Here at last is the Harry Potter film franchise stripped down to its essential parts — all the scenes featuring Severus Snape. And, really, does anything else matter?
Mailbag: First Steps in Ring Writing, Medieval Modes & Methods of Reading, and the Knight of the Potter Panic
July 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment
There are three letters this week in the HogwartsProfessor mailbag, all re-printed here with permission.
The first is about how to write a ring composition rather than just recognize it another person’s work:
Hello John.
Question for you. I have been working on a series of my own for the past five years on and off, and I’ve been putting a lot of work into the structure of it. Or rather, I’m working on developing the architecture and thousand other things it feels like. I have read Hero With A Thousand Faces, and enjoyed it. I know many authors who have prospered from the pages of that book including J.K. Rowling I’m sure.
I was hoping you could help me in some way. I’ve bought most of your books on Harry Potter and find them to be very interesting. I’m just finishing your notes on Ring Composition Theory.
Reading all this material has been a great help to me, but I must admit I’m not sure how to begin yet on how to apply Ring Composition to my series. I like building the framework for my work, but I could use your advice on how to begin.
This particular series I’m working on is very important to me. I’ve been studying different story structures for years, but I must admit some are simply superior to others. I look forwar d to your response.
Dear Rob, if I may,
You write:
MuggleNet Academia: Books Inside the Books — About How to Read Books!
July 8, 2015 by 7 Comments
David Martin joins Keith Hawk and our two brilliant student guests to discuss ‘Books Inside the Harry Potter Novels,’ a self-referential, mind-bending topic if there ever was one. Is Ms Rowling providing a key to how her readers should be reading (and how they should not be reading) her books inside the plot events of her own books? So it seems! Let me know what you think after listening to this week’s show.
Trusting a Reporter Named Rita: Phew!
July 7, 2015 by Leave a Comment
As I wrote at HogwartsProfessor last week, Rita Cipriano, a reporter from the Portuguese online newspaper Observador, sent me questions for an article she was writing about the Harry Potter phenomenon today, eighteen years after the publication of Philosopher’s Stone. Our exchange was delightful, but, as I explained to her, I had to wonder if I weren’t being foolish in expecting fair treatment from a journalist named ‘Rita.’
Well, the results are in. This is not a reporter from the Skeeter School of Quick Quotes Quills. You can read the story, ‘A geração Harry Potter nasceu há 18 anos. A magia não morre‘ online here.
The paragraphs in which I am quoted:
Para John Granger, investigador norte-americano que dedicou os últimos 12 anos a estudar o fenómeno de Harry Potter, apottermania tem apenas uma explicação — a “mestria e significado” dos livros de J.K. Rowling. E nada mais do que isso.
“Vamos apenas dizer que Rowling conseguiu escrever um livro que é simultaneamente um romance de escola, um drama alquímico, um romance gótico, um bilungsroman [um romance de formação] órfão e um ótimo exemplo da melhor fantasia inglesa”, dentro do género de As Crónicas de Nárnia, de C.S. Lewis, e das obras de J.R.R. Tolkien”, explicou o autor ao Observador. “É uma grande façanha!”
Para explicar o fenómeno, Granger desenvolveu aquilo a que chama a “Tese Eliade”. Na obra O Sagrado e o Profano, Mircea Eliade defende que as histórias têm uma função religiosa ou mítica na cultura secular. Ou seja, “quando o divino é atirado para a periferia da praça pública”, o homem experiencia o transcendental através da imaginação.
Para Granger, isto significa que as “histórias que oferecem uma experiência mais profunda, muitas vezes com um conteúdo espiritual implícito, significado e mestria”, são aquelas de que gostamos mais. “Os romances de Rowling são isso tudo. Em resumo, ela dá aos leitores aquilo que eles querem.”
Para além disso, o investigador acredita que o sucesso alcançado por J.K. Rowling fez com que a literatura de fantasia se tornasse num “género mais respeitável para todas as editoras e para a maioria dos autores”. “Iria mais longe e diria que Harry Potter mudou as expectativas de leitura de seis gerações. Estamos a viver a era de Joanne Rowling em termos de história, quer gostem disso ou não.”
“Estas histórias mudaram as expectativas de leitura de várias gerações. Ignorá-las é perder um dos eventos que moldaram o nosso período histórico.”
John Granger, autor de “How Harry Cast His Spell”
Run that through the Google translator for Portuguese and we get:
For John Granger, an American researcher who has dedicated the last 12 years to studying the phenomenon of Harry Potter, Pottermania has only one explanation – the “artistry and meaning” of J. K. Rowling’s books. And nothing more than that.
“Let’s just say that Rowling could write a book that is both a school boy novel, an alchemical drama, a gothic romance, a bildungsroman with an orphan, and a great example of the best English fantasy” within the genre of The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, and the works of J. R. R. Tolkien,” explained the author to the Observer. “It’s quite a feat!”
To explain the phenomenon, Granger has developed what is called the “Eliade Thesis.” In his book The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade argues that stories have a religious function or mythical in secular culture, i.e., “when the divine is thrown to the periphery of the public square,” men will seek transcendental experience through their imagination.
To Granger, Eliade’s thesis means that the “stories that offer a deeper experience, often with an implicit spiritual content, meaning and artistry, “are those that we like more.” Rowling’s novels are all that. “In short, she gives readers what they want.”
In addition, the investigator believes that the success achieved by JK Rowling made fantasy literature become a “more respectable genre to all publishers and for most authors.” “I would go further and say that Harry Potter has changed the expectations of six reading generations. We are living in the era of Joanne Rowling in terms of history, whether we like it or not. “
“These stories have changed the expectations of several reading generations. To ignore them is to lose one of the events that have shaped our historical period.”
John Granger, author of “How Harry Cast His Spell
I haven’t checked this against the answers I sent her, but, just reading the instant translation from the cloud, it’s clear she was very faithful in her turning my English responses into Portuguese sense. [Sigh of relief]
If Joanne Rowling modeled her Rita Skeeter character after a journalist in Portugal, where she lived while plotting and planning the series, her model wasn’t Rita Cipriano. I think we can accept this as negative evidence that, as I’ve argued since my first book, this name is to be read as ‘Read-a ‘Squito,’ which is to say, The Presence is likening reporters to mosquitos (ahem: blood-sucking, disease-carrying parasites) and other disgusting bugs. Her opinion has if anything hardened in the treatment given the Fourth Estate in the Cormoran Strike novels.
Thank you, Rita Cipriano, for the thoughtful questions and for translating my answers as faithfully as you have in this article!
Mail Bag: How to Reach and Read On the Third and Fourth Levels of Meaning
July 6, 2015 by Leave a Comment
A friend and serious reader who had just finished reading Deathly Hallows wrote me to say “thank you” for recommending he read to the end of the series before passing judgment — and to ask as a throw-away in his post:
How do we learn to read at the third and fourth levels?
That’s a reference to the four levels of reading first propounded by exegetes of the Hebrew Scriptures in ancient times, evident in Plato’s Divided Line, adopted by Aquinas and many others, and sealed to the Western Canon by Dante’s letter to Con Grande (read an introduction with very helpful chart to all that and Plato’s Cave, too, here and, for a ‘for instance’ of its application to a specific story, The Hunger Games, head over here).
If you’re up to speed on the four levels — and the posts behind those two links are a good afternoon of reading — then we can skip to the answer to my friend’s question: How do we learn how to read, how to think, at these levels?”
Dear John,
The first and hardest step is grasping that allegorical and anagogical reading correspond to knowing with surety and knowing in wisdom (the first two levels corresponding with sense perception and with opinion).
We know that we can see through tons of data to see the natural law or principle of which the phenomena are only instances. Knowing this principle and seeing the data as ephemeral occasions of it gives us scientia or sure knowledge. This makes the reams of data effectively a transparency, window, or allegorical figure of the principle that is not perceptible in itself. You cannot see the Law of Gravity but you know it from observation of, by seeing through the transparency of the behavior of all natural objects in space-time on earth.
Sophia or wisdom is not a knowing that we acquire but one we become, a knowledge that transforms us into a temporal image of the Principle of Knowing, the Logos. All other knowing is only valuable insomuch as it leads us to this communion and elision.If we first understand the corresponding knowledges to allegory and sublime writing — again, science and wisdom — and begin to read the world in light of these capacities (instead of remaining subject to surface sensory data and opinions shaped by the errors of our age), then ‘getting’ the depths of books written by authors who are wise or who write in wisdom shaped genres is a natural extension.
The rest is only learning the tropes of artistry — structure, symbolism, literary syntax — that are the means better writers have used to create the experiences that change us.Getting the last, however, without seeing the world differently first… That is knowledge that will become cocktail party and blog post fodder to show how sophisticated a thinker and reader one is, an obstacle, another hurdle to spiritual maturity rather than an edifying, providential helper.
And — oh, yeah! — being a believer in a traditional, orthodox, revealed faith helps more than anything. It is the real experience of which reading is only the imaginative shadow. The Orthodox Christian Liturgy, for example, is when uncompromised by innovations only wisdom experience and the Eucharist the Logos incarnate Himself. Baptism and the daily asceticism and joyful sorrow of Orthodoxy is the means to photismos or illumination in the Holy Spirit, as you have discovered.
As you might have guessed from that last, this friend is a recent convert to Orthodox Christianity. Your comments and corrections on the means to reading effectively at four levels are coveted, as always.
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