Lethal White: The Swan Symbolism

The story ends — its very last words — with “twin swans,” a return to the beginning as evident bracketing:

Head bowed against the rain, [Robin] had no attention left to spare for the magnificent mansion past which she was walking, its rain specked windows facing the great river, its front doors engraved with twin swans. (p 647)

Brad  Bellows told us, in a comment attached to Evan Willis’ post on the hermetic and mythological meaning of Lethal White, that “the paired swans Robin fails to notice in the final line, actually exist, on Swan House, built in 1876 by R.N. Shaw, overlooking the Thames.” Mr Willis in that post had suggested this might be Jonny Rokeby’s home in keeping with his theory that, per Leda and the Swan/Zeus mythology, that Strike’s mysterious paternity, the pairing of his super-groupie mother with the other-worldly rock-star, explains why Rokeby remains off-stage but ever-present. The myth holds that Leda has twins, two sets of twins actually, with two fathers for each set; Castor and Pollux are the off-spring of Leda with the swan who is Zeus and with the king of Sparta, her husband. Robin and Cormoran, great driver and former boxer, are the novel’s stand-in for Castor the horseman and Pollux the pugilist. [See the discussions of this mythology and the Strike mysteries in the Gray/Granger and Willis posts on the subject.]

While the predominant symbolism of the story is white horses, which occur so frequently that Strike remarks on it and Billy Knight laughs about it (pp 394, 496), white swans occur often enough, not only as the story’s framing brackets but in references to individual birds on signs (see Robin’s noting and overlooking the Swan pub sign on pp 56 and 166), that we are obliged to consider their meaning beyond markers of Leda mythology in which the books are set. Swans, as you might expect in a Rowling novel, have an alchemical meaning as well, one that we will explore after the jump.

J. E. Cirlot writes about the swan in his Dictionary of Symbols as a “symbol of great complexity:”

The dedication of the swan to Apollo, as the god of music, arose out of the mythic belief that it would sing sweetly when on the point of death (8). The red swan is a symbol of the sun (2). But almost all meanings are concerned with the white swan, sacred to Venus, which is why Bachelard suggests that in poetry and literature it is an image of naked woman, of chaste nudity and immaculate whiteness.

But Bachelard finds an even deeper significance: hermaphroditism, since in its movement and certainly in its long phallic neck it is masculine yet in its rounded, silky body it is feminine. In sum, then, the swan always points to the complete satisfaction of a desire, the swan-song being a particular allusion to desire which brings about its own death (2).

This ambivalent significance of the swan was also well known to the alchemists, who compared it with ‘philosophical Mercury’ (57), the mystic Centre and the union of opposites, an interpretation entirely in accord with its archetypal implications (56).

Now, in Schneider’s view, the swan, by virtue of its relationship with the harp and the sacrificial serpent, also pertains to the funeral-pyre, because the essential symbols of the mystic journey to the other world (apart from the death-ship) are the swan and the harp. This would afford another explanation of the mysterious song of the dying swan.

The swan also has a bearing upon the peacock, although the situation is reversed. The swan/harp relationship, corresponding to the axis water/fire, denotes melancholy and passion, self-sacrifice, and the way of tragic art and martyrdom. Conversely the peacock/lute relationship, linked with earth/air, is possibly a representation of logical thought (50). As Jacques de Morgan has shown in L’Humanite prehistorique, if it was the horse that pulled the Sun-god’s chariot by day, it was the swan that hauled his bark over the waters by night. The relevance to this myth of the Lohengrin legend is self-evident.

“Great complexity,” indeed! As usual, Cirlot is as helpful as he is maddening; I include his parenthetic number references which do not refer to pages in the Dictionary, to notes in the back of the book, or to his extensive bibliography. But he does make three pointers that may be helpful in understanding the use of swans in the fourth and likely central novel of the Cormoran Strike series.

The swan seems, as Galbraith deploys the symbol, to be a sign of the love between Robin and Cormoran, hence the swans on the lake coming together after Robin leaves Matt and the stone swans on the house at story’s end when it seems the two will be coming together soon, and for more than take-out curry with Nick and Ilsa. But the love here is essentially Robin’s love and the swan symbol’s feminine characteristic, “sacred to Venus” and representing a “naked woman” is fitting with how Robin is laid bare, if you will, by the events of Lethal White.

And yet the swan is also “hermaphroditic” in the phallic shape of its neck and yonnic body and, in this, a sign of “the mystic center and the union of opposites.” Lethal White is all about pairs; Strike refers to this repeatedly in his private ruminations — and the story is about his coming-to-conscious realization of his love for Robin as much as it is hers. Though not demonstrative, this doesn’t hurt the argument that the fourth novel is the center and turning point of the series in which the opposites finally unite, which we see in their hug at the wedding reception, Cormoran’s one arm around her shoulder at the roadside verge, and again on the barge after he rescues her from Raphael/Raphaela, the wicked hermaphrodite or Janus figure.

And, as a tease, Cirlot concludes his ‘Swan’ entry in his Dictionary with a reference to Lohendrin, famous because of the Wagner opera but linked to the remarkably involved Knight of the Swan legends. That possibility I will put aside, “self-evident” as its meaning may have been to the lexicographer, for someone else to explore or to return to in Strike5 if we meet a heroic character “who must not be named.”

I will put that discussion off to return to the alchemical meaning to which Cirlot refers. I send the reader unfamiliar to the importance of Literary Alchemy in Rowling’s writing to the pillar post on the subject; its significance to the serious reader of Rowling’s work can hardly be overstated. Little surprise, then, that Lyndy Abraham’s Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery has a significant entry for the swan:

A symbol of the white stage known as the albedo, and of the white elixir or stone which can transmute base metal to silver. Ruland wrote: ‘When the Stone … has arrived at the perfect White Stage … or Swan, then all the philosophers say that this is a time of joy’ (Lexicon, 379).

The swan is one of a series of hermetic birds which represent the different phases and colours of the matter in the alembic during the opus (fig. 43). The crow or raven of the black nigredo is followed by the many colours of the peacock or peacock’s tail, which is then transformed into the swan or dove of the albedo and finally into the phoenix of the red rubedo.

In Jonson’s The Alchemist, Face informs Mammon that he has put the matter through the ‘several colours’, ‘the crow,/The peacock’s taile, the plumed swan’ (2.2.26-7). The swan is sometimes depicted as swimming in a silver sea and spouting the silver arcanum or elixir. It can also signify the magical mercurial arcanum with which the king (the male principle) is fed when he unites with the queen (the female principle) to become one body in the chemical wedding (sixth key, Valentine, in Hermetic Museum, 1:336). 

[See also Roob, The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy and Mysticism for swans pictured as symbols of the albedo: pp 115, 201 (Blake’s Jerusalem), and 301; curious that Abraham makes no mention of evidence for Cirlot’s assertion of swan as “philosophical mercury” and “mystic center.”]

I confess to being distracted by the reference to “the crow or raven” as symbol of the nigredo stage of the alchemical work because of its probable meaning with respect to the Fantastic Beasts film franchise and the prevalence of these birds in the story line of Crimes of Grindelwald, a subject to which we will be obliged to return. Lethal White as albedo is enough fat to chew for this post.

Three things to recall about the albedo or “white stage” of the alchemical work:

(1) It is the central piece of the work between the ‘dissolution’ stage of the nigredo in which the subject is broken down to its essence and the ‘revelation’ of the rubedo during which the subject’s transformation is revealed; the real transformative action of alchemy, however, happens in the ‘purification’ or ablutionary purgatory of the albedo.

(2) The white work is represented in story by tokens of water and liquids (the subject is repeatedly washed in the alchemist’s alembic), by silver, the first product of the elixir of the white stone preceeding the Philosopher’s Stone consequent to the rubedo, and by all things white or pure, especially the moon (Luna!), the dove, snow, a virgin, a white rose, a white lily, marble, salt, etc. (see Abraham, op cit, pp 4-5). The albedo is also known as the ‘albification’ or ‘calcination’ stage.

(3) Its spiritual meaning, as Abraham describes it, is “The body has been whitened and spiritualized (i.e., the fixed is volatized) and the soul has been prepared to receive illumination from the spirit” (p 5).

Are these qualities, besides the swan brackets and asides, evident in Lethal White? I think so, though without the rubedo to come we cannot be sure. And the Potter alchemical sequence suggests we have a way to go before we get to the true series ‘red stage.’

For ‘centrality,’ we do have all the parallels with the story’s beginning in Cuckoo’s Calling that suggest Lethal White is the turn of the ring composition as well as the story echoes with Goblet of Fire, the Hogwarts Saga center and pivot. Robin certainly goes through the crisis of transformation in this fourth book, as she comes to terms at last with her essence, her vocation as a detective, and purifies herself at last from the old relationships and identity she clung to only out of weakness and confusion consequent to having been raped. This epic change in self-understanding is represented in her love for Strike and their working together in their complementary recovery programs; his stretching exercises and diet for the lost leg, her CBT for the panic attacks.

For the ‘white’ symbolism we have the swans, the ubiquitous white horses, the water of the pond in the prologue, the Thames in the finale, the barge of Robin’s climactic confrontation with Raphael, the rain falling against the windows of Cheyne Walk Brasserie’s windows in the epilogue, and Robin’s epic, cathartic tears on the roadside verge. Not to mention the importance of ‘Blanc d Blancs’ in the story line. Check that off. “I like you pale,” Matt notes.

And the spiritual meaning? Have Robin and Strike’s “soul” been “prepared to receive illumination from the spirit”? I don’t think so. Not yet.

My reasoning, though, is more structural than textual. I think we have all but demonstrated that the Strike books run in parallel with their corresponding numbers in the Harry Potter septet. If that pattern continues, then the next three novels should be all-out nigredo, albedo, and rubedo as were Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows. Goblet, in this regard, though it had albedo elements in it for sure, featured all three stages in its Triwizard Tournament tasks’ sequence rather than just one.

Strike5, from this view, will be a nightmare of dissolution and separation, a proper breakdown nigredo, and Strike6 will be the albedo novel of the series.

Perhaps, though, Rowling/Galbraith, in not featuring three events in parallel with the Triwizard Tournament, is breaking with the specific alchemical patterning of this seven book set. It is one more thing that Strike5 will confirm or deny, in addition to Career of Evil and Order of the Phoenix echoing.

What we can say for sure, I think, is that, more than any previous Strike novels, Lethal White shows the characteristics of the alchemical albedo. Only the snow, canal, heroin, and transformation in Strike — the drowning in alcohol, the purgatory swim in the pool and shower after learning of Charlotte’s engagement, the alabaster woman with whom he sleeps — that we saw in Cuckoo’s Calling comes close.

I covet, as always, your comments and correction. Click on the ‘Comments’ line up by the post’s headline and let me know what you think.