Yesterday Newsweek magazine posted a piece with the title, ‘JK Rowling Falls Silent as She Could Be Prosecuted in Imane Khelif Lawsuit.’ The lede was that Rowling’s absence from Twixter for ten days means she has been intimidated by a frivolous lawsuit with exactly zero chances of going anywhere into a cautious retreat lest she be punished for her feminist zeal.

As I pointed out earlier this week, it is much more likely that Rowling went on the tweeting tear that she has been on since late July in order to provoke this kind of counter-attack; as Julia Hartley-Brewer noted in The Mirror (UK), it cannot be cyber-bullying if Rowling was simply telling the truth — and a lawsuit, a serious one, would expose Khelif as a man and his women’s gold medal as fraud if it came to trial. The pictures of a man beating up a woman are so much more to the point than a man beating women in a bicycle race, swim meet, or weight-lifting contest that it is easy to see the world’s most successful story-teller grasping the potential of a court case to flip the narrative here.

But that’s not why Rowling has “fallen silent.”

A friend who tracks Rowling’s yacht via its plotting signal (no, I don’t know what that is) reported this morning that the yacht has gone so far north up the eastern coast of Greenland that it has achieved unplottable status. I’m going to assume that, if the internet cannot track the Murray family boat as they sail toward the North Pole — end of Frankenstein, anyone? — then they do not have internet connections either as they approach a magnetic pole. The odds are good, if that is true, that she hasn’t heard anything about the kerfuffle her twixting blitz about Khelif has caused, whether those thirty-plus tweets were intentionally provocative or not.

Tomorrow, some thoughts on Rowling’s shed artistry, namely, when did she begin writing ‘rings-within-the-rings’ of her novels? My first guess is Order of the Phoenix but I think a closer look at specific chapters in early Harry Potter novels will reveal much tighter rings. See you then!

I recently completed a draft chapter of a new book about Rowling’s ‘Shed’ artistry, the piece about her use of literary alchemy, the story version of metallurgical alchemy. This subtle but powerful adaptation and deployment of hermetic symbols, colors, and sequences is a parallel and complementary backdrop to the psychomachia or soul-transformation allegories of Rowling’s best works — and the key word there is “transformation.”

The key hurdle for readers trying to grasp this occult narrative tradition in English literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Yeats and Joyce, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien, is getting over their received opinion that metallurgical alchemy was the science of Medieval charlatans who pursued get-rich-quick schemes to make lead into gold and an “elixir of life” for immortality. That doesn’t translate to anything that makes sense in terms of story; “literary alchemy” if thought of as “story chemistry” as the modern laboratory science taught in secondary schools everywhere is a head-scratching non-starter. English and chemistry classes today have no common ground.

Traditional, which is to say ‘theocentric,’ alchemy, however, was primarily about the soul of the alchemical adept or seeker, a natural science working to the same end as the revealed spiritual path in which the alchemist lived (there were Muslim, Chinese, Jewish, as well as Christian alchemies). It was, in brief, one of the sacred sciences within the mosaic of said traditions arts and sciences, all of which pointed to the same end, namely, purification and transformation of the soul in hope of divinization in this life or after death.

Perennialists Titus Burckhardt and Seyyed Nasr, both of whom wrote about metallurgical alchemy, put great emphasis on this key point:

Alchemy may be called the art of the transmutations of the soul. In saying this I am not seeking to deny that alchemists also knew and practiced metallurgical procedures such as the purification and alloying of metals; their real work, however, for which all these procedures were merely the outward supports or ‘operational’ symbols, was the transmutation of the soul. The testimony of the alchemists on this point is unanimous. (Burckhardt 1972, 23)

Alchemy was certainly a way of enobling matter, hence its relation to sacred art. But this also means that alchemy is not just a prelude to chemistry, that it is a science of the soul in its relation to the cosmos and making use of external transformations for the sake of that inner transformation which is the ultimate goal of all the traditional sciences. (Nasr 1993, 107)

This is the shared goal of traditional sacred arts, most notably for our discussion of Rowling’s literary alchemy, in written story and staged drama. Through imaginative identification with the story hero or heroine on page or stage, the reader or audience member passes through the transformative and cathartic cycle of the alchemical work, break-down nigredo, purifying albedo, and restorative and illuminating rubedo. Just as the ‘hard darkness’ of lead becomes the ‘solid light’ of gold,’ so the metallurgical alchemist and sympathetic reader feels his soul enlightened by the logos light of the world that is at the heart of the solve et coagula process, “dissolve and recongeal,” shared by the story and laboratory traditions.

Rowling has never been asked about alchemy (!), though she has volunteered quite a bit about the importance of it to Harry Potter, claiming even that it sets the “magical parameters” of that series. Robert Terry, a long time friend of this weblog, pointed out to me recently, though, that, in her Pottermore piece about Draco Malfoy, she points directly to the key piece about metallurgical and hence literary alchemy, that it is not about manipulation of materials but the transformation of the soul for the better.

The Draco page at Pottermore is a delightful capsule review of Draco’s experience before, during, and after his years as a classmate at Hogwarts with Harry Potter, his nemesis. I enjoyed the slightly different but clarifying focus of seeing Draco’s life qua Malfoy, if there is very little new information about him in the story. The piece ends with an ‘Author’s Note,’ which suggests that the much longer summary of Draco’s life was written by Pottermore staff, perhaps from Rowling’s notes. Its psychological points about Draco’s remarkable Occlumency skills versus Harry’s inability to close his mind are invaluable, I think, for grasping Rowling’s thoughts about these two characters, the archetypal Gryffindor and Slytherine fire-and-water pair.

Robert Terry, though, wrote to me about what Rowling shared in her closing paragraphs, her ‘Author’s Note,’ for this piece, namely, new information about Draco Malfoy as a man in the years after his education at Hogwarts:

Draco had many surnames before I settled on ‘Malfoy’. At various times in the earliest drafts he is Smart, Spinks or Spungen. His Christian name comes from a constellation – the dragon – and yet his wand core is of unicorn.

I think literary history and personal experience both tell us that everyone has a critical juncture in their lives, call it a nigredo if you want, perhaps ‘chrysalis’ is better,  in which everything falls apart and a new person emerges, one shaped by that crisis or series of calamities. For writers, Dickens is the prototypical example; each critical biography of the greatest English novelist I own — and I have a shelf — focuses on his time as a young man when he worked in a boot black factory while his father and family were in debtors prison. The wickipedia summary of that experience:

To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The strenuous and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He later wrote that he wondered “how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age”.

I counted up in Harry Potter’s Bookshelf how many of Dickens’ novels featured suffering children. The final tally?

15 novels, 16 leading role characters without surviving parents or parents known to them, 2 novels feature title characters with only one parent, and only Dickens’ first book, an ad hoc collection of stories, does not feature an orphan or a neglected and estranged child.

If there was a creature in Dickens’ Lake of inspiration, it came to life in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. I don’t think he was unusual in this, if the severity of his experience was remarkable; similar cases could be made for Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis among artists, and, lacking such dramatic events, what Freud called the “family romance” of every child is as formative (that is always ‘there’ in everyone’s psyche).

Our task here at Hogwarts Professor is to begin the ‘Fourth Generation’ of Rowling Studies, the one in which we shift from Shed focused literary interpretation exclusive of Lake concerns to one that includes Rowling formative experiences. Which means identifying as much as possible both her “family romance” and the life-and-mind pivotal moments that inform as inspiration her imaginative work.

The death of Rowling’s mother Anne in late December 1990 is almost without exception (and rightly) referred to in the very few biographies of the writer available today as a defining moment in her life as a writer. She described it as a “depth charge” that blew up her life, the nadir of her “year of misery,” and the primary impetus of her November 1991 departure from the UK to teach English in Portugal. That led, of course, to her meeting, marrying, having a child with, and divorcing Jorge Arantes, another formative relationship that is the foundation of her depression and latent PTSD.

Last week in my post about the latest internet meme meant to defame J. K. Rowling, ‘It’s the Mold!’ Rowling Twixter Cameo Shots Launch Bizarro Theories, I used a picture taken in September 2020 of The Presence in her home library. I used its relatively clear image of the back wall to explain that the “mold” supposedly growing floor to ceiling in her library is almost certainly very tasteful wallpaper with a Japanese block print image on it.

That picture came from a 2020 interview on the Version’s ‘Tracks of My Years” show; celebrities on this popular program are asked to share “tracks” in the “song” sense of that word and explain the meaning it has for them. If you follow that link to read Rowling’s answers and song selections, you find what I described in that post as a potential “key to unlocking the central mystery of Rowling’s life.” Find out what I’m guessing that is after the jump. [Read more…]

Enjoy!