In yesterday’s post I wrote about J. K. Rowling’s lists of correspondences between the four Hogwarts Houses and the traditional four Elements — fire, air, earth, and water — as well as with the four playing card suits – diamonds, hearts, clubs, and spades — and how the two lists each make sense intuitively but do not line up with one another. I shared there something I had learned about Rowling from Eglantine Pillet’s Chestnut Hill talk, ‘Harry Potter: A Fool and a King,’ in which she quoted this paragraph from an unauthorized biography of The Presence:
One [of her friends from school] recalls, ‘Jo would entertain us with her brilliant wit and colorful stories. She was very inventive and clever at reading tarot cards and palms and weaving a story around it which was pure make believe but had us alternately gripped and then laughing’ (Sean Smith, J. K. Rowling: A Biography, p 62).
Just think what Richard Abanes and Michael O’Brien, leaders of the ‘Harry is the Gateway to the Occult’ brigade in the fin de siecle years of this century, would have made of that. I shudder to think.
What it made me realize, though, is that Rowling’s simultaneously hilarious and pathetic Professor of Divinations may be her embedded character, a snapshot of herself placed inside the story as a bit of comic metafiction. I think the character Rowling played in her Comprehensive School cafeteria, the gypsy figure doing funny readings of tarot cards and palms that had her friends “alternately gripped and then laughing,” i.e., readings that were close enough to the truth to fascinate but done in camp, mock New Age fashion to make fun of those credulous enough to believe in such things.
And we know Rowling is not afraid to put images of her self into her books. Not only is Lula Landry’s rags-to-riches and struggles with celebrity in Cuckoo’s Calling a shadow-play of Rowling’s experience but Kathryn Kent, the wannabe writer in The Silkworm, seems a there-but-for-the-sake-of-chance-discovery-went-I character. And most of the characters in Casual Vacancy seem to have been drawn to varying degrees from Rowling’s personal experience.
How is Sybill Trelawney, though, a picture of J. K. Rowling? Rowling writes about her seeming doppelganger at some length on PotterMore with some especially interesting notes about why her first name is ‘Sybill’ rather than the expected ‘Sibyl.’ But she neglects to mention the Squire Trelawney connection from Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the financier and clueles wonder that sails in search of treasure with a ship load of pirates, a man who could be said to play a similar role to Sybill Trelawney in his story. First, though, some lower hanging fruit for establishing Sybill Trelawney as Rowling’s embedded image in the Harry Potter novels —
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