After last week’s epic post (‘epic’ in length rather than in value of subject matter, I have to think, because few readers were moved to respond!) on the William Penn epigraph, I promised myself I would tackle the Aeschylus piece from The Libation Bearers that precedes it. This will be relatively brief (!) but, I hope, thought provoking. Greek drama is a little more along my lines of thought and study than late seventeenth century aphorism and epigram collections, if not by much. [Read more…]
‘Deathly Hallows’ and Penn’s ‘Fruits of Solitude’
October 13, 2008 by 19 Comments
I hope you have been following the discussion in the separate post below of what constitutes Harry Potter canon. The topic is of no little importance to the work we do here at Hogwarts Professor, of course, but that thread is also an excellent example of what internet exchanges can lead to but rarely do. I think we have come to a point, after no little give and take, that we accept there are four ways to understand literary canon with respect to the Potter novels, four ways that overlap to one degree or another but which differ enough to be understood independently. That discussion is certainly not over and I encourage you to jump in on that thread if you disagree or have a quintessential position that will square the circle and resolve all the contrary thinking there.
Here I want to apply what understanding we have reached and make an explicitly “textus primus” argument for the fullest understanding of the William Penn epigraph that is part of Ms. Rowling’s opening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. [Read more…]
Tolkien and Rowling: A Case for “Text Only”
October 9, 2008 by 58 Comments
I was talking to a good friend last month about how seriously we should take Ms. Rowling’s comments about her work. He chuckled. As a University professor of several decades and a Faulkner scholar, he found it amusing that Potter Fandom hangs on Ms. Rowling’s every word as “canon.” Faulkner, it turns out, had plenty to say about his novels, especially in answer to questions and as he got older. The sad thing was it seems the 1949 Nobel Prize winner for Literature often had no idea of what he was talking about, confused his novels, stories, and screen plays, and made little sense when describing his themes. Transcripts made from the recordings of his talks, consequently, are consulted by serious interpreters of Faulkner’s work but not given anything like the weight given Ms. Rowling’s every comment.
Joanne Rowling is hardly the senescent Nobel laureate type, of course. I’d suggest, though, that, when tracking influences and discussing meaning, serious readers of her work are best set if they work almost exclusively from text. Almost. If you’ve listened to the podcast I did with Profs. Paul Spears and John Mark Reynolds at Biola/Torrey last month, you know I sympathize with Dr. Reynolds’ “text only” definition of canon. Today I want to look at a case in point — what we can learn about Tolkien’s influence on Harry’s adventures from the still invaluable if much diminished Accio Quote catalogue of interviews — to see if attention to Ms. Rowling’s extra-textual information clarifies this influence or muddies the waters. [Read more…]
Get Thee to Zossima.com!
October 8, 2008 by 4 Comments
For those of you who have been holding off on purchasing The Deathly Hallows Lectures in the hope that Santa and Rudolph will bring you a copy or that the urge to understand the literary alchemy, Christian content, and eye and mirror symbolism of the series finale might pass, please go to the new and beautiful Zossima Press website and read the introduction to Lectures. And then buy your autographed copy right there!
If that wasn’t enough, Travis Prinzi and the house-elves that work for him have posted two audio files from the Wake Forest C. S. Lewis Conference, which talks are included in Views from Wake Forest, the Zossima Press collection of the best talks given there. I was at both Walter Hooper’s talk and James Como’s lecture in Wake Forest; I’m confident that after listening to them, you’ll want to read them and the other conference topics in Views.
Great things over at Zossima.com! Get thee hither, AllPro.
Transformed Vision: Harry’s Odyssey in Sight
September 30, 2008 by 38 Comments
Much of my book, The Deathly Hallows Lectures, is about the eye and mirror symbolism of Ms. Rowling’s Harry Potter series finale. We have the eyeball in the mirror, the eyeballs in the Locket Horcrux, the triangular eye of the Deathly Hallows symbol, Lily’s green eyes in Snape’s agony and death, and Mad-Eye’s surviving eye-dentity and its burial. I argue that figuring out the meaning of the eyes is the way to turn what Ms. Rowling describes as “the key” to the books, the parting words of Albus Dumbledure to Harry at King’s Cross, the lines she says she “waited seventeen years to write.”
While thinking today about Harry’s transformed or corrected vision, a reader wrote me to ask about the Thestrals and why Harry, who was at his parents’ execution, could not see Thestrals before he saw Cedric die. I answered politely (Harry almost certainly did not see his father die and it is probable he did not grasp that the green flash that killed his mother meant her death, if he saw it at all) but the question grew on me. Harry’s experience of death enables him to see what previously had been invisible to him. Cedric’s death changes his capacity to discern reality.
One point, one question. [Read more…]
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