When was the 'ray-gun' first mentioned?

I was asked this question via email, and it got me thinking. First port-of-call: the Clute-Nicholls-Langford SF Encyclopedia (of course), whose Langfordian entry for 'RAY GUN' reads in its entirety:

This generic energy weapon, usually hand-held, is one of the best-known sf Clichés established in the Pulp magazine era; hence the Retro-Pulp magazine title Ray Gun Revival. Ray guns may of course project any of the exotic Rays imagined by sf authors: popular varieties include the purely destructive energy of the Blaster or Disintegrator, and the theoretically non-lethal Stunner or paralyser. Star Trek's phasers are famously switchable between these two settings, as are earlier sf handguns like the Denton (an imaginary brand name) in A Tale of Two Clocks (1962; vt Legacy 1979) by James H Schmitz. Another notable ray gun is Isaac Asimov's agony-inducing neuronic whip.

Not much help with the specifics: 'pulp magazine era' covers a lot of ground.

Google returns plenty of searches for 'X-ray gun' from scientific publications, mostly from the 1920s (for instance, the following account of an X-ray experiment from the US Proceedings of the 9th Annual Educational Conference (1929): 'At the left there appears what may be referred to as the "X-ray gun," which shoots a few rays through a cloud-expansion chamber') although some from as early as the late 1890s. (As you know, Bob, these 'rays' were first discovered in 1895). That's no good for us, obviously. Indeed, I wonder if the first SF ray-guns weren't specifically "x-ray guns", from before people realised that such a weapon would be more likely to fix an image of your enemy's skeletal structure upon any photographic plates that happened to be about rather than kill him:

And then, as with the snap of a switch, he was galvanized into sudden furious energy. The old gentleman was ... aiming the x-ray gun at Charles! [Robert Myron Coates, The Eater of Darkness (1929), 216]

Here's a later paperback cover of Coates's 1929 novel. Cool, no?

I like to think the "!?" is a blurb provided by a reader rendered speechless by the book. But there are earlier examples. Here, for example, is a passage from from a story in Everybody's Magazine of 1917:

"All is not going well, Arnold: the ray-rods are emptying fast, and our attack upon the lower level of the wing has failed. Sanson has placed a ray-gun there. All depends on the air-scouts, and we must hold our positions until the battle-planes arrive."

That's the climactic battle of Victor Rousseau's The Messiah of the Cylinder, published, in revised form, as a book in 1917.

Here's the book version of that same quotation:

"All is not going well, Arnold: the ray-rods are emptying fast, and the storage batteries within the Airscouts’ Fortress have been destroyed, so that we cannot recharge them; the attack upon the lower level of the Wing has failed. Sanson has placed a Ray gun there. All hangs upon the battleplanes, and they have not returned." [294]

This whole battle has a rather pleasing Star Wars, or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence vibe to it. 1917, remember!

Streaks of light, pitiably thin, flashed from their Ray rods, and, with exultant shouts, the Guard sprang forward to meet them. They were dragging lighter Ray guns behind them. For an instant it seemed as if the revolutionists would scale the walls before the heavy Ray artillery could be reaimed at them. The foremost files of the opposing forces clashed and surged and swayed in a rain of meteor flashes. The blackened corpses heaped the bridges, hung, toppled over, and went to swell the heaps below. [294-5]

No SFE3 entry on Victor Rousseau, which seems to me a shame [I'm corrected in this point in the comments]. Maybe I should write one; just as soon as I've cantered through this facsimile first edition of his book. That's the earliest 'ray gun' reference I have found. I also had a look for 'ray pistol', and found this intriguing stage-direction from Glenn Hughes's 1932 play Green Fire: A Melodrama of 1990, in Three Acts -- what an excellent title!

S.D. (Picks up the death ray pistol, and points it at the door. The door r. opens. Enter Ferguson, MacRobert, Alan, Wills, Thompson, Brand and Vera. The Men hesitate and put up their hands as they enter and see the pistol.)

Golly, what happens next? I'm agog. (Glenn Hughes is another character without an SFE3 entry; I assume we're not talking about the Black Sabbath/Deep Purple bassist). His play was based on John Taine's 1928 novel of the same title, summarised here at Wikipedia. There's also a ray pistol in Burroughs' Pirates of Venus (also 1932) I think. Perhaps you know of one earlier? I'd love to know, if so.

[PS: Ian Sales draws my attention to this, where the earliest OED-sourced citation is 1931. My 1917 example is quite a bit earlier than that, I'm pleased to say.]

Current weather

Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014, dir. Rob Minkoff)

Not flawless, certainly (the wormhole plotting was over-complicated, the son-rebels-against-Dad-then-realises-how-much-he-really-loves-him stuff felt pat, and the historical characters were a bit Night At The Museum lite) but the film as a whole seemed to me far superior to The Lego Movie. Some of the set-pieces had real charm and vim, and the script was considerably wittier (my favourite line: Robespierre flattened against the windscreen: 'I'll get you, dog! And your little boy too!'). Nonetheless this has opened to modest box-office, where The Lego Movie has busted the blocks and set all kinds of cash-raking-in records. What gives? I don't know. It doesn't help that it's saddled with a heroically unmemorable title. Or maybe it's too bitty; or too old-fashioned. Or maybe the idea of a superintelligent talking dog just doesn't hit the public sweet spot. In other news, the director Rob Minkoff could be Frankie Boyle's younger, better-looking brother.

One more observation, tossed-in at random. What's with all the father-son bonding? That was The Lego Movie vibe too: not mother-daughter, not even father-daughter, but father-son. 2014 is shaping up to be a pretty male year, pop-culture-wise. Frozen seems very last-year, all of a sudden.

The Lego Movie (2014, dir. Phil Lord and Chris Miller)

This movie is not outstandingly brilliant; but neither is it outstandingly awful.

J K Rowling, Harry Potter Orders a Half-Goblet of Phoenix Blood at the Deathly Hallows (2000-07)

Between finishing my HP 5 re-read and opening HP 6 I clocked this comment by the estimable Abigail Nussbaum, detailing her theory that the whole series is structured around a set of balanced parallels (first as a childish game, then as an adult challenge) that 'hinge' about the fourth volume:

Goblet of Fire, with its story about a magical game that turns deadly serious, acts as the series's lynchpin, and the books around it mirror each other while reflecting that shift from childish game to adult matters with real stakes. As you say, in Prisoner of Azkaban Harry initially fears Sirius Black and then discovers that he is his closest adult friend; he also finds his father in himself. In Order of the Phoenix Harry loses Sirius forever, but not before getting a close look at his flaws and shortcomings, and finds out things about his father that make him regret the similarities between them. Chamber of Secrets and Half-Blood Prince both feature books through which Harry communicates with someone he comes to think of as a friend, but who turns out to be more sinister in real life (they also set up the three-way parallel between Harry, Voldemort, and Snape). Philosopher's Stone and Deathly Hallows have a weaker connection - though obviously since they bookend the series they mirror each other by definition - but the rather silly and childlike magical obstacle course in the former has some darker parallels in the quest for the Horcruxes and the Hallows in the latter. For all its flaws, I do respect Rowling for writing a series that grew up with its protagonist, and the way that the later books reflect the events of the earlier ones while recasting them in more mature terms is one of her primary methods of achieving this.

Very neat. It rather undermines my idea that the series as a whole has a five-act structure, of course. But never mind. Re-reading the latter four HP titles was harder work than re-reading the first three. All four are, I think, simply too long; and a couple are much too long. Goblet of Fire in particular is quite an uneven novel. The way Harry himself gets picked for the Quidditch World Cup generates an uncomfortable sense of authorial exceptionalism (he has to be at the centre of everything! Despite being, somehow, just a normal kid!) and the humour often depends upon Rowling lowering her own suspending-of-disbelief bar. For example, early on the Weasleys pop into the Dursley's house, and Mr Weasley attempts to show off his knowledge of Muggle affairs:

"They run off eckeltricity, do they?" he said knowledgeably. "Ah, yes, I can see the plugs. I collect plugs," he added to Uncle Vernon. "And batteries. Got a very large collection of batteries. My wife thinks I'm mad, but there you are."

Which is fine, and sort-of amusing I suppose; except that Weasley is one of the wizarding world's premier experts in Muggle affairs. It's his job! Get lost he doesn't know how to say 'electricity'. It would be like somebody who devoted their life to studying the world of the Harry Potter novels calling magic 'gammidge'.

Is this a trivial point? You bet your bippy. But triviality doesn't disqualify it. On the contrary, in fact; it indexes the way the novels move away from the earlier whimsy, the (pace Nussbaum) more deliberately child-like and larkish tone, towards a more coherent and adult vibe. In part this is Rowling playing into her own fans obsession with her created world. As Mad Eye (it's not the real Mad Eye who says this, of course, but that only makes it more neatly ironically-pointed) keeps insisting: 'CONSTANT VIGILANCE!' ('You need preparing. You need arming. But most of all, you need constant, never ceasing vigilance [217]). As the books go on, we need to be more and more beady-eyed as to the way details cohere into the large pattern. Because that's what it means to be a fan.

Some of the book’s targets (‘tabloid journalism—boo!') struck me as, shall we say, oblique to the novels’ main concerns, however large they have loomed in the author’s private life. So in sum: not as good as I remembered. And so to Order of the Phoenix; also over-padded, although here the padding is mostly concentrated in the early sections. Will Harry be expelled for using his magic to save Dudley from the Dementor? Won’t he? (150 pages is too long to discover—of course he won’t). And the prose seemed to me less disciplined in this one. Not that Rowling is ever exactly a Nabokov of prose-style even at the best of times, but mostly her writing is usually efficient and workmanlike. In Phoenix there seemed to me too much of this sort of writing—‘there was a soft whooshing sound and something white soared from the top of a dark wardrobe and landed gently on Harry’s shoulder’ [61]—where all the adjectives and adverbs could advantageously have been purged from the prose.

But I’d say Phoenix is better than Goblet. Sirius’s dark side (a bit unhinged; nasty to the house elf and so on) adds some actual depth to the characterisation; and the stuff about him and James Potter bullying Snape is believably pitched. Of course, there are, I’d suggest, more subtle ways by which a writer can suggest that a character is haunted by the memory of a difficult mother than having an immoveable (stuck with magic glue) magical portrait of that mother on the wall of said character’s house, literally screaming ‘Filth! Scum! By-products of dirt and vileness! Half-breeds, mutants, freaks … Yoooou! (she howled, her eyes popping at the sight of [her son]) ‘Blood traitor, abomination, shame of my flesh!' [74] all the time. So, generally, no: not a lot of subtlety or Henry-James-style obliqueness in this book. There does seem to be more screaming in this instalment in general; and more of the dialogue—whole pages, sometimes—given over to SPEECH RENDERED VIA CAPITALISATION!

On the plus side, Dolores Umbridge is a very nice piece of villainy; all the more effective as a baddie for not being a snaggle-toothed gargoyle. At the same time there’s something awkward about the way this instalment posits rules as such as the agency of evil: ‘Educational Decree Number Twenty-Four’ and so on. It strikes me on re-read that Rowlings attutide to 'rules' is confused on quite a deep level. In this she is very much of her class and nation (two qualities I happen to share with her, which is why I feel emboldened to mention the thing about rules). Rules are the structural articulation of authority and hierarchy. Umbridge, for instance, is obsessed with them, and 'we' (via our favourite characters) become heroic warlock-and-roll types for daring to break those rules, fuk da po-lice and so on. At the same time, the whole superstructure of magic itself, from which all the intricate plotting of the final four books depends, is all about the rules. To jump ahead for a moment: though I very much enjoyed the final chapters of Deathly Hallows, the actual climactic wand-dual between Harry and Voldemort was diluted and enfeebled to the point almost of narrative misfire by the tedious pages-long conversation the two have about the precise rules governing their respective wands, all trainspotterishly pivoting on the matter of by whom, and under what conditions, the Elder Wand had been obtained from whom, and which set of arcanely arbitrary magical rules were therefore liable to obtain in the battle that GET ON WITH IT. See also: terms of prophecy concerning the chosen one. See also: Fantasy's fetishization of 'magic rules' tout court. I peg this love-hate, or rather this resent-respect attitude to Rules as a distinctively English business. To quote Al Murray the Pub Landlord: gotta have rules. If you didn't have no rules, where would you be? France. And if you had too many rules where would you be? Germany. If this sounds like 'reasonable compromise' then you're missing the joke. Dumbledore's army is a revolutionary organisation whose business is the wholesale overturning of an unjust oppressive system. But at the same time, and with watery English compromise, it's a nice English middle-class sort of army, who don't really want to hurt anyone. The watchword, as far as rules as the structures of authority they index, is one of lukewarm water. Something similar is going on in these books with respect to 'blood'; but I'll come back to that.

And so to Harry Potter and the Half Blood Symbol-Formerly-Known-As. My re-read here was slightly stymied by an uncertainty as to whether I'd ever gotten around to reading it first time round. Certainly all my memories were of the film, which overwrote the often plodding prose with high-production values and visual flair. On the page I found the plot-coupon-collecting tiresome and the manner by which Tom Riddle's backstory gets filled-in over-elaborate and tedious. The interactions between the real-world and magical-world were clumsily handled (does the Prime Minister need to be a character? really?) and the humour felt strained to me ('Why are you worrying about YOU-KNOW-WHO, when you should be worrying about YOU-NO-POO? The constipation sensation that's gripping the nation!'). I daresay I'm being harsh.

Deathly Hallows, though long, doesn’t feel so padded as the previous two (it helps that it’s only the 600pp, not the 700+ pages of the earlier vols; plus that, as the filmmakers recognised, it contains enough story for two vols). After a small quantity of recapitulation we’re straight off with The Seven Potters, with characters being killed, robbing bank vaults and so on. Dobby is killed, and I wept long and heartfelt tears at this—well, no I didn’t. The first time round I thought the time in the tent in the forest overextended; this time it seemed to me much more absorbing.  The Snape backstory revelations makes for a satisfying tying-up of plottage (though the actual explanation is a little too expository) and the chapter where Harry goes into the forest to confront Voldemort is genuinely tense. Of course, this time through I knew how it was all going to end; but I remember my first time through when the will-Harry-live-or-die ratcheted up actual tension. The film, of course, turns a few pages of final showdown into a forty-minute SFX-spectacular battle, which may be crass, but does at least flag-up how closely the novel flirts with anti-climax. I'd say that in its novelistic form, the McCartneyesque Deathly Hallow-Goodbye needs more heft. Still, I finished it thinking more highly of the whole series than, perhaps, I had done before I started the re-read.

Now: as with the rules (see above), I did find myself pondering how far Rowling develops a coherent approach to 'blood'. On the one hand, there's the sustained critique of those Voldermortians (Voldermorticians?) and Malfoyers who believe that being 'pure blood' makes a person superior to mudbloods and muggles. Rowling makes the point repeatedly that they're idiots for thinking this; and quite right too. Plus you have Dumbledore's commendable and repeated insistence that a person is defined not by their birth but their actions. A bloodline is not some magic passport to special-ness or power. On the other hand is the fact that Potter's early life has been protected from being Death Ate by, precisely, his blood; or more precisely his mother's blood. And his aunt's. And Voldemort is undone by the same magic substance. ‘He took your blood and rebuilt his living body with it!' explains Dead-Dumbledore ('Dumbled-RIP'?); 'your blood in his veins, Harry, Lily’s protection in side both of you!’ [Deathly Hallows, 568]. So it turns out a bloodline is a magic passport to special-ness or power after all. It just has to be the right bloodline! Which, when we come to think of it, is precisely what the pure blood brigade have always claimed.

Now, you may wish to read this as a supple dialecticism on Rowling's part; or as a desire to have her chocolate frog and eat it too; or as a deeper problematic. For my own part, and to revert to my original post, I was at least pleased to see the Kibroth-Hataavah alive and well at the climax of the book. After his 'death', Potter awakes naked in a white place and hears

the small, soft thumpings of something that flapped, flailed and struggled. It was a pitiful noise, yet also slightly indecent. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was eavesdropping on something furtive, shameful. For the first time, he wished he were clothed. [565]

Farrar would be proud.

One more thing: I stand by the implication of my blogpost-title, viz. that The Deathly Hallows sounds like the name of a pub. The French translators improved upon this: Harry Potter et les reliques de la mort. Much better.

J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Stone Chamber of Azkaban Philosopher-Prisoners (1997-99)

Let's entertain the notion that the first three HP novels together constitute a 700-or-so-page singleton. This, you see, would put them on a par with the much fatter later novels. Not that I'm suggesting, you understand, that Goblet of Fire marked the point where Bloomsbury's entire annual accounts had come to depend upon Potter to such an extent that nobody dared actually edit Rowling's submissions any more ('Joanne, I'll be honest: there's a really good 300-page novel struggling to get out from under the weight of this 700-page splurgefest about the Quidditch World Cup and attendant plot-coupons ...'). Certainly not.

Take it this other way, then. Posit HP as a five-part drama, like a Shakespeare play. These first three titles, taken together, are Act 1: setting the scene, introducing the characters, laying down the narrative- and worldbuilding rules readers will need to keep in mind if they are properly to enjoy what follows. Act 2, Goblet of Fire, is mostly keeping the various plates spinning atop their bamboo poles, but it does two new things: it brings Voldemort properly back into the world of the novels; and it kills off a proper character, Cedric Hotdiggory.* This is a skilful way of ramping-up the series: it brings the villain out of the shadows, and shows us that something important is at stake by adding the George-R-R-Martin patent narrative destabliser, that characters we like, perhaps (gulp!) even main characters, could die.

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*Note: 'hot' is my 12-year old daughter's assessment of Robert Pattinson, rather than her judgment on the character as he appears in the novel; and it therefore has little actual bearing on this discussion. My own view? He's not even that hot.

It's such a good narrative trick that Rowling repeats it in the next three acts. In Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort's power in the world grows (Dolores Umbridge takes over Hogwarts, for instance) and Sirius Black dies. In Act 4, Half-Blood Prince, Voldemort grows yet more powerful, the plot-coupons get a new names ('Horcruxes', which I don't like: the plural, surely, should be horcruces) and Dumbledore dies (boo!). That sets up Act 5, Deathly Hallows, where Voldemort establishes his Thaumaturge Reich, the plot coupons are all cashed-in and several characters die, not least snakeface himself. Taken as a whole, I'd say Goblet and Phoenix could have been combined into one 700-page book, were concision needful (Harry Potter and the Gobbling Fiery Phoenix. Or, wait: does that make it sound too like a turkey?)

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I have a couple not wholly joined-up things to jot down about the first three skinny volumes, occasioned by my re-reading them. So here we go. In sum: better, worse, better.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was better than I remembered it: less twee, funnier and more efficient, in the sense that it very deftly introduces both the world and the key characters, includes a number of very readable set-pieces and does it all in approx. 200 pages. The songs are a mis-step, I think ('You can keep your bowlers black/Your tops hats sleek and tall,/For I'm the Hogwart's sorting Hat/And I can OH GOD PLEASE STOP'): an attempt to Hobbitify or Roald-Dahl-tint the text that misfires by skewing too groaningly twee. There were more of these, apparently, in the first draft of Chamber of Secrets, but Rowling's editor wisely cut them out. A good editor's worth is above rubies, you see (vide. my first paragraph above).

The other thing that struck me re-reading this novel was how solid a character structure the core triad is: Harry, Ron, Hermione. I take the point of those who regret the sidelining of this latter (hard to argue with this justly famous 'Hermione Granger and the Philosopher's Stone' satire). But, working with what we've got: Harry as ego, the figure with whom the reader tends to identify; Ron as id, a creature of more prominent appetites (sweets in the early books, snogging in the later), quicker to terror and envy and so on; Hermione as super-ego, driven, hard-working and rule-bound. It's a less caricature version of the Kirk-Bones-Spock triad that served OS Trek so well. And the three are well drawn qua friends. Friends of the qua. The triad structure works because it externalises something important about our own developing psychodynamic.

On the other hand, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was considerably worse than I remembered it. In part this was because I had forgotten how nails-down-a-chalkboard annoying Dobby is. Partly it has to do with the arbitrary way the school rules are applied by notionally 'good' authority figures (when Dolores does this arbitrary-authority thing in Phoenix it's coded as very wicked indeed). Harry and Ron fly a car to Hogwarts and are warned that further infractions will result in them being expelled. They break about a hundred subsequent school rules, putting themselves and others in danger of death; as a result Dumbledore rewards them. What particularly irked me about this was the sense that Malfoy and his kind are bad because they don't think the rules apply to them; where Harry and his friends genuinely don't think the rules apply to them, and we're supposed to love them for it as free spirits. (Wendy Doniger asks: 'Why not just use magic to get all the questions right in exams?' and answers herself: 'because it’s no fun that way; so the quill pens used in exams are bewitched with an Anti-Cheating spell.' Using magic to do well in his exams is exactly the sort of cheating trick Malfoy would use, if he could get away with it! But, wait: how is that different to Hermione using a time-turner in Prisoner of Azkaban to get ahead of her classmates in her studies?) What's objectionable here is the idea that some people (Harry and his pals) are just better than others, and not to be judged by the same criteria as the rest of us -- which is precisely the moral opposite of what the books purport to be saying.

But, actually, the thing I disliked most about Chamber of Secrets was that it just struck me as technically not very well put-together. The first half, more or less, is draggy and slow, with not much happening. The second half, by contrast, feels rushed and over-stuffed, with too much action and drama and suspense.

Still, I come not to carp, but to .. er, some other kind of fish. Prisoner of Azkaban was a real pleasure to re-read. The narrative bait-and-switch with Sirius Black (he's a dangerous madman! He's your bestest adult friend of all!) is well handled; it generates actual suspense in the early portions of the novel, and properly effective twists in the later sections. The Dementors are creations of genuine imaginative brilliance. The Scabbers/Peter Pettigrew revelation is very clever (though it carries with it the slightly icky implication that for the first two books pre-pubescent Ron has been cuddling an evil, seedy, middle-aged man on his lap). But best of all is the business with Harry seeing his father's Patronus, believing his Dad has come to save him, going back in time and having to save himself episode. The aforementioned Wendy Doniger puts this well in her LRB review of the novel:

In the third book, Harry is haunted by his mother’s dying screams, but now that he is older he moves on, in Lacanian fashion, to come to terms with his father. Thanks to a wonderfully complex and subtle episode of time travel that traces a Möbius twist in the chronological sequence, Harry encounters himself in the loop where past and present come together and overlap. The first time he lives through this period, he sees, across a lake, someone he vaguely recognises: perhaps his father? No, his father is dead, but that person sends a silver stag which saves him from present danger. When he goes back in time, he runs to the same place to see who it was, and there’s no one else there: he is the one who sends the stag to save himself in the future. ... The moment when Harry realises that he mistook himself for his father is quite powerful; and it is, after all, the only real kind of time travel there is: each of us becomes, in adulthood, someone who lived some thirty years before us, someone who must save our own life.

What's especially nice about this is the way it points to a strength of the books: the way they tell a story about kids growing up that includes parents as part of the picture, both in the sense that real-life kids growing up necessarily have many dealings with grown-ups (something with which the Famous Five or the Pevensies aren't troubled); and in the sense that grown-ups are what kids are growing up towards.

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.