Sunday Potter Quiz: Flourish and Blotts

As discussed last Monday, Sundays at HogwartsProfessor will be given over for at least a few months to a ten question pop quiz on a specific Harry Potter novel chapter. The first quiz was about the Hogwarts Saga’s first book’s first chapter and I promised then that this week’s questions would be from the second novel, Chamber of Secrets. Which chapter, though, was I to choose?

By a happy providential gift, The Rowling Library issue dropped just as I was struggling with this choice, an issue with an interview Rowling did at the time of the second Potter novel’s publication. Jennie Renton asked her about the books embedded within her novels:

Imaginary books with great titles like Dragon Breeding for Pleasure and Profit are always cropping up in the stories. I wish they were real so that I could get my hands on them. And there’s an amazing bookshop in Diagon Alley, the street where wizards to to get their wands and what have you.

Rowling: I liked that bookshop best of all the shops I made up, with the possible exception of Olivanders (because I really liked doing his wands). If I had a choice, I wouldn’t want to be let loose in the wizarding sweet shop, I’d want to be let loose in the bookshop. When Harry goes to Diagon Alley for the first ever time, he sees a book on curses, Tongue Tying, Jellylegs and Much Much More – all this sort of stuff really amuses me.

Chamber of Secrets, like its parallel novel in the Strike series, The Silkworm, is a book about books. It even includes a chapter in which Harry and Tom Riddle, Jr., journey together inside a book that acts something like a Pensieve — and a ‘book-within-a-book’ plays a critical role. I mean, of course, the Dark Lord Diary-Horcrux slipped inside one of Ginny’s Lockhart textbooks at Flourish and Blotts by Lucius Malfoy. Rowling’s comments about her love of the Diagon Alley bookshop and this book-within-a-book theme made the choice of Chamber’s chapter four, ‘At Flourish and Blotts,’ an easy one.

No, I know these questions are not especially hard. The exercise is supposed to be a fun bit of reminiscence, not a trial. This is not an Open Book test, though! Knock yourself out on the ‘For Your Reflection’ question if your looking for a challenge. The questions follow; the answers are after the jump. 

Chapter Four: At Flourish and Blotts

1. What inanimate object at the Burrow told Harry to tuck his shirt in?
2. How many Gilderoy Lockhart titles are on Harry’s Hogwarts booklist?
3. True/False: While playing Quidditch with the Weasleys, Harry finds out that Ron’s Shooting Star is often outstripped by passing butterflies.
4. What does the O.W.L. acronym stand for?
5. Using Floo powder for the first time, Harry garbles his words and ends up in Borgin and Burkes, a shop in what magical place?
6. What did Mr. Borgin tell Malfoy the shriveled Hand of Glory could do?
7. True/False: Hagrid and Harry meet Hermione in Diagon Alley when she calls them over to where she’s standing outside Flourish and Blotts.
8. Which of his books was Gilderoy Lockhart signing in Flourish and Blotts?
9. After their short fight, Mr. Weasley had a cut lip, and Mr. Malfoy had been hit in the eye by what book?
10. Besides giving him his latest publication free of charge, what other unwanted bombshell did Lockhart reveal to Harry?

For Your Reflection: Though titled ‘At Flourish and Blotts,’ Chamber of Secrets’ fourth chapter only spends five of its twenty-two pages in the Diagon Alley bookstore. Harry spends more pages spying on the Malfoys in Knockturn Alley, who co-star with the Weasley family in this long and busy chapter. We do not learn until chapter 18 (336) via Dobby’s pointed hints to Harry that it was Lucius Malfoy who put Lord Thingy’s diary into Ginny’s used ‘Transfiguration’ textbook after his fisticuffs with Arthur back in chapter four. How did Rowling set up that crucial moment in Borgin and Burkes, in Harry’s conversation with Mr Weasley outside Gringott’s, as well as n the bookstore?

Answers after the jump!

Answers:

1. What inanimate object at the Burrow told Harry to tuck his shirt in? A mirror (42)
2. How many Gilderoy Lockhart titles are on Harry’s Hogwarts booklist? 7 (43-44)
3. True/False: While playing Quidditch with the Weasleys, Harry finds out that Ron’s Shooting Star is often outstripped by passing butterflies. True (46)
4. What does the O.W.L. acronym stand for? Ordinary Wizarding Levels (46)
5. Using Floo powder for the first time, Harry garbles his words and ends up in Borgin and Burkes, a shop in what magical place? Knockturn Alley (53)
6. What did Mr. Borgin tell Malfoy the shriveled Hand of Glory could do? Give light only to the holder (52)
7. True/False: Hagrid and Harry meet Hermione in Diagon Alley when she calls them over to where she’s standing outside Flourish and Blotts. False: she was at Gringotts (55)
8. Which of his books was Gilderoy Lockhart signing in Flourish and Blotts? Magical Me (58)
9. After their short fight, Mr. Weasley had a cut lip, and Mr. Malfoy had been hit in the eye by what book? An Encyclopedia of Toadstools (63)
10. Besides giving him his latest publication free of charge, what other unwanted bombshell did Lockhart reveal to Harry? He would be the Hogwarts DADA teacher that year (60)

For Your Reflection: Though titled ‘At Flourish and Blotts,’ Chamber of Secrets’ fourth chapter only spends five of its twenty-two pages in the Diagon Alley bookstore. Harry spends more pages spying on the Malfoys in Knockturn Alley, who co-star with the Weasley family in this long and busy chapter. We do not learn until chapter 18 (336) via Dobby’s pointed hints to Harry that it was Lucius Malfoy who put Lord Thingy’s diary into Ginny’s used ‘Transfiguration’ textbook after his bookstore fisticuffs with Arthur back in chapter four. How did Rowling set up that crucial moment in Borgin and Burkes, in Harry’s conversation with Mr Weasley outside Gringott’s, as well as n the bookstore?

The average chapter length in Chamber of Secrets is 19 pages so this a long and an important chapter in what remains my favorite stand-alone Harry Potter novel. It largely turns on the antipathy between the poor but virtuous Arthur Weasley and the vicious, rich Lucius Malfoy, a hatred which Dumbledore realizes in chapter 18 turns on the Muggle Protection Act sponsored by Weasley at the Ministry. Malfoy explained to Borgin that he is in Knockturn Alley because he needs to off-load items that the Act makes illegal, Mr Weasley tells Harry that he’d love to catch Malfoy with whatever it was he was selling, and the senior Weasley’s retort in ‘Flourish and Blotts’ that the two men have very different ideas about “what disgraces the name of wizard” is about just that conflict. Rowling masterfully sets up and signals Malfoy’s covert slipping of the Diary Horcrux into Ginny’s possession in those three exchanges.

I love Chamber for a host of reasons, most notably I think for the in-your-face Christian allegory of Harry’s battle with Riddle and his Basilisk in the titular Chamber. Looking back at the book, though, through the experience of the parallel Silkworm, what I wrote in Looking for God in Harry Potter‘s chapter on the second book is wonderfully highlighted, namely, that Rowling’s core theme is about the power of fiction to transform a person’s interior narrative. She flags this theme strongly by making the book-within-a-book a diary, that is, a tool of personal reflection and understanding, being placed within a tome that is a guide to transfiguration, aka ‘transformation.’ The Dark Lord’s shade and Lucius Malfoy try to pervert that process so the innocent person is changed into a wicked one via her immersion in and identification with an evil, false narrative, but they fail because of the selfless courage and faith of her brother and her eventual soul-mate.

In her Renton interview, Rowling discusses both the origin of the animate diary idea as well as the surface theme of Chamber, that is our choices that define who we are. I hope to discuss this and the rest of that interview this week in a dedicated post, in which I’ll offer my theory about the relationship of this surface theme and Rowling’s subliminal focus on the power of reading and writing for metamorphosis. Stay tuned!