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The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 280: “Best of” – “Harry Potter” Book Ch. 3-7
01:36:00
This week we are back with the second part of our remix of Angelina and Thomas’ podcast series on by J. K. Rowling. This week we are covering chapters 3-7. Angelina opens the book discussion with an overview of the literary motifs used by Rowling...
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life podcast.
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B
This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life podcast. Foreign hello and welcome back to the Literary Life podcast. Today, Angelina Stanford, me and Thomas Banks.
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A
That would be I, of course, with.
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B
The very correct grammar there. We are going to carry on with our series on J.K. rowling's first book, what I'm calling Harry Potter book one. And the confusion around this title is, as we have said, because here in the United States, we have sadly, shamefully been robbed of the original British title. So what was called the Philosopher's Stone in England is called the Sorcerer's Stone in the United States. And you know, it was really interesting to see all the feedback on Discord and Facebook as it slowly dawned on the Americans that our version had been, well, not mansplained, should we say American splanged to us, it makes me wonder.
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A
If there's that, there's that four Dummies series and maybe, maybe if we should have a foreign countries for American series, you know, a different volume for every nation around the world. And it could be written with the same kind of gentle, condescending tone one uses with a not very bright child. And yeah, I think, I think there could be some money in that.
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B
Yeah, no, I agree.
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A
I could write probably a couple volumes myself.
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B
I think most of the Americans in our audience, myself included, are of two minds. The one hand we're like, how dare you? On the other hand we're like, totally needed to happen. Yeah, because American kids. Yeah, right, exactly. We'd have been, why is everyone wearing jumpers and trainers? And what is. What is happening?
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A
Make sure you change, you know, football to soccer. Because if Americans Say if you say the Quidditch is like football, then Americans are going to think there's pads and helmets and tackling involved.
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B
I know, I know. Well, I found out from our Canadian listeners that they got the UK version.
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A
Well, of course they did.
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B
Of course they did. Because Canadians are what, Smarter than Americans?
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A
They can, in my experience. That's generally true. Yeah.
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B
Roasted right here on the 4th of July.
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A
Well, yeah. Smarter, more polite, more able to understand.
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B
British.
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A
Yeah. Their history is a lot more boring than ours, though. Okay, I'm gonna say America's history is more interesting than Canadian history. I'm just gonna. Yeah. So we have, we. I guess we have that.
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B
We have more wars. I guess that makes us more interesting. Yeah.
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A
Have they ever had a civil war? Did they ever kill half a million of each other? I mean, come on, country, come on.
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B
Canada, get it together. Put down the maple syrup and pick up a gun. That's right, I said it. Kidding, kidding. One, one of our, one of our listeners said, I think they should have just given the American kids the British version and then put footnotes. And while part of me loved this, the other part of me was like, no American kid is going to read a novel with footnotes.
- [04:10]
A
I've somehow wondered if you could write a. This would probably be better in a non fiction book, but some kind of historical study or some academic term which had passive aggressive and insulting footnotes. Notes.
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B
Yeah, I would read that.
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A
Yeah. And actually there is a kids book called the Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody where the. The writer whose name. This is a book from about 1950. His name is Will Cuppy. I think it was basically the one book he wrote that became a bestseller and then he killed himself. But it's a fake. It's a fake history book for kids and it's kind of like imagine our island story with a sort of satirical twist.
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B
Okay.
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A
Yeah, I recommend it.
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B
All right, very good. If you're enjoying this encore presentation of our series on Harry Potter, book one, then you might be interested in the class I'm teaching this summer. You've heard me say on the podcast that I taught books two and three of Harry Potter in August of 2024. This month, June 2025, I'm teaching another mini class and this time on books four and five of Harry Potter. The class will meet the last two weeks of June at noon Eastern time on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Don't worry if you can't make the live sessions. You'll still have access to the class recordings to watch when you're able. I hope you'll join us for what will be a great class looking at how the Harry Potter series is the gateway to the literary tradition. Go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to to find out about this class or last summer's class on books two and three. And while you're there, check out some of our other summer offerings as well. Mr. Banks is going to be teaching a class exploring the Victorian age through the lives of five figures. And Dr. Baxter will be back with a class called how to Read a poem like C.S. lewis and fall in love with poetry again. That's HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to check out our other offerings and see what we've got going on. And now back to our podcast. Yes. So we are starting our second episode today. We're going to cover chapters three through seven of the Philosopher's Stone. I'm going to, I'm just going to go full Britishy on this because that is the correct title. And as we go further into the book, you're going to see why that title is important and where we can go wrong because we don't understand the entire, all the literary implications of the Philosopher's Stone. But that is for another day. So I really, I've really, really enjoyed the feedback we got from the first episode. And I couldn't help having this moment as I, as I read all the feedback of thinking I had 22 pages of notes. I spent hours and hours and, you know, he's smirking at me right now. You know how many hours I have spent working on this podcast. And I sit down and my husband steals the show with the word Muggletonian.
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A
So just one of those things I had floating around upstairs.
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B
I love it. And this is why I love you. You know, all the things, all of the obscure things. And that was amazing. And I desperately want a writ of condemnation somewhere framed in my office. We could maybe open an Etsy shop for that. Yeah.
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A
Did people feel left out if they didn't receive one of those?
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B
I mean, like, are you even cool?
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A
Yeah.
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B
We know which, which characters in Harry Potter would have gotten a writ of condemnation. One of the other things that was super neat was that people picked up this idea that the series is structured around a ring cycle. And I got a lot of questions about that. And so if you were asking yourself, is a ring cycle the same thing as a chiasm or a chiastic structure? Yes, those are, those are the same thing. So the first half will be reflected in the second half in reverse order. And then there'll be something in the book in the middle that's kind of a hinge. And that's book four for this series.
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A
So you said Ring cycle. And I, I almost said, is this Wagner or something we're talking about here?
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B
Yeah, there you go. Lord of the Ring cycle.
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A
Okay.
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B
I think J. Rowling is Lord of the Rings cycle. I said it. I agree. So anyway, I agree with myself. Anyway, so the kids really took this idea and ran with it. I say the kids, our students have a student forum where they are discussing this, but also some of the adults have been really talking about this. And as I said last week, I'm not going to be able to make these connections on this series because that would have spoilers. And I'm committed to not having spoilers. So I can't talk about how book one is, is echoed in book seven until I get to book seven a year from now. But that doesn't mean that our listeners can't do it. And on our spoiler thread over on our Patreon forum, they are making the most amazing connections, the adult readers as well as our students. And they are having a ball figuring out all the book one and book seven implications, as well as book two to book six, book three to book five, and seeing book four as kind of the hinge, the turning point. We've got some fantastic readers over there. They are doing a great job. I also have to have a point of correction. And I knew this would happen to me. So here, here I shall continue one.
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A
Episode for someone to write in. And.
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B
Yeah, actually, no, but I love that because there were several times in the first episode where I got lost in my notes. And this was one of those places. And so I said something incorrect and we had some listeners correct me. And so thank you for that. You asked me the question, are there any girls school stories? Any girls boarding school stories? And our readers, our listeners came in and said, yes, there are. And so Enid Blyton, who I knew J.K. rowling was a huge fan of, she actually wrote school stories for girls. So there you go. Okay, there are girls. Question answered, question answered, yes. And she was, she was a huge influence on J.K. rowling.
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A
Actually, here's something I had meant to bring up, but didn't, I think a story in that tradition or sub tradition or whatever you want to call it, I would say that the Lord of the Flies, by will, you have all the types. I mean, you have the jocks, you have the awkward fat kid, you know, Piggy. And then you have the, you know, the twisted kid who turns out to be seriously bad news. Yeah, but I. That's.
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B
That's really good. I think you're right.
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A
I would like to do that. That book on this podcast sometime.
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B
We've never done any Golding, but I don't understand why. I think that's a. Actually, all of.
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A
All of Golding stories are. He can take a situation which isn't frightening by itself and make it kind of horrifying without being really grotesque. And there's one of his. There's one of his books called the Paper Men. This is one of his later novels. And the premise is there is a reclusive novelist, you know, a critically esteemed novelist, who's managed to keep out of the public eye for a long time, and this annoying American critic from some, you know, state university hunts him down and starts stalking him to write an unauthorized biography. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's stalking and literary criticism and all that kind of thing. It's.
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B
I love it.
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A
Very interesting, man.
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B
All right, before we get too much further, why don't we stop and give our commonplace quotes? Mr. Banks, do you have a commonplace quote to share with us this week?
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A
Indeed I do, actually. You give yours first. I have to hunt mine down. It's on my person somewhere, but.
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B
All right, well, mine, it comes from. If you're new to this podcast, you will learn very quickly that I am a huge fan of and disciple of the late literary critic Northrop Fry. He's a big influence on me in his understanding of stories and the world of stories and how they work. And one of my recent graduates of our Fellowship mentorship program, Esther Bill, so shout out to her, she sent me a card with an orthop Fry quote on it. It was a new one to me, and I loved it and thought it was so perfect to share on the show today, because one of the things we did in the last episode is I talked about all the literary influences on J.K. rowling. And if you liked episode one, I gotta tell you, I haven't even gotten started yet. You. The real magic of will happen. The real magic. That's right. I said it. The real magic of how to read well is going to come together in the final episode because I can't give. Oh, I can't give spoilers right now. So we have to wait till we get to the end of book one for me to bring it all together for you. If I start explaining what all the symbols mean in the first chapter, I will have ruined the book for you. So we'll have to be patient to see how I get there. But as we go through. And I'm going to be talking about, you know, this is a reference to this book, and this is a reference to this book, and this is the stock character, and this is this trope, and here's what she's doing. It might feel a little bit like, well, what's the deal? I mean, how boring if every story is just about every other story, like, what's the point of that? And here's an Northrop Fry quote that I think helps to explain what is the point of that? I am not suggesting that all works of literature are much the same work or fit into the same general scheme. I am providing a kind of resonance for literary experience, a third dimension, so to speak, in which the work we are experiencing draws strength and power from everything else we have read and may still read. And second, the strength and power do not stop with the work out there, but enter into us. Oh, you're nodding your head.
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A
Yeah. I find that that's thoughtful and uplifting at the same time.
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B
Thoughtful and uplifting. That's exactly what I think of Fry all the time. So this idea is, as I think we'll see, this resonance of understanding that every story is a resonance of every other story that you have read and will read, that there's a whole world, and that the way that literature shapes you is all this resonance of all the books over all of your life, that that's the world that you have entered into, and that is the world that enters into you. And that is when the literary experience becomes expansive and I'd say, also transcendent. But more about that as we go. Mr. Manx, what's your quote?
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A
So mine comes from the early 20th century classical scholar T.R. glover from his book Springs of Hellas. He writes, it is very often a man's digressions that reveal his true character and interests.
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B
That is so you. That is a you quote.
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A
By their tangents, ye shall know them.
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B
Very nice. Very nice. All right, I want to start back a little bit on chapter one. Now that we've gotten a few chapters under our belt, I can start to talk a little bit more about some things I couldn't mention yet. In. In. In the first episode you mentioned to me beforehand, you said, I don't know that I'm going to have much to say in this episode, because it's mostly exposition.
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A
We're still introducing our cast of characters.
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B
We're still introducing the cast of characters. So there are some things, though, that I still think we need to talk about. Last week I said how important it was to understand the form of a book, because form informs. And then I saw there was a lot of chatter online about, well then, what is the form of Harry Potter? So let's talk about that then. We know it's a fantasy book and in particular it's an otherworld book. And we saw that. Here he goes from the world of Privet drive to the magical world and we'll talk about, you know, exactly what happened there and what's going on. But that's what an otherworld story is. So someone starts in this world, they go into another world. We talked last time about that Celtic storytelling tradition where that other world is actually existing alongside the ordinary world, but it's just invisible. And then there's little points of contact, these portals that you can go through connected to the fairy tale. I mean, it's the fantasy is the fairy tale and the romance. So let's talk about that because those things are inseparable. So first of all, I should define what I mean by romance. It's not a story in which someone falls in love. When we're talking about romance as a literary form, a romance is a quest story. It's a knight on a quest, it's King Arthur, it's the Fairy Queen by Edmund Spencer. That's what a medieval romance is. And that has a very particular structure and it's one in which the fantasy typically is structured around. So someone is on a quest. Now, because this is a series, what kind of quest Harry Potter is on is not going to be evident to us right away. We're going to have to wait and grow because the quest is going to slowly be revealed to him over time. And that is going to be, as I said last time, she's going to brilliantly connect the quest story with the growing up story, the Bilden's romance. So as he grows up, he's going to learn more and more what is his quest. So we're going to have to be patient to see that and that she's also brilliantly tying that into a third literary motif. But I'll get to that in a minute. So when I say it's a fairy tale, a fairy tale is also a romance. It has a romance structure, or I should say that's not correct. I should say the other way around. A romance has a fairy tale structure and we, we're going to see lots of sort of magical elements. So one of the things that I want to talk about then, though, is something that those three stories have in common. And it's very important that we understand this to avoid a lot of the confusion that comes when a modern reader picks up one of these old books. Namely, we don't understand how much our assumptions about how to read and how to think about literature are shaped by the modern books we've read all of our lives. When you study literary history, you realize that the novel and the psychological novel and realism are all. I mean, in the. In the 10,000 years of human history that we have recorded, that's a blip, It's a blink, it's an eyelash amount of time that this is how stories were told, that they were stored realistically with psychological realism. And in the form of a novel, the vast majority of storytelling has operated very differently. And what happens is a modern reader picks up an old book and expects it to be a realistic, psychologically rich novel, and then is like, well, what's wrong with these old people? What's wrong with Homer? Why doesn't he know how to write a psychologically rich, realistic novel? Why are there gods and goddesses in here? What's. What's wrong with him? Why isn't Helen showing kidnapping trauma? And, you know, why is she having Stockholm syndrome? I'm joking. But there are people who try to misread the Iliad like that because they don't understand that there is a different type of storytelling going on. So when I was thinking about how to best explain how do you read these kinds of books? I. I thought, there's nobody better to explain this than CS Lewis. So in a letter to someone, he was addressing the fact that when Lord of the Rings came out, people were making those exact complaints against it. It's not psychologically rich. It's not realistic. It's not written like a novel, because, of course, it's written as a romance. Frodo is on a quest. This is a medieval romance. And C.S. lewis explained what's going on like this. He's like, you're reading it all wrong if you're trying to find, like, psychological depth. And. And you're saying, wouldn't Frodo have some orphan trauma? And, you know, wouldn't this happen? And that happened. And he says that is not a valid criticism. And here's why. He says that when it comes to characters in a romance, what you need to understand is that they have their insides on the outsides and that the characters are visible souls. All right, let that sink in. Because that's one of my favorite quotes. They are visible souls. So it's. You're not going to have psychological depth and realism because the realism here is operating differently. You want to add something?
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A
I was going to qualify that. I. Maybe I'm thinking in certain types of story. I'm thinking of epic as well as romance. I think you can have what we would call psychological realism there, Even. Even if that's a term that Virgil or Homer wouldn't have understood. But it tends to be incidental to the story and not of the essence of it. But say, for instance, where it describes Aeneas, it goes into his thoughts after his men have been shipwrecked and all hope seems lost. But he needs to put on a good face since he's the leader. He needs to give an example of bravery and resolve. And he deliberately. It describes him deliberately suppressing his tears that he wants to weep. I would describe that as a moment of psychological realism, though. It's. I mean, it's not a fundamentally, I guess you could say, central part of the narrative.
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B
Right, Yeah, I agree with that. That's a very fine distinction. Yeah.
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A
So things like that tend to happen, as it were, by accidents, happy or otherwise. But anyway, continue.
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B
Well, in experiment and criticism, C.S. lewis talks about two different types of realism, realism of content and realism of presentation. And I think what you're describing there is what he would say is real realism of presentation. That there's. There's. That there's a sort of side realism going on of, you know, he's pushing down his emotions, but that's not the content of what's going on. So I agree with you. It's incidental. So the reason that I bring this up is the way that. And I agree with you, and I would actually argue the same thing is happening in Lord of the Rings.
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A
Okay.
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B
That there. There is a little bit of that same kind of side psychology. I think people get confused when I say things like psychological realism. And anytime a character is shown thinking something, they're like, is that what you're talking about? No, here's what I'm talking about. There have been people who have said about Harry Potter that this book is unrealistic because anybody who suffered the abuse of Harry Potter would be so traumatized and he would just be a mess. And I'm looking at your face and. Yes, right. And so there. That's what I mean when I say psychological realism. They are. They're thinking, why isn't this story that she's telling the story of a traumatized boy who needs to go to therapy to work out, you know, the decade of horrible abuse, and he's been stuck under a cupboard and not fed and, you know, shouted out and neglected and yes, absolutely, a kid like that would need decades of therapy to overcome that. If this was that kind of story. If you're expecting her to talk about that kind of story, all I can say is I'll just have to quote Tolkien about Beowulf. Who says you can't be mad at Beowulf for being Beowulf and not some other kind of story. And that's what's happening here. The story she's telling has a tradition, and it has a tradition of how to read it. And so one of the ways in which we say it's a fairy tale is fairy tales have all kinds of people at the beginning experiencing what we would call abuse. That is to be understood symbolically. And they're not telling the story of this kid overcoming their abuse and, you know, working through their trauma. That's a different kind of story to tell in a story like this. And so here's where we want to go to. The idea that Lewis said the characters are visible souls is. You have to understand that a questing story is at its bottom, at its root, it is a story of the journey of the soul to God. And so these visible souls. And we're going to see as we go through. I mean, she does such a good job of making each of these characters a visible soul that even their names are symbolic. Everything in this story is symbolic. Now, saying the characters are visible souls, I'll just use this as a caveat. That's not to say that they're not also individualized characters. Okay, that's. That's the genius here, that she's crafting individual characters who also represent different struggles of the soul. We'll just leave it at that for now.
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A
So.
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B
What we're going to see is not the story of a boy who's been abused and needs to grow up to overcome his trauma. What we're going to see is that he is a soul on the journey to God. And at the beginning of this soul, he. I mean, the beginning of this journey, he has been orphaned and he has been mistreated. And again, this is how almost all fairy tales start, right? Cinderella's mom dies, her dad marries somebody new. There's a huge drop in status. She's suffering. She's being abused by her stepmother and sisters. But this is all to be understood symbolically and not, oh, this is a real child having real trauma. One of the things that I teach in my classes as a principle when we're reading, and actually this fits with the quote I just read, is when you're reading something, don't ask yourself, what would this mean if I met it in real life? Ask, what does this mean when I meet it in a story? Because those are not the same things. And when you understand how these situations and these character types and these symbols work in stories, then you start to understand. And as Fry said, that is when the story will begin to expand and resonate. We'll see this in practice as we go through. But I just wanted to introduce the principle here that these characters are to be understood as highly symbolic and as different aspects of the soul as it journeys. Now, one of the other things that means as a practical level, because I have promised not to give spoilers, and let me tell you that this makes it a real challenge to teach this without giving spoilers. It means as we go through the introduction of all these characters in this first section of exposition, I'm not going to be able to tell you right now what they each symbolize, because it'll be a spoiler. We'll wait and see as we go through the story if we can figure out what they all represent.
- [25:25]
A
Some of their outstanding traits are pretty obvious from the get go, though.
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B
You want to talk about that now? You want to wait till we get in there?
- [25:31]
A
You can wait a bit.
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B
Okay, so in this section, Harry learns a little bit about his mysterious origin, and he starts on this journey. And we also enter into the fairy world, and we also have the mystery introduced. We saw that Rowling said that all of her stories are whodunits. And we saw in this section that what the newspaper has, the headlines are that somebody has tried to break into Gringotts Bank. So now we have.
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A
Which is an unbreak. Unbreak intoable bank.
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B
Yes, the unbreak into Bull Bank. All right.
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A
Which is the Fort Knox of the magic world.
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B
It is the Fort Knox of the magic World. Correct. So one of. And I mentioned this already because everything's so symbolic in her books. The names are super simper symbolic. And I can't say all them now because it'll be spoilers, but we can talk about some of them. So I'm an American, so I can excuse myself for not instantly getting these obvious British isms. But fortunately, J.K. rowling has explained a lot of these British isms for Americans on her website. So the book, I mean, obviously the book starts at Privet drive. So this is a journey of the soul from privet drive, whatever privet drive represents, into this other world. So unbeknownst to me, and according to J.K. rowling, the privet is a privet bush and it is the most suburban plant there is. Privet bushes are what make the neat little hedges on English gardens. Oh, isn't that brilliant?
- [26:58]
A
I just finished a George Orwell book called Keep the Aspidistra Flying. And the aspidistra in that generation in the 1920s and 30s is a. Also very suburban, boring. It represents convention and bourgeois life.
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B
So that means the world of the privets is this enclosed garden, a boring. Boringly enclosed gardens have.
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A
Where everything is predictable and nothing unusual happens.
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B
It's the world of drills and not the world of imagination. And she also said that where they live little whinging. Am I saying that right?
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A
I'm not even quite sure.
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B
Little whinging, that's a British system for whining. So they live in little whining, complaining. She also said she chose number four because for her the number four is the most boring number there is.
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A
And there's also a reference to a town here called Cokeworth, which is not a real town in anywhere in Great Britain. And I think that's an homage to Coke Town from Dickens. Hard Times, which is. I mean, you couldn't think of a more perfect place for Muggles to be. Muggles safely perfect without intrusion from the outside.
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B
Yes. So we did a whole series on Hard Times and how to read that, and you will definitely want to check that out. But Hard Times by Charles Dickens is really the book about the modern industrial world and education and how it kills the imagination, kills the child, kills the soul. And children need to be able to, you know, escape that and set it free. I mean, Dickens even describes the factory in dragon terms. You know, the fire coming out of the mouth, the smoke out of the nostrils, that's the big fairy tale dragon. It's the factory. And I totally think she's doing the same thing. Many of our astute listeners said that when I was describing the drills and the world of Mr. Dudley, that they all kept saying, grad grind, grad grind, which is the. The main, you know, bad character in. In Hard Times. And I. I think definitely that's what's going on. There's a lot of factory imagery here and. And in literature again. So how do we understand how to. How to interpret these things? Well, through. You interpret literature, through other literature, and in literature, the factory is over and against the imagination over and over and over. Even something like C.S. lewis's voyage of the Dawn Treader, where he says eustace knows about drains, but he doesn't know about dragons.
- [29:20]
A
I. I was reading about a political candidate in the United Kingdom a few years ago whose hobby was photographing old storm drains. Again, that's not. That's nothing against him. I mean, that's not a. I suppose a horrible character flaw or anything, but I just thought, what an odd hobby. Yeah. There are. There are actually people like that who. Who have used to scrubs. Yes. Ways of killing their. Their empty time.
- [29:48]
B
Exactly. And shout out to another one of our fellow grads, K. Pellum, who had this. Brilliant. And I did not catch this, so shout out to Kay. She pointed out that Dudley School smeltings. That's a factory term.
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A
It is, yeah.
- [30:05]
B
Gosh, right.
- [30:06]
A
No, that's a perfect school for Dudley.
- [30:08]
B
It is. So I do think we have that Charles Dickens grad grind thing going on. The world of the. The Vernons. I'm sorry, the world of the Dudleys. Is it the Vernons? What are their names? I'm all confused now. Dursley's Dursleys. Thank you, Dudley Dursley. Thank you. The world of the Dursleys is the world of storm drains and factories and no imagination.
- [30:30]
A
And as with Dickens, the. The adult, the stupid and ignorant adult who finds himself in a position of authority is also the kind of adult who's always on the verge of some fit of rage over some very small trifling and irrational like Mr. I was thinking Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, who is the. Oh, what? The warden of the factory where Oliver works and who loses his temper when Oliver asks him for more food. That type of guy.
- [31:07]
B
Yes.
- [31:07]
A
I think Vernon Dursley is sort of a descendant of him.
- [31:09]
B
There is so much Oliver Twist in Harry Potter. The abused child at the beginning and. Right, right, exactly. He's getting yelled.
- [31:16]
A
And also obviously highly objectionable on religious grounds, too. I mean, Oliver Twist. I mean, he finds. Falls in with a gang of thieves and he steals, you know, for. I mean, come on, can we allow our children to, To. To read these things? Praising vice, violations of the Ten Commandments here?
- [31:32]
B
So, yes, we're teasing because this is not how stories work. And we make. We twist ourselves into knots when we try to make stories be about that. All right, so I said that this is going to be a journey of the soul as. And, and. And that means that he's on a quest of the journey of the soul. And we talked about how that she's tying this in with the growing up story so his quest will be revealed to him as he grows up. But this connects very strongly with this hero of mysterious Origin. So I want to talk about yet another layer that she's playing with. And the hero of mysterious Origin has, you know, it goes all the way back to mythology. You know, so many Perseus, on and on and on.
- [32:15]
A
You know, various sons of Greek gods, various.
- [32:17]
B
All of them basically have some mysterious, oh, my mom was just standing there and there was rain on her and boom, baby. You know, lots of things like that. So that ties in with the, the foundling thing in stories like Oedipus, Tom Jones, Tom Jones, Moses, there's a lot of Moses echoes here with Harry Potter in a basket being left on the steps. So this, this is a very, very old story trope. And my boy, Northrop Fry, he identifies this as what he calls an identity quest. So that's the third layer that I think is going on the identity quest is then that the, the hero of mysterious Origin is on a journey to find out who am I. And not in some kind of like, you know, 70s Zen, like, who am I, man, I gotta go find myself. But like, literally, I don't know who I am. I don't know all those guys from.
- [33:08]
A
The 70s who read the I Ching.
- [33:10]
B
Exactly. I don't know who my. I don't know my name. I don't know my parents are. And they've got to go on this quest to find out who they are. And what Rowling has done is she has connected the growing up story with him learning slowly over seven books and seven years. Who is he? And that is going to be also tied to what is his quest. And she's going to bring all three of those together.
- [33:32]
A
Has he met a single character so far who doesn't know more about him and his family than himself?
- [33:37]
B
Well done. That's.
- [33:38]
A
That's. Every time he meets someone new, it's, oh, wow, the Harry Potter. It's.
- [33:42]
B
So when I teach the identity quest to my students, I say, if this story you're reading starts off with a lot of who am I? And people saying, who are you? Or don't you know who you are? This is an identity quest. And it's all over the place. Like you said, every single person, he's like, who am I? And they're like, you don't know who you are. You don't know about your mom and dad. You don't know anything. And and so she's really laying it on thick here that this is a boy who does not know the truth about himself. We still don't. We had some things hinted at. We know that they did not die in a car crash and we know that he's been lied to. But we still don't know the whole story of what's happened. And that is something that is unraveled over seven books. But some of the symbolic cues that you're on an identity quest. And again, she does this absolutely brilliantly. The fact that he doesn't have a room, okay. And is like not really a member of the family, that that's a big thing. So like who am I in this family? Literally that he's a foundling and an orphan and he doesn't know the truth about his parents. But there's a really, really good detail here that every time we see him, his clothes don't fit. He's in somebody's hand me downs and his clothes don't fit. So il clothes is always symbolic. I always tell my students, note if somebody changes clothes at some point and the FA and if your clothes are not fitting, I mean think back to Shakespeare of Macbeth is in borrowed robes, right, that hang loosely upon him. If the clothes are described as not fitting, that means the clothes are the identity. And that means the identity they have is not really who they are. It doesn't fit them. So we've got this picture here, all these scenes coming together about Harry, that this is a boy who does not know what he is or who he is or both of those things. And I mean you just once, you know, to look for it, you see it over and over and over. Like in the Last Battle with CS Lewis Shift, the ape is described as wearing shoes that don't fit. Like just over and over because he's faking an identity that's not really his. And you start to get really good at noticing these things. But that means when the kids enter into the fairy world at Hogwarts, they all change clothes. They all change clothes. So. Oh, even I didn't even bring up this again. I'm not going to tell you the symbolism but the fact that Lily and her sister Petunia both have flower names. Okay, we'll talk about, we're going to talk about what Lily means later on. But Petunia I'm told is some kind of like.
- [36:05]
A
Isn't that also kind of a suburban flower?
- [36:07]
B
It's a suburban flower, but it's also like, what was it like a non hospitality Flower like it's. Oh, it has those implications.
- [36:16]
A
I didn't know that. That's interesting. I. I was thinking it's one of those flowers you could not write a poem about. You can write a poem about a lily or a rose or a hyacinth, but you can't really write one about a petunia.
- [36:28]
B
No. My husband's a poet.
- [36:30]
A
Sound of the word. I don't know why.
- [36:32]
B
If you're new to listeners, I wasn't being snarky. My husband actually is a L. Publish poet. But yes, that is what I bring you here for, to say things like, you cannot write a poem about a petunia. I'm not sure you could write a poem about somebody now that we've said.
- [36:44]
A
That, like someone is going to go and prove us wrong. So go forth, Go forth and.
- [36:48]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I'm looking at my notes here. So when Hagrid bursts onto the scene here and he's talking to Harry, he keeps saying things like, do you not know what you are? Do you not know who you are? So all of that emphasizes the identity quest he's on. And then I was actually driving and listening to the audiobook because I'm a full nerd. I pulled over and wrote this down because I thought, oh, yep, this is, this is classic. This is, this is the author telling.
- [37:18]
A
Us, this is one of several reasons I worry about your driving. Taking out. Got the wheel, driving with your elbows, you know, riding down.
- [37:25]
B
Sorry, officer. There was a quote I needed to write down from Harry Potter.
- [37:28]
A
Okay.
- [37:29]
B
And he'd be like, oh, go right ahead, man. Let's get. I'll give you a police. As police escort home. I wish. But Hagrid says this and in this one sentence, then J.K. rowling is telling us that everything I said is true, that Carrie is on a journey. So remember we said that school story stories start when the kid's 11, when he enters school and go till he graduates. And that is the, his growing up story. He's going to grow up there. And again. So we're going to, we're going to put that together with the quest and the identity quest and the journey of the soul and all of that. And he says, oh, Harry, after seven years of Hogwarts, you won't know yourself. Okay? So boom. So he's going to go on a journey and he's gonna, at the end of this journey, he's gonna be somebody that he can't even recognize. And that was perfect. All right, well, let's. I've got A lot of things to talk about. Well, we can start with some of these early exposition chapters. So chapter three, we get the letters and the letters are magical letters. We find out that the Dursleys know full well what this letter is and they have been trying to. To stop this from happening. So if the letter represents the world of the imagination, and I think it does because. Or the entrance into the world of the imagination because fairy stories are very closely tied to the world of the imagination, much like dream stories are, that you're going into the world of the imagination. The Dursleys here, guarded behind their hedges of privet bushes, do not want anything. Drills, not imagination, thank you very much. So this is a really funny scene, I think, as he's trying comically and failing over and over to close up.
- [39:07]
A
All the apertures in the house where letters might come.
- [39:10]
B
Yeah, yep. And it's really funny to me that each obscure place they go, it's always addressed to wherever he is in the corner, on the floor, in this hotel. So. So we know there's something magical going on, something different from the everyday world. And then Hagrid bursts on the scene. One of the devices that the Otherworld books use is, and it's a very clever device, is they'll bring a character who's brand new to some world and that character then asks all the questions we have. What is that? Who is that? What is going on? What does this mean? I'm confused. And that is how the author is able to explain this other world. So whether it's Lucy having gone through the wardrobe or, you know, Harry walking through Diagon Alley or even, even a sci fi movie of space travel, there's. Isn't there always that one guy that is his first time up in space and he's like, what is that? What is that? And then everybody else is explaining to them.
- [40:14]
A
I was thinking, also with this type of story, and I think this is another kind of Dickensian touch, you have a hero or a protagonist who is sort of oddly, the least colorfully drawn, the least vividly drawn character in this world full of odd eccentrics, whether the bombastically cruel aunt and uncle or Hagrid or the other various members of the staff and faculty that we're going to meet at Hogwarts. And Harry is by comparison kind of understated.
- [40:49]
B
Very much so. Okay, well, let's talk about Harry Potter's name because it actually fits in so typically, and I'll explain more about this as we go, but typically the main character of a Romance and the main character of a fairy tale are an everyman. They're a medieval everyman. And that means that the journey of the soul that this character is going on is the journey of the soul all of us go on. In fairy tales. The way that works out is that the main character is almost never named. It's almost always a nickname. Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty. Those are not names. If they are Hansel and Gretel or.
- [41:22]
A
Well, Hansel, that's like Jack and Jill.
- [41:24]
B
It's Jack and Jill. It's. It's actually Johnny and Meg. Yeah, it's German for Johnny and Meg, which I love. And. And same thing like Jack and Jill, if they are named, they are named like John Doe, like the most common name, so that it could be anyone. And so. So the idea is that the reader's experience as they're reading this book is you. You. It's your soul. You're on the journey and you're starting from this kind of mysterious origin and kind of, you know, downtrodden beginning of the soul. And. And you're. You're on this journey to. To make it up. You know, the Mount of Paradise from Dante, the. The New Jerusalem there. And you're gonna. You're gonna get up to God. But again, this is all to be understood symbolically. So let's talk about Harry Potter's name. I'll throw this out to you. Do you think the name Harry Potter is an everyman name?
- [42:12]
A
Oh, absolutely. Okay, tell me it's a name anyone might have.
- [42:15]
B
It's a name anyone, Harry.
- [42:18]
A
I mean, there probably are. I dare say there are a few. I mean, even the. Everyone points this out. But the villain in It's a Wonderful Life, played by Lionel Barrymore, the old grasping miser, is named Mr. Henry Potter. And that is. That is. I don't know if she knew about that movie. I don't think it has anything to do with this. But again, it's one of those names that just coincidentally a lot of people might have.
- [42:41]
B
Right.
- [42:41]
A
Yeah.
- [42:42]
B
Well, and because everybody else has really, really crazy names in this book, and he's got such an ordinary name, I think also that is it.
- [42:49]
A
That's also important. And that also is kind of Dickensian names.
- [42:53]
B
It's very Dickensian.
- [42:54]
A
Give people, like, make them a little bit weirder by giving them a name that has something like Wackford Squeers or like, what, some other great Dickensian ones. But anyway, yeah, I think there's a good deal of that here.
- [43:09]
B
Oh, I totally agree. I Totally agree with that. And one critic I read said that they thought a little bit what was going on with the name Potter was the idea of the Potter's clay.
- [43:20]
A
Oh, okay.
- [43:21]
B
Which fits in with this idea of the soul. And it's being molded into something by.
- [43:25]
A
Mysterious forces not within its own control.
- [43:28]
B
Right, exactly, exactly. So Hagrid gets there, and Hagrid is described as a giant. This is the first indication that there is some kind of mysterious other world and it has broken through into the ordinary world, because giants are not something you run into in the ordinary world. And Hagrid is going to give us a little bit of exposition, but it's so brilliantly done. Like, we don't just sit down and he tells the whole backstory. The whole backstory is not going to get to us until the end of the story.
- [44:00]
A
He's supposed to have a story. Scottish accent or something.
- [44:02]
B
Yes. Oh, you picked up on that. Yes.
- [44:04]
A
Yeah, yeah. Another thing, I don't know the movies well, though. I can picture some of the characters.
- [44:10]
B
From the movies, but, yeah, the movies choices usually, that are very different of the symbolism of the book, namely. Well, we'll get to that in a second.
- [44:18]
A
But Hagrid, I mean, in the. In the, you know, phonetic spellings of.
- [44:22]
B
His dialogue, he's reading him as a thought. Exactly, exactly. And we'll. Again, I can't talk about everything that Hagrid represents right now. Symbolically. We need to get a little further into the. The book.
- [44:32]
A
Sure.
- [44:33]
B
But he's a giant, so something. Something weird's going on. This is not ordinary stuff. And then once. So Hagrid, okay, so he's very, very slowly, just in bits and pieces. Don't you know who you are? Oh, what, what? Car wreck? What? You know, who got him? And just really kind of, again, this is how a detective novel starts. It drops you in and you're. You're kind of overwhelmed with all these details and you're like, what's going on? I don't know what's going on. You're not going to get the whole story of Harry Potter's parents until, like, the end of the whole series.
- [45:00]
A
And we're only a few. I mean, we're still less than, what, halfway through here. And Hagrid has only just been introduced, but so far he seems to be playing the role vis a vis Harry that the fairy godmother plays to Cinderella. You know, here, let me conveniently supply you with this or that talisman or this.
- [45:18]
B
So I'm glad that you brought that up, because I want to talk about what is this fairy tale world that Hagrid has come from and that now Harry is going to go into and he's going to go through a portal, right? He's right there in the ordinary world. The Muggles can't see it. Hagrid knocks on the door, magically opens and boom. Now he's in the fairy tale world. Okay? That's it. And Hagrid with his umbrella and his kind of bumbling bad magic. One of the reasons, I think, that American parents got very concerned about these books is that they didn't read them. And instead they heard it was a book about a boy who goes to school to learn how to be a witch. And they imagine like, that's some kind of realistic satanic book of spells and he's really being, you know, learning about witchcraft. And they missed that. This is quite obviously the fairy tale world. I had a really good friend back in the day and she had never read Harry Potter. She was an adult and she wouldn't let her kids read it. And she is somebody who, when she was younger, she was a practicing witch. And, you know, her story was she had converted to Christianity and she'd put all that behind her. But she had a lot of fears about a book that was teaching kids to be a witch because she knew witchcraft was real and dangerous and she felt like it had been destructive to her. Okay. And I was. That was very fair. And I listened to her. And I think sometimes there's a kind of a straw man set up that anybody who reads Harry Potter just must not take real witchcraft, you know, seriously. And this was not the case at all with this woman or me in this conversation. And I said to her, I think you'd find that Harry Potter is not real witchcraft. And that's all I said. Actually, she came to where I was giving a talk. That was it. And I. And I talked. I gave a talk about Harry Potter and something I said just made her think, I don't know, maybe I should. Maybe I should give these a try. So she told me that she started picking up the first book and she read it and that when she got to the magic part, she laughed and said, oh, this isn't magic. This isn't witchcraft. This is fairy tale stuff. This is not real witchcraft. And it's not. This is fairy tale stuff. And, well, she's a huge fan of the series now and reads it over and over and all her kids read it. But.
- [47:26]
A
So you've met an actual. Well, one time, retired witch Actually, more.
- [47:30]
B
Than one person has given me this story that they were a real rich and wouldn't read Harry Potter and then read Harry Potter and said, this isn't witchcraft, this is fairy tale magic.
- [47:37]
A
My first encounter with someone from that, that sort of world was a disappointing one. I worked with a woman. No, I worked with a young woman who was interested in the occult but didn't actually believe in. She was a member of. I don't remember, some kind of. Some kind of pagan club or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, but like, they didn't practice magic. All of them were basically, you know, kind of modern, you know, casually materialist people who. I think they, their main thing was they made druid cookie. They revived, like obscure baked recipes from, you know, Celtic Britain, things like that. So. But yeah, I was. It was that kind of, that kind of shallow hippieism that was enormous, enormously disappointing. The kind of person who would be at home at Burning Man, I think.
- [48:28]
B
Exactly, exactly. Now, you said a couple of things there that I'm going to pick up on later when we talk about the symbolism of the fairy tale world. But right now I just. So I started thinking about it right as I was going through this book. Like, what are the indications that this is Harry Potter entering a fairy tale world versus this is a real kid in the real world who went to a real school to learn how to be a real witch. And the first thing that comes to mind is there are magical creatures in this world. So here's, here's. I made a list of everything that was mentioned in the first seven chapters that we read. Giants, goblins, dragons, vampires and trolls. None of those are real, right?
- [49:10]
A
Trolls are.
- [49:11]
B
Okay.
- [49:11]
A
You've heard of the Internet, I think.
- [49:12]
B
Oh, okay. Ah, points.
- [49:14]
A
Yeah.
- [49:14]
B
Roasted. There you go.
- [49:15]
A
Actually, the goblins are very well chosen as the keepers of the bank because isn't that. Aren't goblins supposed to be greedy?
- [49:23]
B
I think they are. And they dig in the earth, don't they?
- [49:26]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [49:28]
B
And George McDonald's Goblin. Well, yes, that's right. George McDonald's goblins are mining underground. So that. No, that makes total sense. Yeah.
- [49:34]
A
So she knows they're not randomly chosen.
- [49:36]
B
That's right. That's right. But my point is this. Immediately we know this is not the real world.
- [49:41]
A
Yeah.
- [49:41]
B
This is a fairy tale world. There's going to be so many magical creatures. There's going to be magical plants. This is. They've got their own money, they've only got their own government, they've got. They've Got their own banking system, they've got their own newspaper.
- [49:52]
A
This is, they are a state within the state.
- [49:55]
B
Exactly, exactly. And she does a lot of political satire in here and this is why her fairy tale world has a government. But if somebody's saying fairy tale worlds don't have governments, I would again direct them to Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which has a hilarious scene with a governor and he's kind of Swiftian and he's very swift. Ian, just like, just like here, Jonathan Swift. And, and you know, and Louis does this great send up of Governor Goompas and you know, Caspian goes in there and kind of turns it all on its head and like Price, you know, turning over the, the tables in the temple. But you know that, that's part of the fairy tale world too. So this is, this is super, obviously the fairy tale world. And regarding the magic, I love that you said you picked up that Hagrid's a fairy godmother because the whole time when Hagrid's got his umbrella and he's doing like his little really kind of bad magic and he failed. Yeah, I kept thinking, all I kept thinking of was bippity boppity boo.
- [50:49]
A
Yeah, right.
- [50:50]
B
Like he's like the Disney fairy godmother and he's up there with bippity boppity boo. Like, this is not, this is not real witchcraft. This is, is fairy tale magic. And fairy tale magic has a symbolic purpose and a very good symbolic purpose as, as we'll see. And one other thing that really struck me in this section as Haggard was explaining, like, didn't you ever notice weird stuff happened around you? And that was when I realized Harry Potter is also a magical creature. He's a magical creature. He, he has.
- [51:19]
A
Not everyone sees it but him, Everyone.
- [51:20]
B
Sees it but him. And he, he has magic coming out of him without his control, without his knowledge. He's not doing it. This is just who he is. And he's going to school to learn how to sort of craft who he is. But it'll become more clear why magic would be the symbol if this is the journey of.
- [51:37]
A
So, yeah, he's this vessel of all of this potential untapped power. And you kind of see even from these beginning scenes, people sort of fighting over him.
- [51:47]
B
Right?
- [51:48]
A
Everyone takes an interest in him. Oh, Harry.
- [51:51]
B
It's Harry Potter.
- [51:52]
A
Yeah. I mean, he's an instant celebrity of sorts and he doesn't fully understand why, but he attracts the attentions of. I mean, yes, he has a sort of instant friendship with Ron, but then there's also less trustworthy characters that he might. Who might be taking a more criminal interest in him.
- [52:13]
B
Precisely. Precisely.
- [52:16]
A
Should we go to Draco?
- [52:18]
B
Well, yeah, I wanted to get to there in actually just a second. But yeah, no, I guess we can go there. I want to see if there was something else I wanted to say. Yeah, yeah, He's. He's a born wizard. Let's go ahead and talk about some of the other characters. I was going to talk more about what it means that this soul at the beginning of the book has this magical power. But we'll. We'll get it. We'll get with that later, I think. All right, so I want you to read the chapter name, Diagon Alley. I want you to read it for me. Just say. Just say them together. No, the title of the chapter. Just say that word.
- [52:47]
A
Diagon Alley.
- [52:48]
B
Say it faster.
- [52:49]
A
Diagon Alley.
- [52:50]
B
Say it again.
- [52:51]
A
Diagon Alley. What am I saying?
- [52:54]
B
Diagonally.
- [52:56]
A
Oh, okay.
- [52:57]
B
So she has a lot of oral pawns, and I didn't catch it till the Stephen Fry version because I'm saying it like Americans. Diagon Alley. But he says Diagon. Diagon Alley. So it's Diagon Alley diagonally. So not only is it another world, it's a slanted sideways otherworld, and that's. That's a very important symbol as well. So she has a number of oral puns to want to be on Alice.
- [53:23]
A
Through the Looking Glass because there is.
- [53:26]
B
A direct Lewis Carroll reference in this book. I was you kidding? Ahead of me. When I want to talk about the names, I will.
- [53:32]
A
And again, also, Alice is kind of the flattest character, I would suppose, in. Well, no, it's just. It's just an obvious observation. She's like the one. Oh, and maybe it's a. Lewis says. Lewis is somewhere that when you're describing a mad world or a strange world, you kind of have to describe it. You have to have some kind of center of regularity. An Alice or a Harry or.
- [53:57]
B
More normal than everybody else. Yeah, more plain. More flat. So that the contrast is greater. Right, exactly. So I was noticing all of the Alice in Wonderland stuff, and I was noticing in particular that his journey to Hogwarts was described as a descent. They go down with Hagrid. They go down, down, down. And she even says they're going deep, deep underground. So all that Alice descending into Wonderland. And then he gets there and it's like, Wonderland. And he's like, is that guy mad? Is Dumbledore mad? And very much the Alice in Wonderland stuff in a Later book one of the characters will be described as believing ten crazy things before noon. Ten impossible things before noon, which is a line from Alice in Wonderland. But how's this? When he meets the ghost, Sir Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington. The first time the word mimsy was ever used was. Do you know, could you catch the reference? Yes, the Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. So there's just, there's a ton of Lewis Carroll elements here that she's playing with too. And I just hear everybody in the audience going, what? Alice in Wonderland, too? Oh, there's going to be so much everything. It's going to be so good. All right, so let's talk about some of these characters. So Draco's the first one he meets. And because the names are so, so symbolic, why don't you tell our listeners what Draco means?
- [55:16]
A
Well, okay, obviously it's cognate with dragon. And here's something in Greek from where we get Draco, Dragon. Dragon and snake. There's only one word for both, and.
- [55:31]
B
Draco, and he's a snake who's gotten into Slytherin.
- [55:33]
A
Yes. And historically There was in 6th century Athens a tyrant named Draco who radically recrafted their law code so that every crime was punished by death. So hence the word Draconian. One of my. Actually in this, I once had a very, very clever student, but he believes that Draconian and Dracula. That the word Draconian meant having to do with Dracula. And I was. And I told him several times that the words are not. No, that's not what it means. But eventually he decided that this annoyed me and he was correct. So he would, he would start describing things as Draconian that could not plausibly. So he would say, Mr. Banks, do you think you should have some color in your room, like in your, in your office? It seems rather Draconian, by which he means Dracula, Draculaan, Draculian or Dracula esque. I, I don't know.
- [56:31]
B
Yeah, yeah. All right, so we've got, we've got Draco. Now, she loves to use Latin words. So remember, if the characters are visible souls, if they are wearing their insides on the outsides, then they represent the journey. So every man is on his journey of the soul to God. And so there will be things, things and people and magical creatures that will help him along the way. And then there will be obstacles. And clearly the first obstacle he is meeting is this character. And she loves to use Latin to play with that. So, Mr. My husband, the classicist what does malfoy mean in Latin?
- [57:07]
A
Actually, it would be. I think it's a French bad faith.
- [57:10]
B
Bad faith.
- [57:10]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [57:11]
B
So he's, he's dragon Bad faith it is.
- [57:14]
A
Remind me, the three Saracens in the Faerie Queen.
- [57:18]
B
Oh, Sansloy, Sans Foy and Sans Joy.
- [57:21]
A
So yes, Sans Foy would be faithless. Yeah. So similar, I guess.
- [57:25]
B
No, it is. You're. Oh, man. That means it's a fairy queen reference. Okay, I did not catch that. That is really good. That is really good. And the thing about. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself. But in a romance like the Fairy Queen, what you find out symbolically is every, every character or monster that the main character is facing and has to overcome is really just some version of.
- [57:45]
A
Himself or something evil that he finds tempting him within himself.
- [57:50]
B
Exactly. So the thing about Draco, when we first meet him and, and, and someone very astutely pointed this out that the. Here's where the movie will mess you up if you have the movie visuals in your head, because they chose actors who actually do not look like their physical descriptions in the book. And they pointed out that Dudley has blonde hair and Draco has blonde hair. And so Dudley and Draco represent the same thing. And each of them have a gang of three who are bullying Harry.
- [58:20]
A
Oh, that's really good.
- [58:21]
B
That is really good. So what you see here and this, this happens very often. Okay, so when you have these other world stories, when the character moves away from the ordinary world into the fairy world, typically there's going to be a double in the fairy world of whatever obstacle there was. So his obstacles in the real world are the surrogate mom and dad who are abusive to him, and Dudley's bullying him with his two compadres. The first thing he does is meet this guy who's Dudley, and then on the train he's going to meet him with his two compadres. And so this is, this is the.
- [58:54]
A
They're both spoiled rich kids.
- [58:55]
B
They're both spoiled rich kids. And, and they function in the same way. So we'll have to see what's going to happen, what's going to happen there. But a lot of times what you see is the characters are working out their real life struggles in the fairy world. Now, you know, don't rush ahead here because this is book one and Harry is just starting the journey. So don't expect to see that his real world struggles, his ordinary struggles are going to be resolved at the end of book one. They're going to be resolved at the end of book seven. So he's. He's just. He's just starting. I think she does a really good job of. Of creating this whimsical alternative world that's just full of wonder. And also very funny. It is the book list and the authors of the book list struck me as really funny this time. Time. Which they had. They had. I had missed that.
- [59:46]
A
And oddly knowledgeable too. I.
- [59:49]
B
He's very. Oh, go. Go right ahead.
- [59:51]
A
Well, I mean, she. She mentions. Oh, there are little tips of. The tips of the hand or the wand to Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, who were real, what, Late medieval. Early modern alchemists. Alchemists, polymaths. And Paracelsus is one of the. One of the scientists and occultists also scientism and occultism and the Renaissance went hand in hand. That Victor Frankenstein reads.
- [60:27]
B
Yeah, no, yeah, that Victor Frankenstein. That's also a reference in that hideous strength, C.S. lewis. He references all these same people. Occultist doesn't mean Satanist. It just means secret knowledge.
- [60:37]
A
Sure, yeah, yeah.
- [60:38]
B
We gotta define our terms. No, no, I think we're saying something wrong. Some other things I pointed out here in the notes in my book about how we know that this is a fairy tale world. I mean, even his book list is like, he needs dragon hide gloves. Like, that's not a thing. This is a fairy tale world. He finds out he's rich too. This is so Dickensian. Right. The orphan finds out he's secretly rich. So the first thing he does is buy all the candy when he gets in the train. Which is a great touch. But even the food. The food is different. The candy is different. Everything's different.
- [61:14]
A
Yeah, the. The beans of every flavor, including the repulsive ones.
- [61:18]
B
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So she even says. Okay, page 77. When he meets Draco, Harry was strongly reminded of Dudley, so she makes it plain. This is. This is going to be the fairy tale world of Dudley. We also see immediately this guy is representing class snobbery.
- [61:37]
A
And there's a lot of that in the traditional school story.
- [61:40]
B
Exactly, exactly. So this is going to be the school bully who is a snob and who makes a big deal about not wanting to mix with Muggles, but also not wanting to mix with the wrong kinds of wizarding families.
- [61:50]
A
The Weasleys, for instance.
- [61:52]
B
Yes, and we'll get to them in just a second. But he's clearly. He's not interested in Harry until he knows he's Harry. Then he's. Then he's somebody to know and he should. He should come on over to their side. All right. Yes. More fairy tale creatures. The wands are made of unicorn hairs, phoenix tail feathers and the heartstrings of dragons. This. Okay, this, this is not real. This is not real. I mean, I would like to believe unicorns and phoenixes and dragons are wheels. So we've also been having some hints along the way that there is some. Something going on with Harry. And you know who we've got like. Oh, very curious. You have the same kind of wand, you have a twin wand with him. So he's got a scar on his head and a twin wand. So she's just dangling these little bits out there. We'll talk about what Voldemort's name means later. So this was a great catch here. I read this in a book, but I also saw someone in our Facebook group made the same connection. He. Harry names his owl Hedwig and Saint Hedwig was the patron saint of orphans.
- [63:02]
A
Ah, gosh, right.
- [63:04]
B
She's so good.
- [63:05]
A
I didn't know that. I knew there was a Saint Hedwig but I, I did not know that about her patronage.
- [63:10]
B
She's amazing. She's amazing. So then we have this really funny scene with the platform at nine and three quarters. So there's. There's a portal here that's invisible to everybody.
- [63:21]
A
I thought it was kind of C.S. lewis. Very, very. I mean through the wardrobe.
- [63:26]
B
Yeah, very, very. Entirely that there's. And even the fact that it's like an in between. It's in between 9 and 10. This is what this is that whole Celtic thing that there's this in between and then there's this other world and I mean she's just killing it. She. I just love her so much. We also meet some of the stock characters that I mentioned last time we would see because it's a school story. So now we have the practical joking twins, Fred and George Weasley. And he makes it through the portal and instantly he's in a fairy world. There it is. We meet. We meet Neville and the first thing we know about him is he's lost his toad and he seems just as lost as everybody else. So I guess he's going to be the stock character of the Misfit Kid.
- [64:14]
A
I was thinking, I mean this, this book came out in 1997. Do you think she's giving some of her characters names more deliberately English than. Are there still Nevilles? I'm thinking like, are there Neville's my age in England?
- [64:29]
B
It does sound like an old fashioned.
- [64:31]
A
Well, I was thinking like you think Neville Chamberlain. You would think that there would never be another Neville after Neville Chamberlain.
- [64:36]
B
He's come from an old family and he's raised by his grandmother.
- [64:39]
A
Yeah, maybe that's, maybe that's what it is. It's like Reginald or one of those other. Exactly, yeah.
- [64:46]
B
Cecil.
- [64:47]
A
Cecil Archibald.
- [64:49]
B
Arch Archibald. Well, no, we got, we got the new prince. The prince, yes. The Harry formerly known as Prince. His son is Archibald.
- [64:56]
A
Oh, okay.
- [64:58]
B
Named after Archibald Montepul.
- [64:59]
A
I was gonna keep that one running a bit more.
- [65:01]
B
Oh, well, you know, there's always room for that. We also meet the stock character of the Prefect. Okay. And so we meet the Weasleys. All right, so it's very interesting to me that he goes from this really kind of anti. Family that he grew up in. And then he sees the Weasleys where this, this is a mother who is mothering her children, who's making them sandwiches and who's wiping Ron's nose and who's getting where they need to be.
- [65:28]
A
And poor Ron, you feel sorry for him from page one. Seriously.
- [65:32]
B
The youngest of all the. The BO feels like, you know, he can never live up to his brother's reputations. And he says, oh, the Weasleys are clearly one of those old wizarding families the Pale Boy and Diagon Alley had talked about.
- [65:46]
A
And you do notice sort of the ethic of a career open to talents here at, at Hogwarts. Because I mean, there are the old sort of elite wizarding families like the Maloys, but then there are people who come from no lineal, long lineal descent of magicians or witches or wizards at all. Their parents were Muggles and all of a sudden they had this gift that showed up in them but nobody else.
- [66:12]
B
Right. And later on.
- [66:13]
A
So it's kind of unpredictable.
- [66:15]
B
It is unpredictable because later on you're going to find out that sometimes wizarding families give birth to kids who don't have magic. So despite the fear that 90s evangelicals had that this was a book that taught kids how to be witches, it is very clear you cannot learn to be a witch. That there, there are wizarding families who have kids. And you'll find out in the book, it's extremely shameful who, who can't do magic. And some ordinary families have kids. So there's, there's something going on. These, this, this witcher, witch wizarding thing. This is, this is something symbolic that some people are born with and some people are not. All right, then we have the. I just. All the candy. It's all just so delightful and such a wonder filled world here. But yeah, he gets the trading card of Albus Dumbledore and here's what it says on the back. Oh, have they yet said his full name?
- [67:07]
A
No, yeah, we've seen Albus Dumbledore.
- [67:09]
B
No, no, but he has like four middle names and they're all symbolic, so I won't say what they are if we haven't gotten to that yet. All right. Considered by many the greatest wizard of modern times, Dumbledore is particularly famous for his defeat of of the dark Wizard Grindelwald in 1945 for discovery of the 12 uses of dragon blood and his work on alchemy. With his partner Nicholas Flamel, Professor Dumbledore enjoys chamber music and tinpin bowling. All right. And of course we find out that people don't stay in their pictures and be like, what in the mobile world they stay, how boring. And you know, again, the, the contrast between Ron and Harry and their conversations show us that we are in a different world. And then Ron, you know, he rambles off a bunch of names of stuff. He has. I've got Dumbledore, I've got Morgana, I've got Albert Brunian, I've got Cersei from, from the Odyssey, I've got Procellus, I've got Merlin. So Morgana and Merlin, that is two direct King Arthur references. There have actually been a bunch of King Arthur references, but I won't bring them up yet because they will be spoilers if I explain them now. But King Arthur as a medieval questing romance story that's going to be running all the way through this thing.
- [68:15]
A
I, I do not know Italian, but the, the name Morgana, I believe in Italian simply means a fairy.
- [68:24]
B
And is it Morgana le Fay?
- [68:27]
A
Yeah, Morgana le Fay that we're referring to here.
- [68:29]
B
But yeah, yeah, no, exactly, exactly, exactly. All right, so on this one page we have three references to alchemy. And alchemy is connected to the title, the Philosopher's Stone. And I can't explain that now because it will be a spoiler. But I will say this.
- [68:46]
A
Yes.
- [68:47]
B
When J.K. rowling, as I said, she spent five years plotting out these, this series before she ever wrote book one. And so the reason why you can get to book seven and say, holy cow, everything in book seven is in book one is because this woman planned it all out. She knew exactly what. She's just a master of structure. I think she is, I'm going to say it, the greatest living author of structure. Just like, holy cow, the way she structures it, it's just fantastic. It's the same with her detective stories. She needs to. I know I have a joke that I only read dead authors, but, J.K. rowling, stay alive, please, for a very, very, very long time, because I need much more books from you. I'm not done with your detective series yet, so just keep on going. But. But one of the things she said when she was sitting down to, to work on this was she said that she needed something that would be sort of the interior logic of all of the books, something that would make it make sense. Sense again, like CS Lewis says, you know, the more fanciful that you're setting in your other world, the more that you better have some concrete things to kind of pull it together. Otherwise it becomes sort of a nonsensical, irrational world. And so she chose to use alchemy as the thing that holds them all together. So there's got a lot of alchemy references, and alchemy is something that is deeply misunderstood by moderns, and we think that it was just a bunch of idiots trying to turn lead into gold. But here's all I'll say about it. Now, alchemy actually was always understood in the Middle Ages as a spiritual pursuit and a spiritually symbolic pursuit. So we'll, we'll get to more about that later. All right, so we've got Ron. We've also got Hermione. Now tell me your first impressions of Hermione. So she bursts onto the scene here and what do you just tell me what you think.
- [70:31]
A
Annoying. Know it all.
- [70:33]
B
Perfect. Annoying. Know it all. Okay, annoying. No, we'll just leave it as that and we'll see where this goes. Because, I mean, I can.
- [70:41]
A
I can never decide. I mean, I've been a teacher for a long time, but I. I can never decide which sex is more annoying at that age when they become know it alls, boys or girls. It's neck and neck.
- [70:51]
B
There's a lot to go around.
- [70:52]
A
Yeah.
- [70:52]
B
A lot of annoyance to go around.
- [70:54]
A
Yeah.
- [70:55]
B
But it's funny because the. I think the word Hermione has become synonymous with all of my students through the year of that, of that student, the one who always raises their hand. They'll even laugh, almost. Angel, I'm being Hermione. I've got my hand up and I really want to. Really want to share something. So again, we. They have a conversation about, you know, what do you. What do your brothers do, Ron? And again, we find out there's. There's Jobs. And, oh, Charlie's in Romania studying dragons. Bill's in Africa doing something for Green Gods. So again, there are no dragons. I hate to break it to our people who've been scared of Harry Potter. This, that's a fairy tale creature. And he just casually says is somebody tried to rob a high security vault in Green Gods. As you said. The Un. Unbreakable. The Un. Unbreakable.
- [71:36]
A
You mentioned girl students of yours who said, I'm being Hermione. It seems that that's another way in which this book, in a small way, has sort of changed society because you do meet Hermiones now born from like the late 90s onward. And I think basically because of this character. So, yeah, fashions and names.
- [71:56]
B
Exactly. Fashions and names. And Harry is feeling a little bit disoriented, but he said he supposed this was all part of entering the magical world. So again, she's emphasizing he's. He's entered another world. All right? Then they have a conversation about Quidditch. And as we said last time, a sport is always going to be a big part of this stuff.
- [72:15]
A
And then in comes usually rugby.
- [72:18]
B
Yeah. But here it's her made up. Of course it's gonna be a made up magical sport, Quidditch. So in comes the bullies. And here's where we see that there's some class snobbery. Okay. Think my name's funny, do you? No need to ask who you are. My father told me all the Weasleys have red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford. All right, what does that obviously make you think of?
- [72:43]
A
Every mean kid in any English novel ever?
- [72:47]
B
Pretty much, yeah. And shout out to Naomi on our Patreon, she's gonna squeal because I did so much reading on Harry Potter. Good. Good Lord.
- [72:56]
A
I don't.
- [72:57]
B
I've done a lot. I'll just put it at that. And then she drops this bomb on me in the spoilers thread and I thought, I never thought of that. And no one else has. And she says the Weasleys are Irish.
- [73:08]
A
Oh, right. Oh, yes. Red hair and too many children. Yeah.
- [73:12]
B
Yes.
- [73:12]
A
Gosh.
- [73:13]
B
Genius. And. And so her whole theory, again, you can read Naomi's whole theory over on our spoiler thread in our. In our Patreon forum. But seriously, for $5, you get over there and read all that good stuff. It's the best place on the Internet to talk about Harry Potter right now. Now. But she thinks J.K. rowling is tapping into that whole British literary tradition of that class Snobbery against the Irish. I mean, Jonathan Swift writes about that. I mean, that's, that's definitely a thing. So the Weasleys are not the right kind of old wizarding family because, you know, they're Irish. That was, that was fantastic. That, that was a whole new, whole new thing. Of course, he refers to the Weasleys and Hagrid like Riff raff. So we've got all of that. After he leaves, Ron informs us that the Malfoy family had been followers of.
- [74:01]
A
You know who, and not necessarily with the excuse of having been hypnotized.
- [74:06]
B
Right, that, that's what they said.
- [74:08]
A
Maybe, but there's something shady about that.
- [74:10]
B
Exactly. So we're very slowly starting to get a sense that. Of what happened before Harry Potter's, you know, parents died. What was going on there, but knowledge. And then the chapter ends with them pulling up to a castle and then all this Descent language. Here, I'll show you what I was meaning about thinking like, hey, this is, this is kind of an Alice in Wonderland, you're falling down the rabbit holes kind of thing. So they're in the boats and they're going across. Heads down, yelled Hagrid as the first boats reached the cliff. They all bent their heads and the little boats carried them through a curtain of ivy that hit a wide opening in the cliff face. That, by the way, is so Celtic. The other world is often in Celtic stories behind a rock or waterfall. And when I started paying attention to that, I noticed how many times in each of the books she describes someone going through water. Art feels like water, but she, she totally knows water is very often the portal. I mean, Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Red water waters the portal. They fall into a painting of an ocean. They all bent their heads and the little boats carried them through a curtain of ivy that hit a wide opening in the cliff face. They were carried along a dark tunnel which seemed to be taking them right underneath the castle until they reached a kind of underground harbor. So this was a descent. They went down and then he knocks three times on the door. This is serious fairy tale stuff. All right, now we get to the Sorting Hat. So we, we find out about the four houses. Again. This is part of the boarding school tradition that there's going to be houses and a house competition. And we, we see that the houses have sort of a history. And Harry doesn't really know, and he doesn't even really know what he wants to be in, but he doesn't want to be in Slytherin because That's where Malfoy is. And when the hat is sorting them, it doesn't really know where to put Harry. And Harry chooses not to be slithered. Then we have a lot more magical stuff, right? We have. I mean, this is the magic I wish I had, but this is Beauty and the Beast, right? That's. The food appears, the food disappears. Dumbledore stands up and says, basically, bibbidi bobidi boo. And Harry's like, is he mad? Percy says, of course he's mad. And you know, it is very Alice in Wonderland. It absolutely is. And then we meet the ghosts. So again, you know, we've got all of these elements. And this is where I want to bring in another genre that she's playing with that I mentioned last time. So. So as soon as we go into a castle, we know that now she's pulling in from the Gothic tradition. And this is a tradition. I can't. Looking at the time here, I can't give you my whole talk on the Gothic novel. I will say this. Go check out the series we did on Dracula. That's going to be everything you want to know about the Gothic tradition. How it's always been understood symbolically, how those stories are also a journey of the soul to God to be understood highly symbolically. And you know, a lot of people said that series just knocked their socks off and all of a sudden they understood what it meant to read not like a modern, but to read like a pre modern. But she's tapping into all of that. So we've got castles and dungeons and turrets and ghosts and lots of creepy stuff and a creepy, weird teacher, Severus Snape, and all these kind of things. And the Gothic tradition, like I said, highly symbolic, but very much tied to the idea that the Gothic novel is an attempt to help us recover our imagination. That because of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, we've lost our imagination, we've lost our wonder. And the Gothic novel is trying to, to recover that for us. And I think that's definitely something that she's got going on here. Okay, you, you were going to say a bit about the Latin at the end. So the. So that the feast ends and they're being taken up to their room. So now we know Harry is part of Gryffindor and a griffin, of course, is another magical creature. And we can. I'll pull out my medieval bestiary next time. We'll talk about what a griffin is. But that, that's also highly symbolic. But again, I, I don't want to explain all the symbols just now, because there'll be spoilers, but they have to give a password to the. To the fat lady in the portrait. And she says.
- [78:15]
A
Or they say kaput, Draconis, which is dragon's head.
- [78:19]
B
Dragon's head. Okay, dragon's head. The head of the dragon. So we'll just leave that there, like. Okay. Interesting, interesting. So there's one more thing I want to say about the quest story and how it works so that we can be thinking about this as we go through the next set of chapters. I feel like we've set you up pretty good on things to look for. Look for symbolic names, look for the characters being visible souls and representing some aid of the soul in its journey to God or some obstacle to the soul in the journey to God. The other thing to remember is that when you have a quest, there's some goal at the end, some big thing. And again, I said the way she's doing it with Harry Potter, he doesn't know yet what his quest is because his quest is so tied to his identity, so slow, things will have to be revealed to him. We also know from the schoolboy story that there's usually some crime or mystery that has to be solved and the kids get together to solve it. So that will be part of his quest to solve whatever the mystery is. But I think sometimes we're tempted to think that there's the quest at the end and these sort of like random adventures before you get to the big quest. What you should remember about a questing story is that the. The adventures that lead on the way to the quest are not random. They're actually a microcosm of the final quest. And once you get good at spotting this, it's super fun and just brings all kind of new layers. So on one level, the hero, as he's on this journey, will have miniature quests along the way. And he usually will learn something important or be given something important that when he gets to the final quest, he needs some piece of information or he grows a little more courageous or, you know, maybe he gets an item which will help him at the end. So it's not random in that sense. But usually also the miniature quests are microcosms. Like, they're a tiny version of that, and you can identify the parts. And. And so when you get to the last quest, you should be able to look back and see how miniature quest along the way led to the big quest. So that's how quest story works. What she's doing here, that's so Fascinating is she is not only setting up each individual book like that, she's setting up the entire series like that. So book one ends up being a microcosm of the whole quest at the end of book seven. And each of the books along the way he's learned something important that he needs to be able to fulfill the quest in book seven. Now when these books first came out, of course I felt the same way. I wouldn't trust just a first time author that I knew nothing about. I wouldn't read the first book and say, oh, I bet six books from now she's going to really develop this. But they're done now we have the whole thing, we know that she did it and now we can trust it as we go through it that, that she has a plan. One of the books I read about the phenomenon of Harry Potter was how the first two books, the readers were like, oh, this is fun and these are cute. And then when it was got to, when they got to book three, which is the first one that's long, that's when they all started saying, wait, she has a plan. These all fit together. She has a plan. And people got really excited and they would read the books and reread and reread to learn how to put it all together. And I'll have some thoughts later about what happens to you as a reader when you start to realize there's a plan by the author and there are layers and it changes the way you read. It changes what you look, look for. And we'll talk more about that as we go. All right. I'm looking over my notes to see if I missed anything. Anything else you want to say?
- [81:54]
A
You've been using this phrase, the journey of the soul to God to describe the romance. And it reminded me of something I've read in different forms from a different a number of writers. I'm thinking of the late Martin Amos and more recently James Matthew Wilson. And I think both of them would agree that the novel is kind of descended from the romance. Oh, I know that they both make the point though that it's the, the one desacralized form of literary expression. The one, the one form of literary expression that is kind of, from the get go, secular. By secular I don't mean anti religious, but just overtly not shot through with spiritual presences.
- [82:51]
B
Right?
- [82:51]
A
Because I mean you have Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones and Pride and Prejudice and all that kind of thing. So maybe the, could you say that the difference between the romance and the novel, if the Romance is the journey of the soul to God. Maybe the. The novel is just the journey of the soul in its most basic form.
- [83:07]
B
Okay, I have a lot of thoughts about that, because Northrop Fry talks about that. Do tell, do tell.
- [83:11]
A
Somehow I thought you were going to bring him in.
- [83:13]
B
Well, of course.
- [83:13]
A
Yeah.
- [83:14]
B
So when you're talking about things like Jane Austen, for example, he calls those displaced romances, meaning they're romances that are pulled from one place, the fairy world, and put into this place, the realistic world. And so what I think Jane Austen does there is. She says, yes, there are knights on quest and there are dragons, but dragons don't look like dragons in this world. Dragons look like handsome, charming young men and maidens still need to be rescued. And I think that underneath the surface, and it's just right below the surface, are all those. All those elements. And you actually do see the characters on a journey in. In a. Less. Well, to use north and Fry's expression in a more displaced way.
- [83:56]
A
Okay, yeah.
- [83:57]
B
And then that's the novel through the 19th century. When you get to the 20th century, you do see a change, and the modern novel becomes much more deliberately disconnected to the romance tradition, and it becomes much more hyperfocused just on this world. This world is the only real world, you know, and that's why there's such a. Like, a focus on psychology. Like, we. There is no transcendent reality. We're. The things that are happening to our life are not teaching us spiritual lessons that will then lead us to God. It's just, you know, a bunch of crappy stuff happens to you, and then you die. Okay.
- [84:31]
A
I would say that goes back into the 19th century.
- [84:33]
B
Well, it does.
- [84:34]
A
Like Flaubert, certainly.
- [84:36]
B
Very, very generally, any. Anytime you have to talk like this, I'm speaking very, very broad.
- [84:40]
A
I gotcha.
- [84:41]
B
But I would agree. Late 19th century, early 20th century. I would agree. Certainly after the world wars, we see more of this. But, yes, I would agree with you.
- [84:47]
A
Theo Bloom wanders around for a day in Dublin and comes back and nothing, learn nothing.
- [84:52]
B
That's right. And you actually see a lot of parodies of the romance. Alice in Wonderland is a parody. So there are parodies which are doing it to sort of make a. A spiritual point. And then there are parodies that are. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself, so I'll just leave it at that. Sometimes there are parodies of romance, but right now, Dr. Jason back, I could.
- [85:12]
A
Take up that ball and run with it.
- [85:13]
B
Okay, go ahead.
- [85:14]
A
Well, I. So I mentioned Gustave Flair he has a story unquer sample, a simple heart where you have. It's the story of this lower class French woman who's deeply religious. She, oh, one day she is. And it's very much about her spiritual development. And this is kind of a mean, almost sadistic twist at the end. And she at some point in her life had been staring at the stained glass window representation of the Holy Spirit Spirit and thought that it kind of looked like a parrot. And then on her deathbed years later, she imagines a parrot coming down to receive her soul into heaven. But the idea is that this is just a, you know, a, you know, sort of scrambled memory of, you know, many years ago and she's dying. And as the synapses in her brain are firing, she imagines the Holy Ghost as a parrot. So sort of a, a, a parody of a story.
- [86:17]
B
It has parody elements. Alice in Wonderland is a full length parody that has in the western tradition, in Eastern literature. You see much, much more examples of full length parodies in the west, almost none. Alice in Wonderland is one of the few full length parodies. Most of what we have in the west has parody episodes in it. Like what you're talking about, what you're describing there with Flaubert. Because now you've opened the floodgates and I'm going to have to go full story structure on you now. And what you see into the 20th century, Northrop fry says, now we have entered the ironic mode. So we were in the romance very much. Right, okay. So we were in the romance mode. Which means even the novels were still in that romance mode. They were, they were still giving us displaced romances. Right? You still have, you know, somebody on a quest and has to defeat the bad guy and rescue the girl. When you enter the ironic mode, they are deliberately writing an anti romance. So what you have there is modern stories saying, there we are not on a journey to God, our life is meaningless. We're atoms bebopping around in the universe. Everything's random.
- [87:21]
A
We're Emma Bovary pointlessly committing adultery and.
- [87:24]
B
The French countryside or pointlessly committing suicide in other 20th century books. Okay? And the best you can hope is that as you die, the synopsis of your brain will delude you into thinking.
- [87:34]
A
You'Re going to have your life meant something.
- [87:36]
B
Yes, but you're like, that's right, your life means nothing thing. So that's the ironic mode. And those are deliberate anti romances. We have been so, so saturated in that if, if you, the listener, have ever thought to yourself, oh, all that 20th century literature. It's so depressing. Correct. Because they are anti romances. They are one saying your life has no meaning. You are not on a journey of the soul. You. You're learning nothing. And. And at the end of those stories, the main character has very deliberately learned nothing, gained no spiritual value. They're just. They. They came from dirt. They're back in the dirt into the story. You know, you live, you breathe, you die at the end. And they are very depressing because.
- [88:12]
A
Scarcely different from an insect.
- [88:14]
B
Exactly. So one of.
- [88:15]
A
Or maybe literally, like Cough coast, right?
- [88:17]
B
Yeah, it's a mad world. And maybe you're just a roach, but what Fry says is you can only spend so much time in the ironic mode, or you just basically go insane. Which culturally we have come to that point. And he says what will happen is that you will curve back around and you will go back into the romance. And I think that's why we see the rise of the fantasy genre, because fantasies are romances. And we tugged out that ironic mode. We drove ourselves crazy with thinking we live in these meaningless lives. And then the stories that we reach for, the stories that sell more than any other stories right now is fantasy. It's the fantasy genre, it's the superhero genre. And in those worlds, there is a very clear moral black and white because everything's symbolic. You don't have to spend any time in a superhero movie wondering who the bad guy is. He tells you at the beginning, he's the bad. At the end he's the bad guy and he's dead. Right? That's how they work. And so that's what I think. I think the fantasy genre has made such a comeback because we are once again being shown in fantasy. It's a displaced romance, okay? But because it's in other world, it's not this world, but you. You still are able to enter the story in which a person's life has meaning. In the midst of the 90s, with all the issue books and the problem books, there was still this underlying assumption that the only thing that is real is the materialist world. It's this world. That's all there is. And you're going to live, and you're going to have some cafeteria drama at school, and then you're gonna die. And that's it. It doesn't mean anything. And so Harry Potter bursts on the scene and there's a world full of wonder. There's a world in which what is real is not just what you see. There are things that you can't see that are real. And over seven books, she shows kids that Harry Potter's life has meaning, that he starts off with nothing. He's abused, he's unloved, he's neglected. And over seven books, you, the reader, discover his life, my life, our lives have meaning. And that meaning is not found in this realm. It is found in another realm. And that's how romances work.
- [90:35]
A
All right, because on privet drive, I mean, their life can have no meaning still. Right? The Dursleys can. We can find out that their lives meant nothing. We can derive that satisfaction. I'm hoping. I don't know, but I'm hoping.
- [90:46]
B
Think what we're seeing in this book is that they actually are aware of this other world, and they are. They are refusing it. They are blinding themselves. They are choosing the world of drills over the world of wonder and imagination and transcendent reality. Absolutely. All right, well, you ended up getting a miniature Northrop fry lecture there, guys. And inevitably, what happens is I'm going to get tagged in a million Facebook quotes saying, what books can I read to explain this? Yeah, you don't want to know the answer to that, because I have spent my career, 30 years reading these books, and this is me synthesizing really difficult academic books into something that you can understand. There is no dummy's guide to this. And I. People always ask, however, I can give you some tips, and the biggest one would be take my how to Read Fairy Tales mini class. It's over 20 hours of material, and it is a crash course in how to read like this. How to understand the stories of the journey of the soul to God, how to understand the characters are symbolic and what they mean. And I know it sounds like, oh, she's just out here shilling your pro. Her. Her product, but go ask about it on the Facebook group. People there will tell you this really is the. The dummy's guide to all of this. The one that you want to go buy this class, is it. This is me synthesizing 30 years of knowledge about how these stories work. And. And, yeah, once you take the class, you'll understand. You'll understand all these things that I'm talking about. All right, well, next time, join us to cover the next section of chapters. We're going to read chapters eight through 12. So we'll be fully in this fairy tale world. And, yeah, we'll be able to talk a little bit more about what these things symbolize as we get further on. And just a reminder that this podcast is basically the first class free of a Harry Potter mini class I'm going to be teaching in August. And you can find out about that as well as find my fairy tale class@houseofhumaneletters.com Click on the mini class webinar tab and you can find links to both the Harry Potter class and the fairy tale class. And one more thing. Our Patreon forum, man, that is where the conversation is. We've got two different channels set up. We got a no spoilers channel and we've got a spoilers channel. And that is, I think, the hottest conversation on the Internet right now. For $5 a month you can join that conversation or just do one month. Just spend $5 talk for one month and then go away. But yeah, you're gonna really enjoy that. And you can find out about that@patreon.com backslash theliterarylife. So stick around to the end. Mr. Banks will have a special poem for you. I hope you're enjoying this series. I'm having a ball. One of the biggest treats for me is to how many people I heard from that their whole family is reading the book together. And then the whole family is listening to the podcast and the kids are shouting out connections as I'm talking. And that's the way it should be. I love it. What we're seeing is what Northrop Fry is saying, that when you understand that stories connect to other stories, the whole world of stories expands, expands, expands and becomes both a world you enter into and one that enters into you. So thanks for joining us and until next time, keep crafting your literary life, because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy at morning time for Mom. Join the conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. And check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.
- [94:47]
A
Walking Away by Cecil Day Lewis. It is 18 years ago, almost to the day, A sunny day with leaves just turning the touch lines new ruled since I watched you play your first game of football. Then like a satellite wrenched from its orbit go drifting away behind a scatter of boys. I can see you walking away from me towards the school with the pathos of a half fledged thing set, set free into a wilderness, the gate of one who finds no path where the path should be. That hesitant figure eddying away like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem has something I never quite grasp to convey about nature's give and take, the small, the scorching ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay. I have had worse partings, but none that so gnaws at my mind. Still, perhaps it is roughly saying what God alone could perfectly show, how selfhood begins with the walking away and love is proved in the letting go.