Casual Vacancy 15: A Telling Re-Take on ‘The Good Samaritan’

November 4, 2012 by 7 Comments

In response to HogwartsProfessor Casual Vacancy post 4 on Literary Narcissism, Kelly first raised the possibility that Ms. Rowling’s  post Hogwarts Saga debut was a postmodern re-telling of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Lavonne Neff at Christianity Today spoke to this possibility as well, while denying a Christian allegory. I urged a reader who wrote me with thoughts along the Good Samaritan lines to write them up as a Guest Post for your consideration.

The Casual Vacancy and the Good Samaritan by B. Waisanen

There are some obvious parallels between Casual Vacancy and the parable of the Good Samaritan.

As you well know, a lawyer asks Jesus, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus prompts the lawyer, “What is written in the law?” The lawyer answers with a quote, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself,” and Jesus says, “You have answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.” But the lawyer, “….willing to justify himself,” asks, “…And who is my neighbor?”

This seems to be a fundamental question of The Casual Vacancy, and it comes with a rather obvious answer. However, is Rowling really that obvious? Something has to be going on under the surface. Connecting the dots between the central parable and the book’s title provides a key to the deeper meaning of the book; that the casual vacancy,  of England’s Christian heritage leads to the inevitable tragedy of the ending.

While I’m sure Good Samaritans abound in the book, Barry Fairbrother is the obvious first choice candidate, dealing out help and healing all round. Not only is he the main tether keeping Krystal on track, Barry supports Gavin, Cubby, Parminder, and the Fields in general.

Later on, as Miles and Samantha arrive for dinner, Rowling slides in another reference, “Here they are, the good Samaritans,” boomed Howard.” Unfortunately, he seems to be making an over the top double entendre towards Samantha.

The real acting out of the parable happens at the end of the story.

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho….

The journey took Krystal back to her childhood. She had made this trip daily to St. Thomas’s all on her own, on the bus.

It is not a man, but a girl and her brother. I think it is not accidental, that Krystal and Robbie journey up from the Fields to Pagford. She makes a journey, but it is in reverse direction.  The man in the parable journeys from Jerusalem, the city of God, to Jericho. If it Rowling meant this to be a direct parallel, she would have had the journey reversed, from Pagford down to the Fields. [Read more…]

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Casual Vacancy 14: Notable Reviews, High and Low

November 4, 2012 by 1 Comment

It’s been more than a month since our first look at Casual Vacancy and we’re overdue for a second reading and discussion. Let’s begin with two reviews of the book, one enthusiastic and the other appalled, and an invitation for you to share links to your favorite, challenging, or most despised thoughts on Ms. Rowling’s latest.

First, the enthusiast — public atheist and Rowling fellow author and magical world cum literary novelist Lev Grossman, TIME magazine: “I’m a believer”

It’s rare to see a writer whom you think you know well unfold a new dimension like this, a dimension you didn’t even suspect existed. The Casual Vacancy is, in a funny way, not so much an extension of the Harry Potter books as their negative image: it’s a painfully arbitrary and fallen world, a world that, bereft as it is of the magic that animates and ennobles Hogwarts, sags and cracks under its own weight. After his furtive coupling with Krystal, a melancholy, postcoital Fats “wished he could simply be transported, this instant, to his attic bedroom.” Harry would have apparated there. But Fats, like the rest of us, must take the long way home.

Next, the Tory convert to Catholicism and champion of British culture, Charles Moore, Telegraph (UK): JK Rowling rejects the culture that made her great — “The Harry Potter author made a fortune from the provincial life that she now so clearly despises”:

I dwell on these points because, taken together, they show that JK Rowling, though very po-faced, is not artistically serious. Her plot is not well-grounded. Her morality tale has all the improbability of magic, but none of its allure.

This is sad, because it is in our provincial life that our great culture has flourished. And it is partly because of the decline of our provincial life that it has degenerated. The huge preponderance of London in the 21st century has certainly made our capital city one of the liveliest places in the world, but it has also drained the life and variety out of the rest of the country. In literature, as in politics, London runs everything, and doesn’t care much about anywhere else.

JK Rowling’s success in the Harry Potter stories was, in fact, the product of a provincial life. Her magical imagination grew strong in the confined spaces of her background. She made a huge fortune. It is an unattractive feature of our celebrity culture that she now despises all those people – virtually the entire human race – who are less of a global phenomenon than herself. Left-wing she may be, but what JK Rowling is really saying to the poor old provincial England that made her is, like Harry Enfield’s famous creation, “I am considerably richer than yow!”

More links to reviews after the jump. Please share your favorites and finds in the comment boxes below! [Read more…]

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Josh Richards: Rowling or Milton or Meyer or Joyce?

November 3, 2012 by 3 Comments

Votaries of Antiquity, a Guest Post from Prof Josh Richards, Palm Beach Atlantic University

Antiquity, like every other quality that attracts the notice of mankind, has undoubtedly votaries that reverence it, not from reason, but from prejudice. Some seem to admire indiscriminately whatever has been long preserved, without considering that time has sometimes co-operated with chance; all perhaps are more willing to honour past than present excellence; and the mind contemplates genius through the shades of age, as the eye surveys the sun through artificial opacity. The great contention of criticism is to find the faults of the moderns, and the beauties of the ancients. While an authour is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

Someone recently posted the following comment on an old thread at this site. At the risk of possibly feeding a troll, I have been asked to comment as several illustrative points may be drawn by response.

It follows:

Kids, stop reading this garbage. Do not try to give arguments which you know that are fake. There are better books than this. If you want to read bildungsroman novels, read Mario Vargas Llosa´s, “The Time of Hero” or James Joyce´s, “Portraid of the Artist as a Young Man”. If you like fantasy, read Lewis Carrol, Kipling, Stevenson, Wells, Swift, Wilde, Verne or Jorge Luis Borges. Borges especially will reeducate you and will teach you what literature is. You will discover that many good writers have what is called “style”. Style consists in writing euphonically, by avoiding repeated words, repeated phrases, cacophonies, clichés, anacoluthons and other things. Read good literature. Believe me: you will improve your culture and the way of using your language.

There are three matters that may be learnt from such a post (whose author I have somewhat arbitrarily gendered male for convenience). The first is whether or not there is something that can be learned from works like Harry Potter and Twilight; The second, on the weighing of writers, especially translations; the third on the dangers of pretension. [Read more…]

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Guest Post: ‘Treasure Island’ as Ring Composition?

November 3, 2012 by 1 Comment

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island: An Exploration of its Possible Ring Composition Story Scaffolding

by Michael Murray

I would like to heartily thank Professor John Granger for drawing my attention to this book.

If any reader has not read it, or not read it recently then I urge them to do so; I have greatly enjoyed re-reading the book. The book was published in 1885, after having been serialised in the magazine Young Folks, between 1881 to 1882.

The scenes, characters, events are all very well realised; the seaman’s language is always used to great expressive effect, and never sounds unnatural, obscure or artificial.

1

The story is told wholly as narrative by the central character, young Jim Hawkins. The only times Hawkins is not the narrator are chapters sixteen, seventeen and eighteen when the narrative is supplied by Doctor Livesey.

The story is told in retrospect. It opens by explaining that the following is a record of the events and circumstances consequent upon the discovery of the treasure map of a notorious privateer/pirate Captain Flint.

For those unsure of the story by now, allow me a brief run-through. [Read more…]

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J. K. Rowling as Ungrateful Liberal Wretch: The Anti-PC View

November 1, 2012 by

Friend of this blog and author of Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness, Bruce Charlton, has written perhaps the most damning critique of Ms. Rowling’s self-importance and agenda as a writer since Orson Scott Card let her have it with both barrels over the Copyright law suit years ago. Mr. Charlton thinks we need to have a ‘Emperor Wearing No Clothes’ moment in the wake of Casual Vacancy’s transparent screed against everyone not celebrating Redistribution of Wealth. You can read it in a piece he’s titled ‘Case study of Leftist resentment, moral inversion and the corrosion of character: J.K Rowling.’

Mr. Charlton errs on the side of the right, perhaps, in his hyperbole but it seems like a small breeze of fresh air and something of a counter balance from the excess Jo adoration we are accustomed to from the political left (can you say ‘Harry Potter Alliance‘? I can). Reading Ms. Rowling’s recent ‘By the Book’ interview in the New York Times , you’d have to be numb not to be struck by the author’s pretense and desire to be admired and respected by the cognoscenti. As a UK correspondent of no little reading penetration and literary accomplishment wrote me, “Reading the article made me feel dumb.  And boring.  And provincial, in the worst sense. Oh yes, and unsophisticated, too.”

This is a shame. As we’ve noted here many times over the years, Ms. Rowling’s charitable efforts and personal restraint in the Public Square have been remarkable and laudable given her unprecedented celebrity and the speed she traveled to it from total obscurity.  Her behavior has seemed wonderfully unnatural in her remaining balanced and not as pre-occupied with herself in public as fame encourages, even demands. It seems of late she is sadly human after all and, if Mr. Charlton is correct, her fame and wealth and power have left their mark.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes