Philip Nel’s Tales for Little Rebels I thought was published some time ago but NYU is putting out an edition on the Ides of March that I want to mention here because it makes an important point about children’s literature, all literature really, and how we think about this subject.

Full disclosure: I know Philip Nel and I like him. Prof. Nel wrote what I think was the first academic attempt to come to terms with Harry Potter as literature and his critical biography of Dr. Seuss is perhaps the best thing I’ve read of this type, certainly in the field of children’s literature. I met him at my first Harry Potter conference, Nimbus 2003, and again in Toronto at Prophecy 2007. He came to my talk about Literary Alchemy in Orlando and was very kind and encouraging to me in his comments afterward (to understand how grateful I remain for that kindness you’d have to remember I was considered something of a nut-job at the time by Ivory Tower types for arguing that Ms. Rowling was using a traditional alchemical scaffolding for her work).

What is Tales for Little Rebels about? Here is the Amazon page’s product description:

In 1912, a revolutionary chick cries, “Strike down the wall!” and liberates itself from the “egg state.” In 1940, ostriches pull their heads out of the sand and unite to fight fascism. In 1972, Baby X grows up without a gender and is happy about it.

Rather than teaching children to obey authority, to conform, or to seek redemption through prayer, twentieth-century leftists encouraged children to question the authority of those in power. Tales for Little Rebels collects forty-three mostly out-of-print stories, poems, comic strips, primers, and other texts for children that embody this radical tradition. These pieces reflect the concerns of twentieth-century leftist movements, like peace, civil rights, gender equality, environmental responsibility, and the dignity of labor. They also address the means of achieving these ideals, including taking collective action, developing critical thinking skills, and harnessing the liberating power of the imagination.

Some of the authors and illustrators are familiar, including Lucille Clifton, Syd Hoff, Langston Hughes, Walt Kelly, Norma Klein, Munro Leaf, Julius Lester, Eve Merriam, Charlotte Pomerantz, Carl Sandburg, and Dr. Seuss. Others are relatively unknown today, but their work deserves to be remembered. (Each of the pieces includes an introduction and a biographical sketch of the author.) From the anti-advertising message of Johnny Get Your Money’s Worth (and Jane Too)! (1938) to the entertaining lessons in ecology provided by The Day They Parachuted Cats on Borneo (1971), and Sandburg’s mockery of war in Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), these pieces will thrill readers intrigued by politics and history—and anyone with a love of children’s literature, no matter what age.

If you’ve read the Seuss/Geisel work, you know that Prof. Nel really understands the way children’s literature delivers meaning between the lines (as well as in-your-face) and especially ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ meaning. We live in a historical period, of course, characterized by no little irony because the regime’s message today is the deconstructionist anti-metanarrative war-cry “Speak Truth to Power!” The irony and black comedy of having an implicitly anti-regime message as the predominant cultural meme we see played out in the bizarre contradictions of political correctness.

The value of Prof. Nel’s book, though, and the point of this post is only the fairly obvious one that all books are vehicles, first, of the core values we have in common as people living in a specific historic period. Children’s books, because they are almost by definition stripped down work in which the moral messages are transparencies even the youngest reader will get, are broadsides of these shared ideas or mores.

The odd thing is that we recognize that in primers (if we’re paying attention or lucky enough to be guided by a mentor as capable as Prof. Nel) but neglect it in popular fiction. Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games have several things in common, though their narrative lines are poles apart: think ‘literary alchemy,’ ‘religious allegoricorical meaning,’ and ‘genre melange’ for starters. The most obvious  — or least obvious for being hidden in plain sight — is their shared postmodern mantras of “the exclusive metanarrative is evil,” “don’t believe what you think,” and “right choice is the only means to real freedom (and the only legitimate choice is, that’s right, “speak truth to power”).

I think we can expand the message of Prof. Nel’s book, in fact, though it is not about Young Adult or Adult fiction or even Children’s literature as a whole, to the whole of reading and story-telling in our times. All of it, to greater or lesser degree, is about fostering the “Little Rebel” in us.

Sadly, in a nation of non-conformists imagining themselves all to be “different” in wearing their baseball cap off center like everyone else pursuing individuality, such messages are redundant. Please send me your list of novels, not about ‘Little Rebels’ combatting prejudice and discrimination, but about the young person who chooses to conform to higher standards rather than lower ones because s/he believes there is a larger life in community and tradition and in the spirit than in the individual, the conventional, and the ego.

When I describe the influence of Jane Austen on Joanne Rowling to lecture audiences, my pet phrase is that a good way for them to understand the Harry Potter novels is as “Pride and Prejudice with wands.” This hyperbole is more true than not because (1) the Hogwarts Adventures feature narrative misdirection consequent to the voice chosen by the author, a voice lifted straight from Austen’s Emma, (2) the moral message of both authors is anti-empiricist, that is, not trusting unexamined prejudices or “first impressions,” the original title of Pride and Prejudice, and (3) the satirical quality of Austen’s manners-and-morals fiction is a big part of the genre melange the writing of which is Ms. Rowling’s peculiar genius. Inside a Schoolboy novel and gothic thriller, she includes without hiccup a Georgian era romance.

This genre mixing is postmodern “double coding,” which I explain at length in Unlocking Harry Potter. But Ms. Rowling isn’t the only author to include Austen in their genre story mix. Stephenie Meyer has said Twilight, the first book of her ‘Twilight Saga,’ is a re-telling of Pride and Prejudice (if Jane Eyre is behind and within many of that book’s scenes and characters, too). But Meyers and Rowling are way too subtle with their allusions and recasting for the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; it’s time for a real re-telling, straight up, with gothic horror elements on steroids thrown in. Regency romance meets Texas Chain Saw Massacre? You get the idea.

From the book description:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

Seth Grahame-Smith, the co-author with Miss Austen of this soon-to-be-classic, is “the author of How to Survive a Horror Movie and The Big Book of Porn.” He writes a very funny blog on the book’s Amazon.com page which is well worth checking out, believe me. On why he did it, for example:

I’ll admit it — I’m a message board stalker. Anytime I get a “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” Google Alert (any author who tells you they don’t obsessively scour the internet for the slightest mention of their books is a filthy, filthy liar) I swoop in and scroll straight down to the reader comments. As I mentioned yesterday, people’s reactions to the book’s existence (no one’s actually read it yet) tends to break one of two ways. On one side, you have the “awesome; this is full of win; I hate Jane Austen but I would totally read this” crowd. On the other, you have the “why? Why would you tamper with something as beautiful…as pure…as perfect as Pride and Prejudice?”

There seems to be very little grey area in people’s response to this book’s existence. It’s either “omg! best idea ever!” or “how dare you sir!”

Frankly, how much different is this Monty Python-esque in-your-face double coding from the Kafka-esque subliminal uses of Ms. Rowling? Both are funny and meant to turn your experience of Jane Austen upside down then right-side-up again, after all. Zombie movies, especially the Dawn of the Dead film archetypes, are all about portraying postmodern people as unthinking, unfeeling, not-quite-mentally-alive undead consumers without the power of self-reflection or self-restraint. (Meyer includes quite a bit of this satirical zombie meaning in her Eclipse.) I love Pride and Prejudice and love the idea of “Elizabeth Bennet striking down hordes of zombies with a Katana sword” because it makes some of the same points Austen makes, albeit in graphic, totally incongruous fashion. The incongruity makes the reader experience and explore both the original and the wild meaning, if only to try to answer the inevitable question, “what the heck is going on here?”

Your thoughts and corrective comments are much appreciated. I hope RevGeorge will add Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to his ever growing pile of books-to-read so he can give us a full report, or, better, that he will write the PoMo classic we’ve all been waiting for, Anne of Green Gables Meets Godzilla.

Okay, Wizard Rock is a blast but it’s time to put Potter-mania and Fandom aside and get back to the books and some serious thinking, folks. Here are three notes on Umberto Eco and how to think about the narrative of the Harry Potter stories, especially about why it resonates so universally.

The first is a delightful introduction to the man himself in I Invented Dan Brown, a Jerusalem Post interview with Italian novelist and semiotics professor Umberto Eco:

Eco unhesitatingly accepts the label “postmodern” to describe his novels, whose plots often hinge on the ambiguities of language and pay homage to writers, philosophers and theologians from throughout the ages. “Postmodernism is a form of narrativity that takes for granted that everything has already been said before. If I love a girl I cannot say ‘I love you desperately,’ because I know that Barbara Cartland has already said it. But I can say, ‘as Barbara Cartland would say, “I love you desperately.”‘”

As unclassifiable as a platypus, Eco made his fictional debut at 48, when a publisher commissioned him to contribute to an anthology of detective tales written by academics. Instead, he turned in a 500-page tome: The Name of the Rose. Italian literature lacks a tradition of detective fiction, which Eco attributes to Renaissance Italy’s abandonment of Aristotle’s Poetics. “The Poetics is the theory of pure narrativity. The Italian tradition was more interested in language than plot.”

The argument of much of Unlocking Harry Potter. the first and revised editions, is much along these Umbertian lines, namely, that Ms. Rowling’s popularity must first be understood in the resonance her books have with our times. Transcendent meaning is all well and good, but if the Harry Potter epic weren’t very much a Postmodern epic about the goods and evils (and blindspots) of the historical ages, a surface meaning that hooked millions of readers, no one would be interested in the literary alchemy, Christian content, and Dante allusions. As discussed in Unlocking, the Potter novels pass every test for postmodern orthodoxy from genre crushing (call it “platypus publishing”) to metanarrative bashing.

Umberto Eco has more to tell us about Harry Potter, though, than his resemblance to a literary genre-crosser:

In Opera aperta, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Those works of literature that limit potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line are the least rewarding, while those that are most open, most active between mind and society and line, are the most lively and best — although valuation terminology is not his business. Eco emphasizes the fact that words do not have meanings that are simply lexical, but rather operate in the context of utterance. So much had been said by I. A. Richards and others, but Eco draws out the implications for literature from this idea.

Eco’s deconstructionist theories about “fields of meaning” explain as much about Ms. Rowling’s great success as does her resonance with the Zeitgeist. To many readers, Harry Potter is an epic Harlequin fantasy-romance in which ‘shipping is the central focus. To the younger (or beach-novel) crowd, it’s an exciting and engaging story without substance or quality meriting study. Come to think of it, this is also the Ivory Tower response in large part. And then there are HogPro geeks, who understood on the first read that the books were ‘heavily laced’ with symbolic and transcendent meanings very much worth exploring. How else can we explain both Potter-mania and individual fascination with Harry?

I’d suggest that this breadth of readings reflects at least partially what Eco means by “fields of meaning” and a book’s open understanding to a plurality of reader experiences

And an old hand from Sword of Gryffindor days on his own blog, Ohio River Utopia, takes Ecovian explorations in a different line, namely, how the Harry Potter novels are about the reader’s experience of the novel because the hero is in a similar race to understand what is happening:

I also have to wonder what this means for the structure of narrative. The story/discourse dichotomy is one that clearly exists. Can they be conflated? Or at least blended? The Harry Potter novels construct a story telling device in which the reader reads Harry’s attempts to “read” the narrative(s) that are emerging and/or rending in front of him. He seeks to codify some simple notion of his own past, something completely alien to him. And he easily latches onto a recaptured/reconstructed narrative of his father as a heroic and popular figure. His experience in Snape’s memory fractures that self constructed narrative (one largely built from shaky, biased sources filtered into a biased narrative architect/ure[Harry]). It’s a transgressive moment that figures the discursive element of narrative architecture as unstable, at least to a degree. It cannot collapse, or else the text is unintelligible entirely. But Harry must interpret the memory and do something with it. He does empathize with Snape, but only for a brief moment. He destroyed the limits of the narrative he had constructed, but only saw it as a minor crack in his father’s character instead of a seminal comment on the nature of Snape’s character evolution.

Is this a simple metanarrative? Or might it be a kind of elided narrative, or bifurcated narrative? One could argue that the real story is the one that Harry is trying to read, that we never fully see. Most of the plot in each book is bound to the attempts by Harry and the others to understand the behind-the-scenes activities that involve primarily Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Snape. And Rowling encourages this speculation by building a plot in HBP centered on Harry’s education in deciphering the text(s) to which he has access. The Pensieve lessons are devoted to an understanding of Voldemort’s motivations and plans through interpretation of his personal histories, both as Tom Riddle, and as the fictional Voldemort, a simulacra of the original in some fashion.

All in all, I think Eco’s theories give us plenty to think and talk about. I look forward to reading your thoughts, comments, and corrections.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has hit the streets of Tehran and one newspaper at least finds this a very disturbing event. From The Memri Blog:

Iranian Daily: Harry Potter, Billion-Dollar Zionist Project

In an article, the Iranian daily Kayhan, which is identified with Iranian Supreme Leader ‘Ali Khamenei, criticized Iran’s Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry for approving the distribution of the new book in the “Harry Potter” series.

Source: Kayhan, Iran, July 26, 2007

Now this is an entirely different brand of Harry Hating, no? A billion dollar Zionist project? Or is it just a different wrapping for the same package?

First, let’s note the irony (or is it just “absurdity”?) of a book laden with Christian themes and imagery being condemned by the agents of a mullah as Zionist. Now, no doubt the Israelis and the Zionist conspirators are clever, but would they think of using a Christian story “to disrupt the minds of young people” in revolutionary Tehran? Maybe they’re just covering their tracks…

Then, there’s the linkage made possible by this report that the Hogwarts Professor can make with his friends at LifeSite News. What, after all, is the difference between a make believe headline about letters proving that the Pope condemns Harry Potter and this blog entry that links a newspaper story with an Ayatollah? That’s right: the question mark — and the fact that I am not working a media agenda the week before a Potter novel is published.

And then, perhaps, there are the more substantial points lurking in here that reveal the common ground shared by Harry Haters like Richard Abanes, Harold Bloom, A. S. Byatt, Brjit Kjos, Life Site News, and the Iranian Supreme Leader ‘Ali Khamenei (or Kayhan).

(1) Though explicitly Christian in composition, the Harry Potter books are also decidedly anti-authoritarian, especially with respect to government, schools, and media. This would be threatening to those for whom religious, political, or academic position and authority are matters of self-identity. The ivory tower aesthetes, the anti-semite Semites, and scriptural fundamentalists can all get into the same bed on this one. They all have problems with libertarians and Ms. Rowling has been linked with that bunch of anarchists.

(2) Ms. Rowling is a “postmodern’s postmodern” in her resistance to all restrictive and exclusive metanarratives. This would include, it seems, the anti-metanarrative metanarrative of the politically correct regime, in which being against prejudicial thought becomes the discriminatory headware in a world-beyond-satire. It definitely means she has no time for the “lunatic fringe of her own religion” and their “back to the future” metanarrative that offers a throwback, lockstep belief system with all goods and evils clearly marked in black and white in reaction to the confusion and relativism of our times.

Her Harry Potter novels, in contrast, offer a “metanarrative of love,” essentially a Christianity without creeds, in which there is no constitutive “other” or class of people that are Samaritans by definition. Not Mudbloods, not Slytherins, not even Death Eaters or Ministry officials. Anyone capable of love or of just feeling remorse can be saved.

Who could this message offend? It’s a little bit like being against lynching or drunk driving. But to what I would call “regime postmoderns,” Ms. Rowling’s message has way too much religious symbolism and morality; their writer of choice is Philip Pullman whose anti-church and anti-god novels have the p.c. bad guys spot on. To culture warriors on the other side of the fence, the “anti-relativism, Leave It to Beaver” crowd, the stories don’t have enough explicitly Christian content or resounding morality (which is to say, “Filch punishment for rule breakers”); their strong preference is for Messrs. Tolkien and Lewis, whom they have pegged as Focus on the Family writers.

The ‘Ayatollah’? Like all the other Harry Haters, his newspaper (and I have to think he has as much to do with this announcement as Pope Benedict did with the Kuby Letters and LifeSite News’ use of those letters) uses Potter mania as an occasion to create another faith litmus strip and attack the enemies of the Islamic Revolution. Reading Harry Potter in Iran because of this pronouncement now means you’re a Zionist stooge — and the government agency in charge of policing these things is “soft on Zionism.” You can find similar litmus strips and condescension with name-calling in the various Harry Hating camps in the NY Times editorial office, various Christian ghettos, and in the better Ivory Towers.

With enemies like these, Ms. Rowling must be doing something right.

Your comments and corrections, please.

From the Sightings WeBlog, a guest post:

Trangressive Irony at Radio City

– Travis Scholl

At this time of year American culture is laden with customs, themselves laden with multivariant meanings. The Christmas Spectacular that takes place every year at Radio City Music Hall, for example, comes with its own set of traditions. The stunning simultaneity of the Rockettes’ high leg kicks…the complex choreography of the Wooden Soldiers…the condensed retelling of the Nutcracker story—most of the elements of Radio City’s Christmas Spectacular, now in its seventy-fifth year, are told year after year, only with different choreography and new sets.

Near the end of each year’s Spectacular, another tradition takes place: the “Living Nativity,” in which, as the program notes tell us, the “beautiful and inspiring story of the first Christmas [is] told reverently in pageantry, music, and scripture.” It features multiple set tableaus, live animals, and swelling musical orchestration; but perhaps the most notable component of this particular scene, as I observed it over Thanksgiving weekend, was in the audience response to it. As soon as the curtain pulled back to reveal the full set of the nativity, the stage began to sparkle with the strobing flashes of camera bulbs. It was the one and only point at which the audience was willing to transgress the venue’s explicit rule to not take flash photographs.

It has been about twenty-five years since the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard characterized postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” His definition relied on the distinction between (big) metanarratives, which tend to dominate whole systems of meaning, and (small) narratives, which provide more organic meanings within existential realities. But what Lyotard’s distinction does not necessarily take into account is the way that cultural narratives, even religious narratives, can be inverted upon and into each other. In a postmodern context where popular culture is inundated by spectacle, religious narratives, most often presumed to function as metanarrative, can be inverted, taking the form of smaller narratives within other systems of meaning. At Radio City , the Spectacular’s own metanarrative could have been summarized by the production’s oft-repeated encouragement “to believe in the magic of Christmas,” supported by its signature lyric to “let Christmas shine.” As such, the narrative of the Christ child—which took up all of about twelve minutes of an almost two hour show—was subsumed within the larger narrative of the Spectacular’s more recognizable emcee, Santa Claus.

In most cases, such inversions become instances of those most famous of postmodern events; they become transgressive instances of irony. The irony of what happened at Radio City worked through a kind of double inversion: The production inverted the nativity narrative within its much larger spectacle, but audience members displayed their own inversions of what they were seeing by transgressing the rules for (non)participation and pulling out their cameras at what was staged as perhaps one of the least “spectacular” moments of the show.

This holiday season will surely provide countless opportunities for talking heads to argue over public displays of religion; and just as surely, each display will open itself to its own potential transgression into irony, where discourse becomes spectacle, where the spectacle is in the eye of the beholder, and where one person’s metanarrative is, for another, just a fat man in a red suit. I saw it happen at Radio City Music Hall on Thanksgiving Day. The irony came in a flash. And it left just as quickly, lost in the 3D metanarrative of magic and exhibition that is New York City—and twenty-first century America—at Christmastime.

Travis J. Scholl is a recent graduate of Yale University Divinity School and Managing Editor of Theological Publications at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

Here we are, the “night before the night before.” I confess that I’m very tired and very excited about the day to come.

Before I begin this next-to-last of my seven predictions, which is largely taken from a previous post, I want to note a difference between what I am doing here and what everyone else is doing on their predictions lists on the Internet and in public spaces.

I’m just like everyone else in being overly attached to pet theories I’ve made up myself or just adopted. And you would have a hard time distinguishing my not-so-private hope of being acknowledged as brilliant or at least insightful if I hit a plot-point spot-on from every other Potter Pundit and faux-expert. Like Janet Batchler said about one of her excellent predictions, “If this one hits, I want a parade.”

The difference is that my predictions are all correct. None of them are wrong. Really.

Now before you call Mary to suggest that I call it a night with such a big day coming up (and a long night of reading aloud), let me explain.

There is an important difference between illustrating themes and ideas with crack-pot theories and trying to hit plot-point bull’s eyes for the glory of hitting plot-point bull’s eyes. No matter how silly and off-base my theories are — and however much I have come to enjoy them and defending them against all comers — I’ve always known they were wrong and not what Ms. Rowling was going to do. After four hours of discussing the Five Keys and these Seven Predictions at Enlightenment 2007 in Philadelphia last Friday I had a hard time convincing that crowd that I was wrong, but I insisted on it.

Because the theories and predictions will all be revealed as what they are on Saturday morning. The Five Keys these ideas and best guesses illustrate are invaluable in unlocking Harry Potter and they will still be essential for Serious Readers studying the book for years to come.

In that sense, then, my predictions are all correct because they can only be “failures” if they haven’t made the literary point necessarily clearer. None of them fail in this regard, so, though Stoppered Death, Scar-O-Scope, and Harry Through the Veil will all be just happy memories on Sunday, they have all succeeded in doing all I hoped for them. Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader will be re-written without it’s speculative pieces but it won’t change in purpose or substance.

I do hope Zossima Press will include pictures of Janet’s victory parade in the second edition.

Now that I’ve disavowed the truth value of my prognostications as plot-point detectors and affirmed their great value as illustrations of literary principles, let’s get back to tonight’s crystal ball gazing.

The Keys were illustrating tonight are Ms. Rowling’s postmodern themes, her use of traditional symbolism and repeated elements, and not a little narrative misdirection. The prediction is simply that the house-elves will be the saviors of the Wizarding World.

I cannot remember if I first read this in Janet Batchler’s posts at the old HogPro Forums (it is in her book) or at Travis’ Sword of Gryffindor website. Either way, it is not my thought. I came late to the House-elf Party. It wasn’t until I heard Marietta College Prof. Kathryn MacDaniel’s paper, The Elfin Mystique: Fantasy and Feminism in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series, at the “Past Watchful Dragons” CSL Conference in Nashville, 2005. Dr. McDaniel made the strong case that the house-elves are Ms. Rowling’s portrait of house-wives and their three dimensional portrayal in the characters of Dobby, Winky, and Kreacher are a snapshot of feminism’s victories and failures.

It was at that same conference that I realized, while listening to Andrew Lazo’s talk on the modernism of the Inklings, that Ms. Rowling’s books had to be examined for qualities of postmodernism. The house-elves had to be central in the story’s punchline if Prof. McDaniel was right in the parallel she drew (See pages 169-171 of Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader for more about feminism and house-elves).

That was the background to this HogPro post in celebration of discovering another jewel at Sword of Gryffindor.com: How the house-elves would save the day at story’s end.

House-elves as Saviors: Dumbledore’s Trump Card

How will Harry and friends overcome the combined forces of the Dark Lord, his Death eaters, the Giants, the Goblins, and the rapidly-reproducing dementors?

Travis Prinzi, maven at the Sword of Gryffindor weBlog, has a theory that I think satisfies one of the Postmodern requirements of the story, namely, that the periphery become the center, that the “other” becomes what is good and decisive in the central conflict. Travis’ theory is that the house-elves in Hogwarts are Dumbledore’s real Army; Ollivander has “disappeared” to arm them with wands and Dobby will lead them in combat against the Dark Lord they all despise to save their hero, Harry Potter. Travis’ original post, “What Happened to Ollivander,” is worth reading in its entirety, but here is the part about the house-elves I find so striking:

[The goals of S.P.E.W. as Hermione shares them in Goblet are:] fair wages, good working conditions, political representation, and — wands. Wands! I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same book that focuses so heavily on house-elf slavery also focuses so heavily on wands, and makes the point that the wizarding prejudice against house-elves is actually institutionalized, by forbidding them wands. We should probably conclude from this that, with wands in hand, house-elves would be powerful enough to be a threat to wizards.

Ah, if Harry Potter only knew what he means to us, to the lowly, the enslaved, we dregs of the magical world! Dobby remembers how it was when He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was at the height of his powers, sir! We house-elves were treated like vermin, sir! life has improved for my kind since you triumphed over He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Harry Potter survived, and the Dark Lord’s power was broken, and it was a new dawn, sir, and Harry Potter shone like a beacon of hope for those of us who thought the Dark days would never end, sir.(CS-10)

Harry feels the same way about Hogwarts, and he’s not going to give it up without a fight. I don’t think the house-elves of Hogwarts would be too keen on having to submit to Voldemort himself, especially if many of them recall their days as slaves of Death Eaters. Look for a force of house-elves, finally armed with wands provided by Ollivander himself, in Book 7.

In terms of the Five Keys, this theory satisfies the Postmodern theme requirement, Traditional Symbolism (can you say, “the Last will be First”?), Repeated Elements (what Travis points out in the several attempts at taking Hogwarts from Dumbledore’s control), Literary Alchemy (Harry as quintessence, the resolution of contraries), and, of course, Narrative Misdirection. As important as Dobby, Winky, and Kreacher have been in the story-line thus far and as involved as Hermione has been in her fantasy of liberating the oppressed house-wives (I mean “elves”), no one takes the house-elves very seriously, do they? House-elves are comic relief, and pathetic comic relief at that.

But it is just this “overlooking” that is the strongest pointer to the likelihood of Mr. Prinzi’s theory. Dumbledore doesn’t overlook the strengths and possibilities in people or Magical Brethren.

On their first meeting in Goblet of Fire, Dobby says to Harry, Ron, and Hermione down in the kitchens that he and the other house-elves are delighted to be in the Headmaster’s service. He goes so far as to say the house-elves know the Headmaster’s secrets.

“Tis part of the house-elf’s enslavement, sir. We keeps their secrets and our silence, sir. We upholds the family’s honor, and we never speaks ill of them — though Professor Dumbledore told Dobby he does not insist upon this. Professor Dumbledore said we is free to — to –”

“But Dobby is not wanting to, Harry Potter,” he said, talking normally again, and shaking his head so that his ears flapped. “Dobby likes Professor Dumbledore very much, sir, and is proud to keep his secrets and our silence for him.” Goblet, Chapter 21, ‘House-Elf Liberation Front,’ Scholastic page 380.

The biggest of these secrets seems to be his training them for more than cooking and cleaning duties. All Five of the Keys for the Serious Reader (have you ordered Unlocking Harry Potter yet?) point to Travis’ being “spot-on” in his SWAG that the house-elves will be the deciding factor in the climactic battle in Deathly Hallows. A tip of the hat to my friend at “Sword of Gryffindor” and my request that friends here will share their thoughts about this possible ending of the series. Don’t forget the house-elves at the Ministry of Magic after the battle between the Dark Lord and the Headmaster…

That was the end of my House-elves as Saviors: Dumbledore’s Trump Card
post (the comments following this post were especially rewarding and I encourage you to go the original post to read them). I’d only add to it the necessary note with which I began this exchange; the prediction that the house-elves will save the Wizarding World as the real Dumbledore’s Army is an excellent illustration of four of the Five Keys — and it will prove to be wrong Saturday morning as a plot point. The Keys it illustrates, however, will be correct.

Amazing.

Do you remember Dobby’s aside to Harry when promising to follow Draco everywhere, that he’d throw himself “off the Astronomy Tower” if he failed? Dobby may be proud to keep Dumbledore’s secrets but he also likes to give Harry clues when he can for Harry to figure out. One of Dumbledore’s secrets may have been the plan to stage his death on the Tower.

Nah. Couldn’t be.

Or could it?

A friend over at the Barnes and Noble Book Club I’m moderating this month wrote a longish post about the Four Houses, their Four Elements equivalents, and their probable spiritual qualities. I do enjoy thinking about Ravenclaw (Air), Hufflepuff (Earth), Gryffindor (Fire), and Slytherin (Water) along these lines, if I would have never come up with what Oriflamme did. More recently I have been tracking the choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine, and melancholic humors/temperaments in the various characters. Fun stuff.

Most interesting to me is how Ms. Rowling has used these traditionalist conceptions of character and physics to make postmodern points — and has done so from the first book of the series.

I am thinking about Dumbledore’s four word speech to the Four Houses after the sorting in Philosopher’s Stone. He says, “Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!” and sits down. This talk made enough of an impression on Harry (and Ms. Rowling thought it important enough) that he recalls these words during the eulogy at the Headmaster’s funeral in Prince.

The context of his talk is the Sorting of the ickle firsties into their respective houses. However off-the-wall, Albus seems to be making an important point about the divisions that have just been made and the identities these students are about to take on. In short, each of the four words is a “put-down” that one house would use to describe the “other” (anyone not part of their new house).

“Nitwit:” Ravenclaw is the house of witches and wizards of greater intelligence. As a rule, Rowena’s children will think of those not selected for membership in their select group as “nitwits” or dummies.

“Blubber:” Blubber, in contrast, is a word used on playgrounds in the English speaking world for “fat.” It is disparaging because children use it to be unkind to their peers who are heavier than the average kid and probably less athletic. Gryffindor, the jock or frat house, sees the “other” as less physically bold or courageous, for which condition, an eleven year-old would probably find “blubber” a handy signifier.

“Oddment:” This is a word from the world of sewing and fabrics. An oddment, if memory serves, is the remainder from the bolt of cloth, a remainder not large enough to be usable in making anything significant. Slytherins are lovers of “pure-blood” and, in this, “wholeness” or “integrity.” The “other” to a Slytherin is any witch or wizard born with insufficient purity, an insufficiency that makes them an oddment of less, even no value.

“Tweek:” Hufflepuff is the Hogwarts House for magical folk who were not smart, bold, or pure enough for the three Houses described above. From Malfoy’s comments in Madame Borkin’s in *Stone,” they seem to be the dustbin house, where the nobodies wind up. Cedric’s success in *Goblet* also suggests that glory is something of a stranger to Hufflepuff champions.

I have to doubt this is the Hufflepuff self-understanding. They look at the “other” and see “excess” or “imbalance” not “excellence” and “virtue” they lack. Hufflepuff witches and wizards are down-to-earth, humble (humilis), and real people. The “other” needs to be “tweeked” or adjusted to refine their excess and bring it to the mean, which as Aristotle teaches, is where virtue really lies.

The Headmaster doesn’t make a long speech about what a shame it is that they have been divided and will soon see themselves as better than their friends who have had the misfortune to be sorted into the “other” houses. As a good postmodern linguistics professor, he notes that the Sorting Hat is the vehicle of the metanarrative or Grand Myth that is the *real* evil of their world and throws out his comic marker for those capable of hearing what was not very well hidden in his short speech.

As Harry must act as Quintessence to the Four Houses and Four Magical Brethren and was destined to this role as “The Chosen One,” it is no accident that these words stayed with him. Here’s hoping he can make sense of this lesson in his Deathly Hallows efforts to unite the Magical World against Lord Voldemort.

European Minorities Torn Between Worlds

I post the story above in case you sometimes wonder if the discussion in the previous posts about the “Constitutive ‘Other’” in postmodern thinking is just a head game or if the idea of a Gryffindor/Slytherin Hermaphrodite who can bridge the chasm created by cultural metanarratives is silly beyond words. The agony of “home grown” Muslims in Europe unable to assimilate because of their beliefs and the beliefs of their host countries puts a “real life” face on this discussion and highlights both the relevance and the urgency of a “metanarrative of love.”

I would say, too, that this theme of painful duality needing resolution strikes home in our hearts both because we are all the victims of faction or “misfit toys” to some degree and because, as psychosomatic life, just by being human, we are a joining of contrary physical and spiritual tendencies. Our outsides and our insides, the external social environment and our interior life, then, resonate with the alchemical action of this story.

This isn’t kid stuff, however edifying the experience of this story is for the open-hearted, young or old