I think we’re seeing something similar in recent comments on a Focus on the Family radio program about Twilight. Let’s take a quick look at the Focus history of Twilight reviews, the backlash from Conservative Christians (TM), and the response of a literature professor to the consequent back-pedaling on the radio.The history is pretty straight forward. At Focus on the Family’s web site for popular culture, ‘Plugged-In,’ the book and movie reviews about Twilight have been balanced, always careful to note those scenes, language, and themes some parents may object to, while being for the most part positive about Mrs. Meyer’s work and the film adaptations. Check out their “book report” on the first book in the series and the movie review of Twilight. The review of Summit’s adaptation of New Moon is equally straight forward with ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ that you’d expect from a Dobson ministry and their audience.

But part of their audience was furious and have been raising a fuss on their internet sites about Dr. Dobson’s endorsing the Twilight franchise, and, along with it, the occult, free love, and Mormonism. If you think I’m kidding, check out World View Weekend’s Focus on the Family Praises Twilight Vampire Love Film.

If you want to read more of the Culture Warrior reflex-rejection of Twilight that is the back-drop of this hand (face?) slapping being dished out to Dr. Dobson and company, check out Eric Barger’s Bringing Twilight Out Into the Son or Caryl’s The Twilight Phenomena. My favorite is an “Interesting Sidenote” afterword to the weBlog take-down of Focus (‘Dobson’s Focus on the Family — or is it Focus on the Coven?’), a “side-note” that is clearly the point of the whole piece, in which we learn that Mrs. Meyer’s work is the work, in fact, of the Devil:

Author Stephenie Meyer

A housewife named Stephenie Meyer “received” the story of Twilight in a dream on June 2, 2003.  The vision she had of a vampire and mortal as lovers compelled her to start writing the story immediately.  She says she couldn’t resist the drive to write down her dream (a similar scenario to J.K Rowlings, author of Harry Potter).  Meyer gives a summary of that first dream:

“I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately.”

Within three months, she had the entire novel written. Within six-months, it had been dreamed, written, and readied for publishing.

She admits she had little to no prior writing experience with only a B.A. degree in English and had to learn from the Internet how to submit a book proposal.  She tried a few times and “miraculously” got published with a $750 thousand dollar publishing contract! Miraculous happenings have been known to come from powers of darkness, and in this case, no matter how it’s sliced, the God of the Bible would not use vampires, sexual tension, lust, boyfriend worship, and teenage romance to spread His Gospel of eternal life and salvation through Yeshua.

Meyer, a Mormon mother of three, states that some of her inspiration in writing her vampire saga came from a band of musicians called Marjorie Fair.

“For New Moon, they were absolutely essential. They can put you into a suicidal state faster than anything I know . . . Their songs really made it beautiful for me.”

Also an inspiration for one of her characters was a band called My Chemical Romance. She states, “It’s someone . . . who just wants to go out and blow things up.

Scarily, Meyer’s fictional character Edward took on the “terrifying” form of “real” spirit when it leapt from the pages of her saga and communicated with her in a dream.

She says she had an additional dream after Twilight was finished when her vampire character Edward came to visit and speak to her. The Edward who visited her in the night told her she’d got it all wrong because he DID drink human blood, and could not “live” on ONLY animal blood as she wrote in the story.  She said, “We had this conversation and he was terrifying.”

Conversation with spirits (saying they need human blood to suck!) and frightening dream visitations by spirits are part of occult communication.

Meyer’s spiritual experiences could well be influenced by her Mormon faith which allows for communication with the so-called “the dead”; indeed “the dead” of former generations are baptized into Mormonism in Mormon Temple ritual.

In 2007, Stephenie Meyer wrote portions of a work titled, “Prom Nights from Hell,” which is about supernatural events surrounding evil prom nights. On May 6, 2008, she released her adult novel, The Host, which is about “invading alien souls” that take over a person and get them to do what they want.

This behavior is called demonic possession, a state Jesus came to set captives free from.  Meyer’s so-called fiction “crosses over” to severe occult philosophy.

I’m not terribly surprised, consequently, that on a recent Focus on the Family radio program the radio ministry reassured their listeners that they are, in fact, not on the side of the devil. I’m told they, a la Colson, have retreated to the ‘point of prudence’ which is to issue a warning to parents that adolescents seeing the New Moon film may be encouraged to jump off cliffs (or feed themselves to Italian vampires?) if relationships don’t work out and to have unhealthy boyfriend-girlfriend hook-ups in the first place.

Elizabeth Baird Hardy, literature professor and author of Milton, Spencer, and the Chronicles of Narnia: Literary Sources for the C. S. Lewis Novels, has written Focus this charitable letter, admonishing them for their retreat. I have her permission to quote it in full:

Dear Focus Friends,

Focus on the Family is a ministry near and dear to me and my family.  We have frequently been blessed by the wonderful work done by Focus. As a college instructor, my schedule is such that I am frequently in the car to listen to Focus on the radio, an experience I usually relish. However, I am concerned about the content and tone featured in the today’s and yesterday’s programs, in which guests expressed their concerns and issues with the popular Twilight Saga.

While I know we must be vitally concerned with what our young people read,  as an English teacher and literary scholar, I was deeply troubled by the guests’ frequent comments that imply this popular series is somehow a terrifying new threat. While these individuals seem very sincere and their hearts are undoubtedly burdened with true love and concern for young women (and others), many of their concerns seemed questionable. I was particularly struck by one guest (forgive me, I was driving and did not catch which ) and her comment about the dangers of Edward’s love because he is willing to die for Bella and she for him.

His attempted suicide (and her perceived one) are plot elements of New Moon, which is built upon the scaffolding of Romeo and Juliet. How many students read Shakespeare’s beautiful tragedy every semester? Do we wring our hands that these students may model their lives on our tragic Montague and Capulet? Or, even worse, wrench it from their hands? I certainly hope not. Rather, I hope we have intelligent and interesting conversations with them about love, passion, and perhaps even the complex moral, alchemical, and spiritual drama played out in Verona (and echoed in Meyer’s novel).

Another guest (or perhaps the same one, again, my apologies) was concerned about Edward Cullen as a dangerous person for young women to adore. How many generations of women, including myself, swooned over  Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights or Mr. (Edward) Rochester of Jane Eyre, both far more dangerous and even abusive in their passion (though Edward Cullen has literary roots in both)?

Certainly, we should be directing young women (and everyone else, for that matter) toward Christ, but I think our guests might do well to remember that literature, and literary discussions may be the best tool to help anyone understand the Twilight Saga, built as it is upon the framework of some of the most beloved love stories in the canon of Western Literature. Concerned parents really ought to read ANYTHING which they are unsure their children should be reading. If they read Twilight for themselves, they may open not only a few spiritual conversations (and not all negative ones), but they may also discover, together, some new old favorite authors like the Brontes and Austen and become better readers, thinkers, and parents.

May I advise parents, and other readers, to read John Granger’s Spotlight: A Close up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga? It is an excellent analysis of the Saga (including why this really isn’t even a series about vampires at all.) Mr. Granger is also an outstanding speaker, homeschooling dad, and fine Christian who would be a wonderful guest on Focus.

Thank you very much for your time. May God continue to richly bless you in your tireless effort to bless and support families and lift up our Savior.

In Him,

Elizabeth Baird Hardy

Senior Instructor of English, Mayland Community College, Spruce Pine, NC

I’m not holding my breath for the phone call from Focus especially as I suspect their hope was that their radio program convinced the Twilight-focused Culture Warriors that they were firmly on the anti-vampire and contra-Twilight side of things. But Prof. Hardy’s understanding, that is, reading the books as literature rather than litmus strips of fidelity and righteousness by which we gauge our neighbors and their children, is the right one, I think.

I covet your comments and correction as always.

I flew into Phoenix last Thursday and enjoyed a wonderful afternoon at Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College. Prof. Joel Hunter, faculty adviser to ASU’s Harry Potter Society, talked with me on a tour of campus and took me to dinner with said Society before my talk that night on ‘The Eyes of Deathly Hallows.’ Considering it was the night before Spring Break at America’s largest university, we had quite the crowd — and these folks have a command of canon detail that, frankly, really surprised me (how many readers know how many stair cases there are at Hogwarts off the top of their head?). They also were all over the Coleridgean ideas and anagogical artistry in Deathly Hallows, which was a treat for me to discuss with them.

The next day I taught a class at Glendale Preparatory Academy, one of Arizona’s Great Hearts charter schools, and I confess to being both surprised and delighted by my experience there. Headmaster David Williams has created a challenging, nurturing and wonderfully engaging school of moral and intellectual virtue north of Phoenix in just a few years. My evidence? The experience I had Friday morning at ‘GP’ leading a discussion of George Herbert’s poem, Vertue (1633), in a classroom of seventh graders; the conversation never flagged, the participation of the 20 boys and girls was doggone close to 100% — and everyone’s comments were always attentive and respectful of their classmates’ contributions.

This isn’t an elite private school but a free public school whose students were chosen by lottery from the pool of local children interested in the Great Hearts ‘Great Book’ program. These polite, wonderfully challenging, and curious 12 and 13 year olds had been part of Glendale Prep’s community for a year at the most — and yet they all dove into Herbert’s meditation on life and death and his wonderful conceits with real enthusiasm and no little insight. I’m confident I was much more impressed with them than they were with me. I sat back and directed conversational traffic for the most part — while marveling at their excitement and courtesy.

I drove to Tucson that night after a sushi lunch with the Glendale Prep architects and an afternoon meeting with the ASU Potter Society. Incredibly, to me at least, these die-hards met to discuss chapters 16-18 of Deathly Hallows though the campus was all but empty (and given the Godric’s Hollow and pre-Silver Doe material of those chapters, it was a full 90 minutes!). I arrived in Tucson and, after a wonderful conversation with my hostess for the festival, I was asleep in a minute when I finally turned in.

Saturday was a ‘wow.’ Lisa Bunker, goddess of Harry Potter fandom and to all Potter Pundits because of her AccioQuotes.org resource (and a person to whom I will always be personally and profoundly indebted because of certain sensational discoveries she posted there), gave me the royal tour of beautiful Tucson with none other than ‘Lexicon Steve’ Vander Ark, also in town for the Book Festival! The first eye-popper was at the Tucson Museum of Art where Ms. Bunker introduced us to El Nacimiento, a Nativity scene several decades in the making and something I won’t ever forget (I wish we had had the day or two of attention this one room display and three dimensional icon deserved).

Before heading over to the University for the Festival of Books and my Twilight talk, Steve and I were treated to a trip out of town to the ‘Rez,’ and a Roman Catholic mission church, the Mission San Xavier de Bac, founded there in the 17th Century and still active as a Native American parish run by Franciscans today.

The weather was clear, bright, and cool. The desert was in bloom and the book lovers were on hand to listen to and meet their favorite authors. I was flattered that so many people came to hear my thoughts on Mrs. Meyer’s Twilight — and that they found my arguments about these books (which they loved or despised, it seemed to me, with little middle ground) largely convincing. Ms. Bunker sent me these Twitter notes from the University of Arizona Arts group, Wild Cat Arts:

• HPW: Twilight seems to be the theme of the festival. Is that really all people are reading anymore? 2:47 PM Mar 13th via txt
• BS: Speaking of Twilight, John Granger just gave a surprisingly convincing lecture on why Twilight is good literature. 2:50 PM Mar 13th via Seesmic
• BS: Would you believe that Edward Cullen represents God, Joseph Smith Jr. and divine consciousness? 2:50 PM Mar 13th via Seesmic
• BS: BTW, Granger is known as “The Hogwarts Professor”. At least his last name fits the theme. 2:52 PM Mar 13th via Seesmic
• SK: Ugh, Twilight. 2:59 PM Mar 13th via Twitterrific

The folks in attendance bought copies of Spotlight (and a few picked up Deathly Hallows Lectures, too, hurrah) and we spoke in the Signing Tent for about an hour afterward while I did the Gilderoy number, talked Twilight, and enjoyed the roasted corn. Ms. Bunker then gathered a clan of librarians, Potter mavens, and good friends — several of whom qualified on all three counts — for a night of live mariachi music and delicious Mexican food at a delightful restaurant.

I drove back to Phoenix before dawn on Sunday for an early morning flight and I was fully expecting to sleep my way through fly-over country. As providence would have it, instead I wound up between a pilot on his way to Kuwait and a serious reader and history professor at a notable Washington, DC, university. We talked without a break from Arizona to Washington-Dulles — and to where the baggage claim and flights to Allentown paths split. What a treat to discuss life as a mercenary in the 21st century and the comparative merits of Gladstone and Disraeli as writers and literary wonders at 36,000 feet…

And even nicer to be at home! Just in time to get ready for April’s talks at the C. S. Lewis Conference in Oklahoma City, two venues in Missouri, and then Augustana College… But more on those dates and topics in the next few weeks.

A very warm thank you to Joel Hunter and the Harry Potter Society at ASU, David Williams and Company at Glendale Prep (especially Mrs. Junker’s 7th Grade Literature class!), SVA, Lisa, the Bunk-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, and Gertrud in Tucson for their delightful hospitality, my friends from the talk at the Festival of Books, and my conversation companions from United Flight 952, Phoenix to Washington. It was a trip I hope to repeat for next year’s Festival, if not sooner!

(Photos all by L.Bunker)

The short version is “It was a lot of fun.” I am very grateful to friends at The Leaky Cauldron (Melissa), The Group That Shall Not Be Named (Jonathon), and Pace University (Prof. Limbach), as well as to Travis Prinzi and James Thomas, my fellow Pundits, for setting up the event and making it as enjoyable and edifying as it was.

Until then, though, here is a Guest Post by North Carolina’s Ms. Misty Dotts about Shakespeare’s influence on the Twilight Saga. Enjoy!

Stephenie Meyer and William Shakespeare:

How Romeo and Juliet Influenced the Twilight Saga

Millions of readers in the twenty-first century have read, or at least, heard of the phenomenon of author Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. These lengthy novels- Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn- are aimed at young adults, but have appealed to readers of all ages. The Twilight Saga follows the unlikely epic love story between a teenage girl, Bella Swan, and a (seemingly) teenage vampire, Edward Cullen. Though not often the most popular literary genre, Meyer’s “vampire stories” (Granger Spotlight 36) have been whole-heartedly embraced by readers, and are not being hailed as mere teenage angst novels as some of her peers would like to believe (Flood).

These modern romance novels are being recognized as true literary creations of a forbidden love that have the elements of a love story with the power to draw the reader in and not let go. But what gives the novels this power to pull at the reader’s heart? Meyer achieves this in the same way other literary greats have, by consciously interweaving details and emotions that draw upon the reader’s mind and heart, and naturally her own writing would be influenced by the literary works most important to her.

According to Meyer’s autobiography at YABooksCentral.com, her influences include some of history’s most critically lauded writers such as Charlotte Bronte, L.M. Montgomery, and Jane Austen, but Meyer has also said the novels are “tied to Romeo and Juliet” (Granger “New Moon Notes #2, Romeo and Juliet”) by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is arguably the most beloved love story of all time. Though written hundreds of years ago, the romantic tragedy about star-crossed lovers is still the classic romance and is quoted frequently even today. The classic elements that weave the memorable stories of both Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Meyer’s Twilight Saga books are the forbidden romance and conflict keeping the lovers apart, the star-crossed characters in similar roles, as well as their families and friends, and the alchemy and symbolism in both creating a dramatic plot that envelopes that reader and delivers a love story to be read for many years to come.

The magnetism of the classic forbidden romance in both Romeo and Juliet and the Twilight Saga pulls at the reader just as Romeo and Juliet and Edward and Bella are drawn to each other. It is human nature for one to want what one cannot have, and this creates even stronger bonds between heroes and heroines in both these works. Romeo’s and Juliet’s families, the Montagues and Capulets respectively, have been at severe odds with each other for years, provoking altercations and leading to all-out duels; therefore, their relationship is doomed before it even begins. Edward and Bella’s relationship is impeded by Edward’s supernatural status and thirst for, especially Bella’s, human blood. Bella’s human scent to Edward is excruciatingly painful because she smells so delicious to him. He must constantly be on guard to control his thirst for her, but he endures this pain because his love for her is so strong.

Also complicating their relationship is Bella’s strong friendship with Quileute wolf shape-shifter Jacob, the wolves being the arch-enemy of the vampires. With treaties and boundary lines drawn, the shape-shifters are ready to attack the vampires if they so much as cross the line or, especially, if they attempt to transform Bella. This also forces Bella to make a decision in which side she will take, thus cinching the attention of the reader even more. The conflicts that both couples encounter create obstacles for the heroes and heroines to overcome, giving the reader a purpose and an emotional investment in the story. This passionate, emotional tie to the story is very important in keeping the reader engaged in what they are reading and Meyer utilizes Shakespeare’s technique of harboring this air of drama and desperation in the plot.

The characters in Romeo and Juliet and the Twilight Saga also work together to concoct irresistible love stories for readers. The reason readers have loved Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is the characters are typical of an actual romance, with flaws of their own and obstacles standing in the way of their true happiness. Romeo is a leading man who has found his soul mate, but manages to get himself banished from the city, not to mention vilifying himself even more with her family, when he accidently kills Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt. Edward also imposes his own sabbatical from Bella when he believes she is endangered by their relationship. Both heroes self-imposed separations from their heroines create strife and heartbreak for the couples and ultimately lead to additional consequences.

Also comparable to Romeo and Juliet is the third element to the main characters’ relationship, another love interest for the heroine. With Romeo banished, Capulet tries to force his daughter into a marriage with Paris and she wants nothing to do with it. In the Twilight saga, Jacob is the other romantic interest, but he is also Bella’s best friend and the only person she can confide in when Edward has left (Meyer New Moon 370-371). This complicates the matter even more for Bella because she does love Jacob, but not with the intensity she loves Edward. Bella’s choice between two handsome, god-like men with nothing but love for her is especially a draw for female readers. The heart-wrenching decision she must make between the two suitors adds suspense and allows readers to live vicariously through Bella, especially because the majority of the Twilight saga is written in first person from Bella’s point of view. Meyer also adds the close familial conflict that Shakespeare’s Juliet has with her father, Capulet.

As Capulet prefers Paris for his daughter, Bella’s father, Charlie, prefers Jacob for her. This creates additional tension at home for Bella and gives the reader a deeper involvement with another obstacle for Bella to overcome. Warring with parents over the choice of a boyfriend/girlfriend is a typical argument fought throughout the ages as is evident in the three hundred year old Romeo and Juliet. Charlie’s contention over Bella’s ultimate choice of Edward is never fully extinguished until the last novel, Breaking Dawn, when he is melted the same way modern parents are, with the reward of a grandchild. Edward himself recognizes the similarities between he and Bella’s relationship and that of Romeo and Juliet, when he chides himself for leaving Bella saying, “Mistake after mistake. I’ll never criticize Romeo again.” (Meyer New Moon, 508).

Finally, the alchemy and story scaffolding of both Romeo and Juliet and the Twilight Saga lend dramatic edge to the love stories and give the reader a sense of what is to come. Alchemical drama consists of a “three-step process: dissolution, usually called the nigredo or Black stage, purification, the albedo or White stage, and perfection and revelation, the rubedo or Red stage.” (Granger “New Moon Notes #1: Alchemical Nigredo!”) In Romeo and Juliet, both lead characters are the subjects of the alchemy because of the rift between their families. In the Twilight Saga, only Bella is the subject of the alchemy because she has to be transformed into a vampire in order to fully be with Edward. Her black stage is set in New Moon when Edward leaves her and thus the dissolution of their relationship.

During this darkest time in her life, she develops a deep relationship with Jacob, whose last name is interestingly “Black,” and he is the lifeline that keeps her going until Edward’s return. The white stage begins when Bella and Edward marry and suggests the ultimate purity of their romance, especially since they abstained from a sexual relationship until their marriage. During their honeymoon Bella discovers she is carrying Edward’s child and eventually dies as a human and is reborn a vampire as she is giving birth to Renesmee. The white is also symbolic in Edward’s and the other vampire’s skin. The red stage includes the final truce between the vampires and werewolves and the showdown with the Volturi. Red is also symbolic of the bloodshed throughout both Romeo and Juliet and the Twilight saga, but the rubedo actually exemplifies the transfiguration and divination of Romeo’s and Juliet’s deaths and the resolution between the vampires and shape-shifters, Bella’s immortality, and the birth of Renesmee.

The enmity between Edward and Jacob over Bella also is comparable to the quarreling Mercutio and Tybalt. Mercutio instigates the squabbles and, eventually, Tybalt kills him in a duel. Like Mercutio and Tybalt, Edward and Jacob quarrel often and denigrate each other. When Renesmee is born though, Jacob imprints with her, the shape-shifter’s form of true love at first sight, and Edward and Jacob realize they are destined to be family one day (Granger, Spotlight 125). This alchemy and symbolism in both works permits foreshadowing for the reader if the reader recognizes these clues. Romeo specifically says he would rather die than live without Juliet, while Edward says at the beginning of New Moon that he would not know what to “do without” Bella and would attempt suicide himself (Meyer New Moon 21). In both tales this proves to be true, but Edward is not successful in ending his own life. For the reader, this alchemical drama works to capture their attention and draw them in with symbolism, therefore giving a sense of suspense and expectancy about the outcome.

Stephenie Meyer’s work in the Twilight saga is reminiscent of the, arguably, greatest love story ever written in Romeo and Juliet. William Shakespeare’s literary influence upon Meyer’s writing of the novels imparts a lasting imprint into the mind of the reader. Elements of both works are personally engaging because of the fallible characters, and their vulnerability echoes remembrances of one’s own humanity. The suspense of what will become of the characters, and how they will overcome obstacles thrown in the way of true love, keep the reader engrossed in these literary works. Because of the emotional involvement and suspense created in the plot, one does not feel deflated after reading either Romeo and Juliet or Meyer’s Twilight saga, and even feels compelled to read them over and over again, repeatedly. These components of a great romance are what makes Meyer’s Twilight saga an enjoyable reading experience as well as a work of literary art.

Works Cited

Flood, Alison. “Twilight author Stephenie Meyer ‘can’t write worth a darn’, Says Stephen King.”

guardian.com.uk 5 Feb 2009: n. pag. 17 Jan 2010.

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/05/stephenking-fiction>.

Granger, John. “New Moon Notes #1: Alchemical Nigredo!” Forks High School Professor. 21 Nov 2009.

John Granger. 21 Jan 2010. <http://fhsprofessor.com/?p=361>.

Granger, John. “New Moon Notes #2: Romeo and Juliet.” Forks High School Professor. 21 Nov 2009. John

Granger. 21 Jan 2010. <http://fhsprofessor.com/?p=361>.

Granger, John. Spotlight: A Close-Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight

Saga. Allentown, PA: Zossima Press, 2010.

Grossman, Lev. “Stephanie Meyer: A New J.K. Rowling?.” Time Magazine 4 Apr 2008: n. pag. Web.

17 Jan 2010. <http://www.time.com/time/printout/o,8816,1734838,88.html>.

Meyer, Stephenie. “Authors: Bios: Stephenie Meyer.” 21 Jan 2010. www.yabookscentral.com.

<www.yabookscentral.com/cfusion/index.cfm?fuseAction=authors.bio&bio_id=260>.

Meyer, Stephenie. Breaking Dawn. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

—. Eclipse. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2007.

—. New Moon. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2006.

—. Twilight. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2005.

Shakespeare, William, and edited G. Blakemore Evans. Romeo and Juliet. The New Cambridge

Shakespeare. Cambridge, Great Britain: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1984.

]]> http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/twilight-guest-post-on-romeo-and-juliet/feed/ 2 http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/why-there-is-no-jewish-narnia/ http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/why-there-is-no-jewish-narnia/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:37:55 +0000 John http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/?p=1548 I hope if you have five or ten minutes today that you will read ‘Why There Is No Jewish Narnia’ by Michael Weingrad in the Jewish Review of Books. I know very little about Judaism, but what Mr. Weingrad argues in his discussion of why there isn’t a Jewish fantasy tradition to speak of, confirms what I think to be the case about the origins of the English High Fantasy literary stream post Coleridge.Mr. Weingrad writes:

It is not only that Jews are ambivalent about a return to an imaginary feudal past. It is even more accurate to say that most Jews have been deeply and passionately invested in modernity, and that history, rather than otherworldliness, has been the very ground of the radical and transformative projects of the modern Jewish experience. [my emphasis] This goes some way towards explaining the Jewish enthusiasm for science fiction over fantasy (from Asimov to Silverberg to Weinbaum there is no dearth of Jewish science fiction writers). George MacDonald’s Phantastes, thought by some to be the first fantasy novel ever written, begins with a long epigraph from Novalis in which he celebrates the redemptive counter-logic of the fairytale: “A fairytale [Märchen] is like a vision without rational connections, a harmonious whole . . . opposed throughout to the world of rational truth.” Contrast Herzl’s dictum that “If you will it, it is no Märchen.” The impulse in the latter is that of science fiction—the proposal of what might be—and indeed Herzl’s one novel Old-New Land was a utopian fiction about the future State of Israel.

As I’ve argued here before, I think that the English fantasy tradition grows out of a Coleridgean, anti-nominalist, even sacramental determination to subvert modernity (empiricism, materialism, industrialism, etc.). Weingrad’s thesis about the dearth of Jewish fantasy writers being a consequence of Jewish intellectual fidelity with the modern revolution and worldview is compelling.

On the Christian side he isn’t as good. He mistakes the power of myth experienced through the transparency of Romance (as Frye defines it) for “otherworldliness,” which suggests that Christians are looking to escape from the world through portal fantasy-writing for a short vacation in the Middle Ages. As Tolkien scholar Ralph Wood writes, high fantasy is not about escaping out of the world but into it, which is a sacramental idea springing from traditional panentheism (God is both entirely other and transcendent and nearer than our breath, completely imminent). This might also be a worldview issue that makes Jewish fantasy writing problematic. I don’t know enough about Judaism to have any idea.

The article also has no little insight about Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, which he reads as a Jewish meditation on Narnia and the fantasy genre in general. I don’t think Mr. Grossman would self-report as a “Jewish writer,” but his experiment in crossing the psychological novel and portal fantasy, if read as Weingrad suggests it can be, does offer a fresh perspective on the best new novel I read last year. [More on The Magicians here.]

Again, please read ‘Why There Is No Jewish Narnia’ and let me know what you think.

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.

Two Sundays ago, in a post called ‘Who is the Mockingjay?‘, I put forward a theory that the wife of the District 12 mayor, Mrs. Donner-Undersee was the mastermind-puppeteer behind the Mockingjay story being written within the Capitol’s Hunger Games. Many readers have embraced the idea, at least as many have objected to the theory, and I have spent most of the past two weeks answering questions about and objections to it (see here and here and here and here). [Thank you to Arabella, JSavant, Ellie, gethsemane342, Ally, Dee, all my friends at HungerGamesTrilogy.com, and everyone else who checked in with ideas, comments, and corrections.]

Last Sunday I wrote a long post called Unlocking ‘The Hunger Games’: The Surface, Moral, Allegorical, and Sublime Meanings in which I offered the traditional ‘four senses’ or iconological approach to get at Ms. Collins’ artistry and meaning. I wrote as much as I did there to explain the premises of my speculation before rolling out the 2.0 version of what I believe Arabella first called the “Pearl Plot.”

That was important because, while the Pearl Plot may make perfect sense without understanding the guts and gears of Ms. Collins’ craft, the only reason besides grins and giggles that I bother with speculation like this is to illustrate the principles or “keys” to understanding the best writing. Let’s have this out front right from the gate: the Pearl Plot, however credible or logical or just internally consistent (or not), is certainly wrong. The value of the exercise, then, outside of time spent with serious readers discussing a favorite book (no small thing that) is in gaining familiarity and facility with the tools that make reading more enjoyable, even exciting.

I promised in the Unlocking post that I would begin my next Hunger Games philippic with an updated version of the Pearl Plot theory, then explain (briefly!) how it helps us grasp the four senses of The Hunger Games Trilogy, and, time allowing, maybe even throw in a few SWAGs about what may happen in Mockingjay based on what we have discussed. If you’ve read the original post, ‘Who is the Mockingjay?‘, and last week’s Unlocking ‘The Hunger Games’, we’re ready to go.

The Pearl Plot, v. 2.0: The Back Story of District 12 Resistance

Let’s start at the beginning with a note about the obvious that the beginning of the story, like most tales, isn’t the beginning of the story. Like Homer’s Odyssey, we start out in medias res, in the middle of things, and it is part of the author’s challenge to use her artistry and expositional skills to bring us up to speed on what’s gone before while introducing characters and the drama’s core conflict. We start out in Katniss’ home on the day of the Reaping for that year’s Hunger Games, but what is the real beginning of the story?

I’d suggest the story origin, its time before time, is in “the old, very old” lullaby that Katniss sings to Rue to honor her last request.

Sing. My throat is tight with tears, hoarse from smoke and fatigue. But if this is Prim’s, I mean, Rue’s last request, I have to at least try. the song that comes to me is a simple lullaby, one we sing fretful, hungry babies to sleep with. It’s old, very old I think. Made up long ago in our hillls. What my music teacher calls a mountain air. But the words are easy and soothing, promising tomorrow will be more hopeful than this awful piece of time we call today.

I give a small cough, swallow hard, and begin:

Deep in the meadow, under the willow
A bed of grass, a soft green pillow
Lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyes
And when again they open, the sun will rise.
Here it’s safe, here it’s warm
Here the daisies guard you from every harm
Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true
Here is the place where I love you.

Rue’s eyes have fluttered shut. Her chest moves but only slightly. My throat releases the tears and they slide down my cheeks. But I have to finish the song for her.

Deep in the meadow, hidden far away
A cloak of leaves, a moonbeam ray
Forget your woes and let your troubles lay
And when again it’s morning, they’ll wash away.Here it’s safe, here it’s warm
Here the daisies guard you from every harm

The final lines are barely audible.

Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true
Here is the place where I love you.

Everything’s still and quiet. Then, almost eerily, the mockingjays take up my song. (Games, 234-5)

Rue’s death and Katniss’ bedecking her corpse with flowers are scenes that echo throughout the rest of Hunger Games and Catching Fire — think of the District 11 salute she receives on the Victory tour, Peeta’s confronting the Games Makers with Rue’s icon, and its prequel echo in Haymitch’s farewell to Maysilee Donner in his Quell — but this song, a lullaby that infants trust as truth, is, because of its age and meaning, the primordial aspect of life transcending Panem that Katniss taps into as her core strength and surety. She returns to this forgotten meadow paradise in her Quell when she commits herself to serving Peeta even at the cost of her life:

Peeta won’t let [Finnick stand watch], though. “It’s too dangerous,” he says. “I’m not tired. You lie down, Katniss.” I don’t object because I do need to sleep if I’m to be of any use keeping him alive. I let him lead me over to where the others are. He puts the chain with the locket around my neck, then rests his hand over the spot where our baby would be. “You’re going to make a great mother, you know,” he says. He kisses me one last time and goes back to Finnick.

His reference to the baby signals that our time-out from the Games is over. That he knows the audience will be wondering why he hasn’t used the most persuasive argument in his arsenal. That sponsors must be manipulated.

But as I stretch out on the sand I wonder, could it be more? Like a reminder to me that I could still one day have kids with Gale? Well, if that was it, it was a mistake. Because for one thing, that’s never been part of my plan. And for another, if only one of us can be a parent, anyone can see it should be Peeta.

As I drift off, I try to imagine that world, somewhere in the future, with no Games, no Capitol. A place like the meadow in the song I sang to Rue as she died. Where Peeta’s child could be safe.

When I wake, I have a brief, delicious feeling of happiness that is somehow connected with Peeta. (Fire, 353-5) pages

This happiness associated with Peeta and the meadow where his baby lives, I think, is the unconditional, selfless, and sacrificial love Katniss has just experienced in his kiss, a love that extends to the “tips of [her] being” (page 352). Peeta’s Christ-like love is this absolute and transcendent point that is the center or origin of the Hunger Games trilogy circle.

Setting that primordial, atemporal paradise as our story “beginning” or principle, what are the first historical events Katniss relays to us within her story? Well, we don’t get dates, but the three events defining the Capitol’s metanarrative are:

1. the District Rebellion at least 74 years before Hunger Games’ opening,
2. the Capitol victory over the Districts and the Treaty of Treason, and
3. the establishment of the annual Hunger Games and occasional Quarter Quells to dramatically demonstrate each year the continued subjection of the Districts.

Katniss is largely unaware of what life was like even in District 12 before she was born and we don’t learn any of the history she learned in school. The few bits of the past we do pick up during the course of Hunger Games and Catching Fire are very personal or vague pieces.

Here are a couple that strike me as notes suggestive of a history hidden from our narrator:

Haymitch tells Katniss after Gale’s whipping, “Don’t worry… Used to be a lot of whippings before Cray. She’s the one we took them to” (Fire, page 112). This aside is meant to restore in Katniss some confidence in her mother’s healing abilities (which it does) but it also causes her to reflect that “I can’t remember a time before Cray, when there was a Head Peacekeeper who used the whip freely. But my mother must have been around my age and still working in the apothecary shop with her parents.”

I think there is more here than Haymitch meant to share — and something which suggests at least one reason that he was chosen for the second Quarter Quell

[Quick aside: if you still think the Reaping is a straight up and down lottery, please forgive me for thinking you have missed the point of the Games as well as the several points in the narrative where it is all but said that the Capitol or its minions choose the District Tributes in advance. They choose sacrifices whose death will especially discourage any spirit of identity or rebellion in the Districts. End aside.]

Haymitch’s reassuring comment to Katniss says three things in addition to “Your mom is really good at this sort of thing.” He says, most obviously, that District 12 wasn’t always the quiet backwater that it is now. There “used to be a lot of whippings” means that, at some point before Katniss was born, the District had subversive elements that the Peacekeepers had to punish — and they chose to do it publicly and brutally to discourage others from joining them.

His next sentence is loaded on both ends. “She’s the one we took them to.” Starting at the back, Haymitch in saying “we” is identifying himself either with the crowd that picked up rebel bodies out of Christian charity or with the rebels taking care of their own. I think his being chosen for the Quell, the evident disdain he has for the Capitol and the Games that we see in his interview tape (Fire, page 197), and his brilliant strategy of attacking the framing story which wins the Quell marks him as a revolutionary and a leader, not part of anyone’s ambulance squad.

By saying “She’s the one we took them to” he also introduces a whole new dimension to Katniss’ back story. Her mother and by necessity her family, by treating the punished criminals whipped by the Peace Keepers to repress the locals, were relatively open sympathizers with the rebels. The resistance in District 12 crossed Seam and City boundaries — and Katniss’ mother, because of her gifts as a healer, was an important person known to all the rebels. Katniss’ mother has told her that she met her father because he brought foraged herbs to their shop. Haymitch’s comment suggests dad had other reasons for choosing that apothecary as the place to sell his goods.

As Peeta’s father explains to him, Katniss’ mother and father’s marriage was a reflection of that inner-District border crossing and unusual familiarity;

“[My father] said, ‘See that little girl? I wanted to marry her mother, but she ran off with a coal miner,’” Peeta says.

“What? You’re making that up!” I exclaim.

“No, true story,” Peeta says. “And I said, ‘A coal miner? Why did she want a coal miner when she could have had you?’ and he said, ‘Because when he sings… even the birds stop to listen.” (Games, page 300)

I confess to wondering how Mrs. Mellark, not the most forgiving or charitable of characters, or Katniss’ mother received this revelation from the Cave about the Baker’s feelings. Regardless, we are given a deliberate note about the unusual character of the Everdeen marriage beyond it being echoed in Baker Peeta’s love for Katniss, coal-miner’s daughter.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think that Katniss’ father was a leader in the District 12 resistance to the Capitol and a friend of both Haymitch and of Gale’s father.

There isn’t anything that can be offered as definitive proof of such an assertion but there are two or three facts that we do have that suggest it as a possibility.

First, Mr. Everdeen was a man of nature and the traditional ways (hence his ‘Family Book’ of plant lore) who risked his life to trap and hunt despite the laws against it. As remarkably, he took his oldest daughter on his foraging and hunting expeditions to teach her the skills she would need to survive. This remarkable risk-taking makes more sense if the coal miner and daddy in question understands that he might be killed at any time and that his family will perish in his absence if someone doesn’t have survival training.

Second, Mr. Everdeen dies in a mine explosion with Gale’s father. We know from Gale’s whipping and the care his friends give him that mining teams are very close; their lives depend on the skills, strengths, and reliability of their teammates. It seems reasonable to assume that fathers Hawthorne and Everdeen, members of the same team in the mines and sharing skills in the forest, shared other interests as well.

We learn from the District 8 refugees, Bonnie and Twill, that the Peace Keepers blew up an entire factory full of workers because “Someone must have told the Capitol that the idea for the uprising had started there” (Fire, page 146). I suspect that the Everdeen and Hawthorne men trained their oldest children to be able to live off the land because each man knew their revolutionary activities or just sufficiently seditious sentiments would be enough to cause a fatal “accident” in the mines.

I think if they did not know Haymitch as a resistance man it was only because he would have distanced himself from careless firebrands to play “the long game” he was forced into as a Victor. But, again, it seems reasonable that Haymitch, with his connections in the Hob and relative freedom of movement, knew about them — and their children.

That Katniss’ father died in a mine explosion — one set by the Capitol to “send a message” — perhaps explains the catatonic depression of Mrs. Everdeen at his death and her willingness to let her children die of starvation. Their future, as she imagined it as a member of the resistance and the wife of a martyred leader, could only be one of continued punishment, even a trip for at least one of them into the Hunger Games to remind District 12 what happens to hotheads and their children.

The District 12 salute to Katniss when she volunteers for her sister Prim (Games, page 12) is a remarkable gesture that perhaps only really makes sense if her father had been some one they knew and loved and still miss. They understood why her family was marked for Reaping Day. That Katniss doesn’t get this speaks to her mother’s care, which Katniss picks up, not to speak against the Capitol publicly or privately. The daughter of District 12 Patrick Henry is already marked for death, so it is best to keep her family’s past a secret — a prudence her fellow citizens observe, as well, until the Reaping almost brings them to revolt in remembrance and sympathy Katniss does not understand

Another glimpse into the past we get quite unexpectedly is a view of Haymitch’s Reaping Day in the Second Quarter Quell. Peeta and Katniss decide to look at the tape of his Quell while waiting in the Capitol for theirs to begin. They see a remarkable scene:

By the time we get to [the Quell Reaping Day in] District 12, I’m completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of kids going to certain death. There’s a woman, not Effie, calling the names in 12, but she still begins with “Ladies first!” She calls out the name of a girl who’s from the Seam, you can tell by the look of her, and then I hear the name “Maysilee Donner.”

“Oh!” I say. “She was my mother’s friend.” The camera finds her in the crowd, clinging to two other girls. All blond. All definitely merchants’ kids.

“I think that’s your mother hugging her,” says Peeta quietly. And he’s right. As Maysilee Donner bravely disengages herself and heads for the stage, I catch a glimpse of my mother at my age, and no one has exaggerated her beauty. Holding her hand and weeping is another girl who looks jut ike Maysilee. But a lot like someone else I know, too.

“Madge,” I say.

“That’s her mother. She and Maysilee were twins or something,” Peeta says. “My dad mentioned it once.”

I think of Madge’s other, Mayor Undersee’s wife. Who spends half her life in bed immobilized with terrible pain, shutting out the world. I think of how I never realized that she and my mother shared this connection. Of Madge showing up in that snowstorm to bring the painkiller for Gale. Of my mockingjay pin and how it means something completely different now that I know that its former owner was Madge’s aunt, Maysilee Donner, a tribute who was murdered in the arena.

Haymitch’s name is called last of all. It’s more of a shock to see him than my mother. Young. Strong. Hard to admit, but he was something of a looker. His hair dark and curly, those gray Seam eyes bright and, even then, dangerous. (Fire, pages 196-197)

We see three children of District 12 chosen: an anonymous girl from the Seam who is never mentioned again, Maysilee Donner, a City girl, and Haymitch Abernathy. I think I’ve already said that Haymitch might have been chosen because he was “dangerous,” not only in the looks of his bright “gray Seam eyes” but in the eyes of the regime as well. What do we learn of Maysilee Donner?

She is embraced by two friends, who, like her, are blonde City girls. The first is her twin sister, the someday-to-be Mayor’s wife and Madge’s mother. The other is Katniss’ mother, nurse to the resistance fighters. As Katniss notes, we have a “connection” in this between Mrs. Donner-Undersee and Mrs. Everdeen in their relationship with “Maysilee Donner, a tribute who was murdered in the arena.”

The third Quell at the 75th Anniversary of the Treaty of Treason was evidently designed to send an especially punishing message to the Districts by killing their Hunger Games Victors. Is it unreasonable to consider the possibility that the second Quell at the 50th Anniversary was similarly designed — and that this spectacle was not just in the quantity of Tributes taken on Reaping Day but also in specific qualities these young men and women had? Might Haymitch and Maysilee both have been chosen because of their relationships with, even their participation in the District 12 underground resistance?

I think that’s a reasonable possibility. It sets up the alliance Haymitch and Maysilee have in the Quell — and his agony when he holds her hand as she dies, his Rue moment of revelation, unable to save the woman who saved him, a woman he allowed to walk away from him without offering “to shake her hand or even look at her” (Fire, page 200). He has broken the code of the Hunger Games arena by discovering its edge but he wasn’t quick enough to think of a counter-narrative to the rules of the Games that could have saved Maysilee. And I think in that moment the outline of the Peeta-Katniss ‘Romeo and Juliet’ play, the ‘Pearl Plot’ was written in his heart.

Not to mention “in the heart of Maysilee’s twin sister” (assuming, of course, without any evidence more substantial than Katniss’ understanding from the Quell video that Maysilee’s unnamed sister didn’t go at the Reaping when her sister’s name was called because Maysilee had gifts the resistance fighters needed more than her skills). Which brings us at last to the players and details of the ‘Pearl Plot.’

Dramatis Personae: The Pearl Plot

Hunger Games opens with Katniss rushing to meet Gale on the other side of the fence for hunting and foraging before the Reaping in the Public Square. Curiously, he has a fresh loaf of bread, real Bakery bread, that Katniss observes is reserved in the Seam “for special occasions” (page 7). They eat a lot of berries that Katniss picks in a bit of aggressive foreshadowing of the Games’ finish, but it is the bread I confess that distracts me.

I used to be a baker, believe it or not (Berkshire Mountain Bakery in Housatonic, Massachusetts), so there’s nothing unusual in the Baker being up early or in his being willing to trade a loaf of bread for a squirrel, except perhaps for Gale’s having a leftover squirrel in his game bag; Katniss and Peeta we see later usually trade what they kill and find the day of their hunts to move the evidence of their adventures promptly. Maybe this vignette of Gale as the Boy with the Bread eating berries is just, again, Ms. Collins giving us a decent picture of the end at the beginning.

Except that in the next chapter, when Peeta Mellark the Baker’s son is chosen as a Tribute, Katniss shares via flashback her first meeting with him. She was only 11 years old and she was quite literally starving. Peeta explains to her later how he fell in love with her years before that when she sang the traditional Valley song and “I swear, every bird outside the window fell silent” (Games, page 301), but in Katniss’ memory they are essentially strangers. The boy, inexplicably to her, gives her two burned loaves of bread out by the pig sty, bread she realizes later he had burned intentionally, insuring his being beaten, to get her food.

This bread — and seeing the eyes of Peeta — causes Katniss to see the world differently and realize how she and her family will survive:

We ate slices of bread for breakfast and headed for school. It was as if spring had come early. Warm sweet air, Fluffy clouds. At school, I passed the boy in the hall, his cheek had swelled up and his eye was blackened. He was with his friends and didn’t acknowledge me in any way. But as I collected Prim and started for home that afternoon, I found him staring at me from across the school yard. Our eyes met for only a second, then he turned his head away. I dropped my gaze, embarrassed, and that’s when I saw it. The first dandelion of the year. A bell went off in my head. I thought of the hours spent in the woods with my father and I knew how we were going to survive.

To this day, I can never shake the connection between this boy, Peeta Mellark, and the breat that gave me hope, and the dandelion that reminded me that I was not doomed. (Games, page 32)

She goes into the forest under the influence of this inspiration and soon thereafter meets Gale, orphaned son of her father’s friend and fellow hunter, the young man who helps her keep her family alive.

Much, perhaps all of this epiphanal flashback in the Public Square, I think, is the critical introduction of Peeta as sacrificial Christ (see Luke 24: 13-35 about the eye-opening effect of sacramental bread). But there is also a note here, something like a red flag, that Peeta would have been at the bakery the morning Gale says he traded a squirrel for a special loaf. Could it have been Peeta that persuaded Gale that morning to urge Katniss to run away with him? Could they both have known that she was being set up that day, that, in fact, she had been groomed her whole young life for a trip to the Hunger Games?

It’s not that big of a stretch. Peeta marvels later at Katniss’ “purity” but might he not mean by that her “innocence” or “naivety”? She narrates the story with wonderful observations and with significant clarity about her own thinking and feeling — but with remarkably little penetration into the reality beneath the surface of events. She offers us little in the way of clues that there is a rebellion afoot in District 12, even after President Snow comes for a visit, he tells her flat-out that she has been the cause of uprisings, he replaces the Head Peace Keeper with a barbarian, the Hob is burned to the ground, and her world goes into lock-down. She tells Haymitch she wants to start a rebellion oblivious to the reality that she is is in the midst of one and is its inspiration and guiding symbol.

Given that her perception is accurate but not penetrating or revealing, we’re left to make our best guesses after the surprise finale to Catching Fire about how the Panem-wide Mockingjay rebellion was planned and executed out of District 12. Here are my best speculative shots:

I think, as explained above, that Katniss’ and Gale’s fathers were leaders in the District 12 resistance to the Capitol and that they were betrayed by spies in the mines. Both men knew that their seditious work undermining (sic) the regime would probably end this way, so they did what they could to prepare their children to help provide for their families at their deaths. Mrs. Everdeen and her fellow citizens, to protect Katniss and Prim, never speak to them about Papa Everdeen’s secret life and the cause of his death.

I’m guessing, though, that Gale’s and Katniss’ meeting in the forest and their consequent partnership was only as accidental as the mine explosion that killed their daddies. The survivors of the Capitol’s attempt to extinguish any kind of uprising probably realized their approach in resisting the regime’s power was not working. Whippings were common, mine explosions were a real threat, and all the power remained in the Capitol’s hands. With no way to communicate between Districts, the regime was able to focus its strengths on any one rowdy District without fear of unrest spreading. The surviving leaders had to find a new tactic.

I suggest they decided to play “the long game” instead of pursuing local, short-term, Pyrrhic victories the Capitol would respond to with only more crushing force. What they needed was a way to communicate their message effectively to every corner of every District and to create events that could serve as rally points for resistance fighters across the country. The obvious means to those goals — obvious at least to Haymitch Abernathy and the sister of Maysilee Donner — would be to use the annual Hunger Games broadcasts to send a message that was clearly contrary to the Capitol’s punitive and spirit-crushing meaning.

For that artistic high-risk hijacking, they would need to groom at least two Tributes for the Hunger Games who would be able to perform guilelessly and convincingly this subversive play-within-a-play. Then they’d have to recruit a support crew of undercover revolutionaries to work the stage pieces.

I offer for your consideration these possible players for ‘Team Pearl‘ the playwrights of the Mockingjay Rebellion:

Haymitch Abernathy: Haymitch was probably already a rebel before his time in the Quarter Quell. As explored above, I think he might have been chosen because the regime in power had already identified him as being somehow “dangerous.” He certainly demonstrated in the Quell that they were right. Alone among Victors, Haymitch understands how to defeat the story tellers and Games Makers at their own game.

But why is he interested?

His experience in the Capitol and in their Quarter Quell would have done nothing but confirm and inflame his hatred for the regime. I suspect, though, that the death of Maysilee Donner (or her sister) filled him with regret that, in his youth and inexperience, he had only been thinking about how to save himself. He did just that, of course, by forcing the narrative parameters of the Arena, but he missed the chance to attack the Hunger Games metanarrative of individualism, every-man-for-himself competition, and naked power by writing a story within it of the love he felt for Maysilee. He let her go when she left because he believed, just as the Capitol taught him, that if he didn’t he would have to kill her himself.

At her death, he realized just how wrong he had been. And this remorse, this rue, left him determined to write the play and organize the cast of stage hands and players to act out that drama he and Maysilee should have starred in, a work to destroy the Hunger Games and its soul-destroying message that power is reality.

His first recruit to Team Pearl, if it wasn’t her that recruited him, was the twin Donner sister. Forgive me, but I like the idea that it was Maysilee who stayed behind because she was already a leading light in the underground resistance movement, or, perhaps, engaged to be married. That would make the Mockingjay pin hers not her sister’s, which, while not necessary, I think is a nice touch (not to mention creating still another echo — the sacrificial sister stepping forward — between the second Quarter Quell and the 74th Hunger Games Reaping Day that she orchestrates).

We don’t know Madge’s mother’s first name. Because ‘Madge’ is short for ‘Margaret’ which derives from the Greek word for ‘Pearl,’ I will call her ‘Pearl’ from now on rather than Mrs. Donner-Undersee, Maysilee’s sister, Madge’s mother, or the Mayor’s wife. I believe the Mockingjay Rebellion is largely her invention, that she is the playwright of the drama that Haymitch produces. Her motivation is simply revenge for the life taken from her, her own reflected, better self lost in the Games.

Team Pearl, after its two principals, includes, at a minimum, the rebellious Victors from other Districts that Haymitch recruits on his annual trips to the Capitol (and on their trips through District 12), Cinna, and Plutarch Heavensbee. Arabella believes Effie Trinket is a team member, which makes even my narrative-misdirection-happy head spin.

I think it very likely, though, that Peeta Mellark and his father, Madge Undersee, and Gale Hawthorne are on board as well, perhaps only as “Friends of Katniss,” her District 12 team of handlers who have been preparing her for years to play the Mockingjay part in the Capitol and Games Arena.

Why would these players sign on as stage hands for the Pearl Plot drama in three acts?

Gale Hawthorne would have been the easiest recruit. Not knowing Katniss at the time but perceiving the genius of the plan, he would have signed on to protect and train her to take his revenge on the Capitol through her for his father’s death — and Katniss’ father’s death as well. Gale keeps his hands off her in the forest, not because he is an Edward Cullen wanna be, but because her innocence and purity, her ability to fall in love with Peeta, are as essential as her archery skills to her victory in the Arena.

Peeta Mellark, the artist, actor, and Boy with the Bread (TM), is probably recruited by his own father, a resistance man from before the second Quell, who recognizes in this son the exact gifts the thespian conspiracy needs. In addition to being able to persuade anyone of almost anything, Peeta loves Katniss-the-Mockingjay/Phoenix with all his heart and is willing to die in his role to insure her victory.

Madge? Except that Katniss has the perfect skill set and innocence for the Mockingjay lead role, I imagine (we’re guessing here, right?) that Pearl named her daughter what she did either as a reminder of the ‘coal into pearls,” light-in-the-darkness resurrection theme of her life’s work or because she expected Madge to play this part. Madge grew up as part of this conspiracy within the Mayor’s house.

Team Pearl, remember, is like the pearl, about creating value hidden away deep in the water (Undersee). They are purposely avoiding direct confrontation with the regime and doing all they can to become invisible or comically visible. Hence, Pearl Donner marrying the Mayor of the District and Haymitch becoming the alcoholic Foster Brooks of the Victor Village and Hunger Games community. (Please notice that each of his off-the-platform pratfalls and barfing episodes serves a strategic purpose for Team Pearl.) They know they cannot defeat the Capitol by force; they choose stealth and art instead.

The Pearl Plot is simply this. Defeat the Capitol at its own game.

The Hunger Games are designed to communicate clearly and graphically the pointlessness of the Districts resisting the Capitol. Their Tributes are just actors in a puppet-show world in which the Capitol pulls all the strings and they are condemned to lives that are nasty, brutish, and short. Their only hope of survival is to play the Capitol’s game by its rule, guiding principle, and central message: power is its own justification and excuse. Murder or be murdered for the Capitol’s entertainment and distraction because, consequent to the treason of your ancestors, they are your rightful masters.

The Pearl Plot’s aim is to usurp the Hunger Games’ stage and to use this metanarrative of power against itself through a story-within-the story, a counter-narrative of love’s victory over force and falsehood, of art’s triumph over the lifeless machine.

It worked like this.

After the mine explosion, Haymitch and the Pearl draft their script for the Mockingjay Rebellion that should begin with the 74th Hunger Games five years away. They assign Gale to groom Katniss’ survival skills and to be sure she is eating enough (while keeping his hands off her!). Peeta is brought into the conspiracy nearer the Games’ Reaping Day but with enough time that he and Gale could have had a heart-to-heart about getting her out of District 12 and saving her from the Games (though they know this will mean her sister’s death and the end of any hope for a Games inspired rebellion in other Districts). Gale’s suggestion to Katniss goes nowhere — and he acts out his two minds about sending Katniss to her probable death by launching into Madge when he sees the Mockingjay pin, the symbol of the Rebellion and Pearl Plot (Games, page 12).

The actual Reaping Day in the Public Square is staged for maximum effect and works so well that it almost backfires with an unplanned popular uprising off-the-cuff. When Prim is selected and Katniss predictably volunteers herself sacrificially, “to the everlasting credit of the people of District 12, not one person claps” when told to give their volunteer tribute “a big round of applause” (Games, page 23).

Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don’t expect it because I don’t think of District 12 as a place that cares about me. But a shift has occurred since I stepped up to take Prim’s place, and now it seems I have become someone precious. Ay first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means good-bye to someone you love. (Games, page 24)

As mentioned above, this out-of-the-blue response may be a token that the crowd recognizes the Everdeen children as the daughters of a resistance martyr who died for them. This is a moment threatening to become something Team Pearl hoped would play out over the whole Hunger Games. If Katniss begins to cry, what might happen?

Enter Haymitch. He taunts the Capitol audience through the cameras (and perhaps us as readers) — and falls off the stage, a dive that breaks the crowd’s swelling sentiment and gives Katniss time to pull herself together.

Team Pearl (except for Pearl herself) show up at the Justice Building, of course, to play their parts. The Baker pays his respects. Madge delivers the all-important Aunt Maysilee Mockingjay pin accessory, the sine qua non, really, of the whole plot. Mom and sister are given their marching orders by Katniss. Gale discusses strategy but is forced out of the room before being able to tell her what to remember –

Was Team Pearl able to pre-determine who was chosen in the Reaping? Yes, and, given the good possibility that Katniss’ father was a rebel leader dispatched in a mine explosion, it probably was easy to convince an apparatchik to set it up. They chose Prim rather than Katniss because they knew the volunteering of an older sister would mean immediate identification and audience engagement with her as a tribute. They chose Peeta because he was the only man for the job.

There was a decent chance, of course, that this might not have worked. Katniss has no idea this is a scripted event in which she is playing a part. I think, this being the case, that Rue and Thresh were chosen (via the District 11 Victors Haymitch trusted) for much the same reason that Katniss and Peeta were drafted by Team Pearl. Each had good survival skills and both were beloved by their district (Rue, especially, because of her singing from the tree tops role, must have been an easy selection to fix. Who else if selected could have equalled the punch to the heart that Rue’s pick meant?). They are only shadows of the Katniss-Peeta pairing, with Rue a clearer Mockingjay perhaps than Katniss, but their role in the Games serves a parallel function in the drama.

Cinna, whose name I think is meant to suggest both “sinner” as in “out-caste” rather than “bad guy” and “heat” as in “incinerator” (or “cynic“?), chooses to design the clothing for District 12 because he knows about the Pearl Plot. He reveals his hand to Katniss, whom he assumes must be aware to some degree of the Mockingjay symbolism, when he tells her “you must despise us.” He is a truly revolutionary artist, whose anti-regime message is not just or principally contrarian but transformative. The symbolism of Katniss and Peeta’s clothing and how Cinna stages their entrances as light from coal marks this couple as a pair whose lives and allegorical meaning are greater than that of the Games. The Mockingjay wedding dress, though it may have resulted in his death, in its ascendant Phoenix beauty almost caused a revolution in the Capitol in conjunction with Peeta’s revelations about their secret marriage and Katniss’ pregnancy.

Because Katniss is our narrator and Ms. Collins wants us to experience the Games and Quell both alongside Katniss, even as Katniss does, and as members of the voyeuristic Capitol television audience (hence our never seeing cameras), we miss all the behind the scenes machinations Haymitch works before, during, and after the time in the Arena. We are left to assume, after the revelations of Panem wide uprisings at the end of Catching Fire, that he, Plutarch, and the Team Pearl Victors from other districts Haymitch has recruited have all been working with great stealth and to greater effect. They certainly do yeoman’s work in Fire within the Arena keeping Peeta and Katniss alive.

I understand that the thought of Gale and Peeta both being in on this plan to use Katniss as the symbolic accelerant to inspire the Mockingjay Rebellion really bothers a lot of readers. As much as we readers identify with Katniss because we experience the story through her, this feeling of betrayal and abuse is in one sense inevitable. I’d only note that both men are heroically loving, protective, and, while seeming to adore her, simultaneously respectful of her desires not to be forced into a relationship.

Peter and Gale play the intentional parts of contraries, whose retraint and attractiveness, their selfless love, keeps Katniss pure, maybe even purifying her spirit, while protecting her heart from the shattering blow it would take if she committed to either young man and then learned about the Pearl Plot. And could there have ever been any doubt, if she survived to the point of the Pearl Plot’s success, that she would have to learn about it?

But use her Peeta and Gale do, no doubt about that, if only in not telling her what they know (which would, of course, end the Team Pearl game on the spot). I’d go so far as to say that Gale loves Katniss as a sister, and, though he is torn up about sending her into the Games, he understands she is the only woman from District 12 with a prayer of surviving and that her victory could change the world, avenging their fathers’ deaths.

I’m guessing his stolen kiss with Katniss on the Seam side of the fence, too, the kiss that President Snow’s goons caught on film was staged by Team Pearl just so President Snow would see it. I think they wanted the Third Quell to be a Victor’s recall and had to bait President Snow into over-playing his hand, which, of course, he does. Unknowingly, the man with blood on his breath fills the Quell Arena with Team Pearl players prepared to die to save Katniss (and Peeta, to keep her around) and with a plan to break out of the Arena a la Haymitch.

The 75th Quell was designed by Heavensbee with escape in mind, the breakout plan engineered by Volts. Haymitch recruited the necessary Victors, the Capitol obliging him by selecting a crew of popular previous winners whose sympathies were suspect, to protect Katniss inside the Arena as a living symbol of love. Within Peeta’s narrative of marriage and pregnancy, she becomes in the popular mind the Bride of the Immaculate Conception giving birth Phoenix-like as the Mockingjay to a Panem-wide rebellion.

Katniss’ understanding, though, like ours, until confronted with the truths beneath the surfaces she observes, is about only the shadows on the wall. She doesn’t question the parameters of her story, incredibly, even when she meets them as people, by which I mean the District 8 refugees who signal to her with a Mockingjay symbol pressed into bread much like a communion wafer’s seal that they are “on her side.” Only Katniss’ innocence and humility explain her not understanding the depth of the Rebellion and her part in it after this.

She succeeds against alll odds and without direct instruction in throwing off the Capitol’s metanarrative and in taking Peeta’s roof-top plan to heart “to speak truth to power.” Katniss remembers Peeta’s goal through the fog of war and, as Haymitch told her, that the Capitol is her real enemy, both at Rue’s death and in destroying the Quell arena Force Field. She is so self-preoccupied, though, and whelmed by the story into which she has been written that, once she has thrown off the regime’s mythic blinders, she cannot imagine that there is another deeper narrative into which her closest friends have written her without her knowledge or assent.

Mockingjay will be the story of the Pearl Plot revelation and Katniss’ response, which I’m pretty sure will ultimately be to embrace consciously the part given her by the Pearl playwright and to make the self-actualizing choices to speak truth to power, bringing down the Capitol.

Well, this has already run way long (as if you needed me to tell you that). I’ll close this off here and pick up the thread again soon with a discussion of how the Pearl Plot throws light on the Four Senses of the Hunger Games trilogy we discussed here last week. I’ll also make the obligatory SWAGs about what we can expect to see in the series finale.

Your comments and corrections, of course, are coveted. Fire away.

Last Sunday, in a post called ‘Who is the Mockingjay?‘, I put forward a theory that the wife of the District 12 mayor, Mrs. Donner-Undersee was the mastermind-puppeteer behind the Mockingjay story being written within the Capitol’s Hunger Games. Many readers have embraced the idea, at least as many have objected to the theory, and I have spent most of the past week answering questions about and objections to it (see here and here and here and here). [Thank you to Arabella, JSavant, Ellie, Ally, all my friends at HungerGamesTrilogy.com and everyone else who checked in with ideas, comments, and corrections.] My task tonight is to explain the premises of my speculation before rolling out the 2.0 version of what I believe Arabella first called the “Pearl Plot.”

Got that beverage? Then let’s get started.

Dante and The Hunger Games

The first premise of my argument about the layered meaning of The Hunger Games Trilogy is that Suzanne Collins is a brilliant writer whose novels are simultaneously inspired and deliberately crafted. Many of the objections to the Pearl Plot theory (hereafter just ‘Pearl Plot’) have been that I’m making way too much of a kid’s book and that “there’s no way all that is in there.”

I’ve been through this same bit of denial when I’ve explained the popularity of Harry Potter and Twilight by examining the artistry and meaning of these books by Joanne Rowling and Stephenie Meyer. Much of the denial, sadly, is class bias and misogyny, but I think most of it is really just a misunderstanding of why we read. We are taught that reading is an entertainment or diversion very much like any other type of ‘break from work.’ This view, though, is contrary to our shared experience, I think, as well as to the

traditional view of the arts, “drawn from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, and the rest, and standard in Western Civilization down through the 18th Century,” that art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy. It is a tragic and not a trivial game.

Writers are delivering much more than diversion. Saul Bellow once explained to newspaper reporters the difference between their written work and his was that he “wrote for eternity.” Think that’s pompous? How many newspapers do you keep on a shelf in your home or share with friends? Read to your children? Writers are after the big game of life’s meaning and we come to their work expecting them to deliver. Reading has spiritual import and consequences.

I am convinced a good part of the skepticism about popular books having depth, beyond misunderstanding what reading is for, is doubt about the intelligence and craft of the series’ author. When writing about the Austen elements in Harry Potter and the Shakespeare echoes in Twilight, I was laboring against the pigeon-holed perception many readers have that non-academic writers like Ms. Rowling and Mrs. Meyer, who though well educated do not have advanced degrees in English or teach writing, cannot be familiar with or be using the tools from the Greats’ toolbox.

Discussing the meaning and artistry of The Hunger Games, though, shouldn’t require clearing this particular hurdle. Suzanne Collins has a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in dramatic writing from New York University (NYU). Let’s be clear about what that means, if only because most Americans don’t get what an MFA is.

If you’re like me, you think of a “Masters Degree” as a stepping stone to real postgraduate study, namely, PhD or doctoral studies. An MFA is a Masters but it is the end of the road in the study of the fine arts with practical applications.

MFA programs have generally required a bachelor’s degree prior to admission, but many have not required that the undergraduate major be the same as the MFA field of study. The most important admissions requirement has often been a sample portfolio or a performance audition.

The MFA differs from the Master of Arts in that the MFA, while an academic program, centers around practice in the particular field, whereas programs leading to the MA are usually centered on the scholarly, academic, or critical study of the field.

The MFA is seen as a terminal degree, meaning that it is considered to be the highest degree in its field.

An MFA differs from a Masters, then, in being “hands-on” study, in being as far as you can go, and, most important, in its being truly Masters work, in the sense of an apprentice studying with a Master. To receive the MFA in creative writing at NYU today means a lot of workshops in Greenwich Village:

Requirements for the Master of Fine Arts degree include the completion of 32 points (eight 4-point courses) and the following specific requirements:

1. Four graduate creative writing workshops taken in four separate semesters (16 points).
2. One to four craft courses (The Craft of Poetry or The Craft of Fiction), taught by members of the CWP faculty. Craft courses may be repeated provided they are taught by different instructors (4 to 16 points).
3. Any remaining courses chosen from any department with the permission of that department and of the director of the CWP.
4. A creative thesis in poetry or fiction, consisting of a substantial piece of writing—a novella, a collection of short stories, or a group of poems—to be submitted in the student’s final semester. The project requires the approval of the student’s faculty thesis adviser and of the director of the CWP.

I do not know how this MFa in creative writing differs — or if it differs — from the MFA in dramatic writing when Ms. Collins was at NYU but I imagine the core requirements for Master seminars in Craft of Fiction were the same. What is that required course that students are expected to repeat with different instructors about? The website page with the MFA seminar faculty and schedules for the class doesn’t spell out course requirements, but with teachers like E. L. Doctorow, David Lipsky, and Edward Hirsch, we know the conversations in these classrooms are not just about how to package a book or screenplay proposal for your literary agent.

But we all know, too, that you can skate through any degree program, alas, and that advanced degrees or the lack of one tell us very little about what an author knows or what talents they bring to the table. As with the Hogwarts and Forks Sagas, the test is in the text. Does the Panem Trilogy have the literary guts and substance reflecting that Ms. Collins got anything out of her advanced studies in dramatic writing?

I think even the most superficial look at her books says that it does.

And by “superficial,” I mean right at the surface: the number of books and chapters. If you haven’t noticed, the first two of the three book set are each twenty seven chapters long and in three parts of nine chapters each.

So what?

In itself, of course, this clever use of threes — a trilogy of books, each having three sections, each section having 3-squared chapters, for 3-cubed chapters in each book, and 3-to-the-fourth chapters in the series — could be meaningless or just an affectation. Even if so, it is also, nonetheless, a marker or red flag for Dante’s influence. His Divine Comedy is in three books or canticas of 33 chapters or cantos each, all of it in rhyming three-line stanzas or tercets in the terza rima rhyme scheme. When a writer makes a point of stacking threes in her story structure, the serious reader asks herself, “Is she telling me to think Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso?”

I think she is.

I’ll explain that in a bit but I couldn’t resist the lede in to traditional literary criticism that this thin Dante link provides. Because to lay out why I think the text is substantive enough to stand up to a reading at depth, I need to look at Hunger Games as I would a “Great Book,’ as in, say, Hamlet or War and Peace… or the Divine Comedy. Dante, fortunately, left instructions in his letter to Can Grande about how readers should read his poems: in the four senses, namely, the literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical levels of meaning.

For me be able to present what I am going to say, you must know that the sense of this work is not simple, rather it may be called polysemantic, that is, of many senses; the first sense is that which comes from the letter, the second is that of that which is signified by the letter. And the first is called the literal, the second allegorical or moral or anagogical. Which method of treatment, that it may be clearer, can be considered through these words: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion” (Douay-Rheims, Ps. 113.1-2). If we look at it from the letter alone it means to us the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if from allegory, it means for us our redemption done by Christ; if from the moral sense, it means to us the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace; if from the anagogical, it means the leave taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And though these mystical senses are called by various names, in general all can be called allegorical, because they are different from the literal or the historical. Now, allegory comes from Greek alleon, which in Latin means other or different.

I have explained at length in my last three books — that would be Deathly Hallows Lectures, Harry Potter’s Bookshelf, and Spotlight – why these four senses are not arbitrary perspectives but straight reflections of the four ways human beings know anything (for the free short course in iconological criticism, read this). Before I roll out version 2.0 of the ‘Pearl Plot,’ then, I want to roll through the four senses of Hunger Games very quickly to demonstrate Ms. Collins is writing deliberatively and at depth and that her works deserve a serious reading — even outlandish speculation based on the themes and meaning of the books we have in hand at present.

[nB: My apologies in advance for both the length and brevity of this treatment; it's much too large a subject to treat in a single post and the exposition and demonstration of my assertions, consequently, is limited to the point of being terse. Time allowing, I'll expand it into a proper book or booklet with the longer explanations this introduction cannot have if I'm to get back to the Pearl Plot this month!]

The Surface Meaning of The Hunger Games

Of the four senses of any text or work of art, the most important is the literal or surface meaning. This is just because all of the other meanings have to come through the surface. Whether they are understood consciously or experienced unconsciously, the several allegorical layers can only be had via what the viewer sees in the painting or sculpture or in the narrative line the reader reads.

For writers, the surface story has to do several things right up front. However fantastic the setting or unusual the characters and plot, the tale has to be sufficiently credible that the reader suspends disbelief and enters into the story in an act of poetic faith. It helps a lot if the lead character or narrator is someone-in-a-situation with whom the reader is fascinated, sympathetic, or, best of all, that s/he is someone both fascinating and sympathy-inducing. Orphans have been great story fodder, obviously, especially orphans-in-a-jam, from Oliver Twist to Harry Potter, because you have be pretty bent-out-of-shape not to be rooting for the kid with no parents.

I submit that Katniss Everdeen,

• father-less provider and protector of her mother and sister,
• a young woman trapped in the nightmare dystopia of Panem’s District 12, and
• Appalachian girl with true grit,

is a brilliantly conceived character with whom readers identify profoundly and almost immediately. Her first person narration absorbs us to the point that we identify with her view, which has repercussions at the moral and anagogical levels.

Beyond voice, the next important key to the surface story’s success is the genre or story setting chosen by the author, i.e., “what kind of book is this?” Romance, School Boy Novel, International Blockbuster, Monomyth, Gothic horror, Satire, High Fantasy, Modern Psychological novel, Bildungsroman, Alchemical Drama, Science Fiction, Murder Mystery or a melange of elements from all of these (and many others) — whatever the story-type chosen, it must be a fitting vehicle or medium of the author’s prevailing message.

Hunger Games is a dystopian novel at its core, though it has important mythic (think “Theseus and the Athenian Youths”), satirical (think Survivor), alchemical (think Tale of Two Cities), and coming-of-age (David Copperfield) touches. The post-apocalyptic setting of the trilogy with its oppressive authoritarian regime and its nightmare to-the-death competition between District tributes is an engaging cross of 1984 and Rollerball. And that hybrid story from nightmare futures powerfully delivers Ms. Collins messages, most obviously her critique of our addiction to television and its soul corrosive influences, but also a call for a change within us, a revolution against the regime’s shadow-casters and myth-makers via our choosing a counter-narrative of love and sacrifice.

A School Boy setting even with the Hogwarts Gothic drapes won’t do that. Neither will Paranormal Harelquin romance on the Olympic Peninsula. Right? To make a critique of the darkness of our age and call us to the light, we need a genre made for projecting the failings into a supposed future. Just as 1984 was really Blair’s metaphorical description of life as he knew it in 1948, so Panem as Collins’ dystopia is a vehicle for her images of our world as it is in essence.

After genre and voice, there is “story-drive,” essentially, “what keeps us turning pages?” In a mystery, we want to learn whodunnit. In epic fantasy, we want to know the ending of the historical saga. In romance, we’re trying to figure out how boy-gets-girl in the end (we know it’s going to happen…). In Hunger Games, the story drive is “action drama,” the story structure of formulaic 3 Act television writing.

Ms. Collins is quite open about her books working this way:

At what point did you know that your story was a trilogy?
I knew from the beginning. Once I’d thought through to the end of the first book, I knew there would be repercussions from the events that take place there. So I actually proposed it as a trilogy from the outset, with the main story laid out. I started out as a playwright, and have an M.F.A. from New York University in dramatic writing. After I graduated, I began writing for television. Since I’ve worked in television so long, the three-act dramatic structure comes naturally to me.

“Okay,” you ask, “what’s a three-act dramatic structure?”

Though we know it best from the half-hour sit-com, whose commercial breaks all but require a three act drama with crises before each stop in the action before the soap sale to be sure we don’t change channels, the 3 Act drama formula is straight from Aristotle’s Poetics. You need a story set-up, a compelling confrontation, and satisfying or challenging resolution. For the specific teevee and screenwriting formula that is Ms. Collins’ story-telling base-line, you can read more here and here and here. A picture from this site will save a lot of explanation:

The Three-act Paradigm:

You’ll have to trust me for now when I say Ms. Collins follows the formula she says she does and that this is the skeleton of the medium in which she has worked since 1991. She uses it, though, not because it’s the only set of tools at hand. Ms. Collins uses it both because it works, especially in terms of keeping us turning pages, and, I think, because the teevee formula is an especially ironic tool to use while satirizing our collective addiction to the glass tit. Ms. Collins has us watching the Hunger Games both as a Tribute via Katniss’ perspective and as the Games are experienced by Capitol and District watchers (hence our never seeing cameras, a point that Stephen King just doesn’t get). We are both viewed and viewer, which will have important consequences when we learn with Katniss who is telling the story-within-the-story.

The Moral Meaning of The Hunger Games

We’re trained to flinch at the word “moral” because we’re told from Sesame Street and primary school onward that it is synonymous with “judgmental” and “moralizing” — but of course it isn’t. The word comes from the Latin word for societal conventions (O, tempora! O, mores!) and “moral” just means our understanding of right and wrong. You’ve got good guys and bad guys, as a rule, in stories, and the moral of the story is predictably that what the bad guy does is wrong — don’t do that! — and what the good guy does is right and we should follow his or her example.

Even anti-moralizing stories, consequently, are necessarily moral and moralizing.

The real trick in understanding story morality is that it is the very rare story that tries to teach us anything that we do not already accept as a core value. Our historical period or ‘Age’ has its defining beliefs just like every other historical period; our principles and blind-spots may be different, excuse me, certainly are different, than those of the Elizabethans and Victorians but we are just like them in having an Age-defining set of shared beliefs. The morality of every successful postmodern story is the same. In brief it goes like this:

There is a big, bad cultural belief, call it the “defining myth’ or, my favorite, the ‘metanarrative.’ This story is what everyone in the culture believes about the world they live in and every metanarrative features two groups in defining mental reality: the Chosen Ones and the Others. The story tells us that the Chosen Ones are good by nature and that the Others, in not being Chosen Ones, are necessarily bad. Chosen Ones, consequently, enjoy powers and privileges while Others occupy the Public Square periphery, are powerless, and serve the Chosen Ones.

The postmodern morality play’s chief lesson, though, isn’t that the Chosen Ones are bad by definition and Others are good (if that is indeed one of its lessons!). The core message is that the metanarrative itself is the fount of evil because it distorts everyone’s ability to see the world as it is. The Big Bad Cultural Myth makes us prejudiced, in brief, and prejudice is the great evil to be fought in our times. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, even age discrimination, any perceived mental preconception, bias, or intolerance is something, ironically, our tolerance and fairness fixated age cannot tolerate.

There are two consequences of the prejudice-inducing metanarrative that every book, teevee show, and movie of our times subtly or dramatically teaches us to watch out for:

1. Because we are by definition prejudiced on account of our social, religious, and class biases, there is no way to be sure that anything we think is true is really true; therefore, “everything is relative.” And –
2. Because we cannot be sure of what is real, the only way we can be free of the metanarrative’s grip is to choose to confront and oppose the powerful who have their position only because of the false metanarrative.

In bumper-sticker language, this amounts to “Don’t Believe What You Think” and “Speak Truth to Power.”

I could bore you silly here and make this already too long post much longer than it need be by explaining how Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games (did I mention Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?) are all stories conforming to this type. [Yes, it's in my The Deathly Hallows Lectures and of Spotlight.] Suffice it to say that Ms. Collins’ trilogy, as counter-cultural as it is in several important ways, has its evil metanarrative (”Capitol, good; Districts bad”) and its oppressive and quite literal marginalization of the District-Others from the Capitol-Chosen.

There is also the message that no one and nothing are what you think they are (blinded as you are by preconception and prejudice) and that the only route to freedom is sacrificial love’s choice to confront the powerful and liberate the oppressed. Katniss’ almost continuous surprise at turns in the story-line by people turning out to be more or less than she thought and her anger at being prisoner in a story she isn’t writing is a snap-shot of the postmodern rise to consciousness and freedom-through-self-actualizing- choice. Do you doubt that Mockingjay will be the story of her learning the story she is in at last and of her choosing to play the part of the Mockingjay-Phoenix and Rebellion leader she has been forced to play unwittingly thus far? I don’t.

The Allegorical Meaning of The Hunger Games

Dante uses the word “allegorical” for all the senses of a text that are beyond and within the literal because the three senses included in the surface meaning are all in some sense story transparencies, i.e., story ciphers through which the reader sees or experiences something greater than the character or plot point itself. With the moral, we get the right and wrong lesson by seing the good guys as good and the bad guys as bad (even if in our age, the morality play’s message often is that there is no right or wrong except believing that there is an Absolute right and wrong — which is really wrong, right? Oi.). With the allegorical and anagogical, the story transparencies take their meanings from referents more specific and more substantive than just “white hat” and “black hat.”

The allegorical layer of Hunger Games is in two parts, one pretty easy for us to recognize, the other not so much.

The easy one are the political satires that the author talks about and the stuff she doesn’t need to talk about because it screams from the text. She’s showing us through the transparency of her imagined future and its oppressive regime that uses television stories to demean and diminish the spirits of the District workers our own anti-culture’s use of television to dumb us down into desire-driven, conscience-less consumers. She has shared in interviews that her inspiration for the story came from channel surfing and being impressed by televised images of the war in Iraq and reality television shows. Hunger Games, consequently, is largely Plato’s Cave Allegory re-told by Collins with a hard to miss “kill your television” message only a television writer could deliver so powerfully. (Jerry Mander comes close, but he’s writing discursively.)

I don’t think even television addicts find this an especially troubling message; anyone who watches teevee will tell you about the “bad” programs they despise and the really good shows they watch that are so different, unaware of the corrosive effect of the medium per se, regardless of programming content. Everyone on some level thinks teevee is a mixed blessing, though, so I doubt this troubles many readers because as Swift said, “satire is that mirror in which the object never recognizes himself.”

I would say that the more barbed bit of Ms. Collins’ satire in Hunger Games is not about television or about the relative poverty of parts of America outside the Beltways and Metropolises. It certainly isn’t anything that she talks about in interviews, if it jumps from the page like a Dorothy Day Catholic social justice broadside. Panem is the world and the Capitol is the United States, which sucks the world’s resources into itself and delivers in return military might and media programming that shows how great materialist life is in the US, a life they cannot share. Katniss probably would have been a lot less sympathetic if she were written into the story as a Palestinian refugee or Thai factory worker but I have to think this is closer to Ms. Collins’ political indictment.

This is tit-for-tat allegory in which story elements have real world, recognizable referents. The Capitol is our corporate-government power monopoly. Their medium of suppressing and controlling life outside their circle is brute force and television programming. The oppressed are, depending on how you want to frame it, everyone outside the US or everyone here not in the power-rings of New York, DC, and Hollywood, the moguls of money, military, and movies.

The more obscure and I think more powerful allegorical story, though, doesn’t have political or even temporal referents. It is spiritual, which I think will take us into the next layer or depth of meaning.

The Anagogical Meaning of The Hunger Games

If the moral and strictly allegorical (tit-for-tat) senses of a text are best understood as transparencies through which we see and understand other things, people, or events, the anagogical sense is more of a translucency through which a greater reality shines on us. In The Hunger Games, the supernatural story within the story that gives readers the self-transcending or mythic experience Eliade says a secular culture looks to find in fiction is the alchemical transformation of Katniss Everdeen. Hunger Games is essentially about her miraculous change from child of the Seam or ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ into the Mockingjay-Phoenix, the Girl on Fire, from lead’s hard darkness to the solid light of gold, or, as Effie would have it, from coal to pearl.

This is evident in the allegorical role Katniss plays as the pure heart or seeking soul, in the alchemical artistry of the series, and in the symbolism of the pearl. One at a time.

Step back from the story and its narrator for a moment. Is there anything especially unreal about the drama taking place? If we look at the action in the Victor’s Village, Capitol, and Seam from a distance significantly greater than the immediacy of Katniss’ story telling, two or three things seem especially bizarre.

First on the list, for me at least, is the uninterrupted if not easy progress of Katniss’ journey from “District 12 nobody” to the focus of all Panem, even the cause of a Revolution. I mean, there is “unlikely” and “improbable” and then there is just plain silly. Her survival and success reads like a Cinderella-at-the-Super-Bowl fairy tale.

Right up with that oddity are her two boyfriends who aren’t boyfriends. Even accepting that mothers in this dystopia seem to be able to block relationships prior to marriage, as Katniss’ mother acts out for the cameras, these guys, forgive me, don’t act like guys. Their relationships with her are ideals or archetypes rather than anything like what young men in love with an attractive young woman are like.

But if the center-piece characters and relationships of the trilogy are more ‘true myth’ than realist fiction, what realities are the characters representing that make them so engaging as transparencies and translucencies? Why do we care so much about how Katniss will work out her loving two guys and not being able to love either one as they seem to want?

I think the beginning of an answer is in the boys’ names.

Both names can also be girls’ names, which feminine quality, oddly enough, gives Gale and Peeta an oddly hermaphroditic character. The meaning of these names reflects the role each young man plays in the alchemical drama or Morality Play about a soul’s perfection that Hunger Games is.

‘Gale,’ the man of the woods, free and unbound except for his family obligations, is an embodiment of Nature, a ‘gale force wind’ of spirit and the experience of natural beauty. His relationship with Katniss is platonic despite their spending years in each other’s company and both leading lives deprived of touch and love. He fosters rather than challenges Katniss’ purity, freedom, and individual strength or identity.

‘Peeta,’ the man of town and ‘Boy with the Bread,’ has a name that means bread (pita) as well as a vocation as a bread baker. As a child, he gives two loaves of bread to Katniss that he purchases sacrificially (he is beaten for it by his mother), bread which saves her from physical starvation and the eating of which immediately inspires her to think of her ‘Family Book’ and the means to provide for her mother and sister. His bread, in effect, saves her. In a world named ‘Bread’ (Panem is the accusative case form of the Latin word for Bread), I think it is transparent that Peeta or ‘Peter’ is an icon of the Christ, the world creator, Who in St. Peter’s church at least, is received as Bread, and Who loves the world and every soul in it sacrificially. As artist, actor, and self-less lover, he is Culture and Faith that are fostering without challenging Katniss’ purity, vision, and individual will.

There is a lot more to Peeta-as-Christ, believe me, from the several suicidal sacrifices he makes in the Games to his rising from the grave in Hunger Games and his CPR assisted resurrection in Catching Fire, not to mention Katniss’ committment to serve him even at the cost of her life in the Quell — but let’s save the full break-out of Peeta for another post. What does Katniss’ name tell us about her?

Start not with the name but with her character: like the boys, this is an androgynous figure. Note the resolution of contraries. Her mother is city, her father is country. She is an attractive woman but she has been father, provider, and protector of the Everdeen survivors since her father’s death. Like the mockingjay, a hybrid of genetic manipulation and mutation in the wild, she is a living harmony of Culture/Nature, masculine/feminine, healer/killer. The polarity of her loves — Gale, the wind or Nature icon, and Peeta, sacramental bread of sacrifice and artisan of beauty and meaning, the Culture icon — cannot be resolved because she is their resolution and each sustains her. (Check out the first two Scholastic covers which make quite a point of this symbiosis with the Mockingjay symbol locked to two other circles.)

That she is named for a tuber is important on two levels. First, the moly plant. The moly is a tuber that Hermes gives to Odysseus as a cure for any of Circe’s poisons in Homer’s Odyssey. It is described as “black at the root, but with a milky flower. The gods call it moly. It is hard for mortal men to dig up, but the gods have the power to do all things” (Odyssey, Book X, ll. 304-306). Black at the bottom, white at its top, and ungraspable as a whole except by a divinity, the moly plant’s power is in its being a resolution of contraries and image of the kosmos and Godhead (see Romans 1:20).

Second, this tuber is life-saving when found. Katniss‘ father told her “as long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve” (Hunger Games, page 52), and — the kicker — the English word for moly is Rue. Katniss thinks of the plant in terms of its fragile yellow flowers but, like Katniss, it comes as a root-flower package. That’s a head slam because of the District 11 character Katniss adores and could not save. What is the medicinal property of Rue? To Milton, it is cure of blindness, spiritual and physical, that the Archangel Michael uses to restore Adam’s failed vision

but to nobler sights

Michael from Adams eyes the Filme remov’d

Which that false Fruit that promis’d clearer sight

Had bred; then purg’d with Euphrasie and Rue (Paradise Lost. Book xi. Line 414)

The visual Nerve, for he had much to see;

And from the Well of Life three drops instill’d.

So deep the power of these Ingredients pierc’d,

Eevn to the inmost seat of mental sight,

That Adam now enforc’t to close his eyes,

Sunk down and all his Spirits became intranst:

But him the gentle Angel by the hand

Soon rais’d, and his attention thus recall’d.

That Rue appears to Katniss in the purgatory or cleansing of the albedo (see below) in Hunger Games and that they are immediately kin speaks to the importance of both their names. They are named for medicinal tubers, the gift of Hermes, whose worth is concealed beneath the earth and difficult to reveal. (Note the contrast with the weakness and superficiality of characters named for flowers.) Does Rue cure Katniss of blindness? Does she protect her from enchantment? Does she in her death draw out the saving feminine quality from her masculine front? Her father’s comment, that her tuber name means she will live if she can “find herself,” points to the importance of Katniss embracing her resolution-of-contraries “root” identity, her being neither Male nor Female, Jew or Greek (city-country, Gale-Peeta, etc.).

Travis Prinzi explores the meaning of “Rue” in his Panem’s Politics post at the Hog’s Head:

There are lots of references to plants and plant names in these books, and Rue is a key one. A “rue” is a strong herb with medicinal properties, used to help with eyestrain or sore eyes. Shakespeare called the rue the “sour herb of grace” in Richard II, and it was used to mark the spot where the queen learned of Richard’s being taken captive (III.4.104-105). “Rue,” of course, also means to cause to repent or regret. At Rue’s death, Katniss’s inward repentance and transformation begins. She can no longer simply act out of self-preservation. She must act for others and against evil (the Capitol). She reflects later that her covering Rue with flowers was seen by the Capitol as an act of rebellion; she was suppose to glory in the death of other tributes, not mourn them (p. 363). The funeral she enacted on the forest floor for Rue was edited by the Capitol when broadcast on TV. Rue’s death and burial, Harry Potter fans, is the Dobby moment. Rue is the medicinal herb which helps Katniss begin to “see” (healing eyestrain) the spiritual things.

As he points out, “rue” is remorse, which specifically is an awakening or act of conscience. Conscience, in traditional anthropology and psychology, is, as the etymology of the word tells us, not personal knowledge or understanding but “shared knowing,” the logos mind or noetic faculty of soul. It is the Light of men which “lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9). Katniss wakes up to who she is, the root of her being, in her remorse for Rue.

[If you're thinking that's a stretch, note that Haymitch had a parallel moment of remorse at Maysilee Donner's death in his Quell (Katniss notes the similarity: Catching Fire, page 201) waking him to conscience. More important, Peeta, the Christ figure, attempts to shame the Games Makers in his time with them before the Quell by painting a picture of the dead Rue for their reflection -- and potential remorse/experience of logos-conscience.]

There is much more to this, the Body-Soul-Spirit tryptich of Gale-Katniss-Peeta, and the allegory of Katniss as pure soul growing into spiritual life, from doubt to devotion, in relationship with Peeta, but you get the picture. The underlying allegory or translucency of the story is Katniss as human soul being illumined or enlightened. This takes us back to her name and dad’s little joke about her being named for an edible plant: “as long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve” (Hunger Games, page 52). Katniss must “find herself” to “never starve” or die; she learns in the Games that this light of conscience or logos is what she is most and, having found it and identified with it, because it is the fabric of reality and cause of all things, just as dad said, she can never die.

The Literary Alchemy of The Hunger Games

This kind of hero’s journey — one in which the principal character plays the part of what the Bible calls “the heart” and their story is about their apotheosis or spiritual illumination, something like divinization — has a tradition of its own in English literature we can call “literary alchemy.” The English alchemical tradition in letters begins in earnest with Shakespeare and the Metaphysical poets; its tropes, symbols, and story stages are evident thereafter in the poetry and novels of Greats like Blake, Dickens, Yeats, Joyce, and C. S. Lewis. In my books on Harry Potter and on Twilight, I have explained how Joanne Rowling, alchemist wannabe, and Stephenie Meyer have adapted this tradition as powerfully and effectively as they have in Harry’s and Bella’s epic transformations (you can read about it in chapter 3 of The Deathly Hallows Lectures and chapter 4 of Spotlight — and of course I hope you will!).

Though there are academic journals devoted to this subject and a host of books, when a writer uses the alchemical formula and colors and such, readers of their work — especially if they’re serious Potter readers — write me to confirm their sighting. I picked up Hunger Games for the first time because two readers I respect very much, one in Houston and another outside Spokane, wrote me independently and nigh on simultaneously to ask me if I thought Suzanne Collins was writing in this tradition.

Yes, she is.

Again, I cannot lay all of this out here but let me give you five key markers of a work in the alchemical tradition:

1. The work is going to have three key stages marked by the use of specific colors and story events, namely, black, white, and red, which stages reflect, in sequence, the dissolution or break down of the subject character or main characters (nigredo) usually by heat, the purification or purgation of same (albedo) usually with water, and the revelation of the transformation undergone in the process in the story crisis (rubedo).
2. There will be story contraries that must be resolved by the principals’ transformation, contraries like the Two Cities in Dickens’ most popular novel or the Montagues and Capulets of Shakespeare’s Verona, or just groups like Gryffindors and Slytherines and the Quileute Wolfpack and Cullen Vampires.
3. Look for a couple, a pair in opposition, one relatively feminine or lunar, the other masculine and solar, who engage the character being broken down to prima materia for illumination as ’solid light’ or gold. This duo are polar opposites and they either quarrel or draw the principal in contrary directions (the ‘Quarreling Couple’ of alchemical mercury and sulphur).
4. Between the white and red stages, there is an Alchemical Wedding of the Red King and White Queen that prefigures the conjunction of opposites signaling the golden moment of the Philosopher’s Stone creation, i.e., the divinization of the main character and birth of the Philosophical Orphan or story savior joining contraries as a Rebus.
5. And there should be remarkable resurrection imagery, say, something as simple as light shining out of darkness or grander images of a hero rising from the dead or even of a Phoenix, a Rose, or a Red Lion, symbols of the Stone and of Christ, the Light of the World.

If this is all new to you, I’m sure you’re profoundly skeptical that such a tradition exists or, if it does, that these bizarre sequences, symbols, and story points are anything but a conceit shared by egg head writers. That’s understandable. Given the popularity of Harry Potter, Twilight, and now The Hunger Games, though, not to mention the shadow Shakespeare casts to this day over all English writing, I would suggest you not write this alchemy stuff off as “For Geeks Only.” It’s obviously a powerful and pervasive way to frame a story.

My evidence that The Hunger Games is written deliberately as an alchemical trilogy? In brief:

• the nigredo and albedo character of and the black, white, and rubedo elements in the first two books, i.e., the first two books correspond to the first two stages of alchemy and each has three stages within it,
  
• the contraries to be resolved between Seam and City, Capitol and District, are the dynamic driving the story,
  
• the ‘Quarreling Couple’ of Peeta and Gale are the essential tension in Katniss’ life,
  
• the alchemical wedding of Katniss and Peeta we’ve been to (almost) and the orphan they have conceived are the spiritual conjunction of alchemical transformation,
  
• and the light-from-darkness phoenix imagery in the story are pervasive, from Cinna’s costumes for Katniss, especially the Mockingjay wedding dress, to the golden Mockingjay pendant that is the token of District 12 and symbol of the revolution.

An unwrapping of the alchemical artistry of tyhe story so far will require a longer post than this one but I can give you a taste of the details Ms. Collins deliberately included in her books to signal this — and prove this isn’t my little literary hobby horse — by quoting an email I received from the serious reader in Houston I mentioned earlier:

I re-read HG the other day with alchemical imagery in mind and took the following notes, which I pass on to you in case they can be of any use.

Katniss’s arrival in the Arena is the beginning of a clear nigredo phase in the novel. Starting with her descent *downward* to the Arena, followed by the hot, dry weather, lack of moisture and her own burning thirst as she tries to locate a water source, the section screams black/nigredo. Even once she finds water, then there is the wall of horrific heat/fire/smoke descending *down* on her.

We move from that to a clear albedo phase when she finds the pool and cleans her burns. After the Feast at the Cornucopia, she and Peeta are subjected to downpours, and cold rainy weather. The rain and cold go on and on, and as the rain finally stops, a full beautiful moon appears (and there is a good bit of discussion of the moon and passage of time).

Then, she and Peeta set off to confront Cato when all water sources dry up — meeting up at last at the shining gold Cornucopia. It is dusk at this point. I wasn’t clear if the berries she and Peeta threaten to eat were actually red or not … the only descriptions I could find suggested only that they are dark berries, rather like blackberries (which are not red, although the juice of blackberries looks very much like blood). Katniss makes much, during the ending phases of HG, of trying to recapture the “real” Katniss.

Black and hot — to wet White — to Red and Gold and something very much like a sacrificial death and miraculous resurrection as Love defeats Power.

Accidental? C’mon.

If your patience were indefinitely long, I could explain here why in the albedo or “purification by water” novel of the series, Catching Fire, the story opens in snow that is used extensively in healing (with a visit from President Snow, no less), why the Quell Games open on the water which clock-center pool also turns out to have healing, even specifically purgatory effects, after Katniss is chased down by killer fog, and how the story is largely a story of Peeta’s and Katniss’ alchemical wedding of Spirit and Soul, Christ and Seeker. The first two books are the ‘black and ‘white’ novels of the three stage alchemical trilogy and each of the books features nigredo, albedo, and rubedo qualities in their three nine-chapter Parts.

But I want to move on to the Pearl Plot, version 2.0, so I’ll close this discussion with a short note about Dante. His Commedia’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, though not restricted to English literary formulae I’ve touched on here, reflect the same three-step transformation of hot dissolution, wet purification, and celestial illumination which is the poet’s Good Friday to Easter journey from the solid darkness or lead of the forest to the light of the Beatific Vision and apotheosis. Collins’ chapter numbers are no accident but a marker for the attentive reader to the greater artistry and meaning of her Hunger Games Trilogy.

The Symbolism of the Pearl in The Hunger Games

Which brings us to the point of this post, namely, explaining the principles and tools behind the Pearl Plot theory. A pearl is a symbol of three things, all of which are relevant to understanding the Pearl Plot.

(1) In Effie’s otherwise incomprehensible gaffe about coal under pressure becoming pearls, we can see a beautiful alternative metaphor with the same meaning as lead being changed to gold, hard darkness being illumined and becoming solid light or “gold.”

“Pearl,” like the swan, silver, and the moon, is a traditional alchemical symbol representing the white work or albedo of transformation (see Abraham’s Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, page 142). It is especially apt because a pearl’s beauty is in its whiteness, certainly, or purity, but mostly in its luminescence. When Peeta gives Katniss the pearl before the crisis of the Quell and after promising to die for her greater life, we have the gift of love and light that is only the Christ figure’s to give — and a sign of her eventual divinization if she can retain the purification she has experienced there.

(2) A pearl, traditionally, has the meaning, too, of “genius in obscurity” because of this white light being created and hidden in the secret chamber of an oyster (see Cirlot’s A Dictionary of Symbols, page 251). Again we have the image of light shining forth out of darkness that we would expect at the close of the albedo in the alchemical work, but we also have a marker that there is a hidden light or “genius” in the story which pearl will be revealed in the story rubedo.

And –

(3) We have the Pearl of Great Price parable from scripture, which unites these meanings in pointing to the Kingdom of Heaven:

Matt 13:44 “Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found, and hid. In his joy, he goes and sells all that he has, and buys that field.”

Matt 13:45,46 “Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who is a merchant seeking fine pearls, who having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had, and bought it.”

These parables of hidden treasure and singular pearl of value are the teachings of Christ Who is this Kingdom of Heaven within you (Luke 17:21), the hidden light we all experience to varying degrees as conscience. Katniss’ spiritual transformation, even her theosis, is dependent on her “finding herself” and it is this “pearl of great price” she has been given by the Boy With Bread that is her “hidden treasure” and the pure light that will save her.

Tomorrow, a much briefer post (I hope!) on the how the Pearl Plot helps us grasp the four senses of The Hunger Games Trilogy, an updated version of the theory, and maybe even a few SWAGs based on what we have discussed about what may happen in Mockingjay. See you then!

I’ve neglected this weBlog for weeks because I’ve been on the other Professor blog I write, ForksHighSchoolProfessor, promoting Spotlight on Twilight, and reading non-Potter titles, most notably, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. That didn’t leave much time for more Potter reading, thinking, and writing than the preps I have to do for The Leaky Cauldron’s PotterCast Potter Pundit segments.

But late last week I realized I should focus all my public writing time in one spot — and of course that spot is here.

What that means for you if you’re a HogwartsProfessor regular (’HogPro All-Pro,’ get the coffee-cup, t-shirt, and hoodie) or newbie is many more posts on a lot more subjects.Today there will be only one post — this one! — because of the responses I need to make to the great comments on other threads here but it could very well be three posts: one on Twilight, one on Harry Potter, and one on the Hunger Games.

On Twilight what I want to talk about today is a wonderful web site called TwilightNewsSite that is a news aggregator for all things Twilight. There may be 50 of those but what makes this one better than most, than all of the ones that I’ve seen, is that there is tab on the home page that says Meaning. That tab invites a conversation about the state of Twilight fandom specifically and of popular culture in general because the news-home page for the site is all movie news, all the time. The page full of challenging essays on the books’ meaning, though, is neglected, to say the least. No one has left a comment on any of the posts there, which are quite good. Is this just a function of the series finale being in hand, of the movies being a work-in-progress (and therefore a subject producing “news”), or a statement of what really drives fandoms today, story experienced visually, which is to say, superficially and as cinema?

On Harry Potter, I received an email today as I suspect many of you did making an “Exclusive Vacation Offer” to Universal Orlando Resort. If you didn’t get it, here’s the heart of the sales pitch:

This EXCLUSIVE vacation package includes:

• Early Park Admission^◊ to experience The Wizarding World of Harry Potter
• Breakfast at the Three Broomsticks™ – one per person^
• Commemorative GRAND OPENING ticket – one per person
• Hotel accommodations at a Universal Partner Hotel
• 3-Day Base Ticket^^ to both Universal Orlando® theme parks – one theme park, per day
• Access to live entertainment◊◊ at Universal CityWalk®

I think this “exclusive” offer invites discussion of how much our imagined experiences shape our waking life. I mean, when you plan your vacation to a place as far away and as expensive and uncomfortable as Orlando (in the summer?!) for the chance to visit a plastic Hogwarts with roller coasters, you gotta know there’s a big bleed from the books into your life. (I’ll see you there, I hope, for Infinitus 2010!)

And on Hunger Games? Well, if you read the Stratford Caldecott essay on Imaginative Literature I posted at HogPro yesterday (and if you haven’t, there’s nothing here as important and edifying as that; just go back now and read the whole thing), you’re familiar with the spectrum of fable-to-fantasy he charted and explained. It begs exploration in terms of The Hunger Games. Where does the Panem sub-creation fall on the chart? How does it differ from the examples Caldecott gives or from your favorites? The essay is a gold mine for serious reader thinking and conversation.

The thing is — finally, the point of the post! — while I could post the Twilight piece at ForksHighSchoolProfessor.com, the Potter piece here, and my thoughts place on Hunger Games’ place in fantasy literature at PanemProfessor.com, that would be a serious waste for several reasons.

The most obvious one is few readers have even heard of my other Professor blogs, even die-hard Twihards and Games Groupies. Why post something on a site where I’m talking to myself?

More important, though I really do value conversation, is none of these post subjects is restricted to Twilight, Harry Potter, or Hunger Games fans and readers.

• Tell me the Twilight fandom’s movie fetish isn’t mirrored in Harry Potter fandom today and I’ll tell you that you are mistaking differences in degree for differences in kind. You’ll note on Hunger Games fan sites that the conversation is already as much about potential casting for the movies than where the books are headed.
• The Harry Potter ‘Wizarding World’ complex in Orlando may not have sibling Twilight and Hunger Games theme parks (yet), but the subject of how what we read and imagine shapes our vision and experience of the world obviously isn’t a subject about which only Potter-philes have something to say. And –
• Prof. Caldecott in his essay talks about Twilight and Harry Potter*** (and Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, and Pullman, among many others). This overview and attempt at a fantasy moral-taxonomy of sorts almost demands a broader than one-fandom discussion.

And that’s what the new HogwartsProfessor.com will be about. Yes, there will be posts devoted just to each one of these book series, especially in the run-up to Mockingjay’s publication this August, and other series as well (Artemis Fowl, The Space Trilogy, and Redwall come immediately to mind). But the discussions on these posts and in the broader-focus essays I’ll put up here will be about topics of interest to all readers. I hope you’ll join me in this conversation.

But PLEASE don’t start the conversation here about any of these three topics I gave as samples today! They’ll be posted properly in the coming week.

That’s it for explanations now. Thank you for spreading the word to friends and fellow serious readers about the talk here, and, again, for joining the conversation yourself. I’m off to the several active threads about the Hunger Games ‘Pearl’ theory (here and here) to answer some questions and acknowledge your corrections. See you there!

***See page 6: The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling I would place in the category Symbolist-Moral, or perhaps even Symbolist-Spiritual, whereas the Twilight vampire novels of Stephanie Myer, the Mormon housewife, with their strongly erotic overtones, would be Fabulist-Idyllic or (at worst) Fabulist-Idolatrous.