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The book is prepared by the professors, students and graduates from the philological faculty of Omsk F.M. Dostoyevsky State University. The authors' purpose is to find keys to J. Rowling's epopee, to prove that "Harry Potter" is a part of one continuous temporal current, a specimen of the Victorian text and highly important page of the secret "magic history" of Britain.
The authors' purpose is to find keys to/in J.Rowling's epopee, to prove that "Harry Potter" is a part of one continuous temporal current, a specimen of the Victorian text and highly important page of the secret "magic history" of Britain.
British university intellects of our age, still "obsessed by the voices", leave their academic field to wander in the heaths together with the ghosts, i.e. to write strange books touching upon about the same subjects since the times of Mother Goose and Oliver Goldsmith's sarcastic elegies. For us "Harry Potter" is a philological Stone. It was hard to discover it, but ever harder and more dangerous is to "possess" it. The main guiding principle of our work was, according to Byatt, to comprehend ‘emotionally’, intuitively the one you're studying, and then philology will appear as a method to experience illumination.
In "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" Mrs. Rabbit pours her son a cup of camomile tea - as he's a nervous "boy" of a 1901 pattern - the year of queen Victoria's death, the end of the epoch and the beginning of a brand new XXth century.
The name Peter refers both to Peter Pan, the leader of the "lost boys" in James Barrie's fairy tale, and to C.S.Lewis's Peter Pevensie. By the way, in the screen version of "The Chronicles of Narnia" this role was played by a young English actor William Peter Moseley who auditioned in one time to play Harry Potter - an example of a sign's circulation which is typical for the Victorian text. And the place of the inspiration for Miss Potter was a Lake District, sung by the romantic poet W.Wordsworth. The voice "of death and the beyond" might be borrowed from Wordsworth's poems: the night and owls' hooting open the most famous piece by the poet - «The Idiot Boy». Biographers tell that Beatrix finally managed to buy a country house in the Lake District where she worked in a field when the "nervous" and "pragmatic" boys went to First and later the Second World War.
Boys and Death, Boys and War - that's the axis of the "circulation" amongst the texts belonging to the different ages yet one Cycle, a united Victorian text. WWI (and later WWII which bore its reflection) is a dangerous adventure (a voyage, a flight, a journey to the Beyond), came true in 1914 and "rehearsed" in the fairy-tales written not long before the war. It's a very strange real experience when it's almost impossible to distinct the border between this experience itself and fiction.
It's not Miss Potter who "creates the archetypes", as Greene supposes, - they had already existed before in the fund of the Victorian text understood by the contemporary science as a supertextual phenomenon, the united text of the XIX century as a whole, with its background in the past. In modern fiction (such as "HP") it is represented by the archetypal ideas, images, certain substratum of spiritual and other spheres. Between Peter Rabbit, Pan, Pevensie, between Potter and Potter there is a perfect and subtle connection; they are related by their genesis and a common mystery.
Do you remember the night forest with the owls where fathers rabbits found themselves searching for their lost children? I recognized in this description an accurate replica of the introduction in Wordsworth's ballad "The Idiot Boy"(1798) - almost the main intertextual interpretant (according to M. Yampolsky) for the English literature of XIX – XXI c.; the most famous and yet the most controversial in the poet's heritage.
Wordsworth created not only a hurting archetype of A boy with an Owl (both an idiot and a bard; an oaf and a forest wizard) but also an image of the total impenetrability of the other/foreign world, however hard we try to possess it.
Personally, I am usually mostly interested by the same question about the "circulation of the texts": who is the prototype of Harry Potter - a boy with an owl? Or we are rather dealing with the Victorian archetype? Does Joanne Rowling know these keys?
In 1962 there took place the premiere of Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem": in six parts of the setting there were used nine poems by an outstanding English poet of WWI Wilfred Owen who was killed in 1918. He became famous only after the Second World War. William Plommer called him an eminent poet of the two world wars whose poems appealed to the sorrowful people of 1945 just as well as those of 1918.
As we've already said, griffindorian, or paternal element is secondary in the European culture (both as a social function and a symbolical paradigm). It's no wonder that the son of a witch inherits maternal gift. Woman's magic is an example of tautology. Apollo ("heavenly" male god) kills female Python (telluric mother goddess) to assume the whole sphere of the solar maternal perceptiveness, and first of all a gift of prophecy and inspiration.
The whole history of European civilization is a consequence of this murder which actually recoded the ancient mythological database. Feministic criticism, relying on the achievements of 19th-century so called feminine fiction is searching for its justification, though creativity is actually a primordial male problem. Due to the personal reasons (not only because of the literary tradition) Rowling imposes "Harry Potter" a "griffindorian" ending, but in this particular case the epilogue is just the acme of the strategy of survival. The text itself is maternal, from the beginning and till the end. The sword lying hidden at the bottom of the lake is another step of the initiation of the boy Harry, a mother's boy just like Severus or Tom Riddle with their abilities to make potions and speak with the snakes. Eileen, Merope, Lily are a clan of dead mothers whose influence on the male world remains constant, spinning the history of Hogwarts and at the same time England.
The widowerhood of the Potions master corresponds to the mournful spirit and style of Victorian age. Snape's behaviour not only has certain literary parallels, but also reflects real fortunes of the epoch mourning over nearly everything and everyone, according to the royal canon. First there were romantic poets, then prince Albert, Arthur Hallam, king Arthur; add to them famous and nameless firstborns, consumptive maidens and brides; mad heirs, drowned men, the whole families - feminized nation almost lost the sense of distinction between the objects of grief, inventing some unknown methods to keep and increase the memory of their beloved dead.
Victorian dead girls (from C.Dickens to decadents); "pale sisters" (from Bronte to J.Harris and A.Niffenegger); Carroll's Alice and her phrases, Rossetti's Lillith, little witches- miss Evans is a reflection of them all, but the main heroine will always be puella, a pearl lost and eternally searched for. In "Harry Potter" this plot is hidden behind a fairy-tale about the search of horcruxes and deathly hallows, but through all these symbols there appears an image of "a girl forever", dating back to the traditions of English poetry of XVII – XIX c. and to the ancient myths.
On the one hand, widowed Snape is a guard of the underground treasure; making potions, probably, in a hope to find a reanimating Flammel's essence. On the other hand, Lily's patronus, a silver-white doe, passes after her death to Severus. In the light of this great mystery, he appears as a fairy-tale knight liberating the one who finally saves (through Snape's sacrifice and triumphal retransmission of maternal love) children, Hogwarts, England, and Snape's reputation.
Tennyson's poem ("V. I sometimes hold it half a sin...") gives an answer to the question: why does Snape make potions? He stands in front of us, wrapped in the coarse clothes of his grief, like a scarecrow wrapped against the wind in the ancient letters and a magical handful of dust.
In the finale scene Snape's life and death, gathered in the weaker vessel of human memory, are spilling with a silver-bluish flow into Harry's blind consciousness. And it becomes clear that it is the last and the only chance for the story of teacher Snape to be finished, and for Potter to read and learn it, as the most important - i.e. maternal - lesson.
Time in "Harry Potter" is magical, that's why the contact with the dead ancestors, their patronuses, is necessary to maintain the protective sphere. This magical aura is spreaded over both Muggles' London and the whole world fraught with the forthcoming war. The future battles will always be the battles of the past, they can't be won without the help of the ghostly army - a very English plot.
Sacrifice presupposes an inevitable departure. Tolkien, who survived an immense massacre at Somme River, realized that very well.
With each new book about the boy who survived we become more and more confident that Harry, like Frodo, being wounded deeply and incurably, will have to depart. But it doesn’t happen. Being near to death in the final battle with Voldemort, Harry doesn’t die and even becomes a happy husband and father. To save the world, the main hero of the series sacrifices a lot, but doesn’t make the main sacrifice which remains for ever in the shadow, as it should.
Orphaned Albus Dumbledore is terribly lonely, having gone through the ruin of his parental family and being deprived of his own. He dies fatherless and childless, and so does Severus Snape, whose childlessness rather has a metaphysical reason. His and Dumbledore’s lives are a life-time poignant atonement. The same fate is shared by Sirius Black, Lupin, Rubeus Hagrid – all of them are doomed to bear someone’s guilt and to be devoided of a family.
Childlessness as a continuation of one’s own orphanage; life as an atonement of someone’s guilt; life given as a price for the life of a child – these stigmas mark almost all Harry’s adult friends and protectors.
Unclouded happiness in the finale of the heptateuch may seem farfetched, but in fact it isn’t. According to Rowling’s logic, the burden of the peace offering was taken by the older generation of the wizards, and due to that, self-sacrifice of the young shall become a bloodless Abraham’s sacrifice – a sacrifice through the intention.
The boys Albus and Severus are dead, and because of that a boy Harry won’t take a train at the King’s Cross to set off for his last trip. He and many of his friends will be happy and will live the unfulfilled lives of those who departed to let the young generation stay.
Orphanage is traditionally interpreted by the European culture (apart from its “practical”, domestic aspect) as a sign of a specific existential state which is a loss of the connection with the highest generative source, a Father.
Harry’s and Voldemort’s behaviour patterns represent two possible ontological approaches to the problem of orphanage:
1. A search for the father as a source of one’s own existence, a protective patronus (Harry).
2. Negation of the father (as any external source of one’s existence) (Voldemort).
Acceptance of one’s status of a son (as a specific ontological state) presupposes being ready to become a father, since aknowledgement of the fact that you are a continuation of someone’s existence provokes a need to share your own existence with someone else.
That’s why fatherhood, as well as being a son, is impossible for the Dark Lord not only psychologically, but ontologically. The only acceptable form of a “genetic continuation” for him is creating horcruxes, i.e. putting fractions of his own existence into the different containers.
Existence is an attribute of the Universal, and only in the Unsiversal it acquires its absolute completeness. By restricting the sphere of his personal existence, trying to “monopolize” it, an individual loses it the more likely the more he tries to keep it. On the contrary, generously “sharing” his own existence, accomplishing it in the others and becoming their accomplishment himself, a man becomes free from the power of Death. Even the most powerful magic (Hallows and hoarcruxes) is unable to resist it, but living hoarcruxes – people provided with a particle of our soul – can do that.
That’s why the relations of a father and a son, along with the patrimonial continuity, become so important in Rowling’s series – as an initial and universal mechanism of giving your existence to another person, a manifestation of a simple and natural “magic” of love whose power exceeds any kind of magic and even the death itself. But the highest form of self-accomplishment is a sacrifice by which a man gives his existence to the others completely and thus gives it a perfect fullness broadening it to the limits of the Universal.
One of the greatest wizards Voldemort, a head of the order of the Death Eaters, trying to gain immortality, loses the battle with his last enemy, as Death can be conquered only by the one who doesn’t strive for victory.
In A.S.Byatt's novel "Conjugal Angel" the characters read Keats's odes in order to summon their beloved ghosts; both in the days of absolute happiness and full mourning, in loneliness and together with the dead - most often it's "Ode to a Nightingale", with its "sensual love to Beauty" and "a perfect marriage of thoughts and senses".
This kind of a secret collusion also takes place in Jacob's room (V.Woolf's novel, 1922); within the university walls on the eve before the First World War: boys are reading Keats as before, while mothers and betrothed girls, widowed in a good time, notice signs of imminent death on the young faces of Pans and Pucks. Fanny (I think that Woolf took the name of Keats's bride) looked at Jacob who resembled a small boy.
Thus, in such mysterious ways John Keats turns into a lost boy, a boy at war - into Septimus Warren Smith from V.Woolf's “Mrs Dalloway” (1925).
Smith hears sparrows singing in Greek from behind the river, where the dead wander. They are singing in chorus that death doesn't exist. Smith not only hears the voices but also sees the dead dressed in white, clustering behind the fence. He sees his friend Evans who was killed at war, and now he is coming to his survived friend, rustling with the dry leaves.
The worst thing which could happen with survived Keats is that he "was not able to feel anymore" - only to think, to read "Inferno" and to comprehend the world poetry as an experience of repulsion and hate to the mankind. He didn't feel sorry for killed Evans, and here's his atonement, coming with the voices and visions of the dead around. They are calling him to their Land of Lost Boys, Land of Eternal Summer, and an "idiot boy" Smith, spellbound by the Greek singing, throws himself onto the fence.
In this context "Keats" acts as Mnemosyne; he's a password of the poetic and human cohesion: in "The Hours" Richard Brown hears the same voices in Greek, and his death serves as another link in the centuries-old bonds.
In this chapter we are going to talk about the drowned boys - a fixed archetypal image in the English literature, a kind of "opheliac" image serving as an interpretative code.
The influence of the archetype is so strong that, even if a boy didn't drown (like John Kipling), his death is still marked with the water/wave/sea according to the poetic canon.
In Eugene Lee-Hamilton's "Imaginary Sonnets" (1888) there is a sonnet "Henry I. To the Sea" (1120): the king grieves over his drowned 17 year old son William Adelin and calls upon God to flood England.
Kipling's requiem "My boy Jack" (subheaded "1914-1918"), devoted to all perished boys of England, contains an image of the wave which had taken away his son, and this idea runs through the whole poem. Instead of Shakespeare's "father" who sleeps at the sea bottom and is covered by the slime, sacrificed are the sons.
A cross and a quest against the dead glowing faces and marsh lights. No spiritualistic séances, no friends risen from their graves. I'm convinced that John Tolkien was writing "The Lord of the Rings" to rid himself from the ghosts; those red flowers shooting from the flesh of the beloved dead and sowing their seeds in the fields of memory.
Isn't it strange that the scenes containing basic motifs of the English WWI text, such as ghostly visions and obsession with voices, turned out to be black-out?
And while Tom Shippey is happy to have found the similarity between "The Song of Eärendel" (written with a non-typical for English poetry verse) and Keats's poems, I'd be even happier to find out that the guest of the "fairy yards", John Keats, was a ‘dear deadman’ for John Tolkien too, a "scarecrow" of his youth's hopes before Oxford, marked with the losses and first love. I'm still thinking of a boy who went to the war being Keats, and returned, like Frodo, being another person, as no one returns alive from the real dead marshes.
A chronicle of sorrow, a Heptateuch about the war of children and children's death - that's what K.L.Lewis created. The Second World War bears a shadow of the First one.
Chapter 31 "The battle for Hogwarts" is Joanne Rowling's contribution to the British text of WWI. Chronologically it is the Second war; existentially - always the First; historiosophically - it's all the same war. I've already said that for England WWII is a reflection of a period 1914-1918: the death of children and many other scenes in the last book of "Harry Potter" contain a full paradygm of war literature of the mentioned period, and this paradygm, in its turn, dates back to the victorian and medieval story patterns, such as the Children’s crusade.
In the most bloody battles (like on the river Somme) there fought and were killed mainly young volunteers, often the students and graduates from Oxford and Cambridge. Hogwarts students are the same army of children: do you remember an under age boy Colin Creevey? He didn't leave Hogwarts together with the minors but managed to escape the teachers, joined the battle and was killed.
So, Harry's spirit armoured with a sword is aimed at the restoration of the common good, or common Resurrection (a masculine/paternal aspect). Harry's soul (a mother's boy who interests me much more) is a highest concentration of love's essence. It is the aspect which Riddle positively rejects. It is symbolic that before the final battle Potter calls Lord Voldemort like he was called by Merope - Tom Riddle. Harry tries to reach out to the orphaned boy but the mutilated fillial soul of the Lord Voldemort is incapable of repentance.
Finding of Ariane is Dumbledore's personal quest. The landmarks of his mission are hardly outlined and the finale expands far beyond the limits of the book, but I'm convinced that the Cycle will be completed only when Albus returns the treasure, which is silver light not made by hand. And then all the dragons shall be finally won and Hogwarts shall start a new era.
What is good in this retold legend is that it can be used for any fiction quest: a chronicle of the "lost princes" is fantastic itself, and the author gifted with imagination has a power to rewrite it, and thus to liberate the ghosts of the magic clan forever imprisoned in the darkness of history.
In Justine Picardie's novel Peter Llewellyn Davies suggests that they had some family illness. In the late 50s he was trying hard to publish the collection of the family letters and legends, under the title "A familiar crypt". A week before his suicide, Peter told Daphne that he "was drowning under the weight of the familiar mortuary". Put together Barrie's and Daphne's nightmares and you'll get the oppressing atmosphere in which those five lost boys were born and brought up.
On the other hand, a familiar illness (melancholy and madness running in blood) represents a common illness of Victorian age. It's evident that the tragic fate of Barrie's "sons" is a mirror which reflects the fate of the whole generation, as those stories for children (B.Potter, R. Kipling), grown on the soil of the familiar "crypt", turned out to be rehearsal of the forthcoming war for many and many English boys.
Peter Llewellyn Davies and Tommy (Daphne's husband) served side by side during the WWI. Daphne tries to solve the mystery of the "English boys", beginning with the foureyes Branwell Bronte who wrote his first passage on his seventeenth birthday (1834).
It is also noteable that the only son of Daphne and Tommy, Christian Browning, had a family nickname "Keats".
The poem "Soldier" clarifies destiny of body and soul in the beyond, which had always been a poignant issue for Brooke. This gap was overcome as soon as there was found an appropriate method (a sacrifice of the poet), an ideal form - to mature in the death, to keep one's bed in a grave. While Soul, having transformed into "a fraction of pure light, a divine mind", sees the dreams from the poet’s motherland, his ashes sprout through the foreign greensward like an English rose, slender and delicate.
Having presentiment of his own death, Brooke reminds us that "The poetry of earth is never dead, / The poetry of earth is ceasing never" - a great line from quite a simple poem by John Keats about a grasshopper and a cricket.
I see eternal Keats: first a boy of the pre-war age, then a prince lying under the turf, a rose-like youth, a delicate English flower grown on the dead marshes. I see a poet who is great not because he pandered to the romantic visions of the "fathers" or a vital doctrine of the "children", but because he had taken his crest and followed the quest till the end.
Critics note that only W.Owen was the only one who succeeded in his war poems to overcome an elegiac canon. Combining material with spiritual, sober irony with symbolism, absolute pacifism with lyrical expression, he achieved a special power – a mourning, ritual one.
Breaking the traditions of requiem, the composer includes the boys' choir three times. In the foreground (peace here and now) there are two male soloists (soldiers from Owen's poems); then there enter clear voices of the boys, distinct far from the realm of the battles.
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Reply #14 on : Tue May 27, 2014, 16:09:37