Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Harry Potters Bookshelf
What This Book Tries to Do and How
You Can Get the Most Out of It
This is the fourth book Ive written on Harry Potter, believe it or not, and, as in all the others, my e-mail address is at the end of the introduction with an invitation asking you to write to me with your comments and corrections. The only real compensation for being a Potter Pundit is conversation with serious readers like you about books you love and the ideas you haveand I have been richly compensated with conversation and far-flung friendships. I hope very much that you will write to me to share your thoughts as you read and when you finish reading this book.
The most common request I get in my in-box is for further reading. A common ambition of the books I have written is answering the question, Why are the Harry Potter books so popular? and my response is always a variation on Its the literary artistry that engages and transforms readers that is the real magic of the books. That answer involves discussing the usual English literature topics like narratological voice and setting, as well as the more bizarre and less well-known devices and story scaffolding that Ms. Rowling uses, like literary alchemy and vision symbolism.
Take alchemy as an example. The requests I get for further reading are for books that use literary alchemy as Ms. Rowling does (Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet, Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, Dickenss A Tale of Two Cities) and for books about literary alchemy per se (Darke Hieroglyphicks by Stanton Linden, Lyndy Abrahams A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery ). These requests, which I get from serious readers, as well as from teachers, students, and librarians, usually come with one note of delight about understanding and experiencing an unexpected dimension of storytelling and another note of disappointment that their studies hadnt ever mentioned something that spans English literature from Canterbury Tales to Harry Potter.
I taught a Harry Potter online course from 2003 to 2005 and started writing this book then because of the interest expressed in learning more about Harry Potter as English literature. My hope at that time was to write a fun and inviting text that would simultaneously open up the meaning and magic of Ms. Rowlings novels while revealing how much of her artistry has its roots in the traditions of great writing. That hope continues to be the heart of what Harry Potters Bookshelf tries to do.
Writing Bookshelf has been, to risk a clich, a labor of love. It has also been more than a little frustrating over the years it has taken to put it together, with stops and starts to work on other projects. The big problems I ran into were selection and organization. I knew, for instance, that the book would have ten chapters from the first time I outlined it. There are ten genres that the author rowls together seamlessly from heros journey and alchemical drama, to satire and Christian fantasy. But how was I to select what specific authors and works to choose and leave out? Certainly Id be obliged to include the five or six authors and books Ms. Rowling has mentioned in ten years of interviews as important influences on her work, but what about those subjects she rarely if ever mentioned?
Taking alchemy again for illustration, Ms. Rowling said in 1998 that she read a boatload of books on alchemy before she started writing Harry Potter and that it sets the magical parameters and logic of the books. She hasnt been asked or said a word about it since, so your guess is almost as good as mine about what books she read and which alchemical authors she found helpful and meaningful. Shakespeare? Dickens? Charles Williams? Blake? Yeats? The Metaphysical Poets? Thats quite a range.
And Ms. Rowling has mentioned quite a few authors and books that she loves that I dont think influenced her writing of the Harry Potter adventure stories as much as others she hasnt mentioned or downplays when asked. She has said more than once that her big three favorites are Nabokov, Collette, and Austen; that her favorite living writer is Rodney Doyle; and Roald Dahls books. Jane Austen overshadows much of Ms. Rowlings work certainly (see chapter two), but Lewis and Tolkien, with whom Ms. Rowling has a bizarre love-hate relationship, are obvious influences in a way Nabokov and Collette are not, and Jonathan Swift, whom Ms. Rowling hasnt mentioned, is a bigger part of Harry than Doyle or Clement Freud, acknowledged or not.
It may strike you as a bit snooty and bizarre not to focus just on the authors Ms. Rowling has mentioned in interviews (Nabakov, Collette, etc.), but Harry Potters Bookshelf is not Joanne Rowlings Libraryand the author herself has made it clear that she is skeptical about tracking point-to-point influences from her reading list and history. It isnt a mechanical one-way process, in which the writer reads a book, enjoys it, and writes a book very much like the first. As she says, its a more organic, human thing than that.
Speaking with Writers Digest in February 2000, she listed several authors she admired but added quickly, But as for being influenced by them... I think it [may be] more accurate to say that they represent untouchable ideals to me. It is impossible for me to say what my influences are; I dont analyze my own writing in that way. Writers read books, and the best writers, like Ms. Rowling, have read voraciously, profoundly, and widely. These books, as she says, dont mechanically become models for the writers stories. They become the soil out of which the seeds of the authors talent and ideas can grow. The richer and more fertile the soil, the more the talent and ideas will flourish and blossom. The greater the talent and ideas, the more nutrients will be drawn from the rich soil and the more delicious and refreshing will be the fruits from this tree and vine.
My job in selection, consequently, has meant less sifting through the historical record to find things Ms. Rowling has admitted reading and liking and more exploring the various streams of the English literary tradition in which she lives and writes. That meant, inevitably, making controversial inclusions and omissions; I look forward to reading your thoughts on my biggest blunders and better catches. (Before you write to share your disappointment, yes, I wish I could have included Tennyson, Chesterton, and more Dante and Shakespeare!) The selection argument is one of the more powerful engines of the Potter as literature conversation, and Im not offering my choices as anything but a fresh beginning to that discussion.
Organization of the choices I have made, as I mentioned, fell naturally into ten genre and story element divisions based on those Ms. Rowling uses. I decided fairly late in the assembly of the book, though, not to write this up as simply Here are the choices Ms. Rowling makes for setting (or voice or allegory, etc.) with the most important historical giants that are echoed in her books. Not only would that be a boring book to write, it wouldnt challenge readers who want to gain a larger perspective on what literature is and what reading does to them. I decided, consequently, in addition to producing a book that simultaneously opens up both
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