I began writing about Rowling’s psychomachia, the allegory of the soul’s journey to perfection, in 2002 with the publication of The Hidden Key to Harry Potter, the book that eventually became How Harry Cast His Spell. In brief, I explained then that the three principal student characters in the Hogwarts books, Harry, Hermione, and Ron, were Rowling’s version of the allegory of the soul in Plato’s Phaedrus, a conceit that stretched across imaginative fiction to include among many others The Brothers Karamazov, the three hobbits on Mount Doom, and Kirk, Spock, and Bones.
The characters were the respective authors’ depiction of the spiritual heart, the mind or will, and the body with its desires and passions, usually reduced to the formulaic “body, mind, and spirit.” Hermione was the brains of the Hogwarts set, Ron was the body stand-in, and Harry, the scion of sacrificial love and doing the hard, right thing, was the heart or spirit to which the others deferred, at least when things were going well. Together, the three faculties of soul mature through seven alchemical cycles until they vanquish their respective failings and defeat the Dark Lord.
Rowling has worked in other types of psychomachian allegory in different books, most notably the Shakespearean romance model in the Strike series and the transference love of a child and its toy in Christmas Pig. Depicting the perfection of the soul in spirit is what she does, whichever tools she chooses to create the cathartic imaginative effect within her readers. I have argued, again since 2002, that this is what makes Rowling’s work singularly popular; readers come to fiction, per the Eliade thesis, for the oxygen it provides their transpersonal faculty — and Rowling’s allegories of the soul meet that need much more successfully than the other fare on offer in bookstores, the cinema, or in online games.
But where did she first encounter this idea in a book or play? Did she come up with it on her own or did she read about soul triptychs and the like in critical literature about a favorite story? And what inspired her to make the leap from Dostoevsky’s or Tolkien’s triptychs to making the genre formula trio of schoolboy novels with hero, egghead, and swarthy best mate, into a psychomachian drama set piece?
There’s no way of knowing the answers to that question short of Rowling agreeing to answer questions while under the power of a high octane Veritaserum draft. As that has never happened, I think it safe to assume it never will. I have a decent guess, though, namely, that she got the idea while reading about her favorite Shakespeare play, Macbeth, and then recognized it in other favorite works, especially The Lord of the Rings and even Star Wars. When inspired to write a schoolboy series of books, she elected to make the formula trio of students into her soul triptych vehicles.
A stretch? Of course it is! After the jump, I’ll share Rowling’s public statements about Macbeth, the widely available critical work on Shakespeare’s plays that discussed the soul triptych within it, and some preliminary thoughts about the likelihood that this was Rowling’s ur source for her Potter soul triptych. [Read more…]
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