Nick’s Kanreki Retrospective

Having just finished the month-long Lake and Shed celebration of J. K. Rowling’s opera omnia, my dominant feeling is one of pride. Recording somewhat over 31 hours of video, mastering (or at least becoming competent) in video editing for the intro and getting to grips with the technicalities of rendering and uploading the content to Substack and You Tube, all within a month, was a challenge that I wasn’t sure I could pull off. Twenty-five episodes were dedicated to individual works of Rowling, and in each episode only a single example of lake inspiration or shed artistry was explored. The mine is so rich that we could easily produce another hundred and twenty-five episodes and still not exhaust what J. K. Rowling has achieved.

I see it also as the culmination of seven years of enjoying literature through the gift of J. K. Rowling’s writing. I can’t say how much pleasure it has given me to read the supportive comments in the Substack. Join me after the jump to find out how I got here.

My Journey in Rowling’s Fandom

This next section may get a little self-indulgent, so please feel free to skip to the next section, but it helps me to remember how I came love Rowling’s work, and how The Hogwarts Professor has helped me to both deepen and understand that appreciation.

At school in South Wales I was a typical book worm, devouring the required texts for a geek of my generation. My paperback editions of J. R. R. Tolkien literally fell apart, and each new Terry Pratchett was bought as soon as my paperboy money and the cost of the books reached equilibrium. I’ve always had a thirst for fining out things I didn’t know before, and in that pre-internet era most of my reading was non-fiction. In 1989 I began my undergraduate study of engineering at a military college in Oxfordshire (within sight of the White Horse of Uffington) and my reading habits changed. The course was demanding, both intellectually and in the research required to develop novel solutions to unfamiliar problems. With limited time to read fiction, and frankly, the enjoyment I gained from learning new things, and having what I thought I knew challenged, reading literature as a pleasure, rather than a means to gain knowledge, stopped.

After more twenty-five years someone gave me a copy of Casual Vacancy, and this book quite literally changed my life. In 2018, my mother died just a few years after my father. On behalf of the family, I registered the death, read the eulogy, proved the will with probate and settled the estate. I handled the death of my parents competently, which is to say, not well at all.

Casual Vacancy is a book of real people, facing real and imagined moral dilemmas. Almost every page wrings you with emotion, and this was the release that I needed. But more than this, although my prose reading had atrophied to the extent that I could read no quicker that a fairly slow speaker, I found the story completely subsumed me. I was in that graveyard with Krystal and Fats, I was pressed up against the back of the cave with Andrew. This was witchcraft. As well as ordering the Harry Potter series, I set out find how this worked.

The Hogwarts Professor

I set out find out as much as I could about J. K. Rowling. My day job relies on me being able to quickly find, understand and rationalise information about topics I previously knew nothing about. I wanted to understand Rowling’s creative process, just as an over enthusiastic schoolboy wants to understand a clock. And there is only one place where people seemed not only interested in listening to the tick, but were describing the cogs, and explaining how they worked. John Granger’s The Hogwarts Professor. Ring Writing, Literary Alchemy, Allegory, Christian Symbolism and Perennialism. Each of these fields were pioneered by John Granger in applying them to Rowling’s works and every article at The Hogwarts Professor, from all of the writers there, fascinating as they were, meant I was not alone in seeking to understand. There was enough clockwork here to keep me satisfied for years. Armed with a copy of John’s Harry Potter’s Bookshelf, and Beatrice Groves’ Literary Allusion in Harry Potter my reading list expanded to several hundred books, and over the last six years seems to expand with every book I read.

In unguarded moments I have been known to say, “you can’t really appreciate Rowling’s artistry unless you understand [insert literary device of choice]”. This as well as being crass, is just plain wrong. You don’t need to peak behind the curtain to appreciate the beauty of Rowling’s work. If that was true, then she would not have been the publishing sensation that she is. If the clockwork is not for you, there other blogs and podcasts available, that I enjoy as well.

Because there really hasn’t been a biography of J. K. Rowling worth its name, I have studied her friendship group and read every interview I could find. I have looked at the places she has lived, where she has studied, who she has talked to. I do this, not (just) for intrusive interest, but long before the revelation of Lake and Shed, I felt that you could understand a work more deeply if you understood the life of the writer. I used to refer to this as Biographical Allusion in Rowling’s work, but this messy, real life understanding of Rowling, to understand her work, was of little interest to John.

The Lake and the Shed

In December 2019 J. K. Rowling explained the metaphor for her creative process on BBC’s Museum of Curiosity.

“What I find fascinating about inspiration, and I love hearing other creative people talk about their process… I’m always fascinated by it. I think that people who ask the question “Where do you get your inspiration from?” often don’t understand that it’s a process. So although I’m talking about the thing that lives in the lake as that’s where I get it from, I know the thing that lives in the lake is me. It’s just a part of me that deep down is subconscious, it’s my unconscious that’s processing things.”

In this Rowling places the subconscious inspiration on a level footing with the craft of writing in her shed. In The Hogwarts Professor we started tentatively talking about the Biography and Bibliography or the Life and Literature that would feed into her subconscious lake. This is where the lack of a good biography is really telling. Biographic allusion is the identifying known aspects of J. K. Rowling’s life to her written work. But here is so much that isn’t known. In my investigations I have occasionally turned up private information, that is, things that are generally not known, and that Rowling would have a reasonable expectation of privacy over. I have always endeavoured not to use this information publicly. Thankfully I have never discovered anything of such moment that it would test my resolve.

Like literary allusion, biographical allusion is subjective. But because the starting point is known, a known life event, it is repeatable by other using the same method. Consciously or unconsciously that event could, and likely has, affected how Rowling writes.

Fourth Generation Rowling Scholarship

Under the provocatively titled Is Rowling’s Best Work Behind Her Now?  (another example of a title as a question that is inevitably answered: no!), John Granger argues the corpus of J. K. Rowling’s work are now such that they really need to be studied as a whole, and each work studied as a part of the opera omnia. For this work John has coined the phrase Fourth Generation Scholarship. This work is in very early stages, but one key output is the identification of Golden Threads.

Golden Threads are repeated themes across all of J. K. Rowling’s work. If the use of a theme across many different works spanning multiple genres is a piece of shed artistry, then it is reasonable to assume that the basis for each theme lies somewhere in the lake.

The Elephant in the Room

Our last two episodes of the Kanreki project has upset many in the fandom whom I both like and respect. The issue is that we have identified a golden thread with no known biographical parallel. The Lost Child golden thread is present in all her work and is clearly important to Rowling. With no known biographical parallel, John has posited the hypothesis that this may be a psychological reaction to an abortion in her earlier life.

This of course is a sensitive issue for many, and John as an Orthodox Christian and Perennialist, uses language that to the liberal left (such as me!) can seem somewhere between strident and aggressive. John is my friend, and I know this was not his intention. We were at pains to point out that this method drawing a biographical conclusion from textual evidence is inherently unreliable. This is not biographical allusion, as we are not working from a known life event. More than once, John has stated (again in the episodes) that contrary theories were welcomed. This hypothesis is very far from accusing Rowling of having an abortion.

The last episode we filmed, was a test of the abortion hypothesis to see if it added a dimension of understanding to the text we hadn’t had before. As we hoped, this has inspired several alternative hypotheses that I hope John will write up and post with the agreement of the people who tendered them.

Golden thread analysis for Rowling’s opera omnia does have value. Drawing biographical conclusions from textual analysis is inherently unreliable, must be treated with caution, and is useful only in so much as it drives discussion as to why this theme is so persistent in Rowling’s work. I understand that this work will not be for everybody, for those that can engage with what we are doing, thank you. For those that can correct or expand what we are doing, please do contact John or myself.