to her on a weekend I was back in that area for a friend's wedding, and had obviously gotten to the "In Memoriam" chapter and she was asking about the blue eye in the mirror. Obviously I could not give spoiler material to her, but writing this recently actually gave me a chance to update a post I had put in draft form after about 80 pages into my first read and to get the impact the eye in the mirror had on me into a form that makes sense to me with what it wound up being in the end.

(at the end there are a few extra notes of thoughts)

But you see why I could not say about the blue eye in the mirror, that is was Aberforth's eye. Actually I think you were meant to wonder about that until you got the whole story, including the material in the King's Cross chapter, especially the line that "of course it is in your head, but why on earth does that mean it should not be real?" I think one is meant to think that the blue eye in the mirror could be Dumbledore's, really Dumbledore's, not just "Harry's feelings about Dumbledore" ... but a real part of Dumbledore that He left with/in Harry in the way all people leave themselves in those they love (because I think the books are meant to be about real things of real human beings ... in this instance what it is to lose somebody you love, not just somebody you have simply had "knowledge about" but real contact with their person, with what is really them, in such a way that they leave an imprint on you and you leave one on them). In the end it is Aberforth's eye, which works "better" on the mechanical level, but I think it is also still sort of Albus' in that it is sort of the part of Albus he left with Aberforth, a connection of caring about Harry and what happens to him. In the third book I remember being sort of dissatisfied with the explanation of patronuses, that Harry's being a stag simply means it is the part of his dad in him, ... it still seemed liked too much "you have everything you need right inside you already ... you don't need help from outside or above." I wanted it to be more clearly "transcendant" ... but this image of the eye in the mirror actually put a different and better light on it for me.

Note 1: I was really happy when I lit on the idea of human persons leaving "traces" on each other's persons through personal contact. One of the reason's I liked it so much was that the image explains, for me, better the way it (for example the eye in the mirror being actually DD as well as Harry, or maybe can be DD himself brought out in Harry precisely by Aberforth) can be the "other" person - I mean that as the truly other person, I put it in quotes only because it is a paramount theme for postmodernism - usually called the "problem of alterity" - it drives much of Derrida's idea of differance. But the thinker for whom it plays a really large role is Levinas, who is also, coincidentally, the thinker from whom I picked up the theme of "trace" in regard to human presence/being.

Note 2: This actually dovetails nicely with what I have been saying (at least it seems to me like it does, and I use the "dove" image purposefully for this thought, as the bird of peace) about "psychic invasion." Like I was saying at one point about Derrida's concept of language and presence as an invasion, and the role that can play in the interp of the AK, it is an invasion that occurs no matter what when humans have personal contact with each other, which, of course, is impossible to avoid ("no man is an island" etc) ... which way it goes it up to whether or not we choose charity towards each other (and, from a Traditional Christian perspective, there is only one thing can enable us to do that fully, which is Grace). But, for here, a concept of human beings leaving traces on each other, especially interior/psychological/spiritual traces, is (it seems to me) very consistent with the idea of a natural inter-penetration of persons occurring in all human contact.

Note 3: I was talking with a guy once who I knew - I can't remember which of us said it, or if it arose piecemeal from comments by both of us, but we were talking about our relationships with our fathers, and this is what came to mind immediately when I was reading this section for the first time and had the thoughts above about the part of DD in Harry, especially having recently reread Harry's raging in the end of book 5:

"you realize your connection with your father when you realize that you want to yell and scream at him but the only voice you have with which you can do it is the one you inherited from him."

Note 4: This all falls under the big theme for summer of 2007 for me, at least in Harry Potter and POTC land, on the heals of having just finished a course on PoMo philosophy (and just sat in on the first class of a course in Philosophy of Literature in which the professor brought it up again prominently) - which is a concept in Heidegger called "being towards death."

Narrative Perspective and Rowling's Writing

2007-08-22T02:03:00.000-04:00

Rambling Preamble

I just recently picked up CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength from my bookshelf absentmindedly as something to read on a subway ride down to Manhattan, and then again grabbed it tonight on my way out the door to work in case I found the physical arrangements of the security desk not quite as condusive to studying German as hoped (which is often the case since there are now 2 of us working this desk every night, and getting "set up" to do German is a little more involved than the random calls sometimes allow for - when the phone rings when you have the German folder out and all you have to clear it away sort of and grab the pad so as to write details of the call etc, as opposed to being able to just plop the book down quickly and pick it back up quickly when the phone or radio call is done ... and an additional added pleasantry tonight was that the supervisor, who is a big guy but pretty low-key and quiet, mid 40s or so, retired law enforcement, as all the supervisors are, saw me reading the Lewis book and read the cover and said "CS Lewis? ... that guy was really brilliant" - which was really cool; I think I made some small talk about that it must be a copy I bought in college because it is not totally beat up, and I picked up reading Lewis from my dad, who loved Lewis to the extent that when I went through his shelf copies of Lewis' works after he died they were all completely dilapidated from how many times he had read them - there are several night supervisors who have rotated in and out a week or two at a time since I started the gig at the beginning of the summer, but this is the guy who was on nights the week I started so I have worked with this guy off and on since the beginning of the summer, and have always gotten along with him pretty well on the professional level of superviosor and desk assistant, but it was really cool to have that added extra element of a shared appreciation of something like Lewis - nothing overdone ... he is a very "salt of the earth" kind of guy in his own quiet way ... but just that passing connection of it in the midst of every day work that you get every once in a while out of the blue with "salt of the earth" types- the type of thing you encounter in the trades, with a tradesman whose job it is to be "no-bones" business and efficient but you can tell is not defined as a person solely by being a "manual laborer" or a "ex-cop security supervisor" - the type of thing that is completely different from the "romanticazation" of the trades: the trades remain the trades and when in the trades a guy is focused on the trade, but he also takes time here and there for more and has his own unique understanding of some pretty deep stuff and writing ... you have some other very interesting types too, closest "other wordly" fiction fans, like a guard who is a complete trip, sort of out on the edge a little type, is behind on the Potter series at book 3 but was eager to hear how book 7 ended and was totally into the way it ended and then was tugging my ear tonight about a vampire series from the 90s by Harold Lumley ... total trip to talk to)

Introduction

Anyway, I was noticing something on Lewis' use of narrative perspective, in light of some of John Granger's substanital comments on "narrative misdirection" ... well, more particularly for this post, "limited omnicient 3rd person narrative" ... in the year before the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and this lead to some thoughts on recent comments by Stephen King on the closing of the Potter series. So I thought I would jot it down here briefly.

Lewis

What I was noticing in reading That Hideous Strength is the difference, in the opening chapters, between the sections focussing on the Mark Studdock plot-line, and those focussing on his wife, Jane. The reason that I shifted gears from focussing on "narrative misdirection" to "limited omniscient 3rd person" in the last paragraph is atht I am not so sure Lewis is going for any type of misdirection, although I do think he is using 3rd person limited. Actually I think he is trying to make it pretty blatant for the reader - he seems to me to use the language of "thinking" and "got the impression" and "rather felt like ..." and it seems to me like the aim is not so much to "trick" the reader into a false impression of a completely omniscient narrative perspective, but to emphasize to the reader the fact that he is drawing character lines here.

The difference that it seems to me like there is between the Mark sections and the Jane sections is that it seems like in the Mark sections the reader gets ONLY the "Markan Perspective" ... only ever gets to see things through his eyes and see what he can see and think. In the Jane sections, on the other hand, you find other people's perspectives, to which Jane would not be privvy, such as:

"Dimble guessed that Brachton was going to seel the Wood and everything else it owned on that side of the river. The whole region seemed to him now even more of a paradise than when he first came to live there twenty-five years ago, and he felt much too strongly on the subject to wish to talk about it before the wife of one of the Brachton men." (That Hideous Strength, 30).

Of course, Lewis' style is much different than Rowling's, and when I first read that, having over the past year (IE since the last time I read the book) thought a lot more about narrative perspective (and I must add a note of thanks to Dr Granger, since his discussion of narrative perspective in Harry Potter has been a main catalyst for such thought and inquiry in literature for me in the past year), I simply chalked up the presence of multiple character perspectives in the narrative to the general style difference, which also includes much more "intropsective" commentary of the actual "omniscient" sort. It was not till I went further along into the Mark Studdock scenes that I think I noticed, "well, in the Mark sections there does seem to much more a 'limited omniscient' or singular perspective quality to the narrative viewpoint."

I should note that this post has actually been written piece-meal ... I have, since beginning this post, and since the last paragraph, finished That Hideous Strength. However the paragraph follwing this one was begun before before finishing the book but is, from about halfway through the paragraph, being finished now. Other than that I will not burden with the further details of the convoluted manner and timing in which this post has been written. What I will note is that as the book progresses the narrative technique in the "Mark/Progressive Element/Belbury Sections" broadens out and you get such chapters as conversations between Wither and Fairy Hardcastle or Frost without Mark present, or just on the DD with more truly "omniscient" narrative perspective. But I still think a case can be made that in the early part of the book, where the emphasis is more so strongly, directly and solely on the differences between Mark and Jane, one of the marked differences is this dominance of a singular perspective with Mark's sections, versus a more "open" disposition in the Jane sections

Now, there is an explanation of the singular narrative perspecitve in the Mark scenes/plot that "differs" from what I am talking about here, but I prefer to think of it not as an "alternate" explanation (as in "either-or"), but as a complimentary one in which both explanations work and compliment each other on various levels of the work. The "other" explanation is simply the standard "mystery story" one: Belbury is the dark intrigue, so some hiding of detail and slower unveilng of the same is simply material plot pacing. If you spill on the beans on Belbury in the beginning you have nothing to keep your reader intrigued and pulling on. But then you do have that with St Anne's too (some intrigue about what Grace Ironwood and the Director and their crew are about and up to), but there is still more openness in narrative perspective that I think indicates a more open, honest, democratic (in the sense that Chesterton speaks of the "democracy of the dead" ... which is, for me, after reading Deathly Hallows, a VERY central theme in the HP series), and in short humble perspective in the group Jane finds herself being drawn into. And I think the "material intrigue" element can work alongside this perfectly fine without either being exclusive of the other.

Rowling

Anyway, on to Stephen King, JK Rowling and Harry Potter. King recently sort of "reviewed" the series (in some magazine or paper I saw laying around somewhere recently, maybe a Newsweek at the doctor's office waiting room? ... really can't remember), and in a generally pretty favorable light. He gives Rowling credit with penning some really maturely written lines in book 7, as well he should. He notes this as a progression in writing style and ability from the first book (I think the main one he noted is the stylistic pacing of a last line like "all was well").

Now, I do think it would be silly to deny that as a writer progresses there will be development in style prowess, and concordantly that development in skill is somewhat behind deeper style book 7 than in book 1 (especially as this series is Rowling's first major work published). In short there is some truth in King's read of the situation ... but I don't think that read completely covers everything going on. As Granger notes, we view most of the series from a perspective that is, yes, not limited to any character's first person perspective, but in reality it is not much farther 'above' the character of Harry than, "sitting on top of his shoulder." The thing is that in book 1 that shoulder is part of an 11 year old person, and in book 7 it is part of a 17 year old person - which carries with it its own intrinsic progression, or "improvement" in what I might call "aesthetically effective communication abilities."

In other words, I think it is precisely the fact that Rowling has done such a good job of integrating the element of narrative perspective with the central element of the development of Harry's character (really THE theme of the series, along the lines of Granger's other work on the prodcution of the golden soul as the ultimate goal of the alchemical process), that makes it difficult to pin down a difference between, let us call it, "character development artistically rendered in the text" and, what I would call, "development of artistic prowess in the writing of the text," at least, I think, distinctly more difficult to pin down a difference quite as facilely as King's comments would lend to.

(Although, all in all King's comments on the books were very positive, and it seemd genuinely so, even if he might have seemed at points in the past a little jealous of the rapidness of Rowling's success and things like that ... I think we're all a pretty content little, or not so little, family - my main goal in bringing it in was just to illustrate better the stuff I had been thinking on how Rowling worked the stuff really well - just more and more pleased with it as time goes on ... and also grateful to Dr Granger for his helpful expositions of some things in narrative technique that help me to see and to appreciate better the artistry going on in works the Harry Potter and That Hideous Strength).

The Stabat Mater ("Standing Mother") and Feminine Imagery in Deathly Hallows

2007-08-15T02:08:00.000-04:00

The "Stabat Mater" image is one that orginiates in the crucifixion story in the Gospels and has been used in several recent movies. It means "mother standing" and refers to Mary standing at the foot of the cross, bearing witness: "so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too" (Luke 2:35).

In the movie "the Boondock Saints" (of which I know Pauli is also a fan), as Il Duce and his twin sons prepare to finish off the great slippery crime lord in the courtroom they have highjacked, there is a woman in the audience who hides her face - Il Duce comforts her with something like "it will all be over soon, but for now you have to watch" ... in other words a woman being told "you must stand and bear witness to the justice." In both of "The Ring" movies produced thus far there is a teenage "Stabat Mater" in the opening killings by the demon-child Sumara: a teenage girl who is present to witness (in the first one, done most excellently by Gore Verbinski, of "Pirates of the Caribbean" fame - I like the Ring 2 and thought it had some great development of themes from movie 1 and some distinctive Japaneese style from the directore, but I likes Verbinski's actuall directoral work better - the girl in Ring 1 is the "Becca" character, who nicely becomes a "prophetess" from the experience, she can read the mark on Naomi Watts' character of having seen the video-tape).

But in the Gospel account of the Crucifxion, Mary the Blessed Mother does not stand at the foot of the cross alone, she stands with two other women. The "Locus classicus" is John 19:25 - "Near the foot of the cross stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene."

Ever since I saw/read Tonks in book 5 making faces for Ginny and Hermione at the table in #12 Grimmauld place, I was really impressed by what Rowling was doing with feminine identity/psyche. That scene impressed me very much as a young woman who is in a role younger and more "lively" (as an eligable bachelorette) than the mother figure, but is also older than the girls, a "grown-up," and who seems to be sort of "mentoring" the girls in being a girl who is really and truly interesting in a distinctly feminine way of "palyfulness" (which, given that little thing Rowling had on her site in the journal on wanting girls not to be duped and controlled by the "wafer-thin supermodel" image of femininity, I think is right up Rowling's alley). And, low and behold, in book 7 Tonks makes what I think is a very pointed return to a scene right alongside Ginny.

"As the walls trembled again, he led the other two back through the concealed entrance and down the staircase into the Room of Requirement, It was empty except for three women: Ginny, Tonks and an elderly witch wearing a moth-eaten hat, whom Harry recognized immediately as Neville's Grandmother" (DH 624 - emphasis added).

A few preliminary sideline notes are in order here. The first is that this is a really unique passage that sort of jumps off the page at you when you realize the "oddity," in realtion to the rest of the texts involving Ginny, that she is here refered to as a "woman." The second is, quite simply put, that Neville's Gran rocks and quite simply kicks *ss.

But on to the specific "Stabat Mater" content of this post. These are not just any 3 women, they are 3 very representative women: a grandmother, a mother (and a new mother at that ... later we get the experienced mother of Lewis' wife-of-the-captain from Till We Have Faces, whose "wounds" are "where a woman's are when she has had eight children" ... in Molly's well-noted "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" [DH 736] ... Bellatrix's "What will happen to your children when I have killed you? ... When Mummy's gone the same way as Freddie" is a direct affront to the mothering feminine image, and directly after she [Bella] has been, pointedly, attacking particularly the daughters, dueling Hermione, Ginny and Luna all at once) ... and a woman who is a daughter, Ginny (specifically a daughter in the story ... obviously all women have been daughters, but we don't see, for instance, Molly's mother or Neville's great grandmother). These 3 women, representing 3 stages of feminine life, stand gaurd at the ROR end of the tunnel ... Gran Longbottom is even the one with the prudence to close the portal one Aberforth is no longer keeping post at his pub to guard the entrance. They all eventually join the fray, and one dies, but at this point, coming into the crescendo, into Rowling's great "battle rally" scenes that rival even Mel Gibson's horseback speech in "Braveheart," these 3 representative women "stand gaurd" together (Note that in the Gospel account, it is "only 3 wome" plus one man ... John , the "disciple whom he loved" ... all the others deserted in that hour).

PS

Oh, and on the whole thing of Aberforth - and all the aspersions of "fooling around" with goats ... this too, contrary to all the insinuations made by Rita Skeeter and others, has to do with a tender emotional connection with a female family member. The reason his patronus is a goat is revealed in passing and has to do with his love for his sister. So, in case any missed it: "I was her favorite ... She liked me best. I could get her to eat when she wouldn't do it for my mother, I could get her to calm down when she was in one of her rages, and when she was quiet, she used to help me feed the goats" (DH 565 - emphasis added).

A final note - I REALLY like the "whispering woman" image Rowling employs. I do not have time to track down the myriad times that Hermione whispers meaningful things in Deathly Hallows, but the others that really stuck out to me are at the Burrow when, just before she kisses Harry, Ginny whispers something like "there's the silver lining I was looking for" and when the trio have despaired and cannot produce patronuses in the final battle and Luna's, Ernie's and Seamus's Patronuses appear (1 from each house except Slytherin) and Luna whispers the encouragement to Harry "We're all still here ... we're still fighting"(DH 649) ... (Ron is dead on: Luna is a really great character in these books). What it really reminds me of is Constantine's (Keanu Reeve's character in the movie a few years ago) description of the way the "influence peddlers" whisper in the ears of mortals - something like " their slightest word can give you just the encouragement you need, or turn your favorite pleasure into your worst nightmare."

Godric's Garden

2007-08-14T01:30:00.000-04:00

I was on a trip this past weekend for an old friend's wedding in Pittsburgh and could not resist listening to some of Deathly Hallows on CD during the drive and so, having neglected to locate which bag I put my German pocket dictionary in when running late for work tonight I just grabbed Deathly Hallows and have been reading some from where I left off on the CD version and am basically up through getting back to the tent with the wand broken after Godric's Hollow. The person I work tonight with is on break for only an hour, which leaves me too pressed on computer time to write anywhere near an dequate post on this ... but this material is so dense in these chapters I am not sure I could write a thorough and clear exposition without a WHOLE lot more time to work it out. So I am just going to jot my thoughts rapidly.

So, I will just say this: I am not sure this material can be thoroughly "exposited" at all in the first place, merely feeble attempts made at expositing it ... but I do not think that makes it any less real. This is merely to say that this is the type of material where, sometimes, discursive "reasoning" breaks down and the only way to express it is ... to put it in story form.

The first thing right off the bat is to make one point overly clear:

I am NOT accusing Harry and Hermione of a sin - I am saying I think the imagery here points to exactly how dangerous the material is ... perhaps a danger very necessary to risk, but nonetheless a VERY big danger (just like, as Harry points out to Dumbledore in the "King's Cross" chapter, investigating the hallows is not a sin like making Horcuxes, but as Dumbledore points out to Harry ... it is very dangerous).

Some of this fits best with my angle on the debate JKR2 and I were having on a Harry-Hermione "possibility" in Ron's absence (or as I put it in that comment in the thread on the "Home Away From Home" post, there being a difference/variance/alienation between Hary and Hermione in that for him a relationship with Hermione was still definitvely out of the picture owing to his feelings for Ginny, but for Hermione, while it may not be concretely "in the picture" it is not definitively out of the picture the way it is from Harry's side). Returning to that image of Harry and Hermione disguised as muggle middle-aged man and wife (in other words, here is a realm where those nice little "shipper" questions connect up with larger themes by way of providing the "couple image" for the entry into a larger image source, the fall in the Garden of Eden):

-A couple is in a graveyard that is sort of like a garden of snow and grief, pain of loss felt in cold midnight after going "deeper and deeper" into the graveyard.

- The couple is then attacked by a snake who is the agent of a liar. The snake's "tactic" is "division" - speaking a language that only one understands, thus speaking only to one of them (with a great, and I think legitimately feminist, take on the situation by having it be the man to whom the snake appeals/speaks ... this is all on the level of image though: mechanically the sole goal of Naginni and voldy is to kill Harry, whereas in the Genesis story the goal is the seduction of the couple as a unit and thus the race)

-The lure is "identity," and the guise it takes is "objective historty" - the snake hidden within the body of the historian Bathilda Bagshot. This is the central point ... identity: "In the day you eat of it you will be like gods, knowing good and evil." Harry only picks up on the "excuse" of looking for the sword from Hermione (DH 318 ... when she says something like "it's very likely it is there" he says "what's there?") ... Harry's real motivation is pinning down his identity through pinning down his history (as well as the role of Dumbledore and Dumbledore's history in those things). This is at the existentialist core of the works, just as these chapters are at the center of Deathly Hallows. In PS/SS Dumbledore told Harry that people have wasted away before the mirror of Erised, living in dreams, in Harry's case of what was lost in the past, and forgetting to live in the present. In CS Dumbledore tells Harry that it is our actions and choices that make us who we are, more than the "nature" we come to the table with (in other words, to translate it into Thomistic language, potentiality is not the same thing as actuality, potency is not the same as act) ... Here we see exactly how dangerous this all is, we see the snake hiding in the "historian" - the near death from trying to pin down a "static identity" - to pin down "material truth" as definitive.

- In Genesis, the couple goes from being "naked (arumim) and not ashamed" to being naked and ashamed, by way of the cunning (arum) of the serpent in getting them to eat of a tree, ultimately resulting in the "alienation" of the curses in the second half of Genesis 3. In these chapters of Deathly Hallows, the wood of the tree is broken exposing the magical core, breaking the wood and making the phoenix feather, in a way, naked (the wand breaking, the symbol breaking ... but this is transformable, transfigurable - just as the symbol of the veil in the Temple is rent, but precisely at the moment when Christ, whom the Phoenix symbolizes, is naked and broken on the cross, but from this comes the mystery Hermione speaks of: "It doesn't mean defeating death in the way the death eaters mean it, Harry ... It means ... you know ... living beyond death. Living after death." [DH 328]). The result of the breaking of the wand/symbol in the attack of Voldemort's snake? "Her face glazed with tears, Hermione handed over her wand, and he left her sitting beside his bed, desiring nothing more than to get away from her" [DH 349] and "but never, until this moment, had he felt himself to be so fatally weakened, vulnerable, and naked" [DH 350].

Anyway, just some rambling food for thought.

Merlin the Meandering

PS

Further thoughts on the "homecoming" theme as having a much broader range to it in the books - a range that includes the themes of "leaving home" ("for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife") ... Re-Read the language of Harry's thoughts upon realizing he has to leave Grimmauld Place because of Yaxley being taken there ... "Gloomy and oppressive as the house was, it had been their one safe refuge: even, now that Kreacher was so much happier and friendlier, a kind of home. With a twinge of regret that had nothing to do with food, Harry imagined the house-elf busying himself over the steack and kidney pie that he, Ron and Hermione would never eat." (DH 271). And for the other great house-elf, Dobby, "homecoming" meant death at the hands of Bellatrix and her dagger.

Also, on what I would call "legitimately borrowed images" - borrowed with utmost artistic integrity - "tips of the artistic hat" as it were - when Yaxley tags along to #12 Grimmauld place, can anybody say "Jadis' escape from Charn on the coat-tails of Polly Plummer and Diggory Kirke in The Magician's Nephew"?

Dumbledore Deconstructed in Deathly Hallows

2007-08-02T01:13:00.000-04:00

Ok, so this is a major post, or rather a post on a MAJOR question - the "deconstruction" of Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I am writing this partly in response to Andrzej's question on the matter in relation to the Christian meaning of the works, and partly because, especially with the major Dumbledore backstory given in DH, it is probably the single biggest and hottest discussion topic concerning DH and has to be addressed. I have put this one off to the end (I will likely not post as much following this ... I need to hit studying German like a ball from the powder for the month of August) because it is the most controversial topic.

A while back Red Hen was deconstructing DD and making predictions that book 7 would contain major material revealing DD to be a crotchety manipulator, and Travis Prinzi at Sword of Gryffindor was disagreeing and since the release of DH he has been saying that he does not have any problem with the treatment of DD in DH and does not see it as confirming RH's original dire predictions about the late headmaster of Hogwarts (on which I agree with him ... I haven't really read much of his stuff since the first comment out of the gate the week after the release, but that was his opening remark).

So, in order to do this, I will be considering Dumbledore under 3 headings of what I think he is (3 roles he performs as a character in the works) and 1 that I do not think he is meant to be or perform. The last of these is a "Christ Figure." That is to say that I do not think he is meant to be ubiquetously defined by being an allegory of Christ (but I will discuss, then, where in the scheme of his character certain Christ-like actions fit).

The 3 roles that I do think that he performs:

1. "Pure Spirit" in the alchemical crucible/ the "angelic problem"

2. A human being other than Christ, but informed by Christ

3. Allegory of a Bishop

Pure Spirit and the Angelic Problem

In his first book on the Potter series, The Hidden Key to Harry Potter, John Granger revealed one of THE central roles of Albus Dumbledore - "the white" "pure spirit" element on the top of the alchemical crucible, supported by a lot of great exposition of literary alchemy and alchemical structure in English literature and lots of text support for how Rowling has structured the series and the books on alchemy. The opposite of the whit/spirit element, on the bottom side of the crucible, is the black of pure matter (Voldemort). On the horizontal axis, on the left you have the red of sulfur (which I take to be animal soul - Ron's fiery red-haired nature) and on the right you have the silver of mercury, which represents thought as such and which I would put under the heading of "intellectual soul" (Hermione Granger to a T ... loved how she was so "mobile" in DH, so much more prepared for flight than Ron and Harry, very much like Granger's descriptions of thought as untethered). Humanity contains all of these elements and the goal of alchemy is to produce, in the middle in the crucible itself, the golden soul (Harry).

A lot of times in our current culture, particularly in our experience of our Christian faith, we tend to think, unwittingly often, in gnostic terms. We tend to think of pure spirit, to the exclusion of the material and the biological, as the ideal. To be sure, God is pure spirit ("and those who worship him must worship him in spirit" - Gospel of John Chapter 4), but then he is God isn't he? And it must be remembered that the second person of the eternal Trinity did not "remain only God, or only spirit" - he became a human being in space and time, and with a material body the way the rest of us have material bodies (again, entering into mystery that our language cannot describe adequately and sometimes it is healthy to take a step back and remember the wisdom of Eastern apophatic/negative theology ... speaking of the persons of the eternal Trinity in time-bound language of verbes with tenses, like the past tense "did not" and "remained," is, in a very large way, really quite an absurd thing to do ... but it is what we have to work with in our state in this life - so chalk it up to the mysterious absurdity of being human).

Literature is about humanity and humans are both spirit and matter. I would say that in light of the Incarnation this is exactly what Christianity is about too. The object is never to attain some state of pure spirit (even in our understanding of the eshcaton and heaven, it will involve the body in some form we cannot imagine, but still the body, after the resurrection), but to reach the right balance in the marriage of the two in our piebald, bifurcated existence (always love that word "bifurcated" too ... especially because I am a fan of Tommy Lee Jones and of some of Jim Carey's work, and while the 3rd Batman movie was kind of campy, I did love their work together there, especially the line where the Riddler calls 2Face, "oh bifurcated one!" - humanity is always bifurcated, 2Face is an image of what happens when there is imbalance and improper relation of the 2 sides).

The problem that created beings who are pure spirit (IE angels) have had is understanding the piebald creatures known as humans, at least according to the Christian Tradition on why "Lucifer" fell. As pure spirit, like God himself, the angel should be higher than the human, as the logic goes purely on the level of logic. So why are the angels being told to be of service in helping humanity, as if humanity is somehow higher than them or capable of some more unique union with God? I think that Dumbledore's history with Grindewald is meant to demonstrate what happens when a human being mistakenly leans to the side of gnosticism, becomes too wrapped up in pure spirit, too wrapped up in the magical side of humanity, to the exclusion, or at least suppression, of the muggle side.

"Invincible masters of death, Grindewald and Dumbledore! Two months of insanity, of cruel dreams, and neglect of the only two members of my family left to me." (DH 717)."

In a way, the Christian brand of alchemy is the Incrantional answer to/against such gnosticism. The end goal is for both pure matter and pure spirit to be married again, but in proper relation. In the end both Dumbledore and Voldemort are gone, and only Harry, Ron and Hermione remain. Both Dumbledore and Voldemort live on in their good parts in Harry. All that could be salvaged of Voldy, even with Harry's valiant efforts at the end to try to get Voldy to try remorse, is the original good parts of the Slytherin element.

Matter is by nature lower than spirit - not necessarily "wrong" where spirit is "right" - but there is a natural hierarchy. Therefore what remains of Dumbledore is himself, the whole person talking to Harry in King's Cross station. Voldy was spirit, was whole person, but forfeited it, and what remains, and all that can remain, is the basics of matter (but we can see the goodness taht remains in the Slytherin element in Harry's words to his son Albus Severus Potter ... I like that name, don't know if it was intentional on her part, but well could have been, since Rowling has shown disposition before towards thinking of names in their initials form, like RAB, and the initials that are used in labeling prophecies in the hall of prophecy, but the initials of Albus Severus Potter are ASP - a word for a snake, actually for venomous snakes, but we have seen in Slughorn's comments on Acromantula venom that even venom can be put to a good use through magic :) ... actually I think a son of Harry Potter and Ginny Weasely would be a good dose in house Slytherin to help it stay on the right track).

But created pure spirit has its own pitfalls to watch out for, and I think Albus Dumbldore's story is a healthy reminder of that.

Albus Dumbledore: "Regular Guy"

Sorry, couldn't resist doing that subheading like a campaign slogan :) The point here is that one that I said about not being an allegory of Christ, but being the "stand in" (as is Harry and really just about everybody in the works) for the "everyman" of the medieval "everyman plays" - that is, all us human beings who are not Christ. ... but can be informed by Christ. Thus certain things that Albus Dumbledore does are very Christlike - including, since this is literature and literature uses symbols and images, on the symbolic/image level. Thus just before officially laying down his life (both relinquishing it in simple humility, a human being accepting the fate of our race, but also a human hero who sees an opportunity to effect some greater good by using his wits to time the place and manner of his actual exit ... but, as we have noted here before, there is a nice image of "being lifted" in death from the Christian tradition), he "drinks of the cup" of pain, from the basin of potion in the cave that voldy designed to be a tomb for any who entered, but of course DD does not stay in the tomb (as Christ did not, and as Christian Tradition teaches that we all will not eventually).

But Dumbledore does not occupy this role exclusively, as he would were he an allegory of Christ. He shares the role with Harry and many others. Likewise he also shares their ability to make mistakes, to have foibles ... in short to be fallen humans in need of redemption.

Bishop Dumbledore

But I would not say Albus occupies no allegorical role whatsoever. Even Tolkien, who notoriously disliked mechanical allegory, admitted he had some of it in the Lord of the Rings (this comes from the edition of his letters edited by Humphrey Carpenter, I believe ... the book is at home so I can't be 100 percent on Carpenter being the editor, but I think he is ... and I am too lazy to hop on amazon right now :) ). Tolkien pretty much straight up admits that Tom Bombadil is an allegory of pre-lapsarian (before the fall) nature (that is why he always speaks in verse - verse is closer to a wholistic pure human expression).

My reading of the matter would be that allegory itself is not bad in its proper place ... which is NOT being the defining characteristic of a character (at least a major character, and Bombadil is not really major to Lord of the Rings, albeit I love the character ... you basically find out that the reason he is not affected by the ring is the same reason he would not be the one to trust to get rid of it in the fires of Mount Doom, he would forget about it for the same reason he is not controlled by it - and his role is pretty much done except for a little bit of help getting out of the barrow wight's mound). Even here I would not call Dumbledore an "allegory" because it is simply that the allegorical element plays a role in the symbolism filled by a wholistic character.

But on the "allegorical" level I would say that Dumbledore is a bishop in the Church, if you view the "institutions" of the wizarding world sort of like dioceses or patriarchates. I actually got this from Pauli a long while ago, in his comments about the different color robes Dumbledore wears and how the way Rowling describes them come off sounding like descriptions/details of episcopal vestments (indeed, with all the teachers and even parents, the way Rowling just sort of matter-of-factly rattles off robe color details sounds much like you would describe priests - wearing the green for ordinary time, red for martyrs' feasts etc).

Actually the model of Bishop Dumbledore fits is more (tipping my hat to Andrzej here) Eastern than Western (and I am not sure Rowling would recognize and do this intentionally, but she might ... as I have always said she is a very intelligent woman ... and if a historian writing about Byzantine Christianity could wind up using a quote from Charles Williams' Arthurian poetry do describe the Eastern concept of the emperor in relation to the Bishop [the chapter detailing Eastern Orthodoxy in a well respected book we used for one class began with a quote from Williams' poetry on the procession of the people of the kingdom of Logres], the flow could work the other way too). In the West, in the Latin Rite, there is the Pope and the Pope has universal jurisdiction. In the Eastern conception there is not a single Bishop who is jurisdictionally the universal bishop. At leas in the early days (and I have never heard that it was officially revoked, but things got considerably tense between East and West, especially when certain "side events" of the crusades considerably weakened Constantinople, to put it euphemistically, and left the city very vulnerable when the Muslim Turks came through and thus the fall of the city into Muslim hands) the Eastern line was that, as a title of honor, Rome was "first among equals" - meaning jurisdictional equals in that each of the 5 ancient Patriarchates (Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, Antioch and Jerusalem ... although I am not sure of the order below Rome, but it changed in a council or two's lists, which fact itself caused no small amount of tension ... now the Russian Patriach is considered among them but I am not sure of all of the history of the matter) were seen by the East as maintaining jurisdictional independence. The Eastern concept was more focussed solely on "collgegiality" - not that the West does not hold to the authority of the college of Bishops in council, but in the East it is the primary model, with a unified singular jurisdictional head existing only on the level of a patriarchate, not the universally. I would not call any of the ministers of magic we have seen "good bishops" and I think the bishop imagery is much less there with the minister position, but DD never seems to see himself as over-ruling the minister ... but he definitely does not place himself under his jurisdiction in the matter of how Hogwart's is run and in certain cases, especially where no crime has been actually committed (what was that that Fudge was actually going to charge him with anyway? ... simply building an army/group of underage wizards does not necessarily prove any plans to take force action against the ministry) he does not even personally remain under the minister's jurisdiction (something like "ahhh, I thought we might hit that little snag ... you are under the impression I am going to, what is the saying, 'come quietly?'"). And the Wizengamot and International Confederation are definitely more collegial images.

But one of the primary ways that DD is Bishop-like is sort of universal to East and West ... he is a teacher ... and while he is correct in his teaching, he is not incapable of mistakes and sins in his actions. Notice that everything Dumbledore says about the horcruxes, about both the nature and the particulars of the magic that has gone on between Harry and Voldy is 100 percent dead on. When we get to the scar-crux material he states it boldly and matter-of-factly ... and he has it all nailed down. I'm still not sure about his reading that his dying without having the wand taken from him would do the trick to undo the Elder wand's power in the world ... the text remains unclear on that (the situation is one that never really exists, so cannot be confirmed or denied I guess) ... but everything else he is pretty much "infallible" on ... at least when it comes to magic (which is what he is "authorized" to teach).

Matters such as predicting the volitional actions of human beings such as Draco disarming him or Voldy killing Snape are a different story though. He obviously makes some mistakes and miscalculations there - "infallibility" in the office of Bishop in the college of Bishops (or in this case, the collection of magical tradition) does not ensure total savvy or prudence (Dumbledore is rock-solid on how magic works and can predict what certain things will yield, even in unprecedented matters, but as far as historical facts like what Voldy did or didn't do, what magical actions he did in fact take, there "I could be as woefully wrong as Horace Belcher, who believed that the time was ripe for a cheese cauldron")

... and it does not ensure impeccability.

The Last Enemy

This brings me to one of the main things I want to say about "Christianity in literature." This relates to the semi-allegorical roles like Dumbledore as bishop, of which I have been talking just now, as well as Christ symbols and Christ-like action, and most particularly to that line of St Paul's on Harry's parents' headstone. In a certain way I see good Christian literature as a pointed "non-sequitur" - or rather a non-sequitur that points beyond itself. As I think could be demonstrated, there are no "Christ figures" in Harry Potter - Christ symbols; Christ-like virtuous action ... but no figures who fill out the role (Rowling saw to that in the wonderful epilogue: Christ had no earthly wife and family [unless DB's high-foreheaded, money-grubbing "fiction" is to be taken seriously in any fashion, as EITHER fact OR fiction, which I highly recommend against ... he did not write of a family, a husband and wife and kids working out their daily life together trying to be charitable, nor did he write even of gods - his "creations" are more like sickly little humans-turned-demigogues - truly "mediocre to the last degree"], and Harry has no ascension into heaven, or beyond the veil or whatever, but rather sticks around to marry Ginny and have kids with her).

So there is no singular character within a story like this that fills out the whole role in a unified way. But there are plenty of things that we Christians believe require Grace ... virtuous action, not just normal virtue but self-sacrificial love and explication of it that relies on models developed throughout the Christian story of Christ. I think the role of such literature is as morality tale, mainly to examine what virtue excercized looks like. But this points beyond to some source of that virtue, some transcendent Grace. In these books we even get, I think, a lot of pictures of some of the interworkings of Grace itself in the way magic works (that is to say, from my perspective at least, that the images show a sacramental quality in the magic) ... but the source is conspicuously absent.

Actually, the source was simply covered in a different book, and some great works of literature, like Rowlings', footnote the other book. Actually a lot of books footnote it through standard Christ symbols and the like, distinctive ways of speaking of self-sacrificial love etc. This one by Rowling though has a really nice footnote that is, I think, very clever in that it addresses the very matter of Christian literature. Harry finds two verses from the New Testament, one from the Gospels and one from St Paul on the headstones, respectively, of Dumbledore's family and of his own. In a world where religion operates regularly among muggles and right in the shadow of a church, though, Harry can't figure out what it means ... but they seem to him to be obviously very important. He racks his brain over them, and he even comes back to the St Paul passage in trying to convince Ron and Hermione that the deathly hallows are real ... but that is it. No more mention of them; no more tying out their meaning to the main plot action. Yet still they are there, and prominently.

I think that what this relates to, or rather conveys, is the connection of the story, and stories of this kind, with the Christian faith. They are informed by the Christian faith and ultimately have to seek the source of their "magic" beyond their own bounds - in that ultimate story. But to have "direct" connections like actual allegorical Christ figures (as opposed to just symbols and plot elements and character actions that notedly specifically build on Christ images) lessens the story. I'm not going to touch Lewis' Aslan because I see some straight up allegory as all right, but I also think of the Narnia Chronicles as more of children's stories. Don't get me wrong, I love the Chronicles and I definitely think there are some VERY rich images there (and I also think that we listen to children FAR FAR less than we should "unless you become like one of these little ones ..." ... in fact a kid's voice was what got me to give Harry Potter a chance), but the images in the Narnia books I tend to think the richest and most striking are those not as easily tied out to the Bible or the Christian story by way of allegory (for instance, the Christian Tradition has much about the concept of God's eternity in relation to the world of space and time, such as the image of light and explications of how light is the closest thing we know [and also the most mysterious, as in is it particle or wave? etc] to complete rest and complete motion ... as something approaches the speed of light it will elongate in all directions of physical extension to fill all available space, like light does - thus ultimate rest through ultimate motion, and I have always loved Lewis' image of the human participation in that in the "further up and further in" chapter of The Last Battle, when they keep climbing the hill and hedges into ever newer interior gardens or whatever it is, completely fulfilled in the excitement of the ever-deeper movement of going in).

I don't think it would be natural to have a complete Christ figure in such Christian literature any more than it would be natural for Harry or any wizard to completely get the source, meaning and role of the Bible verses on the headstones ... it would be sort of like looking at yourself through the other side of a mirror. It is what he is about but in a religious way that includes the world of factual history of which he is the flipside. Both are truth, fact and fiction, but flipsides of each other ... and the Faith itself, Christ, is the "side beyond the flipsides" ... as Lewis put it in his one essay, "Myth become Fact." To have the Christianity of the works tied out too tightly in something like a full Christ figure would spoil the character of the work as literature with a Christian quality to it.

In truth, my respect for Rowling got even deeper with Deathly Hallows. Not only does she have a nice inclusion of this aspect in it (which I think is a lot wrapped up in, and in some way resolution of, what it seems to me Rowling would be talking about when she has said in interviews that the works have been very much about her working out her own questions about her faith and the Faith), but it includes a nice tip of insight on truth, fact and legend.

"Whether they met Death on a lonely road ... I think it more likely that the Peverell brothers were simply gifted, dangerous wizards who succeeded in creating those powerful objects. The story of them being death's own Hallows seems to me the sort of legend that might have sprung up around such creations." (DH 714).

This is not, I think, just a throw away line saying "well, you know how it is with superstitious primitive cultures and peoples who make up non-scientific, and thus 'false,' aetsiological tales to explain certain thing with a bit more voodoo excitement." Death, like the Peverells, is a dangerous character. In the end death is an enemy that will be defeated. On the natural level death is an objective evil, for soul and body created together to be separated. Yet on the mystical level of self-giving ... it is like that invisibility cloak that Dumbledore and Grindewald saw no real value in outside of completing the hallows (and Dumbledore's unrealistic idea of hiding Ariana in it ... but that at least is the beginning of wisdom, noticing that the uniqueness of the cloak is the ability to share with others) and that Jo2 and I were talking about a while ago as a very interesting and mysterious image that might fit the soul rather well (having the qualities of both fabric and liquid) - it is like Tolkien's idea of mortality as a gift to the second children.

Death is both dangerous and mysterious, like the incredible magical giftedness of those mortals "who succeeded in creating those powerful objects"; so is it really "superstition" to make the connection between death and that kind of mysterious and dangerous giftedness ... or is it insight into deeper reality? I think Rowling is the type who understands that truth is not restricted to the realm of "fact" - that "the truth is stranger than fiction" but sometimes fiction is truer than "fact."

The Final Note

In the end I think the best, and most succinct comment (definitely more cogent than all of my rambling on on the matter here :) ) was that of Jo from Australia ... that despite the "deconstruction" provided by the backstory, the real proof in the pudding is in that conversation in King's Cross where DD asks Harry's opinion and advise - and most of all shows remorse - that human though he may be, with human foibles and all (his particular ones being, as I said, towards gnostic thinking), Albus Dumbledore is a human being capable, and indeed desirous, of redemption.

The difference between Albus Dumbledore and Tom Riddle is not that one was an angel and the other not (I use that old label of somebody "being such a little angel" there intentionally ironically ... Dumbledore was "pure spirit" but kept to the truth in the end by repenting of the "angelic problem" - Voldy is really pure matter but as a wizard latches on to pure spirit and tries to master death and winds up the fulfillment of the "angelic problem" as a Satan figure ... this is of course on the symbolic level, and I still hold to my interpretation of voldy as personality disorder on the levels of "psycholgical realism" and "supra-individual/communal culpability") - the difference is that one yielded to remorse and repentance and actually tried to amend his ways and one did not.

To be human, in the Christian scheme, is not to iradicate radically all possibility of doing wrong - it is to try to avoid evil but to be able to repent when one makes mistakes (I always loved that theme in Terminator 3, that the point was not to stop judgment day, but to survive it ... which is not to say that judgment day is good [in the movie, the machines taking over, created and given the ability to do so by misguided humans], but that it cannot destroy the ability to be human ... in Christianity we believe, though, that only way really to be able to repent and survive is through Christ ... but that gets back to those "Christ moments" and Christ symbols we were talking about, that are the place where the Christian element informs the Potter books)

On the "everyman" quality in the books ... It is hard for one to say that everything one sees is something Rowling would think of ... not everyone has the same tastes in music or art or any number of things that inform such choices an author makes. But I love that Harry calls Albus Severus "Al" because it reminds me of Paul Simon's "everyman" song, "Call Me Al" (my friend Dom has a great theory that Simon has it for Dante ALiegheri and "Betty" for Beatrice, based on the line "he sees angels in the architecure, spinning in infinity" and the illustration of the "mystical rose" from the Paradiso in the set of very famous illustrations by ... whoever that guy was [any copy of the Divine Comedy - if it is black and white wood carving illustrations, that is him]). Simon has been very into the common human theme, with lines such as "who says 'hard times? I'm used to them. The speeding planet burns? I'm used to that ... my life so common it disappears. And sometimes even music cannot subsitute for tears.'" in The Cool Cool River ... but another line from "Call Me Al" that particularly relates here in this post is "I want a shot at redemption."

Magic "Like Fire in the Bones" in Deathly Hallows

2007-08-01T06:24:00.001-04:00

I have mentioned a fair bit on here, particularly talking about issues of prophecy and such, imagery from the Old Testament book of the prophet Jeremiah (much stuff gleaned from a class I took on the book back in the Spring semester). The book and it's themes definitely played a role larger than mere "religion" or "Biblical Studies," a role in art, well into/past the late Middle Ages - with the prophet appearing in a number of medeival wood carvings and a famous painting by Rembrandt (I believe) - the time periods Rowling would have been studying as a classics major (and, as Granger ash noted, Rennaissance buff). I have noted a number of image sets that Rowling seems to like that are in common with Jeremianic images - the one that comes to mind first (outside of the one I am about to develop here, fire in the bones) is the death eaters circling the cage of Phoenix song in GOF specifically noted as being like jackals, and jackals are used a fair bit in Jeremiah as symbols of the desolation brought by the disentegration of the kingdom of Judah and also of God's judgment on Babylon, both cities becoming the "haunt of jackals."

But this Jeremianic image to talk about here is much more dire. Compare Aberforth's retelling of his sister Ariana's story with Jeremiah 20:7-9. Going into this I would fist note something that in both cases could and will be disputed. I believe that the ambiguity in language owes to the greviousness of the event/image - with at least an allusion to (if not a full inclusion of, but I will explain in a moment what I mean) a sexual nature .

In Ariana's case I believe the lack of detail but with presence of certain grave phrasings indicates something possibly sexual in nature or involving areas of the body direcly connected with sexuality (the boys were young, whether they would have had certain direct and violent criminal actions even in their mind to do, one should give the benefit of the doubt ... but it is possible for kids to pick up many other sexually tinged things, whether they be physical action or verbal taunts, as things to be used as weapons or in coercion). This is only a conjecture - but in such cases often the lack of detail (ANY detail as to the nature of the crime - as in not even "killed him" vs "slit his throat" or all the gorey details you find in works like the Illiad [everybody being split crotch to navel, bowels everywhere, eyeballs rolling around on the ground ... the Greek classics spare no details on war]) but with language pointing to something very serious is a sign of respect, the way instructors tell EMTs in cases of the victim of a particularly violating crime simply to wrap the victim in a blanket until reaching the hospital, and it is not necessarily for concerns of warmth, and while it may have some forensic protective value I suspect it is usually just as much for psychological considerations (the lack of detail is somewhat like the scene in Shawshank Redemption the first time Robbins' character is overpowered by the three men, the volume drops as the camera backs around the corner ... you know what happens, you don't need the details ... it is a sign of respect). I cannot say with certainty that this is what Rowling means by it ... in part I think it is because that is part of the respect factor. I do think that older readers are meant to ask the question, and that the very question itself is meant, for older readers, as a path to feeling exactly how strongly whatever it was impacted the girl, hurt her.

Even if it is not meant to be indicative of a specificaly sexual inceident, I think the "lacunae" in details combined with the severity of tone ("It destroyed her") is meant to conjure that feeling: wounds inflicted by one human person upon another so deep that you do not speak of them or their details except where the situation requires it (like Aberfoth telling the trio the story and the dire effects the divide has), for to do so casually or idly, (or for profit - or the prophet? - as Rita Skeeter does) is to disrespect the person gravely. In other words the sexual allusion might serve not necessarily to say that the incident was indeed sexual in nature, but to portray exactly how deep of a wounding happened to Ariana - that is another possible interpretation of the text.

In the case of Jeremiah the word used for "deceive" has a high occurence rate in other contemporaneous literature with connotations of highly invasive, often sexual in nature, violation. The use of the term in Jeremiah is, as one would expect, a hotbed and minefield of exegtical and interpretational problems/debates/arguments/barroom-brawls. The best core concept that I can find, especially given the following "fire in the bones" verse, is the invasion of personal space, meaning the very body of the person, no barrier at all, right into the marrow of the bones (a very effective image and word, "marrow" ... that was the line that stuck in my head more than any immediately from the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, when one of the Dutchman crew says "down on your marrow bones and pray").

Ariana's Story (DH 564)

[Aberforth Dumbledore]

"They forced their way through the hedge, and when she couldn't show them the trick, they got a bit carried away tryin to stop the little freak doing it."

"It destroyed her, what they did: She was never right again. She wouldn't use magic, but she couldn't get rid of it; it turned inward and drove her mad, it exploded out of her when she couldn't control it, and at times she was strange and dangerous."

Jeremiah 20: 7-9 ("Jeremiahs complaint/Lament") NIV

7 O LORD, you deceived me, and I was deceived;

you overpowered me and prevailed.
I am ridiculed all day long;
everyone mocks me.

8 Whenever I speak, I cry out
proclaiming violence and destruction.
So the word of the LORD has brought me
insult and reproach all day long.

9 But if I say, "I will not mention him
or speak any more in his name,"
his word is in my heart like a fire,
a fire shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in;
indeed, I cannot.

"You shall know the turth and the truth shall set you free."
But I think the message in Rowling's work, as Harry finds out in "the forest again," is that when the truth will set you free, is when they crucify you for it.

But Harry is 17 years old and makes the choice himself. Ariana was 6 years old and deserved the "hidden years" our Lord had before his public ministry, or at least the 6 years Harry had at Hogwarts with the very direct attention of Dumbledore (even if he couldn't see it all the time). I think that Ariana's "fire in the bones" is Albus Dumbledore's greatest regret: his shame felt of the wizarding world bickering over other things while it should be working harder at better integration so that things like this dont' happen in the first place (like Aberforth said, "she was a kid, she couldn't control it, no witch or wizard can at that age."); at himself for being so wrapped up in Grindewald's world that he could not see straight to take care of his sister better in the aftermath. I will discuss more later the LARGE issue of the deconstruction of Dumbledore, but for here, this is the regret of Albus Dumbledore (and for the next post I will just say here, it is VERY important that it is a regret to him).

Blood Simple in Harry Potter

2007-08-01T00:36:00.000-04:00

You know me, I love movie titles and quotes that I think encapsulate a point I am trying to make. I don't kow how many times I have used that one of Richard Dreyfus from "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ared Dead" - "the blood is compulsory" - so I thought I would try a new one. This one - "Blood Simple" - is the title of the Cohen Brothers' first movie - "Blood Simple" (more of straightforward gore-thriller, not as impressive as some of their offerings after it, but still all right if you are a die-hard Cohens fan, unlike "Fargo," which really rubbed me the wrong way and I had to chalk up as "a place I diverge with the Cohens").

But actually this one is a little more apt for this post too by way of irony - in that what I will try to do here, explain my thoughts on the blood imagery in Harry Potter - is not exactly simple. So, since this is my first post on the matter of the blood imagery since the series has become a "closed corpus" more properly open for interpretive discourse, I will try to set out here some clearly delineated thoughts ... in other words to simplify the blood image a little for easier digetsion ("sorry, mate - just couldn't resist" - couldn't resist the vampire pun on mentally digesting the image of the blood).

First, I see this whole thing in terms of 3 things:

1. Plot Element/mechanics/rubrics: The blood image as it functions as en element in the plot of the Harry Potter works is defined only by its being a carrier specifically of the protection Lily afforded Harry (and I had to use the word "rubrics" of course, because it means read- the red of the blood and the red of the Rubedo stage of alchemy).

(All of this plays a role for me in the definitions I have in mind, and may get around eventually to writing up on here, of what makes Rowling's work so great and how it works so well, that the "working out" does not happen only on the symbolic/meaning/image level, that it also works like it should work on the mechanical/rubrical level. This was the case with the way the Expelliarmus spell worked on both the symbolic level AND on the mechanical level, where she made sure to tie out everything securely, and here on the blood image the same thing is true. This all ties into my concept of literature as "incarnational" - that the author cannot just make the "meaning" tie out in "Deus Ex Machina" fashion, but should have a real "participation" between the meaning and the mechanical, the magical and the muggle, the divine and the human, the spiritual and the material - not a conflation of the two as allegory does, but a participation as you find in good symbolist literature [part of the reason is that this thus frees it up to be truly symbolist, and not merely allegorical, because it can thus incorporate realms of "realist" literature])

2. Image Source: The blood image, in the Judeo Christian tradition, has specific a images source, in which, in Biblical Hebraic thought, it is the carrier of the soul, the nephesh.

3. Meaning: Given what has been drawn out of the Potter books in research on the ways that certain Jewish concepts worked into the medeival European imagination (the material that Rowling would have studied as a classics major at Exeter) through medieval Jewry (2 examples: Delahie's paper on Jewish name magic, first instance around 11th century in Prague, in connection with the fear of Voldy's name in the wizarding world ... and what we have talked about before on this site in the Semitic origins of the "abracadabra" term and connections with Avada Kedavra as a killing curse) , combined with Rowling's comments on the "ridiculous amount" of research she did for these books, I would would say that the blood-soul connection is VERY likely to be in the meaning of the blood imagery in the books (what it, as a symbol, symbolizes), at the very least on the subconscious level, if not on the fully concscious level (but I think the latter is entirely possible, just don't know of any interview evidence to support it or anything like that).

On with the Show

The upshot of this is, I am not saying the blood technically functions as a horcrux in the story, that it carries a bit of Harry's soul into Voldy (which would be to conflate points 1 and 2). But I AM saying that I think that the close connection provided in text, in one of Dumbledore's statements that links/compares the borrowed blood and the horcruxes, or at least the scar-crux, between blood and horcrux images, combined with the Semitic concepts of connection between blood and soul, means that the blood-soul connection is part of the meaning of the image as a literary element, part of what it symbolizes.

In short, while the blood is not materially/mechanically a horcrux in the story, I do think the horcrux imagery informs the meaning of the blood imagery in the books (and vice versa, but I am not going to go into developing that here)

Specifics

Point 1

"He took your blood believing it would strengthen him. He took into his body a tiny part of the enchantment your mother laid upon you when she died for you. His body keeps her sacrifice alive, and while that enchantment survives, so do you and so does Voldemort's one last hope for himself." (DH 710)

Plain and simple, the main function of the blood as a material element of the story/plot is to carry the enchantment protection. Under point 3 I will list another place in text that I think affects the blood image on the level of meaning, but for here we must say that this is the official text explication of the material/physical mechanics of that particular blood in the story ... to carry the enchantment and keep it alive.

Point 2

The point 3 general description above is where I actually alluded to the connection of this stuff with Rowling and her work, but here I will just give a basic rundown of the material I stated in brief in point 2 - In Hebraic thought in the Jewish Scriptures (our Christian Old Testament) the blood is the carrier of the soul. In Hebrew this is that the dam carries the nephesh. Here the best way to think of soul/nephesh is not strictly identical with the way we think of "soul" and "spirit" - as "not material." The nephesh is the "animating life force" of a body. After the flood Noah is told that the flesh of animals is licit to eat, but is commanded not to eat meat that still has its "life blood" in it, the blood that carries the life force. A "soul" in this sense is actually quite far from being "immaterial" since it is defined by animating a material body.

The "materiality" is especially evident in the way that Hebraic thought came up with words for abstract concepts like soul) I am pretty sure I gvae some of this in another post or comment recently but I will do it again here just to have this post complete so nobody, including me right now :), has to go rummaging around aimlessly). In Biblical Hebrew vocabulary the words for abstract things of this nature come from body parts, such as the word for "mercy" being originally the word for a woman's womb. In many cases the connection is made through human actions of the body, for instance the word for "anger" being originally the word for "nostrils" - most likely because the nostrils flare in anger. The word "nephesh" for "soul" is originally the word for "throat" - and two possible connections inter-play here: one is the throat as the origin of voice and therefor communication, and the other is the jugular vein as the most ready way to kill by letting blood, which is the usual way to kill for ritual sacrifice.

(Note: along these cultic lines note the prevalence of the silver dagger image. The silver dagger, as we have noted in HBP, comes from potions making. It is the instrument with which Dumbledore lets his own blood for the blood-tribute ritual in the cave, and it is also the instrument by which Bellatrix kills Dobby).

Point 3

So, on the level of meaning, one of the things I always look for is conjunctions of images that are not strictly dictated dictated by the material logic of the physical plot (in which case, when such conjunctions they function together not as much strictly as images as properly symbolic, but as images as mechanical plot elements, and then it is the plot that is the symbolic element - it is not as much the images as iconic that are the symbolic as it is the movement itself of the plot that is symbolic).

"without meaning to, as you know, Lord Voldemort doubled the bond between you when he returned to human form. A part of his soul was still attached to yours, and thinking to strengthen himself, he took a part of your mother's sacrifice into himself" (DH 710)

The first part is the scar-crux and the second part is of course the blood ... and right after this DD refers to this all as "this two-fold connection." My basic argument is that such close conjunction of the blood image and the scarcrux image places already existing connections between blod and soul, and connections in a source that Rowling, if not consciously knowledgable of, then at least in some way hevaily affect by (Jewish/Hebraic thought coming into medeival European thought via a place Rowling is particularly concerne with - magic such as Jewish name magic, the abracadabra talisman and the like) - places this already existing connection as prime candidate for being heavily wrapped up in the meaning of the blood image in Rowling's work.

Beyond that, point 3, the meaning, is actually a new subsection of this post called ...

Blood Simple

Basically, blood is, I think, in the Potter books, strongly an image that combines the soul as loving with the soul as suffering. It symbolizes, I think, the fact that it is the same act of making your self, your soul, vulnerable in love that also makes you capable of suffering. This is what I think is the core of that speech ... your suffering so greatly at the death of Sirius, your feeling like you are going to bleed to death from the pain of it, is the very thing that shows how greatly human you are, how much you are able to love.

(Recall the blood tribute ritual in HBP in the cave: Voldy thinks letting your own blood will make you weaker, but then that is how he lost his body in the first place on that night in Godric's Hollow, thinking that Lily's entire letting of her own blood/life made her completely powerless to protect Harry ... man was he wrong on that one - and Dumbledore knows that the ability to let your own blood, to suffer willingly for love of another, is actually the most powerful magic in the world because it is what makes you truly human [human in the way Christ redefined, or rather transfigured, humanity in His death and resurrection]).

All the blood images: Krum with a broken nose and 2 swollen black eyes, having lost the match they were already well on their way to losing anyway, but showing his unique talent in attaining the snitch; Hermione and Harry baptized in the blood of Grawp, the innocent giant who stumbled into the wrong clearing at the wrong time just looking for his brother (who just happens to be the "red character" of the series and has one of the biggest hearts in all the books)and happy to see a feminine face he recognized who might be able to help and got a face full of arrows from a bunch of nagging centaurs who couldn't work out their differences with Dumbledore; the thestrals who save the day drawn by the blood; the 12 uses of dragon's blood; Voldy using Harry's blood; Petunia as Lily's last blood relative (and the separation that it caused in blood for one sister to be born muggle and one magical); Umbridge's sadistically sinister quill (which, interestingly gives Harry his second permanent scar, which is mentioned and which he brandishes at several very pointed instances to Scrimgeour, once in the "A Very frosty Christmas" chapter of HBP and then "For the second time, he raised his right fist and displayed to Scrimgeour the scars that still showed white on the back of it, spelling I must not tell lies" [DH 131] ... twice, once in each of the 2 final books, the last 2 of the final condensed 5-6-7 trilogy, having gotten the scars in the first book of that trilogy, the scar received in the opening of the trilogy like the scar received in the opening of the series, received from a woman drawn to a horcrux, received by her forcing him to draw his own blood ... just the opposite pairing of the first scar, received being protected by a woman repulsed by and defiant to the death to the master of the horcruxes ...); Harry feeling like he is going to bleed to death from the pain of caring so much; the hot trickle of blood in the back of Harry's throat from Malfoy stomping on his nose as he lays in Malfoy's full body bind on the train; Harry walking into the start of term feast still covered in all that blood, Dumbledore striking blood from his own hand withered by the curse on a horcrux ...

All of this in the series (and probably much more could be catalogued) I think points to that meaning in the image: that the horcrux image informs the blood image along the lines of the Hebraic thought on blood as carrier of the soul, and makes the blood imagery a VERY central one in the series.

Epilogue on Souls

I am only going to touch this very briefly (meaning only this once) and make one simple statement on it because far too much blood/ink has been spilt on it already ... but there is a comment to be made here on the issue of "Bi-partite" (body - soul/spirit) vs "Tri-Partite" (body - soul - spirit) anthroplogy. And that comment is NOT "Bi-partite is right." The statement is, as I have tried to say before, that the "part" langauge is really not the best to use when speaking of the human person. While we cannot avoid "part" in our world and there is something genuinely to be gained form language of "substantiality" - because we are creatures of substances and thus the language does reflect something real in us - we are not defined by solely this language, especially when it comes to the mysterious and mystical marriage of spirit and flesh, which was radicalized in the Incarnation. the statement is that the mark, I think, of truly good literature is when it bears witness to the how mystical is this mystery of the human persons we are.

I think in Rolwing we see a pretty good example of such quality in literature- as I have said, some of her use of images fits tripartite and some of it fits bipartite, and sometimes in the same image/text we see the ambiguity that points to the mystery.

Snape: "Souls? We were talking of minds!"
Dumbledore: "In the case of Harry and Lord Voldemort, to speak of one is to speak of the other."
(DH 685)

Notice that dumbledore does NOT say "in the case ... they are the same thing." But if to speak of one is to speak of the other, are they not the same thing? The language is ambiguous, and I think the power of Rowling's art here lies in the ambiguity because it points to the mystery of the matter. If to speak of one is to speak of the other then "materially" they would be the same thing - but reality is not defined solely by the physically material, as materialists would have it. Some would say that all of this is simply "arguing about semantics" - but I would quote Chesterton (I think) - "Of course we are arguing over words, what else is there over which to argue?" Language and linguistics and semantics and syntax and all of that is what we use to convey meaning to one another (we have already looked at, in the post on Snape's memories, the very real difference it makes for Snape whether you are speaking of "the son of Lily Evans" or "Potter's son" ... but we enter there into one of those "sticky" subjects over which "conservatives" and "liberals," "traditionalists" and "post-moderns" etc love to figth each other hatefully - whether or not the "linguistic turn" of continental philosophy in the early 20th century, and its development of concepts of the role of subjectivity in "meaning," was simply a turn to "subjectivism" ... and all I would offer there is Dumbledore's/Rowling's words: "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" [DH 723]).

Personally my concept of the matter is that "mind" is a mode of soul (mens a mode of anima, nous a mode of psyche), just as "intellect" is an aspect of "spirit" (intellectus an aspect of spiritus, cf Augustine's psychological model of the Trinity - for a more readily understandable synopsis of it read Frank Sheeds Theology for Beginners). I also think that "human soul" (intellectual soul versus merely vegetative soul or animal/sensate soul) is a unique mode of existence of spirit, that affects it qualitatively ... although even there I have to step away from the mystery in respect because large questions arise for the question of the Incarnation - corrollary to the questions into which Appolinarius ran and had his teaching condemned at the coucnil in Constantinople in 381 AD/CE.

The question might arise here whether or not that statement, that to speak of one is to speak of the other, applies only to Harry and Voldy via some unique element in the story, and whether the passage indicates that everywhere else we are talking about 3 "parts" to the human person (in other words, that dumbledore's statement on Harry and Voldy cannot be taken as implying anything fir a general anthropology). The first thing I would note is that even if Snape would not be the first to admit it, Dumbledore would readily jump out of his seat to point out that he and Snape do not kow everything on the matter and even in what they do know they are not infallible. I would think that with the amount of self-deprication there is in the text by Dumbledore, it would not be too hard to establish that this principle of "not infallible" always enters concretely into anything Dumbledore says, although not necessarily always postively stated. And I would say that DD would probably be the first to say it ("not infallible) about anyone and everyone when it comes to the level under discussion here.

"What you must understand, Harry, is that you and Lord Voldemort have journeyed together in realms of magic hitherto unknown and untested ." (DH 710)

If magic is about what it is to be human, the potentials of the mystery hidden within our very beings, within our very bones (the "magical within the muggle" in the "real world") ... then such magical "inter-loping" (I love that word, "inter-lope," and I love using it in this seemingly unconventional way here ... for the journey really does spring from Voldy trespassing, and it is genuinely evil trespassing, but at the same time we human beings are also built for, not that level of trespass, but for always inter-loping in each other's lives in some way ... and my interest in the worst, of course, went through the roof, being a huge fan of Pirates of the Caribbean as I am, when I looked up "interlope" on dictionary.com and found that the word developed in England and was "first recorded around 1590 in connection with the Muscovy Company, the earliest major English trading company (chartered in 1555), was soon being used in connection with independent traders competing with the East India Company (chartered in 1600) as well") - such journeying is about going further and further into what really makes us human, what it is to be human the way all of us are human.

Psychic Invasion and Personality-Disorder-Mort

2007-07-31T03:38:00.000-04:00

So, This is the post where I try to demonstrate that I was correct on my theory that what the Avada Kedavra curse is is radical psychic invasion, and that this is based in a wand being a unique channel - show that this was born out in the text of Deathly Hallows.

(Oh, as a SIDE NOTE: before I forget, on wands and non-wand magic: I was wrong about apparition being non-wand magic - it appears from DH, unless I am wrong, and somebdoy can correct me if I am, that a witch or wizard cannot apparate without a wand in hand, hence Harry's command to Ron in Malfoy manner to "catch and go" as he tosses him a wand [DH474 ... dangerous thing about looking up text details is the temptation to get sucked in again, to just start reading and not stop :) ] ... but from what Voldy said in GOF, possession is non-wand magic (the one "power" left to him after he lost his body, and thus the use of his wand. I suspect that potions is similar to apparition, that it does not utilize the wand for a spell but is necessary for a wizard or witch to do the magic of potions making, but I don't know about brooms, although I would not be surprised to find the same being true. I still maintain a difference though, concerning the wand as symbol - that potions and apparation "rub Harry the wrong way" because of the very fact that, while requiring the presence of the symbolic element, the wand, they do not emphasize the symbolic element by employing it directly in a spell, a verbal recitation almost like creedal statements. A broom, though, as I said, is itself a symbolic element of the transcendant)

Anyway, on the presence of psyche in magic:

1. Scarcrux Theory Proven Right

DH 686: "On the night Lord voldemort tried to kill him, when Lily cast down her own life between them as a shield, the Killing Curse rebounded upon Lord Voldemort, and a fragment of Voldemort's soul was blasted apart from the whole, and latched itself onto the only living soul left in that collapsing building."

Now, this was obviously a pretty decisive confirmation of the scar-as-horcrux theory (just as the fact that Harry was able to read Voldemort's thoughts that showed not the slightest inclination that the ring or the locket had ever even been sought, let alone acquired and destroyed, was a sure coffin nail to the "scar-o-scope" theory), but my interest here is with the implications for the psychic invasion quality of the AK. Basically, I believe the evidence is inconclusive but points in a certain direction, that of the AK as psychic invasion. I do not think it inappropriate that the evidence is inconclusive ... I would not expect a full scale exposition of the psychic-physics aspects ... otherwise this would be a textbook and not a story.

But in fact I would even say that the evidence is decisively inconclusive, indicatinn possibly a concrete desire for the matter not to be able to be decided conclusively. The "rubrics" given are that the soul portion wnet looking for another soul to latch onto and found the only living soul left around, Harry (IE, this in and of itself would point simply to a portion torn through murder and then it seeking a home when the rest of Voldy's soul was no longer accessible through a body, which is the definition of a "living soul" - that it is animating a body and accesible to other souls through that body). So, why do I say I think the evidence points in the direction of the wand being a channel of individual psychic energy and the AK as psychic invasion by that route? Well, the first thing to note is what I think would be the reason for the author desiring that the matter not be able to be pinned down entirely ... this is VERY dark magic we are talking about, and there is something to Dumbledore's prohibition on books containing such dark magic as horcruxes - that even knowledge of details of such things taints the person somewhat. I think it is a mark of goodness on Dumbledore's part that he makes the guess the way he does, that he does not speak of, and maybe does not even allow himself to think out the ... but I think the lacunae leave a trace trail of the reality of the thing (or at least that is what I am trying to argue for)

Here are the missing pieces I would suggest. First, we know that murder rends the soul, but we are not given anymore (again, that thing of a certain taint in having too much knowledge of evil things). I believe that is tears the soul because the soul is involved so intimately in it ... all murder is, I think, an assertion of one person's identity over another's to the point of the exclusion of the latter's from the world of the living, and I think the AK as a psychic invasion of the same effect through a wand-cast spell is a symbolization of this.

Secondly, I don't think that soul portion had to go searching "blindly" for another soul to latch onto ... I think it had a "trace" to follow: the psychic path of the AK itself when cast, that led right to Harry. If it had had to go searching "blindly," what would have kept it from eventually dissipating? All the other soul portions in the Horcruxes disappear when the object is destroyed ... if the AK itself and the intended victim of the murder, and possibly also involving the intention in the soul already to create a Horcux from the murder, why did it seek another object and latch onto a soul, when the soul in the locket did not seek to attach to Ron or Harry when Ron stabbed the locket with the sword?

2. The Wand Thing

DH 711 (Dumbledore's explanation of the wand in King's Cross):
"I believe your wand imbibed some of the power and quality of Voldemort's wand that night, which is to say that it contained a little bit of voldermort himself. So your wand recognized him when he pursued you, recognized a man who was both kin and mortal enemy."

"Imbibed some of the power and quality of Woldemort's wand"
=
"contained a little bit of Voldemort himself."

I think any wand in general is always "familiar" with the particular psyche because it is always channeling the particular person's psychic energy ... but a person like Voldy, for whom the AK is as much a "signature shot" as the XP becomes for Harry - then the wand picking up "a bit of Voldy himself" is very characteristic if the wand is by nature a channel of specifically psychic energy and the AK is specifically psychic invasion.

So, there you have it in a nutshell, the reasons I think my interpretation of "wand magic" as the channeling of psychic energy and the AK as specifically psychic invasion is the most consonant explanation of the meaning within the text in these areas.

Personality-Disorder-Mort

But the issue of Voldy's soul raises all kinds of questions, especially for those of us who read Voldy as anti-social personality disorder. For one ... no backstory on any dementors involved in any statement on any childhood history of voldy and how his soul got the way it was when he started ripping it up and making horcruxes. I still think this is a possibility and one that is consonanst with many other things in the texts, but now that it is a closed corpus it officially falls outside the realm of "interpretation of the text" (unless Rowling happens to write anymore "canon" on the matter, such as in the encyclopedia she has talked about) - it can only be, at least for present, a new imaginative creation of.

Of course, I would note again that it can be very, I think, consonant with the text because the text does not preclude it ... the text simply does not go there. Well, the consonance is I think also coming from elements of places the text does go ... but what I am going to address here is another matter, which is the significance of the fact hat the text does not go there in particular.

Is Voldy a APDo? Is he culpable for what he is doing? Or was he already "so far gone" from the effects of whatever nature or nurture was there in and acting upon him from an age before the age of reason, to the extent that, while what he does is evil, his culpability is lessened. I definitely think there is enough textual evidence to indict at least half the ministry of magic of serious moral flaws in the events since Harry was born, but what of Voldy himself? The text simply does not answer that question ... but it does show Harry trying one thing, suggesting remorse to Riddle. And that one particular thing relates morally culpable actions.

But I do not think this proves the matter - I think it is still the case of the text not going there. What I do think it brings through very powerfully is the "predicament" of such things as personality disorders, and also their "murkiness." I have tried for a while now to pin down certain "definitions," or at least to see if they can be pinned down. And as a "layman" investigating, the best that I can come up with is that the scientific understanding of such psychological malady is that any of the definitions of specific disorders really connotes a combination of various factors including bio-chemical factors (psychiatry/nature), psychological behavior conditioning factors (nurture) and even the impact of volitional action. Beyond that it seems to me there is no "ironclad" litmus test to be able to say "you are x." Certain cases are drastic enough to say with clarity that a person is bi-polar etc. But things such as bi-polar are a spectrum of different mixtures of the factors I just talked about. In cases of full blown mania etc - yes, if the guy is trying to jump off the building not because he wants to die but because he thinks he can fly ... he's full blown manic state. But for many people with bi-polar etc, it is not this clear cut (I have a friend with some relatives who are definitley bi-polar, one legitimately diagnosed and hsopitalized once or twice for manic episode).

In all of these though, as far as I understand it, it is always mixtures of factors in varying degrees - certain physiological condition certainly contirbute, but there is no blood test that can tell you, in and of itself without a trained psychatrist investigating the other factors, the psychological factors, "yep you'r ethis count is here and your that count is there and therefore you are technically, verifiably, quantifiably X personality disorder and not culpable for your actions." I believe that the cause and the cure mirror each other and go hand in hand. Is the source of Voldy's "malady" a purely "external" one such as physiological, bio-chemical factors (that is "external" to the volitional qualities of "spirit") that could be symbolized

The murkiness of the cause is concommitant with the further question of the cure - how much culpability there is, how much culpable volition has entered into the matter, and therefore how much the answer is maybe medications to (in my experience, including talking to regular psychaitrists, IE those working the field of prescriving medications, and not just people with "an opoinion" on the matter, the answer is never just medication alone), and to what degree is something like exhortation to repent or "try some remorse" the answer. As I said these things vary ... it seems that sometimes the "external" factors such as nature and nurture have exercised such force on the person during formational years that very little volitional is left. but I think the thing with Harry and Voldemort is that while a person walks upon this earth the will still operates at least in some capacity, and in that situation in the great hall Harry has an obligation at least to make that appeal ... at least to suggest remorse on the chance, no matter how slim or "outside" the chance may seem or be, that the appeal will strike a chord with a person like Voldy. In the case of, say, personally disorders, as I was saying in dicussing the whole annulment thing, the impact of whatever mix of factors there are (nature, nature, habituation of choices) may have damaged the person to the point where they simply are not capable of giving themselves the way that is necessary for marriage, and this would thus provide a "deriment" to sacramental marriage. But the person still can use there will to get into counseling and to work with the St Mungo's staff of healers, as it were (whatever combination of psychiatrists, psychologists, pastors, spiritual directors, priests etc) ... and maybe at some point work back into the capability of making that gift of self in that way.

That is how I read Harry's suggestion to Riddle that he try some remorse: "I don't even pretend to be able even to begin to understand what point you are at or how damaged you are [although that thing in the King's Cross chapter was pretty bad] ... but as long as you are still here in this world, why not at least take the last chance you have left and at least do what you can to cooperate with healing?" It doesn't answer the question "Is Voldy APDo to the levelof not being culpable?" - rather it symbolizes how murky the question is but also tries to at least give a little pointer in the direction of something that might at least possibly help, might at least hold some possibility of helping a person in a bad state to focus on getting help. There may not be much hope, it may be like Gandalf in the 3rd LotR movie: "hope? there never was much hope ... just a fool's hope" ... but it's what you got to go on.

Somebody I was talking to once, discussing these kind of things, said there is an addage: "I'm not responsible for my addiction, but I am responsible for my recovery."

The Weight of Glory

2007-07-31T01:50:00.000-04:00

In my "manifesto" on chiasm I proposed a 2-4-6 chiasm based on the famous first potions class statement of "bottling fame, brewing glory and stoppering death." At the end of this post I will include that original material in this one, basically that book 2 has "bottling fame" (Lockheart), and book 6 has "stoppering death" (as was basically proven right in DH, and again, my peevesish hat is off in deepest respect for those who nailed that one), but the center of that chiasm, the intepretive crux, is "brewing glory" in book 4 (the issue of Cedirc heroically turning down "the kind of glory Hufflepuff had not seen in centuries").

As I said, I'll copy and paste that whole section of that post in the end of this one, but for this part I wish to discuss/establish 2 things. The first is that Glory is not the same thing as Fame. Actually Lockheart demonstrates that best of all in book 2. What he has is fame, but for things he didn't actually do. Glory is a weighter concept. It is not just reknown, it is actual power. Seeking power in and of itself is not intrinsically a bad thing, depending on the power. Power is simply the ability to do certain things ... and if they are good things that you are in your right place to be doing, then you having that power is intrinsically a good thing (although it can, of course, become circumstantially bad). But to seek Glory/power for it's own sake can be even more dangerous than Lockheart's seeking fame in book 2 ... that is to say it is a larger game going on when we are speaking of not just fame, but of glory/power (in only one entity is power and fame, or rather name, the same thing - where the name is so powerful that those of the religion in which it was originally revealed do not even speak or write it anymore except in official editions of the Torah, not even in siddur editions [prayer book] of the Torah, YHWH ... and the "name above all other names in Christianity," Jesus Christ ... although many have tried for the power of the Name, like the "men of the name" born of the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men" in Genesis 6, or those who built the tower of Balel in Genesis 11, seeking "to make a name for themselves").

So point # 2 is: exactly how crucial does glory wind up being? Does book 7 reveal that glory was as crucial for the series as book 4 as in intepretive cruxt would seem to indicate that it should be?

Dumbledore: "I was gifted, I was brilliant. I wanted to escape. I wanted to shine. I wanted glory." (DH 715).

First, this is DD's explanation of his "great flaw" in larger wizard history, the way that he contributed to Grindewald becoming who he became (not "making" him become that, but how he was blinded to the path G was going down and thus did nothing to influence away from it, but if anything encouraged it at that time). These are some potentially very loaded issues with regard to Voldy, for DD really was capable of not only fame, but real glory, real heavy power. Following DD's work with G on the hallows G actually gets the wand. Then DD, because he is truly capable of that power and glory, gets the wand ... and if not for the little bit of "luck" with Draco being the one to win the wand from DD's hand and Harry unseating Draco as the master of the wand, it seems to me an open question whether or not DD would have been unable to accomplish the power of the wand dying with him. Is Voldy correct in thinking that, even after death, if his taking of the wand from the dead masters hand was against the wishes of the master in life, then the wand would recognize him as master? (this is his rebuttal to Harry's point that Snape was the master of the wand because of the agreeance he and DD had on the death). It seems unclear to me ... I am not sure Voldy is not correct on that one. In which case, DD's original seeking of glory led down a path that put the most pwerful wand in the world in the hand of WORST person in the world to let have it (if not for that little bit of "luck" with Draco). A dangerous game to play.

Anyway, here is the section on the 2-4-6 fame-glory-death chiasm:

The First Potions Class chiasm: Bottling Fame, Brewing Glory and Stoppering DeathThis is officially a 2-4-6 chiasm but I am putting it here in this final section because it comes from the first potions class with Snape (the famous quote from book 1, which many have noted is quoted 7 times in HBP ... another tidbit of support: in one of these chapters in GOF it notes that Harry got a bad mark in potions for forgetting a key ingredient ... a bezoar), which would place it at the beginning of the series, thus making it a neat bookend with the next and final chiasm I will note, which contains a hazarded prediction and, thus, concerns the closing of the series.

So, what are our elements? Well, this one is officially going to support the "stoppered death" theory of HBP, on which so many people have commented that it is difficult for me to pull right out off the top of me head (or even from the sea of posts online, or maybe even figure out at all) whose it was originally (although, here I think Felicity gives the answer, a commentor named Cathy who was a co-moderator with John Granger on a class on Barnes and Noble University online in 2005, I think that is reading Felicity's post rightly ... but it is a bit late right now and I am feeling a bit like the "part of the ship" Jack Sparrow in the brig of the Flying Dutchman in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 ... "Wait! nobody move! ... I dropped me brain!" - not trusting my noggin right now ... good thing I have saved editing this essay for tomorrow lol).

But here is the basic run-down. In book 2 Lockheart "bottles fame" in that he takes it by, shall we say, "bottling it away" from those who earned it - getting them to tell their stories to him and then obliviating their memories so they don't know it is complete bunk when they read his books about how he did the things, rather than them. Obviously the book 6 element is not yet confirmed but strongly suspected by all (including me ... I am happily bumping along on the bandwagon here in the Bronx), that one way or another Dumbledore was stoppering his own death all the way through HBP, either by the help of Snape or by elixir of life etc. So, that leaves book 4 with the middle term: brewing glory. Glory is a very central concern in GOF, especially after Harry has been chosen as a champion, and especially to the Hufflepuffs. The "Weighing of the Wands" chapter could almost be a precursor to the "long dark tea time of the soul" of book 5 (a title I have stolen unapologetically from Douglas Adams, that, in my usage here, employs the angst of the fiasco with Cho in Madame Puddyfoot's tea shop in book 5 as a symbol of the book being "the long dark night of the soul" of teenage, romantic coming-of-age emotions)

... "The next few days were some of Harry's worst at Hogwarts" (GOF 295), and the glory "brewed" by the tournament is a big part of that, especially with the house of Helga. "It was plain that the Hufflepuffs felt that Harry had stolen their champions glory; a feeling exacerbated by the fact that Hufflepuff house very rarely got any glory ... " (GOF 293 ... Glory mentioned twice in one sentence, and the end of the sentence connects this passage and chapter to the chiasm of seekers I noted above: "and that Cedric was one of the few who had ever given them any [glory], having beaten Gryffindor once at Quidditch." [meaning the match the previous year, the same one Katie Bell mentioned in the common room just the night before this scene]).

Snape's Most Guarded Memory and Luck

2007-07-30T01:52:00.000-04:00

So, I am "back in the saddle" for a bit here. Some hectic things in life here in the Bronx have made it difficult to get time to write - including pulling of a move. But also, when I can and can't write her at the security desk varies ... they have instituted a new position of a second person on night tour at the dispatch desk, but only 4 nights a week. When she is here, and thus 2 of us at the desk, I can't really write ... but her schedule is at variance with mine: I work the same 4 nights every week and she works 4 on-4 off. So this week the timing runs around to that my 4 nights on are exactly her 4 nights off so I will be sitting the desk by myself all 4 nights, so maybe I will get caught up on some of the things I want to say on Deathly Hallows (including some comments on other comments on the last few posts, so check back there and there is probably some follow up).

This first one is pretty simple and doesn't even really require much text support (although I throw some things in to help out :) ) - the general plot revelations are prominent enough to stand on their own. It is that I think that the "Snape's worst Memory" chapter in OotP is intentionally misleading. I think Snape "front-loaded" the penseive with that memory to protect the ones he REALLY does not want Harry to see ... which are the ones we see in Deathly Hallows. It seems highly improbable that Snape would not put those later-revealed memories in the penseive, and I think that no matter what, Snape would be mad if Harry dived into his thoughts in the penseive ... and genuinely mad ... and genuinely does not want him to do so and genuinely tries to prevent it from happening. But I think that just on the odd chance that something comes up and Harry does go diving, especially as Snape has such a dim view of Harry's inheriting his father's arrogance, Snape protected the valuable memories with another that is "special" in a way I'll describe momentarily.

In short, while I think Snape genuinely does not want Harry to go snooping and is genuinely angry, I don't think everything was exactly as it appeared. In a way he simultaneously protects the memories we find in DH, probably making sure that memory of the OWLs is a long one (and more on that in a mo') to give as much time as possible for Snape to return in the unfortunate event that Harry, well, that he does what he does, but he also sort of sets Harry up to "reap the rewards" of his arrogance if he does what he does. That memory is, I think, in Snape's mind, potentially a way of showing Harry "you think your father was so great? Here have a look at what he was really like, Potter!"

Think about it ... was the section of the memory when they are actually in the test really something to be gaurded? And there is a pretty nice possible "cut-marker" there, when they leave the OWL and are outside for a time before to have shortened up the memory and made it less bulky for extraction if he had wanted. And the section before the actual attack on Snape? One question might be how those conversations between the marauder's was in Snape's memory if he was so intent on his test question (of course a possible answer is simply that this is, after all, magical revelation, and goes beyond the "normal scope of intentionality" - but I also think the answer I propose here is equally possible). I think teenage Snape was not as intent on his parchment as he seemed - that he was avidly listening to what he could over-hear of that conversation with loathing for the four-some, as well as glancing sidelong with loathing at Sirius' casual manner on the test (that same kicking back the chair on the back legs as he does in 3 12 Grimmauld Place when they are at each other as adults) ... and that, in addition to lengthening out the memory to give him more time to get back on the scene in the event the opportunity arises and Harry goes delving where he has no right, it also provides a chance to say "here, Potter, let me give you a REALLY full dose of whatyour father and his buddies were REALLY like! Just like you snooping around in my thoughts in the penseive."

In short, Snape is a pretty crafty fellow and I think he sort of "booby-trapped" the pensieve in the event that Harry has opportunity to snoop and takes it (I'm not saying I think Harry is a snooping gossip etc, but you have to admit that that is the way Snape would see it given his history with James and Sirius and Harry's likeness to the former and affinity for the latter), in addition to giving himself some more time, in that event, to protect the really vital stuff.

I'm not saying Snape had a good reason for ditching Harry 's lessons (and the following behavior in potions class is obviously a case of giving into vindictive attitude) ... but I also do think there is more at stake here than simply what we get the impression of when Dumbledore says "my word, Severus, that I shall never reveal the best of you?" (DH 679). If Harry had seen those memories he sees in DH, but back in book 5 before Voldy has become afraid of the connection, a lot could have been jeapordized ... both the mission AND Severus' life. He has put himself VERY much in harm's way and if Voldy gets access to those memories by them entering Harry's memory in the penseive ... well that is a fine thank you for risking so much to protect Harry (even given that fact that there is some variance in that motivation - that Snape's motivation is more to protect "Lily Potter's son" than to protect "Harry Potter" ... but as we see with Narcissa Malfoy, the desire to protect child is, even when "lopsided," by nature an intrinsically good desire and thus more open to working in concert with the "greater good" [when Narcissa helps Harry fake being dead, and thus undo Voldy, even though her question reveals that she is primarily interested in in Draco's well being ... that whole fingernails in the chest thing, RIGHT over the heart, is a VERY interesting characterization moment on Narcissa, which is one of the reason's I love Rowling's work so much - the way she draws her characters, here the converse to the slightest haughty disdain we see in the third sister's face when Harry mistakes her for Bellatrix at first glance early on]).

But here is one final consideration ... as I discussed in another post, Occlumency never winds up working - at least as it is supposed to do (as Draco is able to do it in HBP) - and winds up, in the end, not being the answer. Harry himself learns his own path of shutting out those visions when he need sto concentrate, when he needs to be in the moment of his here and now ("Harry's scar burned in the silence, but he made a supreme effort to keep himself present, not to slip into Voldemort's mind." [DH 452]; "He was gliding around the high walls of the black fortress - No, he was Harry, tied up and wandless, in grave danger." [DH 453]) while at other times utilizing them. But even before this he winds up not only with the link operating full force, but fully possessed by Voldy, at the end of OotP ... and his love is powerful enough that voldy cannot bear it. And here in DH many many times the connection and the visions help them to progress in an informed way rather than quite so blindly. So, if snape had succeeded in teaching Harry proper occlumency, things might have been much different. We cannot, of course say that this was intentional wisdom on snape's part, but it was ... lucky.

I once heard Jospeh Pearce speak on Tolkien and he addressed the question of why, if Tolkien was such a profound Christian writer, was there no "God" in Lord of the Rings. Pearce answered that while there is no "God" character in the LOTR (although we know there is in the Silmarillion), there IS a distinctly strong sense of providence. Now, I do not pretend that this element is present in Rowling's work in anywhere near as concrete a way as in Tolkien's. But I do think that there is some sense of a transcendant benevolence in the world, if one is willing to cooperate with it.

In a lot of other works I would tend to say that luck is just luck, maybe even in some cases evidence of chaos theory - but not here in Rowling's work. Quite simply put she has spent too much time developing the theme ... most notedly in the "Felix Felicis" material in HBP. But even here, in DH, you can get a sense of the general tendency towards benevolence that luck has (towards what is truly good for a person, beyond just what a person wants, although when a person has a strong will for evil and uses something like felix felicis I think they can bend luck to their service, but it is more like an enslavement of luck rather than it's true nature) in how much voldy detests it: "I have been careless, and so have been thwarted by luck and chance, those wreckers of all but the best laid plans" (DH 7).

In a way, at the very least, the "happy side of chaos theory" is that luck and chance are the great levelers of the uneven odds that people like Voldy build up for themselves. In a way they are, in a work like the Potter series, the objective world's mirror of free will in the subjective world of acting persons ... the refusal to be enslaved (and in the Christian world-view, God is not interested in slaves but in children ... of course the inter-play between free will and the fact that we need Grace to choose the good remains, as it it ever has been in our world, a mystery).

I think that the fact that Snape's actions have a "lucky" outcome is a point in his favor, even if he has been quite the heel and much less than charitable at certain points.

Structure

Just a final note on structure in the series, in light of all the time I have spent on this site developing the concepts of ancient literature stucturing devices such as chiasm. It seems an apt place to do so here because I am tying together book 5 and book 7 material. there are a lot of common elements between the two books that maybe at some point I will try to catalog 9or as they say in fancy academic terms "compose a taxonomy of"). For here I just want to propose that while I still fully subscribe to chiasm as the primary meta-structure of the series (although, who knows, rowling may well heartily disagree with me on its primacy :) ), I think this is one of those structures that operates alongside/within it (like the books 3 and 7 connection of the shrieking shack, which I will here freely admit Red Hen nailed really nicely, and my Peevesish hat is off to RH in true admiration ... although it was more the pente-ulitimate and I must admit that I was quite happy that my theory of the GOF "graveyard lift" being repeated fit so nicely the death in the woods and then the elevation to a battle on a new plane or plateau, in the castle/great hall, with, interstingly, Narcissa's love of Draco acting a little bit like the phoenix song does in the GOF graveyard scene, not so much causing it, I guess, but definitely enabling it ... and then you have the nice use of our Rebudo character, Hagrid, as the "Paul Bearer" of sorts for the "taking it to the next level").

I do not think books 5 and 7 are the outer limits of a distinct chiasm, but I do think that with book 6 as a center point they form a distinctly discrete inclusio/ring-structure of the final 3 books, in the 4 book -3 book structure that I have described elswhere operating alongside the 7 element chiasm (4 cardinal virtues, 3 theological virtues etc and other numerological siginificances in 7 as the most magically powerful number).

so there you have it ... some more of my rambling thoughs on DH in hopefully not too awefully rambling style.

Merlin the Meandering