Harry Potter and You-Know-Why It Works

The Harry Potter books may have started off as a set of 'different' school stories for young readers, but the final work in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , is nothing less than a full-pitched effort to sell England, Old and New.

The use of elements of Western mythology and folklore (including Classical, Celtic and English elements) ensured the early success of these books. They are the 'Amar Chitra Katha' of the English speaking world. The names Minerva, Pomona, Sirius, Bellatrix, Severus, Lucius and Draco are all Greek and Roman; Arthur, Percy and Ginevra are from Arthurian legend, and Hagrid, Hogwarts, and Hogsmeade have Gaelic/Celtic resonances. It is fascinating, it's entertaining, and educational.

How many young children read novels today? And yet they read these, or they have them read out to them. Myth and magic in their pure forms rule over any other form of fiction any day. Add to this the episodic format - with Harry and his friends growing up with their readers, one book every eighteen months, and you know why it all succeded. We're a civilization that loves to wait for the next episode, while we wonder what's going to happen. The number of websites devoted to guessing what would happen in the last book was mind-boggling.

The fantasies on sale are admirable : An orphaned, neglected, unloved and unremarkable boy discovers that he is a hero of sorts in a parallel, hidden world of which he first hears when he is eleven. He's a wizard; he can perform magic, but only after he's been to the school which teaches magic. He is invited to join Hogwarts, a residential school where he doesn't have to pay fees ( a sure-sell fantasy for parents), where every meal is a feast, and where he gets to sleep in a four poster bed with silken hangings. And he's inherited an enormous fortune from his parents.
He is the saviour for whom the 'other world' is waiting, because he is the only known survivor of the killing curse, which rebounded off him and neutralised its perpetrator, the evil Dark Wizard Voldemort. Once in school, he discovers that he has extraordinary skills, including sporting skills. School matches, house points and championships; night-wanderings, misadventures and punishments share the reader's attention with the hero's quest to destroy the returned Voldemort, who still wants to rule the world, but now wants to kill Harry first. The series could have coasted along these lines, but there was scope for much more, which someone was quick to realise.

After the weighty and messy Book Five, it appears that the author and her editors got down to giving a coherent shape - and a slightly different direction - to the last two books. Already the elements of the saviour and the chosen heir are in place. The last book, as many commentators have noted, has an increased number of elements of the Arthurian legend and the Grail Quest.(Remember the success of The Da Vinci Code ?) Only, this Quest is for something unholy, all the enchanted objects which enclose bits of Voldemort's soul and which must be destroyed. It is like the Dark Ages; the castle is without its king, the social order has been subverted, and fear and suspicion prevail everywhere. The school story is dropped abruptly. Harry, Ron and Hermione drop out, and are on the run through the English countryside, hiding in forests like Robin Hood and his band of men. Snape, the teacher who is Harry's tormentor and appears to be on the wrong side but is a double agent, morphs into a chivalrous lover: a Sir Galahad. He'd loved Harry's mother all his life, and he chose to suffer silently all along, maligned by both sides, to protect her son, eventually sacrificing his life. The transformation of Snape is a master-stroke.

All the elements of the Middle Ages are used to create an allegory with today's world. Voldemort is on an ethnic cleansing spree, ridding the magical world of all but Purebloods. He rules by fear, and he rules absolutely. Feudalism, hierarchies, servitude, and social discrimination are the evils which the young adventurers of the book seek to destroy. The world clamours for Harry, ' The Chosen One', Albus Dumbledore's anointed successor, but he chooses to relinquish the sceptre.

This formula has worked marvellously in an age of 'Us' and a nameless 'Them', whom it would be quite politically incorrect to name, and in an age that can't get enough of Prince William and Page Three Royalty. The Lost Heir motif is cleverly introduced in the last book, and Harry turns out to be the last in the line of the Peverells, the most blue-blooded of magical families! Potter's world becomes a metaphor for an idealised, multi-racial, tolerant and enlightened England, with an Heir-in-Waiting who chooses to abdicate! And the final flourish - J.K. Rowling puts a black man in the hot seat by making Kingsley Shacklebolt the Minister for Magic.

While Enid Blyton and the writers of her age appear hopelessly racist and xenophobic today, Rowling and team have spared no effort to produce something that is politically correct, and guaranteed to please everyone the world over. And in case they'd trodden on any toes - they seem to have done a quick review after the book was actually released - J.K.Rowling beamingly announced that Dumbledore was gay. It was like saying, 'See? We made sure no one's left out.'

Civilisation and Culture

I read E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (published 1924) again, after a gap of over 25 years. It is a remarkable novel of British India. A recent article in The Guardian*, from which my brother Raja sent me an excerpt, helped me to understand some issues in the book.
The excerpt goes, 'We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational. It is no surprise, then, to find that we have civilisation whereas they have culture. The contrast between west and east is being mapped on a new axis.'

Forster says in the novel that in the 1920s, especially among the products of England's public schools, 'the arts were bad form'. Any mention of an artistic accomplishment like playing the viola is an affectation, or an embarrassment, especially to the Englishmen in India -- a breed Forster seems to have despised. Among Indians, however, he says, '...literature had not been divorced from civilization' and whether an Indian is educated in it or not, he responds, from his soul, to music, art and poetry.
This must have been because the Indians of the time, unlike the English, had no 'nation state' to inspire fine sentiments: they only had its culture.

Among the major characters in the novel, Fielding is the only Englishman who has Forster's complete approval. Fielding lives outside the tight little circle of the civil station and its rigid norms, makes friends with Indians, and cares very little for what his countrymen think of him. ' The remark that did him most harm at the Club was a silly aside to the effect that the so called white races are really pinko-grey.'
In a world where ' "white" has no more to do with colour than "god save the King" with a god' such a remark does Fielding no good. No wonder, 'the pinko-gray male whom he addressed was subtly scandalised; his sense of insecurity was awoken, and he communicated it to the rest of the herd.'
Fielding says to Dr.Aziz, ' Any man can travel light until he has a wife or children,' and adds that it isn’t only Englishmen like him who travel light, but the 'sadhus and such' of India. Then he says, 'I'm a holy man minus the holiness.'
'He had no racial feeling' the book tells us, 'because he had matured in a different atmosphere', having travelled all over the world.
The reader -- the Indian reader, in particular -- settles down comfortably to the idea that Fielding, indeed Forster, is Indian at heart.

Which is why Chapter XXXII comes as a shock, where the authorial voice actually shrugs off the East completely like a man shaking off a hypnotic spell, or a hallucination that was pleasant enough while it lasted, but is not wholesome at all. When Fielding, on his return voyage, sees the buildings of Venice, we're told, 'He had forgotten the beauty of form among idol temples and lumpy hills; indeed, without form, how can there be beauty? Form stammered here and there in a mosque, became rigid through nervousness....'.
There is worse yet. 'The Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that exquisite lake, whether through the Bosporus or the Pillars of Hercules, they approach the monstrous and the extraordinary; and the southern exit leads to the strangest experience of all.'
'Monstrous' and 'extraordinary' - So after all, we must hear the clichéd expressions of imperialism, which are used to dismiss that which cannot be understood, let alone appreciated. Further, '...tender romantic fancies that he thought were dead forever flowered when he saw the buttercups and daisies of June.' Your Englishman is normal again. Pinko-gray is white once more, when restored to the milder sun of England.

And yet we can’t discard all this completely. Once you recover from the sense of betrayal, you see another aspect that goes beyond a mere rejection of the East.
Forster goes on '...but something more precious than mosaics and marbles was offered to him now; the harmony between the works of man and the earth that upholds them, the civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in a reasonable form, with flesh and blood subsisting.'
Perhaps, like the ancient Romans, Forster wanted to believe that the Mediterranean is the centre of the earth. Perhaps, in Forster's world, the countries around the Mediterranean had arrived at that balance between civilization and culture which neither Forster's England nor his India could achieve.

Once again, the Guardian piece helps us to understand it all better.
' The problem is that civilisation needs culture even if it feels superior to it. Its own political authority will not operate unless it can bed itself down in a specific way of life. Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it. '

*By Terry Eagleton who is John Edward Taylor professor of English literature at Manchester University

A Late Reading of Henry James' The Portrait of A Lady

(Copyright Gowri Mohanakrishnan)

Isabel Archer is a woman of high intelligence who meets a series of people who feel that she has a great future. She hasn’t the means or the opportunity to make this happen. She doesn’t even desire it. A number of people, who begin to love her after they get to know her, become providers and facilitators. She lacked exposure; she is taken under her aunt's wing and she travels abroad. She lacked means; she is bequeathed a fortune. She lacked opportunity; a number of well endowed patrons and suitors offer her all they have. She is empowered.

None of her friends, relations or acquaintances believes she has a fault. Her creator, however, distances himself (and the readers) from Isabel and we see her with all her faults. This is the strong point of this novel. Isabel is wilful, opinionated, misguided and blind to several things which are obvious to characters with far less intelligence. She has lofty ideals and her goal in life is an idealised abstraction of perfection. She loses touch with reality, transferring her perceptions to other people's minds. She isn’t so much the innocent abroad as the self deluded victim of her own flawed, blinkered vision. However, these are only aspects of her character.

In spite of every opportunity and sufficient means, Isabel proceeds to make a horrible mistake and marry a fraud who only wants her fortune. She makes errors of judgement and befriends all the wrong people. A few years after a brilliant future was predicted for her, her young life is a mess, and all prospect of happiness ruined.

There are people who do things, and there are people to whom things happen. For the first time, I saw this novel as the tragedy of the people of the second kind. Could Isabel have prevented the disaster which overtook her life? Can anyone control the direction which life takes?It isn’t just the flaws in her character which lead to all her suffering. It is also the series of unfortunate events that follow one after another. Things 'happen'. Besides, the world is full of 'other people', and their actions affect every individual. No one can control the entire world around them and if things go wrong, it isn’t always for want of trying.

And yet, at every point Isabel had a choice and made the wrong choice. Would the right choices have guaranteed that she lived a life without sorrow? That's too metaphysical a question for this train of thought! The people who care for Isabel feel betrayed by her unrealised potential and unfulfilled promise. The seeds of greatness are gone to waste. There are many Isabels in real life. There are artists and performers, or sportspersons or leaders who never quite make it to the top or anywhere near there. For those who watch them with a sense of expectation, it is tragic.

Of course, both greatness and tragedy are perceptions, not absolutes. Isabel was perceived to be great. Readers of the novel perceive the conclusion as a tragedy. The character herself may think otherwise.