Randy Hoyt: Tell us about the approach you take to Harry Potter on The Hog’s Head web site and podcast.

Travis Prinzi: Let me step back and mention first James Thomas, a thirty-year literature scholar at Pepperdine University. He argues that the Harry Potter series is better literature than both The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. Now that’s a big statement, a huge statement. I reference that to say that there are people who take literature seriously taking Harry Potter seriously.

At the web site, we’re taking the series seriously as literature. We try to look at it from as many different perspectives as possible. We have a few different contributors: Johnny does a tremendous job looking at the Christian elements in Harry Potter, Dave comes at it as a literature scholar who has a good handle on postmodernism, Matthew nicely blends a serious approach to the series with related pop culture issues, and I bring my theological and literary training to it. My wife has appeared on a podcast, talking about it from a psychological point of view. And the commenters bring a lot of great perspectives as well. We’re trying to open up conversation about the series in as many realms as possible.

RH: Not everyone will be familiar with looking at Harry Potter in this way, thinking instead that it’s just a fun adventure story with no purpose but a brief mindless escape. What are some of the similarities Harry Potter has with great literature? What are some of the great mythic themes it explores?

TP: In an interview, J.K. Rowling made the statement that J.R.R. Tolkien — someone you definitely want to discuss when talking about myth and fantasy — said all the most important stories are about death (source: Spanish original; automated English translation). The most likely candidate for what she was quoting is from a letter in which Tolkien wrote:

[The Lord of the Rings] is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going: it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man. (Letter #203)

That’s one of the most universal human themes right there. The earliest stories explore the theme of death. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving story there is, is about death. Death and the human desire to transcend death is fundamental to all mythology.

Regarding whether or not it is escapist, I would mention what Tolkien describes a “real escape” as leaving something that is less permanent to go into a fairy tale to learn about things that are more permanent (“On Fairy-Stories” 69-70).

RH: You mention fairy tales, which you discuss quite extensively in your forthcoming book, Harry Potter & Imagination. What more can you tell us about the book?

TP: It begins with a defense of the fairy tale. The first two chapters of my book deal with what a fairy tale is and how it works. Why does it matter? What does it provide for the reader? We’re not just a bunch of fringe kook people who are overly obsessed with wizards. There is a reason that people love these stories.

From there I go to one of Rowling’s main themes: fear. The third chapter of my book is all about fear, which has a lot to do with death. Rowling gets really frustrated with people who don’t want kids to experience and resolve fear in a novel, a controlled environment. She writes scary moments into her books and a lot of people say, “Too scary for children,” but she’s looking to give children an opportunity to see their fears on the page and work through them along with Harry.

One of the biggest conflicts I think in the individual characters in the whole story is what do you do with fear. Let’s not pretend it’s not there and let’s not say that it is something that we shouldn’t feel. What do you do with it? You’ve got Voldemort, who is afraid of death and runs from it. That leads to evil and to dehumanization. I think she defines evil as dehumanization in the series, very much in the way that C.S. Lewis did in his Chronicles of Narnia. The talking beasts could end up losing their ability to talk — just as George MacDonald wrote in The Princess and Curdie where Curdie was given the magical ability to see whether or not a person was becoming more and more a beast. Rowling is playing with that same idea with Voldemort. The right response to fear is courage and self-sacrificial love. Those are the next two chapters in my book: courage and self-sacrificial love.

RH: These stories are officially classified as children’s literature. What would you say to someone who doesn’t have time for “children’s literature”?

TP: The categorization is unfortunate. The series has been popular among both children and adults. A recent poll has shown that J.K. Rowling has already become one of the authors best loved by British adults (source). Tolkien opened up his essay “On Fairy-Stories” by describing himself as a wanderer filled with wonder in the land of fairy (27). I think that we are all in a rush to grow up into these enlightened rational beings and we lose our wonder.  Even if we only get that far — as far as being filled with wonder — that’s worth doing. G.K. Chesterton says that the fairy tale teaches us that the world is wild (“Ethics of Elfland”), something most of us do not realize on a daily basis. Most of us spend our days in a mundane reality and never experience any wonder in them. The fairy tale brings us to that place of wonder.

RH: In what ways do you think that reading and meditating on the Harry Potter stories as adults can improve our lives or push us to fulfill our human potential?

TP: Rowling uses an alchemical framework as the basis for her story. Alchemy is something that has been incredibly misunderstood: it wasn’t fake chemistry, it wasn’t pseudo-science. It was a spiritual experience, it was a different point of view. What happens externally, outside the body, has some sort of relationship to what’s happening internally and vice versa. The alchemical process, the purification of the base, happens in the metals and also spiritually within the person. She’s not the only one to make alchemy the basis of a story: Shakespeare did it, C.S. Lewis did it in the Ransom trilogy, a lot of great writers do this. The idea is that we are transformed along with Harry as we experience his figurative and spiritual alchemical process. We learn to go through the dark periods of life, like Order of the Phoenix, then we learn about the purification stage, and then we learn how to become the hero. We’re not just watching Harry have his adventure: the adventure of getting through the story is supposed to transform the reader. I’d recommend that anyone who’s interested in this check out John Granger’s work in Unlocking Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Lectures.

RH: Do children pick up on these deeper themes, or are these themes too complicated for them?

TP: I really think they pick up on these things and learn them. We have a problem in the United States of underestimating children and their capacity for understanding. You see children loving Harry Potter, immersed in it: the adults scoffing at these children could learn a lot from them.

Travis mentioned G.K. Chesterton in this interview, and he will be sharing in an article for the next issue more on what G.K. Chesterton wrote about what fairy tales are and why they are important to us.

References

• “Interview with J.K. Rowling.” El País. 08 February 2008. (Full text available online: Spanish original; automated English translation.)
• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
• Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” Tolkien On Fairy-Stories. Ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. HarperCollins: 2008.
• “Enid Blyton beats Roald Dahl and JK Rowling to be voted Britain’s best-loved author.” Telegraph. 19 August 2008. (link)
• Chesterton, G.K. “The Ethics of Elfland.” Orthodoxy. 1908.

Image from Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows cover

The main African-American character in the series is a little boy, later given the name Arthur Stuart, who is the son of a southern plantation owner and an African slave woman. After she gives birth to this “mix-up boy,” the slave woman decides to run away. She makes a poppet, an image of herself, out of wax and breast milk and spit. She then gets feathers from a blackbird and sticks them on to the poppet:

Very strong thing, this poppet with her own milk and spit in it, blackbird feathers on. Very strong, suck all her life out, but boy-baby, he never kiss no White Boss feet, White Boss never lay no lash on him. (Chapter 2)

The power of this magic allows the woman to turn into a blackbird and fly away, carrying her baby away with her. But it does indeed suck all the life out of her; she barely makes it into northern territory and finds a home for her baby before she dies. Later on, Arthur Stuart tries to explain to people what happened to his mother, although they cannot make sense of what he tells them: “My mama was a blackbird. She flew so high but then the ground caught her and she got stuck and died” (Chapter 17). For Arthur, the supernatural events surrounding his birth are somehow, mysteriously, a part of his own conscious memories.

Although Arthur Stuart is adopted by a loving family up north, the Fugitive Slave Treaty puts him at risk of being returned to his former owner. There are Finders who hunt down the runaway slaves, identifying them by means of a cachet of hair or nail clippings supplied by the slave’s master. As one of the Finders explains, “It’s our knack. Who knows how it works? We just look at it, and we — it’s like we see the shape of the person we’re looking for” (Chapter 18). The same invisible power inherent in the body which allowed the slave woman to turn herself into a bird and escape is, ironically, also what leads to her son’s capture by the Finders.

In order to rescue Arthur from the Finders, Alvin  realizes he has to change Arthur from the inside out, so that the cachet can no longer identify him. Using his own powerful knack, Alvin is able to look inside the boy’s body and see “that tiny signature that marked every living bit” of Arthur Stuart (Chapter 18). That “tiny signature” is something we would call DNA, although obviously Alvin cannot use such a term. Alvin then changes the “living bits” of Arthur Stuart — or, more precisely, he calls upon those bits to change themselves — so that he can replace a tiny piece of Arthur’s signature with a bit of his own signature:

I’m dealing with these living bits, and each one of them is alive; maybe I can tell them all what they ought to be. […]  I can just say — Be like this — and they’ll do it. (Chapter 18)

In this way, Alvin manages to summon the “living bits” of Arthur’s unique personal signature from every cell in his body and rearrange them in a slightly new way, making him unrecognizable to the Finders.

As a result of this transformation, Arthur is no longer the person that he was before. Outwardly he looks the same, but he has lost the magic power, the “knack,” that was his own remarkable talent: perfect mimicry. Previously, Arthur had been able to transform his own voice in order to mimic the voice of any other person, male or female, young or old, black or white. As Alvin altered Arthur’s inner signature, he unwittingly erased part of Arthur’s inborn genius:

He still had the near-perfect memory of what others said — he still had all the words. But the voices were gone; only his own seven-year-old voice remained. (Chapter 18)

Like his mother, Arthur has had to change his identity in order to escape from slavery. It is not just a disguise that he puts on and can take off again later; it is a more radical and magical transformation, and it comes at a cost — although the price that Arthur pays is not as high as the price paid by his mother, who gave up her life in order to bring her child to freedom.

In telling this story of Arthur Stuart’s escape from slavery, Orson Scott Card adds an important new dimension to the picture of an imaginary America that he had begun to sketch in the previous two novels. We see an America of different peoples — Indians, Europeans, and Africans — who all wield their own distinctive magical powers. With its subtle combination of magic and science, fantasy and fact, myth and history, the “Alvin Maker” series follows in the ancient tradition established by the authors of the Bible or the singers of the Homeric songs, who likewise synthesized myth and history into an imaginative whole.

In this series of articles about magic in the world of Alvin Maker, I have focused on the first three books in the series: Seventh Son, Red Prophet, and Prentice Alvin. Card has published an additional three books — Alvin Journeyman, Heartfire, and The Crystal City — with a seventh book, Master Alvin, forthcoming. I have not said much in these articles about the memorable characters and suspenseful plots of the novels — with a masterful writer like Card, you know you can count on great characters and plots. What makes the Alvin Maker books truly remarkable, I think, is the way that they embrace the invisible and supernatural dimensions of our country’s history, providing both warnings and wisdom for the questions we face today, drawing upon the legacy of our variegated past.  Who were we, who are we, and who will we become? You will find surprising new ways of thinking about those questions by journeying with Alvin Maker through Card’s imaginary America, and I would welcome your comments and thoughts about the series. Meanwhile, I’ll be back with one more article as soon as Card publishes what he promises will be the final book in the series, and we can see to what destination he will have brought us in the end.

References

• Card, Orson Scott. Prentice Alvin. New York: Tor Books, 1989.

In the Qur’an, Iblis is a supernatural being — either a fallen angel or a diabolical fiery creature known as a jinn. In his disobedience against God and his role as tempter of mankind, Iblis resembles Satan in the Christian tradition. The occasion for Iblis’s disobedience comes immediately following God’s creation of Adam. Here’s one version of the story from the Qur’an:

[God] said to the angels: Make obeisance to Adam; they made obeisance, but Iblis did it not. He said: Shall I make obeisance to him whom Thou hast created of dust? … [God] said: Be gone! […] Surely hell is your recompense, a full recompense. (Qur’an 17:61, 63)

This story resembles that of Satan’s rebellion in Paradise Lost: God there issues a command for the angels to worship the Son, Satan refuses, and God casts him out. Milton’s Satan insists that the Son is not worthy of his worship, and Iblis insists the same of Adam in another passage from the Qur’an: “I am better than he: Thou hast created me of fire, while him Thou didst create of dust” (7:12). Why would God want the angels to worship something other than God himself, especially something apparently younger and inferior to them?

The traditional Islamic interpretation sees Iblis as proud and rebellious, justly sentenced to hell by God for his disobedience. This interpretation follows what I am calling the “religious” theme: Man must submit to God as the absolute authority; God’s actions are beyond scrutiny. While adherents of this interpretation may not understand God’s commands, they agree that these commands should be obeyed regardless. Iblis refused to do this, and he was justly punished for it.

Some of the great masters of Sufism (a mystical tradition within Islam) agreed with this traditional interpretation of the story of Iblis’s disobedience, though not all did. Others puzzled over God’s command and concluded that God could not have truly wanted Iblis to worship Adam. To illustrate this point, they told stories depicting conversations with Iblis; the following story comes from Ahmad Ghazali, a Sufi master from the late-eleventh and early-twelfth centuries:

Encountering Eblis on the slopes of Sinai, Moses hailed him and asked, “O Eblis, why did you not prostrate before Adam?” Eblis replied, “Heaven forbid that anyone worship anything but the One. […] This command was a test.” (Nurbakhsh 13)

What could Iblis believe God was testing? Clearly, Iblis did not envision God testing his obedience — for he then would have failed that test. Instead, he saw God testing his love. This test reflects a concern that many Western theologians have raised: if God gives good things to those who obey him, someone might obey God only to get those good things and not out of any love for God. Farid ad-Din Attar, writing in the late-twelfth or early-thirteenth century, described this concern with an analogy:

If you distinguish between a gem and a stone received from the King, you are not a man of the path! If you’re pleased with the gem and disappointed by a stone, you have no interest, then, in the King. (Nurbakhsh 39)

Farid ad-Din Attar used this analogy to depict God’s test of Iblis’s love: Iblis had to choose between remaining true to God (the King) while suffering the curse of disobedience (the stone) and rejecting God by worshiping Adam while receiving the rewards of obedience (the gem). Another twelfth-century master, Ayn al-Qozat Hamadani, expressed the same idea by ascribing these words to Iblis:

O Lord, I do not worship you for the sake of mercy; I maintain no condition for my devotion. I am content with whatever you will and whatever you do. (Nurbakhsh 7)

In such a religious context, the humanistic theme will not be reflected in full. The goodness of God in his test is never questioned in this story. The word islam itself means “submission,” and it would be unthinkable for any Sufi to advocate anything like Satan’s all-out rebellion against God in Paradise Lost. But the theme is nevertheless reflected in part: Iblis is commended for scrutinizing the divine command and praised for his determination to what he believes is a just cause, even in the face of difficulty and suffering.

So far in this series, I have explored some very intense material: the cause of human suffering, the inscrutability of divine commands, and disobedience and rebellion against tyrannous authority. All of the stories I have considered have reflected one of the two contrary themes: some like Job clearly reflect the religious theme, others like Prometheus Bound clearly reflect the humanistic theme, and about others like Paradise Lost interpreters disagree. I will conclude this series in the next issue by looking at another story with differing interpretations related to these two themes, though this one is much more light-hearted: the Aesopic fable explaining how the turtle got its shell.

References

• The Holy Qur’an. Translated by M.H. Shakir. Published by Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, Inc.: 1983. (Full text available online: Qur’an 17.)
• Wensinck, A.J. “Iblis.” Encyclopedia of Islam. Ed. B. Lewis, et al. Volume 3. London: Brill 1979.
• Nurbakhsh, Javad. The Great Satan ‘Eblis.’ Minneapolis: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications, 1986.

Image from Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (image)