Hogwarts Professor

In my public Harry Potter talks this summer, more than fifteen, not counting my conversations with various Pundits at MuggleNet Academia, there was relatively little interest, believe it or not, in Casual Vacancy. I was asked several times, though, if I believed Ms. Rowling would embed the symbols, structures, and scaffolding of literary alchemy into her adult novel. I thought she would.

Why? There’s the common sense reason, of course, that a winning pitcher doesn’t throw anything but his best stuff in big games. To mix metaphors (and un-mixable horse races), given the success of Harry Potter , it’s not likely, I thought, that the author would feel the need to switch horses when the thoroughbred she’s been riding has won the Triple Crown, the Grand Prix de Paris, and the Derby Stakes.

To the objection that alchemy might work well with fantasy pieces but not a realist literary novel for adults (i,e., “serious writing”), my answer was simply “Shakespeare, Dickens, and Charles Williams.” I might have mentioned Hunger Games, too, but, alas, that powerful parable is classified as ‘Young Adult’ Fiction and in the Dystopian genre to boot, so it doesn’t qualify as serious literature.

To the point, though, I thought Ms. Rowling would not abandon her winning alchemical hand because the reason Literary Alchemy is such a successful story telling is that the act of reading is by nature alchemical. As explained in each of my books and everywhere on this site, the sequencing and symbols of metallurgical alchemy are efficacious to reader transformation when they are used in text because the experience of that reader in stories-told-well is that of the lead-to-gold alchemist: identification or elision of subject-object, catharsis in crisis-crucible, and illuminating transformation.

The full exploration of Casual Vacancy‘s alchemical signatures will require repeated readings. That Ms. Rowling still wears her alchemist bonnet when writing, however, is evident in the first rushed run-through. Not only does she mention alchemy three times, but the thematic heart of the book, ‘Love and Death,’ ‘Authenticity and Hypocrisy,’ is an alchemical glyph.

The out right mentions? The tears of Parminder at her father’s death which “seemed to undergo an alchemical transformation” (Part 1, ‘Monday, chapter 8), the “inevitable, alchemical transformation” consequent to Simon Price’s departure from the Padsford council race (part 3, chapter 7), and the “transformation” of Robbie in the public mind from “dirty and foul mouthed little boy” to “a water baby” (Part 7) if not explicitly alchemical is clearly meant to be read as such. Fats’ tormenting Jolly as a “hermaphrodite” is important, too, of course, especially in light of this young woman’s heroic transformation and actions at story’s end.

But it is the three “love and death” moments that are the alchemical highlights or ‘Howlers,’ if you will.

(1) Andrew and Stuart (“Fats”) meet in the Cave next to the river to discuss life and share their secrets while smoking dope (Part 1, ‘Saturday,’ chapter 2; the seventh day Part 1’s week, the end of the opening of the seven part work — see thread #7). Their posture relative to one another there is important:

“Fats stretched out on his back in his funeral suit, his feet toward the river. Wordlessly, Andrew stretched out beside him. in the opposite direction. They had slept like this, ‘top and tail,’ when they had stayed overnight at each other’s houses as children.”

Electing to skip the burial, Fats has come straight to the river from the funeral of Barry Fairbrother to go underground himself with his best of friends, his diptych ‘other’ (see thread #9). Together they form an Ouroboros or dragon eating it’s own tail, an alchemical Tao, which “paradoxical hieroglyph” as Lyndy Abraham notes in Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery “symbolizes the magical transforming arcanum which both slays and is slain, resurrects and is resurrected during the process of the opus” (p. 207, ‘Uroborus’). The two boys, in their relatively disembodied drug high “realize” and say aloud that the principal mysteries of life, “What Matters,” are sex (“fucking” inevitably, of course) and death. These are shadows on the Cave Wall of greater truths than they know.

Fats skips the Fairbrother funeral but he goes to the graveyard for a cannabis-laced sexual congress with Krystall Weedon, a Barry devotee. Here he is in his birthday rather than his funeral suit (Part 2, chapter 10; again, the last pages of a chapter). Here, in making the “beast with two backs,” Fats and Krystall are another Ouroboros and the elision of self and ‘other’ in both sex and death unnerves both male and female characters.

The human tao, life underground, sex and death, the river, dissolution in coitus and drugs — we see them again in Part 5, chapters 9 and 12, when Krystall, realizing that her mother has used heroin and that this will end whatever hope she has of keeping Robbie unless she becomes pregnant, finds Fats and takes him to the river. They have at it in the bushes, Robbie drowns, and both Krystall and Fats die to self, she in suicidal overdose and he in the birth of conscience and responsibility. Both have turned into their opposites, she the mother to her mother, no-drug-use police woman become drug user, he the Leopold and Loeb nihilist who despises his guilt paralyzed father becomes both his father’s ward and image after Tessa reveals to him his possibly incestuous (self-loving) biological and geometric origin.

Jolly and Samantha are the most changed by this crisis and chrysalis, which transformations I hope to explore on another thread. To close this first of what I assume will be several Casual Vacancy alchemical posts, I’m obliged to note that ‘Love and Death’ are alchemical signatures because the edifying action of the magnum opus is solve et coagula, conjunction and dissolution, which contrary and complementary polarities, like the beating of the organic and inner heart, are the means and symbol of biological life and the greater life.

In alchemical literature as in metallurgical texts, this expansion and contraction is represented by the Alchemical Wedding, the consummation of which joining leads to the death of each contrary, their respective elevation, and the birth of the Philosophical Orphan or Philosopher’s Stone.

Krystall Weedon in this hermetic parable is the spiritual cornerstone despised by the World, whose name points to her being the embodied Light of the novel’s action (‘Crystal’) as well as the Christ figure only the potentially illumined or brilliant can see and love, namely, Barry and Stuart, the presidential and royal names, again, being no accident. Kystall Weedon broken down becomes ‘Christ pissed on by everyone.’ Vacancy‘s original title was Responsible — and Rowling reminds us in the figurative and literal story deaths of Krystall Weedon and Stuart Wall that we are responsible for the life or death of Christ in ourselves and, as much as we love brother as self, in our neighbor as well. Crucifixions are happening all around us and we are the mob worshiping Caesar and denying Christ inwardly and outwardly in our nihilistic pre-occupations and political casuistry or indifference.

More on this allegory via Lyndy Abraham’s Dictionary soon, especially about the differences and similarities of the story’s caduceus sightings. Until then, your thoughts please on the alchemical freight and power of Casual Vacancy as you experienced it on your first reading.

Ms. Rowling suggested in 2007 that her next work would be a “political fairy tale,” though we don’t know if that pronouncement came before or after her in-flight inspiration about the subject matter and scenery of Casual Vacancy. Caught up as we are necessarily with the  realism of Krystall Weedon’s nightmare existence and descent to death, it’s easy to neglect the caricature-laden, even Dickenesque quality of this realism which makes it parable-like and an evident satire of the United Kingdom and its 21st Century political life.

The dot-to-dots here, to risk a translation of the correspondences I think we are meant to make as might in Gulliver’s Travels or Animal Farm, aren’t much of a reach even for an American who is essentially clueless about United Kingdom politics. Howard Mollinson is a story transparency for John Bull, the Whig-Tory pompous middle-class cipher of all things bourgeois and English. He wears the trappings of state in the novel, and, if he is not officially the Mayor of Padsford, he is the principal power holder.

His wife is the Queen, alas, in Brenda mode, whose blindness to her licentious husband’s more intimate relationship with his female business partner (the Capitalist regime ‘in bed’ with government) makes her as comically self-important and a clueless accessory to the evil done by Howard. She dreams of meeting the Queen because Ms. Rowling wants us to make this leap of imaginative association easily; Elizabeth II is no more Queen to her people, Ms. Rowling is all but saying, than the Middle Class deli wife of Padsford and her family’s political myopia.

In this allegorical depiction of the post socialist UK, of course, we need a ‘Late Great’ saint whom we find in Barry Fairbrother, who, though his name is meant to point to Barack Obama — ‘Barry’ is what President Obama was called by friends until well into his college years and, forgive me for translating the obvious, ‘Fair Brother’ is a name for a black man who acts like a fair-skinned person (think ‘Oreo‘) — is not meant to embody liberal disappointment with the Hope and Change candidate of 2008. At least not exclusively! Given Ms. Rowling’s familiarity with the life story and personal traits of Gordon Brown, he is the lamented, fallen star of the Left, whose biography, if anything but rags-to-riches economically, is about a heroic rise from the far periphery of British politics (Scotland!) as a champion of the poor.

The meaning of the parable is in the finish. John Bull denies the rights and needs of both the Weedon family, the disenfranchised other, and the Empire’s Legacy, the medical Sikhs who hold the cure to UK parochialism and self-adoration, so, when he needs public support when his life is in crisis consequent to the over-weight caused by his self-celebration (the need for an ambulance and doctor at his heart attack the morning after his birthday party), the doctor has been suspended and her life-saving heart surgeon-husband has been offended and the means of his deliverance has been sent to help their daughter’s attempted rescue of the drowned child John Bull despised. England winds up on life support, neither truly dead or alive, with the Queen and her son (David Cameron?) left as the gormless political players in charge.

I trust our HogPro All-Pro friends on the right side of the pond will refine or deny this exegesis as appropriate. Thanks in advance for that!

I have discussed at some length in my work on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books the psychological quality of any author’s work. Writing fiction inevitably is, in varying degrees, psychotherapy of sorts in which authors act out their repressed injuries and create wish-fulfillment experiences as self-medication. Twilight and The Host are this in spades and Harry Potter, too, does not escape what is largely inevitable in a creative process that is essentially the imagination and unconscious unleashed.

Casual Vacancy, of course, in being a realist novel of many minds whose inner workings and paths are revealed as the voice of the narrative brings us Ms. Rowling’s own mind and experiences right to the fore. To risk hyperbole and state my working critical hypothesis baldly, one cannot write the thoughts and perspective of another person unless that type has told you their thoughts or you have had them yourself. Ms. Rowling invites this sort of ‘Personal Heresy’ interpretation of Casual Vacancy both in saying repeatedly in publication week interviews that she “had to write” this book, that it’s personal to her, and by making the run-up a repeated review of her biographical experiences in the West Country and afterwards.

You don’t need Sherlock Holmes, consequently, to draw the dot to dot connections between almost every character and some experience we know of Ms. Rowling’s life. Howard Mollinson and Simon Price, of course, are the abusive daddy who worked at the Rolls Royce plant and from whom Ms. Rowling has been estranged for years (essentially since his marriage to his secretary very soon after Ms. Rowling’s mother’s death). Andrew Price is the young Jo Rowling, Paul her younger sister, both of whom lived in fear of the violent man, and Ruth Price, the nurse, is the long-suffering, apologetic Rowling mom, who went back to work in a scientific field much as Ruth returns to nursing.

[Read more…]

As the repeated and realistic cursing of characters throughout Casual Vacancy was the subject of comment in every review I read before reading Casual Vacancy, I decided to track the profanity instance by instance, an exercise I realize that will inevitably cause readers to imagine me at the movies with a click counter for ‘F’ and ‘S’ utterances or, a la the Harry Haters, a Hogwarts reader who flinches at every use of magic. Be that as it may, here are the numbers for your consideration:

Variations on ‘Fuck’ (140). ‘Shit’ (34), ‘Bloody’ (23), ‘Bitch’ (16), ‘Shag’ (12), ‘Cunt’ (8), and ‘Bastard’ (7). There are various unpleasantries about penises, lesbians, and masturbation but no one of more than five appearances. Cursing is part of the atmospheric fabric of the book, I think it’s fair to say, and I think we’re left to discuss (a) what effect the author was after in this besides shock and (b) how it impacted your experience of the work. Have at it!

Just as a starting point of conversation on the data, there are two pages on which characters say or think ‘fuck’ again and again and again, once nine times, another eleven times. There are also stretches of thirty and forty pages in which no one swears at all. Language defines worlds and experience, no?

The profile in The New Yorker in the run-up last week to Casual Vacancy’s publication was titled ‘MuggleMarch’ in jesting suggestion that Ms. Rowling had written a second Middlemarch, George Eliot’s devastating “Portrait of Provincial Life,’ this time featuring Ms. Rowling’s despised bourgeois Muggles. A look at the Wikipedia entry for that work shows why the profile-interview’s title has taken hold as well as it has:

Subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life,” the novel is set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch during the period 1830–32. It has multiple plots with a large cast of characters, and in addition to its distinct though interlocking narratives it pursues a number of underlying themes, including the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism and self-interest, religion and hypocrisy, political reform, and education. The pace is leisurely, the tone is mildly didactic (with an authorial voice that occasionally bursts through the narrative),^[1] and the canvas is very broad.

Although it has some comical characters (Mr. Brooke, the “tiny aunt” Miss Noble) and comically named characters (Mrs. Dollop), Middlemarch is a work of realism. Through the voices and opinions of different characters we become aware of various broad issues of the day: the Great Reform Bill, the beginnings of the railways, the death of King George IV and the succession of his brother, the Duke of Clarence (who became King William IV). We learn something of the state of contemporary medical science. We also encounter the deeply reactionary mindset within a settled community facing the prospect of what to many is unwelcome change.

Read the whole entry for as interesting plot points. As rich as that West Country vein is, though for parallels twixt Eliot and Rowling and their intentions and delivery of ‘message,’ I think there’s another more immediate connection between Ms. Rowling’s Postmodern Political Parable (see thread #5) and Goudge’s Little White Horse. The Sweetlove family, the abbey in ruins, and the setting throughout I think are pointers to Loveday and the Merryweather’s in Ms. Rowling’s favorite children’s story. This, though, is that magical kingdom long after the fall and it’s hard to imagine a more painful re-telling of the story than this one.

Your thoughts, please on the Muggle-Middlemarch connections, my Goudge thesis, and your own ideas about this West Country nightmare’s literary antecedents. What hat-tips and echoes struck you on your first reading(s)? Did any of you think ‘Orwell’ and ‘Austen’ as we had anticipated? ‘Eliot’ and ‘Collette,’ not to mention ‘Nabokov’ seem to have been at least as influential…