Okay, okay, it is ‘Hunger Games Month’ at Hogwarts Professor, so we’re spending some time every day with the best selling books and the ironies woven into ironies of the Big Sale from the Capitol Gamesmakers making a Giant Hollywood Media Spectacular from books largely about the soul corrosive qualities of those Giant Hollywood Movie Spectaculars. But there’s time still to talk about the substance, the ‘inside bigger than the outside,’ of literature and the spirituality implicit to fantasy fiction that, per Eliade, drives its popularity.

For a wonderfully generous helping of that main course and dessert, please watch the late J. Robert Barth’s (SJ) talk on ‘Romanticism and the Religious Tradition.’ You’ll understand Katniss and Kompany, I’m guessing, as well as our love for her and our experience within her story, better for this time in the ‘Front Row’ at Barth’s Boston College talk.

You Know You’re Really an Adult Harry Potter Fan…

By Melanie N. Lee, February 28, 2012

Over the past 15-odd years, the Boy Wizard has collected fans of every age, class, size, and gender.  And who said that the Harry Potter stories were strictly for children?  So, in the tradition of MAD Magazine…  

You know you’re really an adult Harry Potter fan when…

…you know that Bellatrix Lestrange was born in the same year as your older sister.

…your thesis paper for your M.S. in Adolescent Education would be titled The Pedagogy of Albus Dumbledore.

…you wonder why the Slytherins don’t all come down with pneumonia and mildew living in those damp caves under the lake.  (Oh, yeah…magic.)

[Read more…]

Mary L. promised a few weeks back that she would be sharing with us soon a longish collection of her thoughts on Personality types in Hunger Games, that is, a review of how the characters reflect the Myers-Briggs classification of human beings. I am very much looking forward to that largely because of the discussion I think it will generate about the value of this kind of template reading versus a more traditional polysemantic or iconological approach.

I don’t think the approaches are exclusive, as I’ll explain in a moment, but I do worry that the sorting of characters by Myers-Briggs categories risks missing the allegorical representations that are the power of the story figures over the reader. They are ciphers in large part for greater than natural realities whose play in the narrative have an alchemical effect on the reader.  I suspect much if not all of that is lost in a mechanical analysis of defining psychological traits. Taxonomy and typology are little explanation, in the end, of why a story works. [Read more…]

A little over a year ago I wrote a post here on Charles Williams’ Greater Trumps and the connections that leaped out at me as I read that book through Potter-phile lenses. If you haven’t read that post, please do — and then read Bruce Charlton’s remarkable set of posts on ‘Co-Inherence in Harry Potter’ here and here.

Co-Inherence is not a simple idea to summarize, especially as Charles Williams used it in at least three distinct ways only loosely related: Exchange, Substituted Love, and Romantic Theology (see this site for more on that). For novel readers, Williams’ Descent Into Hell gives a story version of substituted love that is unforgettable, haunting, even inviting. Mr. Charlton, friend of this blog, makes the case that the idea of co-inherence permeates the Hogwarts Saga. He does not argue, however, that Ms. Rowling necessarily read Williams or has this sub-theme directly from him.

He is prudent, certainly, in his decision not to make Michael Ward’s error in focusing on “what the author intended” as much as “what the work reflects.” Ms. Rowling, after all, has to my knowledge never mentioned Charles Williams in her interviews. Without her testimony, proving the link is impossible, and, more important, this kind of intentio auctoris argument distracts from the substance of his fascinating insight to the Potter Tales using the lens of co-inherence.

That being said, the alchemy of Charles Williams’ novels (see Gavin Aschenden’s Charles Williams Alchemy and Integration on that if you have any doubts — and want to really understand co-inherence as a loving theology) as well as the Gothic comedy, genre melange, and probable Ring Composition — more on that soon, I hope — makes the possibility of a notable Williams influence, perhaps mediated through the strong effect everything Williams thought had on C. S. Lewis and his fiction, seem more ‘likely’ to me than ‘unlikely.’

A hat-tip and thank you to Mr. Charlton for re-opening and deftly expanding in scope and substance the discussion of the hermetic elements implicit to Inklings fiction via Williams (if not to the whole Romantic tradition) and Ms. Rowling’s work!

When I gave my Ring Compositions talk in Columbus Circle, NYC, to ‘The Group That Shall Not Be Named,’ the notes and charts from which talk are available here, I was interviewed beforehand by a video journalist from CUNY named Vineeth Thomas, who I met again last summer in Orlando. He wrote me yesterday to share the film piece in which he included a part of what was a long and involved talk. Here is the YouTube edition for your consideration and comment: