Rowling-Fry Talk about Fantastic Beasts: An Annotated Transcript of Her Remarks

Last month, a conversation J. K. Rowling had with Stephen Fry about Fantastic Beasts was aired on the BBC. Our good friends at The Rowling Library posted those parts of the program in which Rowling shared her thoughts about two mythological creatures, about two of her own imaginative inventions, and to say repeatedly that this subject is important to her because, in it, one can learn “why we write stories,” even “what it means to be human.”

It is easy to overlook this conversation and its importance for grasping Rowling’s beliefs about writing and about the essence of “being human;” I certainly did when I first watched the video above and posted it here without comment as something of a filler. Today I have written out the transcript (and please check whether it is accurate; does she say the Lethifolds scare the “bejeebers” out of her or the “bejeesus”?) and shared three thoughts after the jump as annotations. Enjoy!

I think about this a lot — that we’re story-telling creatures — because to our knowledge we are the only animal that does this. And obviously it was an attempt, certainly with respect to myth and folklore, it was an attempt to explain the natural world, things that people didn’t understand.

I am very interested in story, inevitably. I am not just interested in writing stories but I am interested in why we write stories.

I’m even more fascinated by the fact that discreet cultures that had never met created such similar archetypes and such similar creatures. So we see the fire-bird, the Phoenix as I called it, but you see the version of a fire-bird throughout different cultures.

And what is that telling us about what it means to be human,  what lives in the back of our minds in our subconscious? We often see this, magical beasts, that magical beasts have been imagined by, after all, people who are living among different real animals. We’re talking about cultures across different continents That fascinates me because that’s telling us clearly about ourselves …

Mermaids… it’s very interesting because where did that myth come from? Even in Africa, these inland countries of course have great rivers, there is a form of mermaid, the jengu, so again this is something that has been created across these different cultures. Why were British sailors imagining fish-tailed women when people in Africa were imagining fish-tailed women? It’s just extraordinary….

I think it would be exceptionally difficult [to create a fantastic beast without any model in nature]. I created a creature in the original Fantastic Beasts, the Lethifold, Now that was my worst nightmare. There I went for something that would scare the bejeesus out of me. Although I was taking the idea from a cloak, when I stood back and looked at what I’d invented, well, that’s just a manta ray. [Fry: ‘Manta’ means ‘cloak’…] Exactly, so I’ve invented the manta ray who doesn’t live in water….

The Niffler is a bit of a favorite of mine. It’s a treasure seeker, likes everything that glitters, so it can locate treasure for you. So, for those of you who don’t know, the Niffler is a curious creature who is, I don’t know, a cross between a magpie in nature and a duck-billed platypus in appearance – and a mole, exactly. They used a platypus to get the snout-like appearance in the movie which I adore, I mean, they ran these things past me and I just loved it, It gave it such an endearing appearance…

So it’s exceptional difficult to invent something and often nature got there far better. Because you look at some of nature’s extraordinary creations and you think “CGI will never match this.”…

I was thinking about the creatures because I knew we were going to sit down and talk about this. And I realized that half those books [the Harry Potter novels] fold without those magical creatures. They’re so important. Hedwig the owl, and then we move through the Thestrals and dragons. They’re key plot points and obviously thematically they work in terms of life and death and power, struggle and treasure, but I realized when I focused on those creatures just how important they were. And that shows that we have a deep need to be connected to the animal world.

I share my three thoughts about the meaning of this conversation after the jump. See you there!

(1) The Importance of Rowling’s Remarks

I was thinking about the creatures because I knew we were going to sit down and talk about this. And I realized that half those books [the Harry Potter novels] fold without those magical creatures. They’re so important. Hedwig the owl, and then we move through the Thestrals and dragons. They’re key plot points and obviously thematically they work in terms of life and death and power, struggle and treasure, but I realized when I focused on those creatures just how important they were. And that shows that we have a deep need to be connected to the animal world.

These were Rowling’s last comments on the program but rhetorically they should be first. She says that she prepared for the conversation with Fry, i.e., “What I am saying here is not off the cuff but my considered and deliberate remarks about imaginary creatures.” She then says her Hogwarts Saga adventures “fold without those magical creatures,” which is to say they are essential to what she is after in her stories “in terms of life and death and power, struggle and treasure” but most importantly because they somehow show “that we have a deep need to be connected to the animal world.”

What she says first is her highlighting the importance of what she is saying and how seriously she holds these views:

I think about this a lot — that we’re story-telling creatures — because to our knowledge we are the only animal that does this. … I am very interested in story, inevitably. I am not just interested in writing stories but I am interested in why we write stories.

She pledges in effect to share “what it means to be human, what lives in the back of our mind in our subconscious,” the meaning of life and of story. It doesn’t get any richer than that.

She knew, too, that she would be speaking to Stephen Fry, a risible public atheist and humanist flag waver, who hasn’t read even an introductory theological textbook’s chapter on theodicy. Read all about the pedestrian Zeitgeist views of this intellectual giant about religion on his Wikipedia page. Rowling waves a hand at the commonplace views of mythology and folklore, namely that they were “an attempt to explain the natural world, things that people didn’t understand,” but her description of this view as “obvious” and “certain” I think is only an acknowledgment that these are Fry’s humanist views of ‘primitive peoples’ straight out of the 19th Century that are still pervasive and unexamined — taught in schools — rather than true. Everything that follows in her remarks shows that this “bad science done by clueless and superstitious cultures” nonsense is not her opinion of mythology. See Eliade’s Sacred and Profane and de Santillana’s Hamlet’s Mill for much more on that.

Rowling, then, is making her remarks about the meaning of mythological and her own imaginative creatures to a person “obviously” and “certainly” incapable of grasping what she is saying. She is kind to him, but her choices of mythical beasts and of examples from her own menagerie show that she is speaking right past him to more thoughtful listeners, even to posterity.

(2) Mythological Creatures

Rowling denies the “bad science” truisms that supposedly explain mythology right from the gate by noting that mythological creatures of remarkable similarity appear “across cultures” that are “discreet” and which have had “no contact with others.” This speaks, she contends, to there being an “archetypal” foundation to these creations of imagination, a universal and common to all human-beings-as-such root to the image used in story.

Her assertion that the universality of mythic creatures, specifically the firebird and mermaid, speak to the existence of “archetypes,” “what lives in the back of our minds in our subconscious,” “telling us clearly about ourselves,” is her answer in brief to the question she posed at the start, i.e., “Why do we tell stories?” She claims to have thought a lot about this — and her choice of illustrations for her point suggests she has.

She begins with the firebird, which she says is the origin of the Phoenix in her Potter novels and Beasts screenplays. This may be as close as we will come to an apology or explanation of her misappropriation of the First Nations Thunderbird in the first Beasts film. The Phoenix across cultures and certainly in Christian tradition is the representative image-incarnation or icon of resurrection or victory over death; the mythical bird dies in its flames and is born again from its own ashes. This is the mythic representation of the alchemical formula solve et coagula that Rowling has tattooed on her writing hand as a marker that this is what she is about. It is, of course, also a token and a symbol of Christ.

The mermaid, the subliminal feminine, water being a universal symbol of the Spirit and the noetic mind, has warnings in it about the dangers of engaging with this reality and simultaneously an invitation to pursue and meet it as a means to transcendence. See Beatrice Groves’ discussion of these creatures and the way Rowling deploys them symbolically in the Cormoran Strike novels at her Liminal Women: Mermaids and Swan Maidens in Galbraith’s Strike Novels.

Chosen deliberately as objects for our reflection and the examples Rowling thought best to illustrate her points, these mythic creatures both speak to archetypal super-lunarary reality that forms the logos backdrop of human consciousness and created existence. Coming to terms with it in story an important way to realize “what it means to be human” and answers the question, consequently, of “why we tell stories,” not to mention why the Logos incarnate, Truth Himself, chose to teach almost exclusively in parables.

(3) Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts: The Lethifold and Niffler

Rowling’s main point or, better, her surface argument with respect to mythological creatures was that they were universal and archetypal. The assertion she makes with her own imaginary creatures is that they all derive, directly or obliquely, from real-world animals. The ‘for instances’ she chose are the Lethifold looking like a manta ray and the Niffler being a cross between a magpie and a duck-billed platypus.

I think Rowling’s point here, because of her conclusion that “we have a deep need to be connected to the animal world,” is that there is a connection between the human imagination and the inner essence of created things, their meaning or logos. We cannot create imaginary creatures that do not in some ways derive from the logos nature of created things because, per Coleridge and her own Harvard address, imagination is logos made active within us and is the origin of human empathy and love. She asserts point-blank that with respect to “appearances,” “nature got there far better. Because you look at some of nature’s extraordinary creations and you think ‘CGI will never match this’,” using “nature” here as a euphemism more acceptable to humanist Fry than “God.” I do not think it accidental that she uses the word “bejesus” here to make her point (see this for the relatively obvious etymology; I don’t think The Presence has ever used the word before in an interview).

Why, though, the Lethifold and Niffler? Rowling’s side point with respect to these two creatures may be to highlight through the allegorical quality or iconicity of these creatures the comedy of humanism and the rationality of Graham Greene’s “doubting his disbelief,” a position in strong contrast with Fry’s strident atheism.

In brief, the Lethifold, Rowling’s  “worst nightmare,” is her fear of being consumed by the subliminal unconscious, the substrate of dreams, and no longer existing but becoming a floating Lethifold-creature, someone not at all conscious but the sock-puppet of personal psychological issues and unexamined habit of mind. The Lethifold is a Dementor-esque creature, one that can only be driven away by a Patronus, albeit one that attacks while the victim is asleep. Sleep is apt whether understood literally, which is to say, while the person is living in their unconscious, wish-fulfillment dream state, or metaphorically, a sleep-walker who lives an unexamined life. Rowling’s personal and professional commitment to solve et coagula is her determination not to be prey for the Lethifold, her worst nightmare” being the sock-puppet of her circumstances and life crises, but someone  who is self-aware, psychologically awake, not ideologically woke.

The Niffler is the anthropomorphic representation of the materialist consumer, who lives for the acquisition of the latest shiny object, human kind as a “treasure seeker.” Funny, but I think the comic genius of this creature is how close to home it comes for all of us psychologically (says the man in his library of thousands of books he will never read).

I covet as always (well, nearly always) your comments and correction. Is this conversation as rich as I have made out? Were Rowling’s choices of mythical creatures and her own imaginings as meaningful as I think — or have I missed their real meanings?  Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts below!