Potterpitude

The difficulty, when it comes to engaging critically with the Potter phenomenon, is distance. I don’t mean in a personal sense; I’m too old to have been properly swept away by the novels as they appeared. But in a general sense. The sheer cultural ubiquity of the books and their spin-off films, the scale of their popular success, make it hard to get a clear view of them. I’m going to step into a lecture theatre this coming Thursday and talk about them to an audience of third year undergraduates. Usually when I lecture about something I know more about that something than the students do; that’s kind of the point of me being up at the front. But Thursday I know full well that many in my audience will know these books in much more comprehensive and fannish detail than I.

So what can I say? Good question. I can, I suppose, try to situate the book in the contexts of children’s literature and fantastic literature. I don’t mean: listing all the precursors and analogues to Rowling’s novels. That would take a long time and be very dull (Wikipedia has two lists: one benign in a Rowling-part of-a-rich-tradition sort of way, the other a much sourer list of accusations of copyright-infringement). We could spend a lot time down this particular dust-mine and come up coughing and pale with only one nugget: that the Potter books are deeply derivative. Which of course they are: they're cooked-up from chunks and scraps of British public school fiction, Tolkien, Lewis, Sword in the Stone, Mary Poppins, The Worst Witch, all stirred in the big cauldron of Rowling’s agglomerative imagination. That doesn’t get us very far. These books haven’t been as successful as they have because they are derivative. Or perhaps it would be better to say: the derivativeness points-up Rowling’s skill in choosing the most resonant bits and pieces from myth, tradition and popular story and assembling them effectively—no mean skills, either of those. Plus young readers care less about this than others. It’s new to them.

I might be tempted to say something more about the ‘public school’ tradition, if only to elaborate on this post I put up last year on Farrar’s Eric, or Little By Little (1857). Eric is a good boy at a very posh public school who goes bad, because (basically) he is corrupted by an evil so powerful and malign that it may not even be named. Farrar calls this appalling, mortal wickedness ‘Kibroth-Hattaavah’. In the 21st-century we call it by a word which may etymologically derive from the Latin for ‘manual turpitude’ or ‘defilement with the hand’: manus turpare. Masturbation. A piece of cod-Latin is, I insist, not out of place in the cod-Latin-packed Rowlingverse. Eric is a bad novel, but it was hugely successful (it was the reason the name 'Eric' came into vogue); its DNA informs the long, dense tradition of British public school stories that succeeded it. (The other key originary text in this mode of writing, Tom Brown's Schooldays, is less obscurely sexual in its version of school; although the battle between Tom and the bully Flashman is clearly the prototype for Harry and Malfoy).

Hogwarts is a public school of a rather old-fashioned sort: Latin and robes and bizarre rituals all soaked in a rather startling celebration of upper-class codes and values. [The demonising of the Malfoy de-haut-en-bas cruelty and snobbishness is actually part of this high-caste valorisation: see, for instance, Gilmour’s classic The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (1981); and Christine Berberich’s follow-up, The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature (2007)]. But Hogwarts is more than this. Certainly, some of the cheerier and more whimsical aspects of the books owe a lot to the Jennings books, to Billy Bunter, and to the sublime Molesworth. ‘Hogwarts’, for instance, the name of Potter’s school, ‘derived from "The Hogwarts", a Latin play by Marcus Plautus Molesworthus’. Re-reading the books, getting ready to teach them, I was pleasantly surprised by how much more endearing I found the use of humour this time around (other aspects were considerably more grating on re-read. Dobby, say). But I’d still insist that it is not the whimsy or the humour of the books that explains their extraordinary cultural penetration. That I think is down to the way Rowling handles her darker theme.

So, a facile way of explaining the success of the books would be to say: they are wish-fulfillment fantasy. Rowlings groks that, for children school is central to their experience. To quote myself:

Formally conservative and stylistically flat novels, yes—but this series is one of the great representations of school in western culture. Perhaps the greatest. School dominates your life from 5-18; more if you go to college. When you’re 25 and reading fiction, school has been literally two thirds of your existence. It is our gateway to the adult world, our first experience of socialisation outside the family. It’s a massive thing. When do Booker shortlisted novels ever apprehend it? They don’t—the most you will get is a little background of character A’s schooltimes past, by way of fleshing out their characterisation as adults. Because it is as adults that we’re supposed to be interested in them. School is a massive, global phenomenon. Yet where are the other great novels of school life?

Rowling spins her school as more fun and exciting than the actual schools her readers actually attend; but one thing that is coming across very clearly from my present re-reading is that this school, and by extension ‘school’ as such, has something very dark at its heart. This is externalised in the second book as the ‘chamber of secrets’, a large subterranean space (as per the broader Gothic mode in which Rowling is also working) inside the castle, hidden from the figures of authority—Professor Binns dismisses its very existence as myth, since ‘a long succession of Hogwarts headmasters and headmistresses haven’t found the thing—’ [Chamber of Secrets, 115]. But its there, and inside it is: death. A basilisk whose very look will kill, and whose reflected image turns you to stone. Or more to the point: Voldemort is there, the noseless embodiment of death—the brilliant pupil who has killed to conquer death

Here is William Acton's 1857 moral-panic-provoking description of what happens to a child when he succumbs to the evils of masturbation:

However young the children may be, they get thin, pale, and irritable, and their features become haggard. We notice the sunken eye, the long, cadaverous-looking countenance, the downcast look which seems to arise from a consciousness that their habits are suspected, and, at a later period, that their virility is lost ... Such boys have a dank, moist, cold hand, very characteristic of great vital exhaustion; their sleep is short, and most complete marasmus comes on; they may die if their evil passion is not got the better of; nervous symptoms set in, such as spasmodic contraction, or partial or entire convulsive movements, together with epilepsy, eclampsy, and a species of paralysis accompanied with contractions of the limbs.

It was because he genuinely believed that this was a clear and present danger to actual schoolboys that Farrar wrote his admonitory public-school novel in the first place. In my ‘Farrar’s Horcrux is Wanking’ post I suggested that thin, pale Voldemort, with his cold, clammy physicality and his tertiary-syphilis-esque noseless face, slyly articulates this buried climate of fear. Tom Riddle’s story is a retread of Eric's from Farrar's novel; but it might be more to the point to say that Voldemort is the apotheosis of Kibroth-hataavah, taking people over and destroying them. In this he represents both a character in his own right and the mysterious, morbid-erotic power that causes others to decline and die. Read Acton's description again: then look back at the descriptions of Quirinus Quirrell in the first novel: he starts thin, pale, timid, nervous and twitchy and gets worse as the novel moves along ('in the weeks that followed [Quirrell] did seem to be getting paler and thinner'; Philosopher's Stone, 167). It's because Voldemort is literally part of him and revealing that fact kills him. In Chamber of Secrets it is pale Ginny Weasley who, prompted by proto-erotic yearning for Harry, develops a dangerous secretive habit (writing in Tom Riddle's diary) and who as a result becomes 'white as marble, and as cold', 'moaning ... shuddering' [Chamber of Secrets, 226, 237]. (On the other hand: Rowling is comfortable enough with all this to make a joke of it too: Percy says 'er, if you must know, Ginny, er, walked in on me the other day when I was -- well, never mind -- the point is, she spotted me doing something and I, um, asked her not to mention it to anyone' [212]). I don't want to flog this to death; you take my point. Yeah; there's a lot of flourishing of wands. Yes, the older generation have nicknames like 'wormtail' and 'prongs'. I'm sure I don't need to paint you a picture.

And my point, actually, is less smutty. It's about the secret-hidden-in-plain-sight nature of Magic itself. How do the muggles not notice the existence of an entire, parallel society? Or since many of them do notice it, why do they not do anything about it? In the early books (Harry and Ron flying the car to school for instance) the impression is that the wizards have to expend a lot of labour and ingenuity hiding themselves from the muggles for their own wizardly protection. But the very beginning of Prisoner of Azkaban we learn that there's nothing muggles can actually do to wizards and witches: burning them as per the great medieval witch-burnings is easily deflected with a simple spell ('the witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame-Freezing Charm and then pretend to shriek with pain while enjoying a gentle, tickling sensation'). So the question gets turned around: are the wizards hiding themselves for the protection of the muggles? Here's how Belle Waring puts it:

Um, why aren’t wizards ruling the world, with Voldemort having a continental empire, full of Muggles whom he has shuffling off, of their own accord, under the imperius curse, quite horribly with no need for guards or jailers or even wizards to construct the camps…? Naturally in a book for children one would put it more, “why aren’t wizards trying with a bit more of a ‘can-do spirit’ to take over the world, I wonder?”

I suppose the tacit answer to this question the books offer (it's never specifically addressed, I think) is: wizards have scruples about these things. Except that, clearly, a great many don't. What's wrong about framing the question this way, I think, is that it insists on reading the text according to the coherence of its surface-logic, its worldbuilding. But the books aren't real. I think the hidden-in-plain-view nature of the magic derives its symbolic eloquence from a different, psychological Chamber of Secrets. That there is sex, in the general (we might say: healthy) sense in co-educational schools, especially as the kids get towards the end of their teens, is not a surprise; and Rowling faces it straightforwardly and pretty well, I think, in the later books. But there's a flipside. There is also something in 'school' that is buried, secret; something that claims the lives of schoolkids; something dark and foul, to do with death as well as sex. It's not merely chronological antecedence that gives Farrar's 'kibroth-hataavah' its longevity as a continuing problematic. It is the direful reality of too many schools, even some of the highest-status and oldest public schools.