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The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 281: “Best of” – “Harry Potter” Book 1, Ch. 8-12
01:51:18
Welcome back to The Literary Life podcast and our series on J. K. Rowling’s . After sharing some thoughts on detective fiction as it relates to Rowling, our hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks discuss chapters 8-12. Some of the ideas they...
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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 we're going to continue with our series on Harry Potter, book one and cover chapters eight through 12. Welcome back. I'm Angelina Stanford, and with me, as always, is my partner in crime, Thomas Banks. Thomas Banks, yes. And if you've been with the podcast a while, you know that this is a running joke that I call him the mysterious Mr. Banks, but he will not introduce himself that way. And so since Cindy's been on her sabbatical, he insists on becoming the increasingly less mysterious Mr. Banks.
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A
Yeah, well, I mean, I can't introduce myself as the Mysterious. I guess I was raised to believe that one shouldn't give oneself epithets.
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B
That's what I'm.
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A
Other people. Yeah.
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B
I am the Nicknaming queen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yet you told me. Okay, so I mentioned this on our student forum and the students, I want you to know, very strong, strongly objected. But you told me that you have had students before who called you Professor Snake.
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A
That's true. I didn't mind. It was actually. I mean, I don't think they meant it as a compliment, but I was fine with it.
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B
I assured everyone that you wash your hair.
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A
Even having a vestigial sort of connection with any character played by Alan Rickman is kind of okay with me.
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B
Okay, well, no, yeah, I have to agree with you there. Alan Rickman definitely made Snape a lot cooler.
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A
Oh, yeah, sure, sure. Like any movie like he's in, even when he's the bad guy, you kind of root for him.
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B
This is true. This is true. Okay. But I can attest to everyone. You're not in your office, like in a dungeon and in the dark?
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A
Oh, heavens no. Behind receiving dark. Yes, I do think my office kind of dark, but I don't have any, you know, toads or newts or anything like that.
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B
No, I'd be all over that. 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 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. So welcome back and welcome to all of our new listeners to the podcast. And we've also got a bunch of new listeners who joined the Patreon, so welcome aboard. And you should be able to find in your welcome letter all of the instructions for how to access the forum. The the two different Harry Potter forums we've got going on one have spoilers and one without. Are are hopping. They are absolutely hopping and it's a lot of fun to watch you guys put this all together. Several people have commented to me that they did not think I was going to be able to pull this off to talk about book one without spoilers. But they have been very impressed and they've said they've really appreciated just the like little CR I'm dibbling out there and that's allowing them to make their their own connection. So it's Been a lot of fun for me to see people thinking through the book one to seven connections and seeing the overall shape and structure and they're, they're doing a good job. And it is a challenge, let me tell you. It is a challenge because part of me just wants to like crack my knuckles and say step aside boys and girls and just let me show you what I could really do with book one. But I'm not going to do, I'm not going to ruin our listeners reading experience. We have lots of kids listening who have are reading this for the first time and I won't do it. I won't do it. But if you take the class and we get to book seven, I will, I will start book seven by cracking my butter.
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A
My butter beer.
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B
Hold my butter beer indeed. And we will, we will definitely get, get cracking. So speaking of that class, just a reminder, you can go over to al humane letters.com and register for my Harry Potter mini class because this book is the freebie of the first one and we're going to be covering books two and three in August and then again, as I said last time, my plan is then to do a fall mini class on book four and a spring mini class on book five and the next summer cover six and seven and we'll have covered the whole thing in a year. And if you are listening to this podcast after the class has already happened, fear not. Everything's recorded. You can still purchase it and it's lifetime access to the video. So if you can't make the time or you find out about us later, it's, it's all fine. Everything's recorded. And the way that I teach is very similar to how I do on the podcast here. So you will be getting loads and loads of information. And as people who have had classes with me before can tell you, you'll get way, way, way more bang for your buck than you're gonna think. Because I can, I can never, never limit myself to the time I give.
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A
You give them the fire host treatment.
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B
I definitely do. I'm kind of known for that. I'm kind of known for that. I am also super enjoying the comments and the feedback on this episode. Sometimes we do the episodes way ahead of time and, and so when I get the feedback I'm like, oh, well, I already recorded it. But this time we actually are recording it week by week. And so we've been able to see the, the feedback and kind of adjust what we're talking about based on your questions and the things you're interested in. But I have particularly enjoyed the stories of parents who are reading with their children right now, sometimes for the first time, and who are listening to the podcast. I wasn't really sure. I kind of threw out the question to our Patreon, like, how are the kids doing with this? Because we're getting into a little bit heady stuff here with literary theory, and I wasn't sure how. How that was going to work. And I've been told that the kids are having a great time, that it's turned out to be just like an awesome summer kind of family event. They're reading the books together and they're going through the podcast. And I have loved especially the stories of the kids who are pausing the podcast to furiously take notes. I love that so much. I've. I've loved the stories of kids who've cried when their mom turned the podcast off because they thought they weren't going to be allowed to listen. I've just. I've loved all the stories. I love the stories of the kids who are shouting back into the, you know, the car stereo at us with their connections and saying, oh, so this and this and that and that. And I love it. I love it. I'm glad that everybody's getting excited about the book. So shout out to all the kids out there who are taking notes.
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A
I actually do that myself sometimes with.
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B
I mean, shout at me when I'm not in the room.
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A
No, no. But like the occasional podcast or lecture, I. I mostly avoid shouting advice in when I'm watching a movie to the characters on screen. But when I'm listening to a podcast or a lecture where it's something I know something about, I actually can get kind of heated.
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B
Yes. I hear you in the other room talking to your phone.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And I'm really relieved to find out it's not early dementia that you, you know, you're doing this. That. That is a relief. That's a relief. I've also got to give a shout out to my good book students who are over on the student forum discussing all their Harry Potter connections. And I'm just so impressed with you guys and so impressed with your ability to. To read and articulate what you're seeing. So well done to all of you guys and well done to my high school students. They are going to town on this. They are doing a fantastic job taking the framework I'm giving and making all these connections to all the books. So well done to all of you. And just as an aside, if you're a Parent of a student. And you're saying what Student forum. This summer, the student form has been in a beta a testing mode and we will be opening up the student form to all of our students in the fall. So you'll be looking for an email and an announcement about that. It seems to be working really well and we're quite excited about that. All right, now, I'm going through my checklist of things to respond to from our, from our listeners here. Something else that came up which is kind of funny to me, but hey, here I am. I, I like to talk about books. I'll talk about books. A few people, not a few people, more than a few people have expressed surprise to find out I am a huge fan of the Corman Strike books, which is kind of funny to me because I feel like I make a big deal about this all the time and my love of the golden age detective novel. And we've done many, many, many podcast episodes on detective novels. But if you're new and you're saying, whoa, what's going on? I thought, I thought Angelina reads literature. I thought she studies medieval literature. Why is she reading a modern detective novel? Well, I will give you the tiny, tiny, tiny answer to that question. The small version here, and that is that detective novels, just like fantasy novels, are also a displaced romance. It's set up exactly the same way. The detective is a knight on a quest and he's on a quest to solve a, a mystery. And because of that, I think detective stories function in a lot of the same ways that the fantasy novel does that I've been talking about in the last few episodes. If that kind of wets your whist, like, what is she talking about? How is a detective novel a romance? Well, let me direct you because we did an entire episode on that, so you'll want to listen to. Oh gosh, one of the first episodes we ever did called the Importance of the Detective Novel. So you'll want to scroll back. We'll link that episode below in the show notes, but you'll want to check that one out. We also did a few series, so the very first book series we ever did on this podcast was one of my all time favorite books, Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers, one of the queens of crime and huge influence on Rowling herself. And you'll want to check out that. So I talk a lot about how to read a detective novel there. We did a short series. It might have even been a one off the one we did on Death on the Nile. Do you Remember? Was that a one off episode?
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A
No, that we did that over a couple weeks.
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B
Yeah. Okay. And we also have. Let me plug this. We also have, coming up in September, another series we're going to do on Dorothy Sayers, my second favorite Dorothy Sayers novel, Murder Must Advertise. I'm so excited to do that with you. You're going to love this novel.
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A
I think I will. I was thinking, actually reading these chapters, I kept thinking of the Name of the Rose for some reason.
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B
Oh, how interesting.
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A
Yeah. I mean, you have this old building where the building itself has a lot of secrets which can become clues or causes of misdirection and all of this odd arcana and lore. It's. Yeah. Of course, the Name of the Rose is not for. Is not for juveniles, obviously. That's a. That's a book you shouldn't read before. You're probably 18 or 20, but 50. Yeah, no, it's. It's a. I think it's a brilliant book. It's a hard book, though.
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B
It's a hard book. That's one of those books where I read and I think maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am.
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A
And like Harry Potter, a lot of Latin, real and fake.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Queens of Crime. And, you know, I have to say that I am a great lover. Mr. Banks can attest to the fact that I have an entire Golden Age detective novel library in our home just devoted to that. I have quite a few first editions. I've collected the Queens of Crime. That. That refers to the golden age of the detective novel in the first half of the 20th century. And that was Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Marjorie Allingham, all of whom are great influences on J.K. rowling, as well as some of the minor members of the Detective club. Anthony Barkley comes to mind. Wish I could explain why, but I can't because it's a major plot point in one of her books and would be a total spoiler. But I was. I delighted in seeing that. And I think. And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you're gonna gasp when I say this because, you know, my. My reverence of authors is typically only after their bones are decaying in a grave for at least a good half century or. But I think. I think J.K. rowling totally deserves to be up there with the Queens of Crime. She is absolutely fabulous. And I've thought a lot about what it is that she does, and for me, I think I would Say that she is a cross between Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. And here's why. I would say that Agatha Christie, I think, has no rival when it comes to pure puzzle, pure misdirection. I can't, until we get to the end of this book, I can't talk about all the misdirects that she's been doing in Harry Potter. But she's genius. Rowling is a genius at the misdirect. One of my favorite things to do, and some of you might be actually experiencing this now, if you've read this book before and you're reading it again, is with both the Corman Strike books and the Harry Potter books, if you know how the puzzle is solved and you read it again. Honestly, sometimes I just want to slow clap her and just be like, oh, man, now look at that. You just dangled, dangled the answer right there in front of me the whole time and just beautifully misdirected me so that I wouldn't notice. And, and that is a real skill. So I, I think she's right up there with Agatha Christie for that. But I also think she's like Dorothy Sayers, because what Dorothy Sayers does and Dorothy Sayers strength is definitely not the whodunit. A lot of people read her and they're like, I was kind of disappointed. That wasn't that great a mystery. It's not about that for Dorothy Sayers. Dorothy Sayers comes with all of her, you know, knowledge as a classicist and a medievalist and just somebody, you know, there's a breathtaking, you know, reading life and, and languages and knowledge. And she elevates the form of the detective novel. She makes it extremely literary, speaking of Latin and French and all these other things that are tossed around, not translated. She develops the characters in a way we don't see with Agatha Christie and for Gaudy Night and Murder Mis Advertised. She said that for those two, she was intentionally trying to elevate the detective novel to a novel of manners. And I think she succeeded. And that's why those are my, those are my favorite. And I think Rowling does the same thing. I think she elevates it. I think, you know, I read these books and sometimes I just put it down and I say, how does she know all the books? How has she read all the things? Like, it's just breathtaking to me. Amazing. Impressive. My students have heard me say before that I feel like sometimes JK Rowling is single handedly keeping the thread of the literary tradition going in the modern landscape. And it's all there as it relates.
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A
To the mystery, anyway.
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B
Well, I would say more than that because she's. I mean, she writes one mystery where the whole thing is the fairy queen, the echo of the fairy queen, and she's deliberately quoting from it. She's deliberately modeling on it Jacobean revenge novels on and on. Like, she's connecting her books with so many other books in very much the same way Gaudy Knight did.
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A
She doesn't disguise her influences, that much is obvious. I. I didn't bring this up last time, did I? That. I think I figured out why Harold Bloom disliked these books so much.
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B
Oh, Harry Potter. Yes, go ahead.
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A
Okay, so Harold Bloom, who.
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B
I don't really care what he thinks, but I digress.
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A
So Harold Bloom of, I suppose, happy memory, probably those people who knew him liked him enough. Nothing against the man himself, but, yeah, he was kind of a curmudgeon when it came to these books. And he, I think, developed almost a weird fixation with them. He denounced them in print. I remember seeing him on the Charlie Rose show, if you remember that, many years ago, going after them. And this was like. This was just his. It was kind of a King Charles head for him. It was just. It came into everything he wrote. Whenever he was touching on the subject of contemporary literature. Anyway, so his theory of literary influence turned around the idea of a creative agon, he called it. An agon is simply the Greek word for a struggle. I don't know why he couldn't just say struggle, but there you are. Yeah. So he believed that every author, every creative writer is trying to assimilate and overthrow his forebears at the same time. So if Jane Austen is influenced by Fanny, help me out here. Fanny Bernie. Thank you very much. She sort of sees Fanny Bernie as the mother whom she has learned much from, but also has to destroy. Okay, J.K. rowling is not trying to destroy. I mean, she's kind of happy to wear her influences, like tattoos almost, it seems like. And we love her for it, and that's fine. But I mean, if you have this preconceived notion that you have to replace that which is influencing you, you have to topple them off the throne. And every truly great creative writer is aiming consciously or unconsciously to do exactly that, then this might not impress you that much.
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B
So that particular Harold Bloom book, and if you're saying, what are we talking about? He was a very influential 20th century.
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A
Literary critic who Shakespeare and the Romantic.
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B
And he. He liked to condemn a lot of books because he was Quite a book snob. But I always found that particular thesis amusing that he thinks every writer is struggling to overthrow his influences because that's what he did. His teacher was C.S. lewis, and he hated him. And he overthrew everything Lewis believed about books. So that's why Harold Bloom is over there on the other side for me, and I'm not interested in what he has to say. But if you want a chuckle here about Harold Bloom and all his wisdom with his crystal ball of, you know, being able to see the literary future like he. He saw. He also held a similar grudge to Lord of the Rings. He hated Lord of the Rings, hated it for many of the same reasons that he hated Harry Potter. He. He doesn't like the fantasy genre. He thinks it's not serious literature. He also just personally did not like Tolkien and Lewis because they represented this old way of reading, an old way of writing. And, and he was against all of that. But here's where we can all have a chuckle because you might have been saying to yourself, harold, who. Who are they talking about? This is one of my favorite Harold Bloom quotes. This is where he predicted this was his condemnation of Harry Potter. Y' all ready for this? He said, Harry Potter, like Lord of the Rings, will end up in the dustbin of history.
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A
I think if there's one thing that.
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B
A literary so want to be thrown in that dustbin.
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A
Well, yeah, I think if there's one thing a literary scholar or critic should not play, I don't think you should take on the prophet's mantle.
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B
It doesn't?
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A
Well, no, because, I mean, Time is really the. The greatest literary critic of us all and, like, proves what lasts and what doesn't.
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B
And, and Time has proven that both of those series have lasting staying power. They were also very popular. And I think Harold Bloom is one of those critics, like many are, who have a disdain for anything popular. But I would argue that what we see with Harry Potter is much what we saw with Charles Dickens. That there. There. I. Let's be honest, most of what's popular is garbage. Okay, I agree with that. And I think a lot of us maybe kind of rolled our eyes at the popularity of Harry Potter and thought maybe that meant they couldn't be good.
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A
Yes. I had to have them medically reset. They got stuck in the back.
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B
I should tell our listeners that your mother called to say how happy she is that I finally. That your wife finally got you to read Harry Potter. This is like a major coup here. But. But what was I saying?
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A
Where was the salt while I eat crow.
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B
Yes, exactly. It's so tasty, though. It's so tasty. I think what we see in Harry Potter is much the same sort of thing we see with Charles Dickens, that occasionally you can come across a literary genius that can be both popular and entertaining and have a high literary value and have more to it. And I think with the Harry Potter books as well as the Corman strike books, that she's operating on so many levels. And so if you've been listening to the podcast saying, well, I didn't. I didn't catch this Greek reference, or I didn't catch this, I didn't know this, you didn't need to know it, you still entertained it, right? It was still, it was still there for you. And we'll talk a little more about that kind of resonance and the weight of literature and what I think's going on there. But the truth of the matter is that one of the things that happened with the popularity of Harry Potter and I was. I didn't. Again, I didn't. I didn't. I wasn't really into this world at the time that was happening. But, you know, I've read books about it. And one of the things that this book argued was that for many kids, Harry Potter was the door to other literature. That kids went on to read Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia and all these other books, and they would have never picked it up if it wasn't for Harry Potter. It was kind of one of those things like, well, what other kind of long epic fantasy tome is there? And they got turned onto those books.
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A
You know, who actually bears witness to that? I was reading a. I think it was in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books, one of the two, anyway, by Christopher Hitchens, and he said that his child, or children, Harry Potter was the first series they really got into. And after that, they, they kept reading other things. And, and I mean, Christopher Hitchens himself, he doesn't, he doesn't write from the perspective of someone who really, really loved these books and thought they were the best thing ever. But he says, he says that the child who reads Harry Potter maybe will go on to read Philip Pullman, if you, if you know Philip Pullman, the, his Dark Materials guy, and then, you know, go on to other things as well. So, yeah, he wrote appreciatively to, to an extent about these.
- [24:19]
B
Actually, I can, I can attest to that in my. In my own family. So my son, who was, he was a bit of a late reader. And, you know, I read out loud to them a ton, and he loved it, and he loved all the poetry. But he did struggle with reading for a while. And even when he was reading chapter books, he didn't have that moment that I could see where something had really captured his imagination. You know, that moment when you realize you're a reader because you. You can't put down the book and you're like, one more chapter and you just keep reading. I could see that that was not happening with him. And I don't remember how old he was, but I gave him the Harry Potter books at some point. He was probably like a preteen. And those were the books that did it. Those were the books where he was disappearing into his room and. And he was staying up all night reading. And it was the first time, because I remember he came out of his room. He. He had just finished book seven, and he had that book drunk look about him, you know, like, I just like, wow, that. I can't believe all of that. And I really need to read this again. And he said, I just finished. And I said, what do you think? And he said, I think I want to start over and read it again. And I thought. I grinned and I thought, ladies and gentlemen, we have a reader.
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A
C.S. lewis. Yeah.
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B
Said that.
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A
That's. I think he says, every real reader is a re. Reader. So. So the guy who says, yeah, you know, I read and Virgil and Shakespeare in school. I put them behind me. What else is there? That guy's probably going to be kind of a superficial student of the written word at best.
- [25:56]
B
Right, right. And. And he did read them many times and read Lord of the Rings and read all the things and went on to become an English major and is now an English teacher. So for him, Harry Potter absolutely was that world. It's really funny, too, because his girlfriend had never read them, and he got her into them, and so now they're reading them together. And she also is an English major. But, yeah, I can totally attest to that. And I have a. Have a quote here from J.K. rowling herself about the idea of Harry Potter as a gateway to other books. And she said, if it is the case that people are moving from Harry to other books, then nothing could make me prouder. I love that. All right, well, now that we've gotten our introductory remarks out of the way, and Bash, it's always a good day on a phone. I can bash Harold Bloom. So thank you for bringing that up.
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A
Just for our spiritual health, we should find a day. We should set aside a day. The non snark day. One day a year, you know, something like that. Or even part of a day where we record an episode where we see. Where we see appreciative things about Bloom and Fr. Levis and. No, no.
- [26:59]
B
Is that Upside Down Day? No, I'm not doing Opposite Day. No Calvin and Hobbes? No, sir. Do you have a commonplace quote?
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A
You go first. You go first.
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B
Not the master of Mr. Act to.
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A
Dig mine up here.
- [27:13]
B
All right. Well, of course, my commonplace quote requires a story. We've been mentioning Northrop Fry on the show a lot. He, of course, is a literary critic who's a great influence on me, and I think he's done just a fabulous job of explaining how stories work and how we should think about them. He also was a student of Lewis and Tolkien's. Actually, Harold Bloom is another one north of. Harold Bloom was a student, Arthur Fry also. And then Harold Bloom wrote an essay in which he rejected Fry because Fry didn't like the book you were talking about. It's all connected anyway, months ago. I can't even remember how many months ago. Maybe you remember. Do you remember there was a podcast episode and you read a commonplace quote from Mercia Eliade?
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A
Yes, I think I remember.
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B
So that was quite a few months ago. And when you did, I thought, oh, my gosh, this guy sounds just like Northrop. So, of course, I fell down that rabbit hole with a couple of my new fellows, and we discovered that Northrop Fry and Mercia Eliade knew each other. They actually met at a conference and became pen pals. I'm desperate to find these letters. It's probably, you know, stored in a back closet somewhere at the University of Toronto. But they wrote letters for years and years and years and were great influences on each other's work. I'm currently reading a book about Northrop Fry and Mercia Eliade in their work, and a couple of my fellows are reading Mercy Eliade's work as well, and we're kind of, you know, crafting our own little. Little theory here. But they've. I've got a quote here then, from the Sacred and the Profane, which is a book that.
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A
That's Eliade's magnum opus.
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B
Yes. He was a.
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A
He was a scholar of comparative religion, mythology, literature, kind of a. An eclectic genius, kind of like Northrop Prime.
- [28:56]
B
Right. And where they crossed over was that they both believed in the importance of a symbol understanding and a symbolic imagination. And they. One came from literature. Fry and the Other from a more comparative religion standpoint. But the quote I'm gonna read from the context for that is that Mercia Eliade is arguing that since we have lost any kind of understanding of sacredness and move toward a materialist, secular understanding of reality, that we are suffering. That we're suffering. And since I'm gonna be talking about symbols in Harry Potter and how they work, I thought, let me find a good Mercy Eliot, a quote about the importance of symbols. And here's a. Here's a short one. For it is through symbols that man finds his way out of his particular situation and opens himself to the general and the universal. Symbols awaken individual experience and transmute it into a spiritual act, into metaphysical comprehension of the world.
- [30:00]
A
Well, yeah, I am by no means expert in him, but I. I gather that. I gather that reading his books would be a very slow experience because you would be commonplace in every second paragraph.
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B
That's pretty much what's happening.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Yeah. When I. When I. I talked to my fellows and said, let's. Let's. Let's get some. Let's pull some good Mercy Eliot quotes. And then, yeah, we're. Then I thought, okay, it's gonna take me an hour to read all these on the show. Let me just find a short one. But. Yes, absolutely. All right, what do you got for us?
- [30:32]
A
So I just finished a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, who is one of my favorite early 20th century novelists. It's called the Narrow Corner, and he writes, the wise man combines the pleasures of the senses and the pleasures of the spirit in such a way as to increase the satisfaction he gets from both. End quote.
- [30:53]
B
Oh, nice. Nice. All right, well, let's turn our attention then, to chapters eight through 12. And we'll, of course, continue to speak generally about literature and stories and symbols and how they all work. But you had some really interesting comments to me earlier, like, what is. What was your feeling reading these. These chapters?
- [31:13]
A
So really, up until the point where we meet the troll, this is. Magic is almost a kind of secondary or ancillary presence in this book. I mean, it's. It's part of the atmosphere, but it hasn't really supplied much of the center of the plot yet. I mean, we're dealing. This is a school novel. Most of the drama that we've seen up until about page. Say page 150. And this is a. You know, that's halfway through the book where kids are settling their place in the pecking order of the school's social arrangements. We're getting Excited about, you know, this, you know, Quidditch game. We're finding out who are the popular and the unpopular kids, who are these snakes in the grass and who are, who are, you know, potential loyal friends and allies of Harry. But, but I mean, all of that is the kind of, that's the kind of story you get in a completely magic less tale of, you know, Tom Brown's school days kind of story.
- [32:22]
B
Exactly. I was really excited when you mentioned that to me. I think one of the fears that parents had in the 90s when they, of course, had not read these books, and I'm the 90s, I've actually heard parents, you know, six months ago, say this kind of thing, but they have the impression that this is a book about a boy who goes to school and learns actual witchcraft. And the whole book is like real. I can't even tell you how many times I've heard people say it's real spells. It's bibbidi, boppity boo. It's fake Latin. It's. These are not real magic spells. Like, but, but we don't even see that. Like, we have some comical History of Magic classes and we have some, you know, comical herb classes and things like that. But, you know, you're, like you said, it's ancillary, it's complete, it's background. And, and what's at the heart here is these relationships and these kids and these tensions and who's in and who's out and who's getting bullied and who's the cool kid and who's going to be the captain of the sports team and, you know, sneaking around, getting in trouble with teachers. Like you said, this is, this is a schoolboy story. And that surprised you?
- [33:25]
A
Yes. Yeah. And I think going back to Orwell, he, he mentions that, like the sneaking around to take something that you're not supposed to take, like extra food from the kitchen when you're hungry or something like that. That is a kind of a classic plot device from the, the British school story.
- [33:46]
B
Yeah. And we see this here and yeah, like, they're right.
- [33:48]
A
What do you do after hours? Well, you get up, you get your friends and you go off and try to steal into a room where there's something that interests you that, you know, you're not supposed to find.
- [33:58]
B
And in this case, it was a book. It was a book on the history of Quidditch. Right. It's a very minor kind of, you know, naughtiness.
- [34:05]
A
Right.
- [34:07]
B
And since you are the resonant classic. Oh, go ahead.
- [34:10]
A
And we Promise not to spoil anything, but from what I understand, correct me if I'm wrong. As the books progress, the stakes kind of get bigger.
- [34:20]
B
Yes, yeah. Yes. And this is this. So this brings up the question that a lot of parents have of, you know, do I let my 11 year old go ahead and read through book 7? And typically the advice is let your child grow up with Harry. These books came out once a year. And so her audience I think is kind of genius. Genius.
- [34:42]
A
I remember years ago, okay, I'm going to compare books to music. But years ago I was talking about the Beatles with a friend and she very cleverly remarked that the Beatles, if you think about it, grew with their audience because their early songs, I want to hold your hand, please please me, I mean those are light pop songs which are not really that inventive. You can hum them easily. They're junior high love songs. And then like, as they progress, you know, they start getting into more of the psychedelic stuff. Their albums grow more ambitious. You get like, you know, Rubber Soul and the White Album album, you know, and, and weird stuff like I am the Walrus and that's more that can appeal to a high school student. So doesn't Harry Potter kind of grow with Harry Potter's audience as well?
- [35:31]
B
Totally. The books get longer, they get more sophisticated. One of the things I'm going to say about five pages of notes from now, I'm going to be talking about some of these symbolic things and, and what you see in book one is the 11 year old version of this. Everything is scaled way, way down, down. But as the books grow up and the characters grow up and the audience grows up, she gets a lot more sophisticated with this. So the, the plot stakes get higher, but the symbolic meaning and the layers, they just explode by the time you get to the end. Harry 17, 18. I mean this is, it's a book. Seven is a book for adults. I mean they're all book for adults in one sense, but it just, everything gets a lot more intense. And I do think that that's super cool. We see the same sort of thing actually happening in Shakespeare. We've talked about this before on the Shakespeare episodes we've done, but, but as Shakespeare himself ages and Shakespeare's actors age, we see the characters aging, the themes and everything. So you know, you have his early stuff which is all like, you know, kind of young lovers kind of tiff things and then, you know, then you get to King Lear and we're like, we're old and what does our life mean? And you Know how do we have a legacy? And, and, and he, because he's growing up. The actors are growing up. The characters change too.
- [36:41]
A
One's one exception I will make to that. The late romances, the Tempest. It seems that, but I don't even know. But I mean I wouldn't call those plays as dramatically ambitious perhaps as Hamlet.
- [36:58]
B
Now you're sounding like.
- [36:59]
A
No, no, no, no, no. That's not to say that they're worse plays. I think in its way the Tempest is one of the best things he ever wrote. Okay, but I, I gave a whole. I don't think necessarily he worked as hard, as hard writing A Winter's tale as he, as he worked writing Hamlet.
- [37:15]
B
Well, I guess it would. Okay, and work.
- [37:17]
A
How hard he worked is not a measure of.
- [37:19]
B
It's not. And, but I, I, I. Well, I gave a conference talk on this. Maybe we should stop. But I disagree, I disagree with the assessment that he's kind of phoning it in. I think, I think at the end of his life he turns to the highest form, which is the romance. But I die. I digress. We'll leave that be. We'll leave that be. I was kind of wondering if you were getting amused at the classical illusions, you being the classicist and the teacher of, of and classical literature at our, our business House of Humane Letters, if you were kind of getting tickled at some of the classical illusions.
- [37:49]
A
Oh, Cerberus. And yes, Cerberus is appropriately a, a guardian.
- [37:52]
B
I love when Hagrid says he got the three headed dog off of a Greek chappie.
- [37:56]
A
A Greek chappie he met somewhere. Yeah, no, that was, that was a nice touch.
- [38:00]
B
That was a nice touch. And of course Cerberus, why don't you tell our audience.
- [38:03]
A
So Cerberus is the three headed dog who guards the entry to Hades, the, the underworld in Greek mythology. And one of, one of Hercules labors was to kidnap Cerberus and drag him up to earth.
- [38:19]
B
So in my middle school good books class where I teach how to read symbolically and, and that how to read mythically and to show that, you know, myth and fairy tale and romance and fable, they're all undergirding all stories. Every time I get to the, the idea of the descent to Hades and, and we talk about Cerberus and the river sticks and all of that, that one of the first. And this is a class for like, you know, 11, 12, 13 year olds. One of the first big aha moments that they'll have is when they, they'll gasp and Say wifey from Harry Potter, it's Hades. And you know, they. And they start to catch it. So yeah, that's great. How about this? This is particularly clever of me. So I'm. Clever of me. Clever of her. Clever of her. Brain went faster than my mouth there. Clever of her. A few people were asking why the 10 year gap from the beginning of the story when he's a baby to when he was starts. And so I think what we have there is that Harry Potter is a character who is returning to his home after being trapped for 10 years and he's recognized by his scar, which means that is an obvious reference to the Odyssey.
- [39:27]
A
Yes, of course, the Odyssey, which. I hadn't even thought of that.
- [39:31]
B
Yeah. Oh no, there's a lot of Odyssey. It is brilliant. Look at that. My husband said it's brilliant. It is brilliant. There's a lot of Odyssey echoes here, especially when you think about how Odysseus was trapped on an island and was like crying all the time and depressed and I just want to go home. In his case, he wants his wife but you know, for Harry Potter it's his mother and just this desperate desire to go home, to be home, to have his family to go where he belongs to after, after 10 years. So, you know, she's definitely, she's definitely pulling in that as well. Or how about the fact that Professor McGonagall's name is Minerva.
- [40:08]
A
So Minerva, she is the guardian, the tutelary goddess who watches out for. Who watches out for Odysseus.
- [40:15]
B
Correct. Very good. Minerva being the Roman name for Athena. Athena. So as Athena, Odysseus is Athena's special, special project. And we see that Professor McGonagall is looking out for Harry in the same kind of way that you're the new seeker. And it'll be interesting to see her role as she goes along to see if she's, if she's the Athena to Harry Potter's Odysseus as they go on. There's so many classical references, in fact there's a whole huge, huge volume on classical illusions in Harry Potter. I didn't buy that because I really thought perhaps this was cocky of me. But I thought between the two of us we could catch most of them. I wasn't too worried about that. But there is a book about that if somebody's super interested in that. Without giving any spoilers though, in later books. So she has lots of Homeric echoes in the early ones. In later books you see a lot of echoes of Aeschylus, particularly The Oresteia. The Oresteia is a series of plays about a, a son whose parents are dead. They've been killed, they've been murdered. And he's given this kind of quest.
- [41:22]
A
He's haunted by the Furies.
- [41:23]
B
There you go. Okay, I don't want to say too much because I don't want it to be a spoiler, but that's something. As you go through the Harry Potter books, you might, you might want to look for some of those parallels. It has some burden been placed on Harry as a result of the murders of his parents, like for Orestes in those plays. Now if you're listening to this, I already, I already know what some of you are saying. But I don't know Greek literature. I didn't know the Odyssey. I don't. How am I supposed to understand Harry Potter, you know, if I don't get all these references? You don't have to. You don't have to. You and millions of other people have read, millions of other people have read these books and loved them without getting the references. This is what I was talking about earlier with Charles Dickens. When you have somebody like Dickens and I would suggest Rowling, they can operate on a number of levels that, that even if you know nothing about literature, nothing about mythology, nothing about fairy tales, you can just read this book and it is a rip roaring good tale, period. 11 year olds read this and knew nothing and loved it. Right? But even if you don't directly get the references, what's happening is you feel the weight of all that literature that's holding the story. You feel that resonance we talked about last time. And to me it does feel like a weight. When, when I pick up any kind of new novel, almost always, I think this feels thin. This feels thin. This is surface level. There's nothing underneath this. I could just push my hand through the page. But with Harry Potter, and again, I would say with the Corman strike books as well, there's a weight there, there's a, there's a weight of every other story behind it. You know, there's a weight to Harry that, because it's Odysseus and it's Orestes and it's Hamlet and it's all these other things. And you feel that even if you don't necessarily, if, if you're not able to name them, it's, it's there. It just, it gives that extra kind of, you know, nutrition. I would say to the, to the whole story. I also want to pick up on the idea of Harry's identity quest. So we, we, we also, so we said he's on this identity quest and we talked about that. One of the indications of that was that his, his clothes didn't fit. And a lot of people excitedly pointed out that his clothes did not fit until he got his wizard's ropes which were made to order. So that tells us that that's his true identity. We also saw a lot of indications of that, particularly that when he gets on the broomstick he's told he's a natural just like his father. So that ends up becoming an identity marker as well. I think it's interesting too that Harry's clothes, what he couldn't fit into is Dudley's clothes. And, and so symbolically that's been true the whole way. He can't fit into being the boy the Dursleys want him to be, the non magical boy, the utilitarian boy to be like Dudley. He can't. Those are clothes that will never fit him. So some other people were asking well what about Dudley's clothes or what about Ron's clothes? Okay, so there can be versions of this without you saying somebody's on a full on identity quest. I don't think Dudley's on an identity quest. There was attention drawn to his clothes, particularly his smelting's uniform. And I think that's because. Yes, that's who he is. That uniform fit. He's the factory kid, he's the utilitarian mind.
- [44:43]
A
Ron, however.
- [44:45]
B
Oh yes, I wasn't.
- [44:46]
A
Ron is.
- [44:47]
B
Yes he is.
- [44:48]
A
We see this especially in that, what chapter 12 that we read because Ron, Ron is not at home. Well no, Ron feels that he does not have a place within his own family. Perhaps he's the, he's that extra kid.
- [45:07]
B
Absolutely. Okay. No, I'm glad you brought that up. So a few people asked me and said well Ron's wearing hand me downs. Is he also on an identity quest? And I would say yes. So what we have here is examples of Dudley where it's not necessarily an identity quest but the clothes is a marker of his identity. You have Harry who's on the traditional identity quest because he's a hero of mysterious origin.
- [45:25]
A
And then you have Ron, the supernumerary last child. Yeah, it feels like I'm just kind of a mistake or something like that.
- [45:33]
B
Exactly, exactly. Wearing the hand me downs, feeling overshadowed. He has a family, he has a home. He does not have a mysterious origin but he definitely has identity issues. Who am I in relation to? All of my other siblings. And somebody in our Patreon who took my fairy tale class made this connection that Ron is the third of a second set of three brothers. And so if you know about fairy tales, the third brother is always like the dopey loser kid. He's also always the one who becomes the hero. But he. And Ron's like, doubly.
- [46:04]
A
It's like he's over the overlooked kid.
- [46:07]
B
The overlooked kid, yeah. So I think that you can definitely, as the series progresses, look, look for Ron.
- [46:13]
A
It's funny how in fairy tales it's the third kid who's always overlooked and in real life, the middle child. Yet in fiction, the middle child never accomplishes anything. I mean, come on here. I say this as a biased middle child myself.
- [46:28]
B
Last time we talked about some Alice in Wonderland influences and I was delighted to see how much that was carried through this time. And I think I'm catching it because I literally just read Alice in Wonderland. We're going to be doing Alice in Wonderland webinar sometime this year and so I just finished rereading it, so it's fresh on my mind as I was going through. But she is definitely portraying Hogwarts as a Wonderland. Like the whole the stairs move and change and misdirections and it's very confusing knowing how to navigate and it's all these, like, imaginative, wonderful things. It's. He's very Alice in Wonderland as he's going.
- [47:06]
A
Certainly Alice and Hermione could have exchanged notes.
- [47:10]
B
Oh, that is a good. That is.
- [47:11]
A
No, and I'm not saying this is. I mean, I. Of course, I mean they're both very, very, very serious and dutiful and miss never breaks a rule kind of thing.
- [47:21]
B
No, that's 100% right. Hermione is a lot like Alice. Yeah. And she's going to have to learn some of the same lessons that Alice is going to have.
- [47:27]
A
And I mean, even her friendship with Harry and Ron begins at that moment when she does break a rule.
- [47:36]
B
And we're gonna actually. We'll come back to that. Well spotted. We'll come back to that. Now, a few people asked me because we did point out that Harry's entry into Hogwarts was described as a descent. He goes down, down, down. She was very deliberate about that. So a few people ask me, like, what's going on there? Because does a descent mean, like, going down? The hell is Hogwarts hell? Absolutely not very often. I'm not going to say very often. I want to say every time, but I'm always scared to say Every time, because then somebody's going to find the one exception to the rule. So I'd say very often an entry into the fairy world is. Is described as a descent. If you go back and read the Narnia books, they're all descents. You know, you go down into the pool of water, you fall into the painting and go down. Even when they go through the wardrobe. Symbolically, if you know how to read it, there's a lot of symbolic descent imagery there. But I think here's my. Here's my easiest way to explain what's going on there, because it's not a descent. That's bad. The fairy world. And I'm using fairy here in, in the Tolkien way, like, so any, Any. Any imaginative world where sort of the rules of ordinary life are. Are not in effect. It doesn't mean that it has actual fairies in it, but the fairy world has a very, very close association with the dream world. And even, like, what was happening, where size and shape is distorted and Hogwarts and the stairs were here and now it isn't. That's. That' stuff that hasn't happened in a dream. And so if you think about it, we use descent language for dreams. We say you fall asleep and then we say you wake up. So we have that descent and ascent. And of course, Alice in Wonderland is a dream. She fell asleep. She. So she goes down, down, down into the dream world. And at the end, she ascends. Literally in the story, she ascends, but then she also wakes up. So because of that close association between the dream world and the fairy world, you will see that this descent imagery, but it doesn't mean, like, they're going down, you know, into the Inferno or something like that. It's. They've entered a dreamlike place.
- [49:42]
A
Actually, since you bring it up, I mean, it's kind of interesting that when Dante goes into the Inferno, into the Inferno, he doesn't really have to pass through a magical portal, he just, you know, goes down into it. But it's connected to this world.
- [49:55]
B
It's connected to this world. Right. But it's also a dream and. Oh, I was going to say something else about dreams now. I don't remember. Oh, well, we'll just carry on. It was going to be some. I was trying to remember something about the fairy world and the dream world. Oh, it's this. That the dream world is also very, very closely associated with the world of the imagination. So because in dreams, like, you can imagine anything and anything can happen. So those three things Often go together. Dreams, the fairy world and the world of imagination. And Hogwarts is definitely a wonderland. It is the world of the imagination. We've talked a little bit about names and what they mean, and there was a name I wanted to talk about, but not until we met the character. So we met the cat, Mrs. Norris. Did that give you a chuckle?
- [50:43]
A
Yes.
- [50:45]
B
We actually did a series on Jane Austen's Mansfield park, and we kept talking about the character there, Mrs. Norris, and how appropriate the cat was named Mrs. Norris. Like kind of the busy body. Yeah, you know, prowling. The. Prowling around, trying to catch you in the act. That is so Mrs. Norris from Jane Austen. And Jane Austen, of course, a huge, huge influence on Rowling. So that made me laugh. But something you'll want to look for as you continue on with the series. The cats in this entire series are very carefully named, all very carefully named. So we'll want to. We'll want to look at that. And last time we talked about Harry's names meaning. But we did not get into Hermione and Ron. And that is because if I get into too much what their names mean, it's spoilers for things that are coming. So you're just gonna have to wait. Wait till we get further in the series for me to explain what's going on there. I also got a real chuckle out of this. We talked about how a fantasy is a displacement romance, and that's the idea of a knight on a quest. And I thought the whole learning how to ride a broom scene was very much like a squire learning how to ride a horse. Oh, completely. Yeah. Yeah. Getting. It's bucking.
- [51:55]
A
And also, I think Harry has in common with, I mean, so many heroes of myth, etc. That he can just do certain things that he doesn't have to study or practice necessarily.
- [52:08]
B
Yeah. And sometimes those things can be another identity marker, like the sword and the.
- [52:13]
A
Stone or Hercules when he strangles the snakes in his crib. It's just that he is that strong, even from, you know, the moment of birth.
- [52:21]
B
Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Harry. Harry, definitely. He. He. You'll find that Harry is very sort of. Don't want to say instinctual. Like, things just come naturally to him and he doesn't think about it. He just sort of knows what to do in the moment.
- [52:36]
A
He has preternatural gifts.
- [52:39]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also want to talk about Quidditch a little bit. So we mentioned in the first episode that a school story book has some Kind of house competition and sporting event that everybody's obsessed with and is very central to the plot. And here we had it with. With Quidditch, and I had to laugh because to me, Quidditch is as confusing as cricket.
- [53:05]
A
And the characters in. In the school story always care about these sports a little more than is properly sane.
- [53:10]
B
Yes. Yes, precisely. Or.
- [53:13]
A
Well, okay, again, sorry I keep bringing this essay up, but Boys Weekly, he says that he's actually read some of the fan fiction that the Billy Bunter stories received. And one of the most commonly asked questions that boys would write into the authors of these stories to ask was, do you think I would be good enough to be on the cricket team? I'm 14 and a little bit small, but. Or actually, another one like this will ring a bell. Which house would I be in if I were a member of, you know, this particular school?
- [53:44]
B
That's what everybody obsesses about it. Harry Potter. What's your house? What's your house?
- [53:48]
A
I've met, yeah. A disturbing number of children who seem to know exactly whether they would be. Yeah.
- [53:54]
B
I think I enjoy the stories of the people who cheat on the online quizzes so that they can get the house they want to be in.
- [54:00]
A
So they're Slytherin then, right?
- [54:02]
B
Oh, automatically.
- [54:03]
A
Automatically.
- [54:03]
B
Automatically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Quidditch, of course. There's, like, adult Quidditch league legs. Even though they don't fly, they just run around with brooms between their legs.
- [54:13]
A
These people also.
- [54:13]
B
I'm just gonna know about this.
- [54:15]
A
Yeah, just a nerve twitched. A vein twitched in my forehead. These people also frequent Renaissance fairs and things like that.
- [54:21]
B
I'm guessing they can reuse those costumes.
- [54:24]
A
I think adults do this.
- [54:25]
B
People are super mad now that we're teasing them. But. Yes. Yes. People take Quidditch very seriously. Houses.
- [54:32]
A
I grew up in a town with a very. Will say, robust Renaissance festival scene. And. Yeah, yeah.
- [54:39]
B
No offense to listeners.
- [54:40]
A
No, I mean, it's fun.
- [54:42]
B
That's not our thing. I enjoy being in a book in my head and have never had a desire to be in a book when I'm not in the book. I was never that. I don't dress up like Lizzie Bennett either. I'm very happy being me.
- [54:55]
A
That's true. Some Austin fans are their own kind of cosplay. Like that. That. What's that movie we saw with Austinland? Austinland, where it's the theme park where you can go to act like a Jane Austen character for. I mean, that place would. I mean, yeah. If. If that place were Real. It would get all sorts of tourists, I'm sure.
- [55:15]
B
But the reason I brought up cricket is because I'm an American and I read a lot of British novels and critic is, cricket is very often a plot point. It's a plot point in some Dorothy Sayers books with Lord Peter playing cricket. It's a plot point in several P.G. wodehouse novels. And I would read it and like, you know, they're, they're, mike, you're going to get your sentry. And I was like, what is that? What's happening? I was very confused as an American that they would take tea breaks during cricket and while somebody else is batting, you just go in the locker room and you have a cup of tea and you come out. When I was in college, we had a great number of students from India. We had a world renowned computer science program and a lot of students from India would come from that. Of course, people from India play cricket and on Sunday afternoons they would go out to the soccer pitch and you're, boy, look at you getting all excited. Yes. And they would play cricket on Sunday afternoons and I would watch them and think, this is the most confusing thing I've ever seen in my life.
- [56:10]
A
Yeah, I. Growing up, Yeah, I, I mean, I grew up in a college town also and yeah, same thing. It was, it was always the weekend. Yeah. Usually a Sunday afternoon. The tennis courts were like a couple hundred yards away from my parents house. And I remember, yeah, there would be Pakistani and Indian guys, looked super cool in their outfits.
- [56:30]
B
Yeah.
- [56:31]
A
The whites, you know, like the light sweater.
- [56:33]
B
And get what they were doing.
- [56:35]
A
Yeah. A couple times I just watched them. I mean, you're like, okay, so this is like English baseball. Kind of, but not.
- [56:41]
B
Yeah, yeah, one year. Okay, so this is like way, this is. Yes. I'm aging myself. This is way before the Internet. Okay. One year they rented, these guys, rented a huge satellite disc and they put it outside the International Student Union. Okay. This huge, huge thing. It was in the parking lot and when I asked somebody like, what's going on here? They said, it's the World Cricket Championship, man. We had to, we had to watch it. And they were all in there, you know, hooping and hollering, staying all night because of the time difference. So when the interwebs became a thing, your wife here. In interest of understanding English literature, even better, I started watching YouTube videos on cricket to try to understand cricket. I like threw myself in. I'm going to understand cricket. And here's what I concluded. I cannot understand cricket. It is Too confusing. And I ran across one article that said, basically, if you did not grow up breathing cricket, good luck, you're never going to understand it. I was like, that, that's fair. But I had to laugh at what J.K. rowling wrote because one of the things that stuck in my mind so big when I was watching all these YouTube videos on cricket, I think this is when I threw in the towel, was when it said the world's longest cricket match was three months. And that's what she said about Quidditch.
- [57:52]
A
Oh. Ah, yes.
- [57:54]
B
Yeah. So I think there's. I think it's a lot of cricket type madness and, you know, tea breaks.
- [58:00]
A
And I. I think that some of our sports.
- [58:03]
B
Oh, sports are nuts, too.
- [58:05]
A
I remember. Yeah. I remember in college, a South African fella in one class, I had remarking that, like, some of the guys were talking about baseball or something like that, and he said that he did not understand. Understand the configuration of players on the field. And he was trying to understand the. The point of a short stop because I think he was a math. Okay, so he was a math guy. It's not symmetrical and it's not symmetrical. And it didn't. It seemed like. I don't know, I think the aesthetics of how the shortstop affects the game, that. That somehow was like, what's the point of this player? Yeah. I don't know. That was.
- [58:45]
B
That's fair.
- [58:45]
A
Yeah. And like, you know, when you watch baseball, you understand because, I mean, there's going to be more balls hit between second and third than between, say. Well, I mean, towards right field, but yeah.
- [58:56]
B
So anyway, left field.
- [58:57]
A
Left. Excuse me, left field. Yeah.
- [58:59]
B
But. Yes. Yes.
- [59:00]
A
Yeah.
- [59:01]
B
Yep. So I got a chuckle out of seeing it's. It's cricket. This is obviously cricket in the air and meant to be, I think, intentionally confusing. And my brain has so often been like, but this doesn't make sense. The rules of this game are not internally consistent. And I think it's okay. I think it's okay. In fact, I want to warn you, as you read the books, not to try to push the limits of this fictional world too hard, because there are some moments that are inconsistent about the rules of magic. I'm not going to say inconsistent. That might be unfair. That are not readily apparent to me what the rule is. And I don't think it needs to be. I think you just enter the world and you accept. You accept the rules of the world, even if maybe you're like, well, I don't understand. Why can't they just snap Their fingers in. There's food. Why. Why can't the Weasleys, you know, use their wand to make themselves rich? You know, there are rules here and. And, you know, I just accept. I accept the rules of the fictional world. All right, so the next thing I want to talk about was something else that was requested. We had a lot of people say, would you talk about the four houses and they're animals and all that? So I thought we would. And so to help me out with that, I have my handy dandy Trusty medieval bestiary. Mr. Banks, would you explain to our listeners what is a bestiary?
- [60:23]
A
So it is a handbook of beasts, both real and fabulous. They existed in the ancient world, but kind of the great age of bestiaries is the high Middle Ages. And it's not a. A. It's not like a medieval version of a zoology textbook because we're not just talking about the natural properties of animals, though that appears as well. But it primarily is focused upon the theological, the symbolic and the moral characteristics of.
- [60:58]
B
Yeah, this one has a lot of, like, Bible verses and references saying. And just as the Scriptures say this, we see. See that? This animal does this.
- [61:05]
A
Yeah. And they don't die out immediately. With the end of the Middle Ages, too, the influence of bestiaries on the imagination of literary Europe, I know, continues into the 17th century. So, for instance. Well, here's one example. The Hind and the Panther by John Dryden. It's a strange poem. It consists of a bunch of animals getting together and debating theology. So there's a Catholic animal, and there is a Anglican and a Presbyterian animal, and the monkey is the atheist. And I believe there was a bestiary, one of the famous ones, whose name I'm forgetting where the monkey was represented as the devil's parody of man.
- [61:58]
B
Oh, yes, yeah. God's ape.
- [62:00]
A
Yeah.
- [62:00]
B
Which C.S. lewis uses with the Last Battle. That's why I shifted.
- [62:03]
A
Oh, yes, of course. Yeah, yeah, right, right.
- [62:07]
B
You know, some of you are saying. I hear you saying, this is amazing, all the stuff you're saying about Rowling, but did she do this on purpose? Does she know she's writing in the tradition about this? I can say 100. Yes, she clearly has a medieval bestiary lying around. She is clearly. All of her animals are quite consistent, instantly symbolically presented. And I also chuckled because on Harry's Year One book list, she included a bestiary, the Fabulous Beasts book, which, of course, I think went on to be.
- [62:33]
A
A movie, which I have not seen, but fantastic beasts.
- [62:36]
B
Fantastic, fantastic beasts.
- [62:37]
A
Where to find Them.
- [62:38]
B
There you go. Fantastic beasts and where to find them. And that's. So that's her bestiary to explain the beasts there. But I'm going to be pulling from a bestiary that was translated out of the Latin. This is a 12th century bestiary that was translated out of Latin into English by an author. Author you might know TH White, who wrote the Once and Future King. He was a Cambridge medievalist. And it's subtitled A Book of Beasts. This is very easy to find on Amazon or AbeBooks or Thriftbooks. And my students love having a copy of this because they can go through and. And use it as a handbook for interpreting the animals that appear in literature. And some of my students have told me they've been using it to write scenarios for Dungeons and Dragons, as if.
- [63:22]
A
One does as one does. You know, it's funny, I. You wouldn't think that, but there is a. I remember years ago I was reading a Woody Allen book. Yes, Woody Allen writes books as well as movies. And there's one where he writes a. A fake bestiary. And they have all of these ridiculous animals, like a mouse who has the gift of song but can only sing Cole Porter tunes or something like that. It was completely ridiculous, but yeah. So a Woody Allen bestiary.
- [63:56]
B
All right, so it is part of a school story that the students are going to be sorted into houses. But here, of course, she's made it all magical. And we have a sorting hat. And it's unclear if the hats place students in each house based on the qualities they value are the qualities they exhibit. And the sorting process becomes a plot point as you move through the series. But that's something to think about. So here we've got four houses, and she, of course, makes them magical that each one has an animal associated with it. And so we'll talk about what those are. But the four houses are Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. And in this book, the most intense house rivalry is between Gryffindor, Griffindor and Slytherin. Okay, so let's talk about them because you guys wanted to know what's the deal with the animals and why the colors? So here we go. Let's start with Gryffindor, or as Stephen Fry says, gryffindor. Gryffindor. But I don't. I don't speak British. So here we go. All right, so Gryffindor's animal is a lion, and its colors are scarlet and gold. And the traits associated with it are bravery and chivalry. Some of you wondered if the four houses corresponded to the four elements they do. So Gryffindor corresponds to fire and that's why the colors are scarlet and gold. But the color of the lion is also scarlet and gold. And a few people think that the Red lion, that's the, the symbol for Gryffindor is a nod to Aslan of, of Narnia. And Lewis, of course, big influence on Rowling. I mean, you know, nobody writing fantasy is not influenced by Lewis or Tolkien. And so some people think it's a nod to that. If it is or if it isn't. The Red lion idea and image goes back super far back. King Arthur has a red lion, shields with red lions on them. That's a very, very old thing, but it's going to connect Gryffindor to King Arthur. And there's a lot I'm going to say about King Arthur, but not in this book.
- [66:03]
A
Book.
- [66:03]
B
I have to wait until we get a little further. But there's going to be so much King Arthur stuff that's going to blow your mind.
- [66:10]
A
Look at you, wetting your audience's appetite.
- [66:12]
B
You know, there I am. There I am. So let's look up in the Bestiary what the lion is known for. Okay, so this will make sense why Gryffindor, right? So everybody there is. They're there because they're courageous. And I, I read an interview where she said it's not like physical courage, but moral courage. And as you read through the books, you definitely see that moral courage is what she values. Standing up against the crowd, that kind of thing, standing up for bullies. And we've already seen a little bit of that in this book. So lions, of course, are known for their courage. So let me find, let me find the lion, okay? Leo the lion, mightiest of beasts, will stand up to anybody. Okay, so we have a long thing here about how courageous the lion is. So of course, that would be one of the first ways that we know the lion would be associated with that. Then we've got pages and pages of how the lion is a Christ figure. Everything from the lion of Judah reference to. Where was that? What was that? This is really good. The third feature. So again, they're explaining all the ways that a lion is like Christ. The third feature is that that when a lioness gives birth to her cubs, she brings them forth dead and lays them up lifeless for three days until her father. Until their father coming on the third day, breathes in their faces and makes them alive, just so did The Father Omnipotent raise our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead on the third day. Okay, so lots of good stuff like that in the bestiary. So, so the lion is associated with courage and it's also associated with, with Christ. And we're going to, we're going to come back to that idea. Then one of this super interesting comment about lions. Okay. The lion has one enemy, a lion, although he gets the king of the beasts gets harassed by the tiny sting of a scorpion and snake poison kills him. And what is the house enemy of the lion? Slytherin? The snake. So well done, well done. Rolling. We also don't want to miss the fact that Gryffindor is a reference to the mythical creature, the griffin. Talk about what a griffin is, but Gryffindor is if. So if you do it as two words, griffin, D apostrophe or. That's rich. There you go. So the gold griffin, the golden griffin. And again, gold is one of the colors here and griffin is another one of these great mythological creatures. And it's got the body and hind legs of a lion and the front legs and head of a giant eagle. Or as Alice in Wonderland says, if you don't know what a griffin is, look at its picture. And okay.
- [69:14]
A
Personal anecdote. I talked about.
- [69:16]
B
Yeah.
- [69:16]
A
At a school for many years whose team was the Griffins.
- [69:19]
B
Oh, really?
- [69:20]
A
Yeah. And one or two times I had people ask me, people who weren't affiliated with the school ask me what was up with our mascot, because they didn't, they hadn't seen it before. And like, I thought that, I would have thought like people recognize a griffin. Right. Surely from somewhere like. Yeah. Whether, whether reading or from Dungeons and Dragons or whatever. But I had one guy, I remember his son had played on a team that played against our school at some sporting event. And anyway, he and I were talking, he said, what's your team again? It was like the demon owls or something. So he thought it was like a demonic owl. A griffin, you know, actually, which I thought was pretty cool by itself. So if any of you are like starting up a sports franchise. The demon owl, the demon owls.
- [70:12]
B
There you go, there you go. Like the lion, a griffin is also a figure that's associated with Christ, namely because it has a dual nature. So as a lion, it's associated with the earth and as an eagle, it's associated with the sky. So it's very, very often animals that are dual natured are, are Christ figures. Frogs are one of those because they're both. They can live on water and they can live on land, that kind of thing. Now all I'll say about this is that Harry is very closely associated with Gryffindor and the idea of the Golden Griffin. And he's told a few times throughout the series that he's a natural Gryffindor, a true Gryffindor, that kind of thing. So we'll look for that. And again, I'm just laying out a little bit of framework for you. But as the story goes, these symbolic connotations become more and more important. All right, after Gryffindor we have. Oh, oh, and the fact that the griffin is an eagle and is associated with the sky. I think that's why the Gryffindors live in a tower. So they're, they're up. All right, after that we've got the Hufflepuffs and they are yellow and black. And their animal is the badger. And the people who are chosen into Hufflepuff are loyal and hard working and so the Hufflepuff element. So Gryffindor's fire, Hufflepuff is earth. And that makes sense because badgers dig in the ground. And the Hufflepuff puff kids are very down to earth. They tend to be the ones that are gifted in herbology. So they plant things in the earth. That's the Hufflepuff kids. Their colors are yellow and black. And again, these are earth colors. So the yellow is the color of wheat and black is the color of soil. Each of these houses also have a colored jewel for the way that they tally the house points. And so Gryffindor's got rubies which are red and Hufflepuffs have yellow diamonds. So the colors work all the way through. So that's the Hufflepuffs. And then the Ravenclaws are eagles and they are known for wit and learning. And their colors are blue and bronze. Their jewel is the blue sapphire. So that makes sense. And their element. Would you like to guess what their element is?
- [72:42]
A
Since they're eagles, I'm guessing the sky.
- [72:45]
B
Yes. They're air. So we had fire and earth and so they're air. And their blue and bronze color is. Blue is the color of the sky and bronze is the color for eagle feathers. And when I looked up the eagle in the bestiary, the, it made a big deal about. The eagle is known for his, quote, acuteness of his eyes. He can see. And so ravenclaws would be the seers, the smart people, the, you know, those who can, can see and understand and Perceive and even kind of having like a mystical all seeingness about them is going to come up as a, as a leader plot point. And then we get to the Slytherins and as I said in this book, it's primarily Gryffindors versus Slytherins. But you'll see the other houses come into ascendance in some of the other books. So the Slytherins are their animals, the snake and students, they're chosen here if they have cunning and ambition and their colors are green and silver. So we'll talk about all of that. The, the Bestiary's got tons of stuff on serpents, as you can imagine, because the serpent's a huge, huge symbol. But first, let's talk about the name Slytherin. That's so great because snakes slither. They slither. All right. So before I start talking. Well, actually, let me talk about these other things and then I'll get to the snake. Their element is water. And that's because of the idea of sea serpents. Serpents are often in water. And of course you find out that the Gryffindor, I'm sorry, the Slytherins are actually in a dungeon. That's where they're from. Coming. Common room. So the Gryffindors are all the way at the top and the Slytherins are all the way at the bottom. Now, what you don't want to do is to think that Gryffindor good, Slytherin bad. Because we're definitely told in the world of the book that there have been good Slytherins. All the bad wizards came out of Slytherin. But that doesn't mean everybody in Slytherin is bad. And I think what we're seeing here is this double idea of the meaning of a serpent. So when you take a class of mine, you learn in great detail why it is that every image has a double, a double meaning. And it's only in the context that you can understand the meaning. So you have to really, really resist the urge to think, you know, serpent equals bad all the time. Sometimes it's bad and sometimes it's not bad, as I'm about to explain. But first, you know, to talk about cunning and ambition. I guess what you could see there is, you know, some people are going to use that for good and then others are going to be tempted to use it for bad. But these are definitely people that have a drive to sort of be the best. So a serpent, according to our Bestiary, also has a double meaning. So obviously, Garden of Eden, Satan is Associated with the serpent, that would be, that would be evil. But serpents, even in the Bible, are not always portrayed as bad because, you know, you flip a few pages from Genesis and you get to. Is it numbers where the, the Israelites look on the serpent and they're healed.
- [75:42]
A
Correct.
- [75:43]
B
Right. So they're all dying and they look at the bronze serpent and they're healed. And the bronze serpent there is a Christ figure. We're also told to be, you know, wisest serpents.
- [75:52]
A
And even the lion, biblically, can be a good and an evil because Satan is raging like a lion seeking those he might devour.
- [76:00]
B
Exactly, exactly.
- [76:01]
A
First Peter.
- [76:02]
B
Excellent. So good reminder. All of these images have good and bad, bad versions of them. And it's, it's why you have to be very careful when you're talking about symbols. Symbols don't mean just one thing. There's a context there, believe it or not.
- [76:15]
A
I should qualify this by saying they don't always mean one thing, but they can't mean everything.
- [76:19]
B
No. Correct. Yeah, correct. No, no, that's. No. Yes, they definitely don't mean everything. The, the symbols are rooted in nature, as I will explain. And, and so because of that. Well, I'll give an example with the serpent. Okay, So a serpent is known as being crafty and poisonous and it'll, you know, strike you and kill you. Right. So that's, that's a dangerous thing. And of course, its association with the Garden of Eden makes it, you know, an evil symbol. At the same time, however, snakes shed their skin, which makes them a resurrection image. It's a death and rebirth image. So serpents can also be associated with Christ. So, no, I'm not saying symbols can, can mean anything, but like, within a very particular framework, there's a good version and a bad version. Even you take something like water, right? So sometimes going into water means, you know, you're drowned and you're dead, and sometimes going into water and coming out, well, that's a baptism. You died and were born again. But, you know, it's not, it's not going to be. You can't just make up it to mean anything. They're rooted in, they're rooted in nature. And again, I'm giving the very, very short version of this if you want to understand. All about symbols, my how to read fairy tales class gets all into that. And how do you know how to interpret symbols? And what do they mean and what do they not mean? What are the limits? But there's a whole tradition of symbols and what they do mean. And what they don't mean, and it's rooted in nature and it's rooted in stories, and it's actually very easy to find out what things mean. Unfortunately, in the 20th century, we rejected all of that. And we began, like, with Freud, we began to think that symbols can mean whatever you want them to mean. And that's not true. And so. So, you know, if you had, like, a professor in college who was doing all this weird symbolic reading, and you're like, I don't understand. How did they. How did they get that? How did they get that? You know, oh, the. The blue curtain means, you know, the oppression of the masses. Like, how'd you get that? Well, they just made that up. And symbols can't just mean anything. And that's what the bestiary helps us to see. All of these animal symbols are rooted in nature. Eagles have strong eyes. Lions are courageous. Right. Serpents shed their skin, that kind of thing. Now, the green and silver is really interesting to me because the sea serpent idea, that's like the lochs, like the Loch Ness Monster. And those are typically green bodies of water, and silver is the color of gray rainwater.
- [78:49]
A
How did you get that? That's amazing.
- [78:51]
B
I did a bunch of reading.
- [78:53]
A
Okay. Wow.
- [78:54]
B
Some. Some of the stuff. Where did I get the stuff about the colors? Some of the stuff about the colors I got off the Harry Potter website. Oh, yeah. The other stuff I got off of the. The bestiaries. No, the stuff about the locks, I definitely got that off of a Harry Potter website. So that's setting us up for the. The houses. And I loved the detail. I actually did not know this until I looked it up for the podcast has that the one enemy of the lion is the serpent. And so she totally knew that. She totally knew that. She totally did this on purpose. And she's. She's genius. I just. I love her. I love. Anybody out there who knows J.K. rowling. You can tell her that somebody over here just thinks she's. She's the best. Living off.
- [79:32]
A
They're beginning to, like, stalk her territory. Yeah, yeah. Best to move on.
- [79:37]
B
I'm not gonna, like, send weird packages to her house. From a fan. Go Kathy Bates on her. I'm your biggest fan.
- [79:44]
A
No, have yourself mailed to her house.
- [79:49]
B
Good times. All right. Don't give me any ideas. All right, I want to talk about then two key scenes. Let's start with. Should we start with the troll scene or the Mirror of Erised? Let's start with the Mirror of Erised, because I have Much more to say about the troll scene. Let's start with the mirror of Erised. You figured that out quite quickly, that Erised.
- [80:10]
A
Kind of easy. It's desire spelled backwards because it's a mirror.
- [80:12]
B
Right. And how about the. The kind of odd language motto that was on the mirror, so that's backwards, reads, I show not your face but your heart's desire. So let's talk about what Harry sees versus what Ron sees. So what is Harry's heart's desire?
- [80:35]
A
His parents.
- [80:35]
B
His parents, his family. And that fits into our orphan motif, our exile from home motif. Very, very closely associated to this every man on the journey to God idea is the idea that because of the Fall, all of mankind feels this exile from home. Why? We've all been pushed out of Eden, we all have a homelessness and we all have a deep, deep longing for home. This is one of the reasons why orphan stories are so important. Important because spiritually, symbolically, we're all orphans, right? We got cut off from our relationship to our father in the garden. We've been pushed out of our home and now we wander around looking to have that relationship reconciled, looking to have that feeling of home. It's really, really easy symbolically then, to show that with an orphan. So, of course, like Odysseus, Harry's greatest desire is home and family. I mean, Odysseus cries through the whole book over his wife and child. It's true. It always surprises my students. I think they have this idea of like this Greek tough guy, and if you read the Iliac and the Iliad and the Odyssey, all the time they're either murdering you or crying.
- [81:47]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [81:50]
B
It's not. You mean, it's not just feminist subversion to show men who have emotions? This is the ancient world, too.
- [81:56]
A
Well, honest, C.S. lewis wrote about this somewhere and. And, yeah, and he says that the association of men and tearlessness comes kind of late in both social and literary history. Yeah, that would be too much of a rabbit trail, but it actually is. Yeah, the history of crying is more absorbing than you might think.
- [82:26]
B
Think. And I think in this scene that we do see that Ron is on some kind of identity quest because what he desires. So it's a. It's a very. She's so good structurally. Again, this is. I have. I'm all about structure and she's just so tight in the way she structures her books. But we have a. We had a. We had a parallel there. So Harry. All Harry wants is to be surrounded by his family. And all Ron wants is to not be surrounded by his family. He wants to stand out.
- [82:50]
A
It's not the case for once.
- [82:52]
B
Yes. He wants to have. Have the spotlight on him.
- [82:56]
A
How many family vacations did Ron get.
- [82:58]
B
Forgotten on Home Alone at the Weasleys? Yeah, exactly. That'd be some fun fan fiction right there. Someone should write that. Now, obviously, this mirror is connecting us with another myth, though. The myth of Narcissus. Especially when Dumbledore comes in and says, it's dangerous. It's dangerous. It'll leads to death or madness.
- [83:19]
A
And also that you can forget yourself in dreaming and fail to live.
- [83:23]
B
Correct. Which is, of course, exactly.
- [83:25]
A
Exactly what Narcissus does.
- [83:26]
B
Exactly what happens to Narcissus, who falls in love with his.
- [83:29]
A
Gets rooted and stuck to his own image.
- [83:31]
B
Yes. And. And, and gets. And gets dying. Now, this is not a spoiler, but if you've read book seven, you might be picking up on an echo here. And I'll just leave it at that. All right, now I want to get to the troll scene in our very first episode. I said that there were two things that J.K. rowling fought for with book one. One was the title, and the other was this scene with the trolls. The publishers thought this was too. I know your face. You're like, what? Publishers thought this was too intense to see kids being in danger of being killed by a troll.
- [84:03]
A
That's dumb.
- [84:04]
B
But she fought for that because she said that there had to be something significant that happens to bond these kids together, get them to overcome things.
- [84:15]
A
And it's not grizzly or anything like that.
- [84:18]
B
Yeah. I mean, gosh, these are the same people that bowdlerize fairy tales. And when I was a kid, we had a picture book of Little Red Riding Hood where the wolf does not eat the grandmother. He just scares her away. Yeah, that. No, that is not what's happening there. Anyway. So, I mean, publishers are overly sensitive to that kind of thing. But as you said earlier, we see Hermione change here and. And it's marked by her not following the rules and choosing loyalty and friendship over rule following.
- [84:50]
A
Yeah.
- [84:50]
B
All right, so I want to back up just a little bit to talk about how we try to understand these three kids. So they've been kind of on their separate journeys and now. Now they're a trio. And we saw in the next chapters, they are a trio. And they're going to continue to be a trio for the. For the whole series. Now, this is. This is the making of this. So we talked before about how characters symbolically are visible souls and again, those of you are at home saying, I don't know. Are you reading too much into this? Does J.K. rowling know about this? I actually have a quote from her which got me quite excited, because she knows exactly what she's doing, folks. And here's what she said. Here's what she said about giving Harry a scar. I wanted him to be physically marked by what he has been through. It was an outward expression of what he has been through inside. And there we are, right? Visible soul. He's scarred, and we can all see it. His insides are on the outside, as I said. She also says I gave him a scar in a prominent place so other people would recognize him, which. Because that brings back the. The Odyssey reference. All right, so where am I going with this? Well, yes, characters are visible souls, but sometimes groups of characters are also an image of something. Okay, Then this and the group together. So to explain this, I will enlist my husband. The Classus is here to explain a little bit about Plato's tripartite soul.
- [86:14]
A
So this Platonic division of the soul appears in a couple of his dialogues in a significant way in the Republic, and also, I believe, in the Phaedrus and Plato divides the soul roughly into the. The logical or reasoning compartment of it. Then the central, which, of course is the head, the affective or spirited element, what he calls the thumos, which is the Greek word for spirit, which is assigned to the chest, and then the appetitive or the emotional side of side of it, which he assigns. He calls Eros and assigns to the belly.
- [87:07]
B
Correct. And if you guys heard our Abolition of Man series that we did, we talk a whole lot about the. The tripartite soul there because CS Lewis whole argument that modern world is creating men without chests is a reference to. To this. Okay? We are. We are creating men who do not have these. The proper affections. Now, once you get to the Middle Ages, they take this Plato's tripartite soul, and they also use it. They translate it a little bit. And so they'll talk about the reason, the will and the appetites. But it's the same central idea that there are three parts to a man. So once you understand that characters are visible souls, that characters are symbolic, okay, that doesn't mean that they're not individually created, need, you know, fully developed characters. And if an author is really, really good, they're doing both. The character is a symbolic character, but also a fully developed character. And I think over these books, she does a brilliant job of that. But it's not either or and it's usually both. So one of the things that happens, my students get really excited when I explain this is that when you find a trio of characters, they are gonna shake out as a head, a chest, chest and a belly. Give you an example. Let's think about the wizard of Oz. Dorothy has how many friends with her on this journey? 3. And what are they? The Scarecrow, the Tin man and the Lion. Okay, the Scarecrow, what does he want? A brain. And then he gets to the end and he says, oh, but I've been thinking all along, I, I, okay, so he's the head, the Scarecrow's the head. When they're like, I don't know which way to go, the Scarecrow jumps in and says, oh, we need to think logically about this. I can't go both ways. So he's the head, head, the Tin Man. What's he looking for? A heart. He's obviously the chest, right? The, the seat of just sentiments, as Lewis would call it. And, and he's the one who's sort of like, oh, I don't know, guys, and I don't know how I feel about this. Right. And then you have the Cowardly lion, who's the belly, right? He's, he's, he's all emotion, he's all fear. Usually the belly is kind of hot headed, but in stories and this amuses me a lot to look for in stories, the easiest way to spot the belly, they're always eating. And think about all the scenes where the Cowardly lion is eating. He's eating. He's sucking on his tail. He's always got something in his mouth. He's the belly. Right.
- [89:22]
A
Three Musketeers.
- [89:23]
B
Oh, nice. The Three Musketeers.
- [89:25]
A
And they're. The belly is the most obvious as well. Porthos is, he's physically the largest. And he also food and women are sort of his, you know, his, his thing, I guess you could say his appetites.
- [89:36]
B
Unrestrained appetites. Right. You also, so they'll have unrestrained appetites in some way and also be hotheads, heads, the pick fights, that kind of thing. So what you want to do and not do when you're thinking about these three characters, this is not good versus evil. This is not head is good, belly bad. These are the three parts of the soul. So the question is, are you properly ordered?
- [89:58]
A
Can they function well together?
- [89:59]
B
That's right. And what Lewis points out, CS Lewis points out is that the chest is the seat which pulls it together. Right. So the head the chest and the belly have to all be harmonized. All right, so let's think about this. The first one's so easy. Who's the head?
- [90:14]
A
Oh Hermione of course.
- [90:15]
B
Right. She's always in the library. She's always reading books. She's the rule follower. She's the one to always say to the guy, come on, use your head. Right. They're all freaking out about the dog and she's like, but use your head guys. You didn't see it's on a trapdoor. So she's the head. I love that. After the trapdoor scene Harry goes back to bed and he says Hermione had given him something to think about. About. Right. This is going to be her role. She is the head.
- [90:37]
A
She even checks their homework for them.
- [90:39]
B
Checks their homework, Right. So she's obviously the head. Okay. And the next one's really easy too. Who's the belly?
- [90:46]
A
I don't think that's as. I don't think that's.
- [90:48]
B
Oh well it's, I think it's obvious if you know what to look for. Ron is always eating. He's right.
- [90:55]
A
When we meet him like yeah, that's right.
- [90:56]
B
He's eating snacks and he's complaining about the sandwiches. He eats all the snacks. He has that whole like youngish child with many siblings being scared to not get enough food. Ron talks a lot about food.
- [91:07]
A
No, that's true.
- [91:07]
B
Ron is the one who will complain the most about creature comforts. Not comfortable. I'm wet, I'm cold. You know, where's the bed? Ron is also the hot headed one. He's the one who accepts the duel. Let's fight. Let's fight. Right? So that, that's also a mark of the belly. He will often be accused in the books of not using his head. Okay. And then the chest, Chest is hairy. The chest is hairy. So what we're to see in the first 150 pages of this book right before we, before we get to the friendship is that they are not functioning well because they are not properly ordered. So it's very easy to portray a character who's out of proportion with the belly. Very easy, right. It's a little harder to do it with the head. And I thought she does a great job. So we are to see Hermione is being obnoxious, she's lonely, everybody hates her. Even the teachers are like put your hand down. Hermione. She is an out of. She's a disordered head. So what happens in the troll scene is that all three work together to defeat this troll. And the moment of Hermione becoming, or us seeing that Hermione is becoming properly ordered is when she and the boys are shocked when she lies to a teacher. And she chooses friendship and loyalty over rules. And that is. That is supposed to be us seeing that they are properly.
- [92:36]
A
Actually, here's another thing. We're well into the book by this point. We expect Harry to have some kind of manifest weakness. It hasn't showed itself yet, so far as I can tell. Whatever it is.
- [92:52]
B
Right. No, I agree, I agree.
- [92:54]
A
She takes a long time setting this particular book up.
- [92:58]
B
She does. And really, book one is a microcosm of the entire series. She does the exact same thing. Her detective novels are also written in a ring structure. And it wasn't until I read book seven that I could see the genius of book one. Much like this, she just really beautifully lays it all out. So one of the things to think about as you finish this book and as well as you go through the rest of the series, be thinking about when is this trio properly ordered and working as one and when are they disordered and when you see them disordered, what happens? What causes the disorder and what happens as a result? So over and over we're going to see the symbolic picture of what an properly ordered soul looks like. Now, again, as I said earlier in book one, this concept is all very scaled down for 11 years old, 11 year olds. But as the books progress, this is going to get a lot more sophisticated. And already I can hear some of you yelling, right? Yelling into. Into your phones and into your car stereos. Book seven. Book seven, yes, book seven. Book seven. All right, one last thing I want to talk about then, because, yeah, we've been going a while now. I want to talk a little bit more about how symbols work because when we get to the end of this series, we're going to see that she's bringing a very significant symbolic meaning together. So I want to prepare us for that by thinking about how symbols work. And there's a couple of different things she does in. In the books which are quite delightful to me. In the series of books, she has at least two books in which books itself are a plot point and about reading the book well and uncovering the hidden meaning and the layers becomes a plot point. So she's very much directing us on how to read, but she's also doing something else with the nature of art. And I think if we think about the pictures in this world, and the pictures are alive and they Move. Right. They're not just two dimensional. There's some. There's a reality there. They have a life of their own, and they're moving around. Well, that's an icon. Okay, so an icon is a symbolic. A deeply, deeply symbolic painting. That's why it's two dimensionals. And people say, oh, you know, those. Those poor medieval artists didn't know. They didn't know perspective. No, no, they knew perspective. They weren't trying to draw realistic things. They were trying to draw symbolic things and trying to bring out spiritual significance. So an icon is that kind of spiritual painting where you look at it and you look through it. It's like a window to the spiritual realm, and there's a life there that's a picture of art. Madeleine Lingle, another great devotee of the Inklings, and I'm sure another influence on earling. But in A Wrinkle in Time, you know, she does the same sort of thing. And in her nonfiction, when she talks about how art works, she's got one of my favorite quotes where she says, art is an icon. Okay, so the whole point then, with art is you're seeing through it to that spiritual reality behind it. Tolkien uses the idea of a prism, right? So you have light, capital L, the spiritual transcendent truth. It's way on the other end over there. And that. The way that we can see that is through the prism of art. So art is a prison. That light comes through each and it hits that prism, and it's, like, diffused into all these different ways.
- [96:25]
A
Here's a question.
- [96:25]
B
Yes.
- [96:26]
A
You are an Eastern Orthodox Christian. That being the case, does it bother you that icon and celebrity get sort of lazily bandied about as synonyms?
- [96:36]
B
Yes.
- [96:37]
A
Like, if we say that so and so. Style, icon.
- [96:41]
B
Yeah. No, they're not. Sorry, your. Your designer label does not. I do not see a spiritual reality behind that. I see a material reality, buddy. Yes, I do. It's also like what C.S. lewis says, that you don't look at the beam, you look along the beam. Right? So art is always iconic in that it's pushing you to some spiritual reality behind it. And there's this idea. Okay, so why. Why do we have to do it like this? Well, it's because spiritual realities are too real to be portrayed realistically. If you went back and listened to my episode, why read fairy tales? You heard me say that fairy tales are realer than real. Okay, that's what I'm getting at. The spiritual is too real. That is why it cannot be portrayed realistically. C.S. lewis kind of gives us a picture of that in the Great Divorce, when he get. They get to the spiritual realm and the grass is hurting him. It's too real.
- [97:34]
A
Mankind cannot bear too much reality. T.S. eliot.
- [97:38]
B
Oh, there you go. That's. That's. That's fantastic. Fantastic. So icons, then and again, art portray spiritual realities through symbols. And I think this is because human beings are made to experience truth. Veiled, Right. In the Fairy Queen by Edmund Spencer, the main character, Una, who is an allegory for truth, she wears a veil. No one can see her face. Right? That's how stories work. There's a truth there, but it has to come through us. Veiled. Why? Well, because it's too much for us to bear in our fallen, finite human state. It'll burn us up. You know, think about Moses wanting to look on God. God saying, well, buddy, that's not going to work like you think it is. You know, you can't handle this. You can only look at this burning bush, which is an icon, right? It's not God. It's. It's a. You know, it's an image to make you think of God, but it's not God. Or it's an image, I'd say, through which you see God. Right. It's the veil. Or we have myths like that, too, where. Where the girl wants to look on Zeus in all his glory, similarly, and it burns her up. Right? So human beings, I think, are made to learn through veiled truth. So Harry Potter, then, like all romances with their visible souls, are portraying spiritual realities. But Rowling is still setting up everything in book one. But we'll get a glimmer of what she's up to when we get to the end of book one. So be looking for that. That. And let's see. Do I have time to talk about one more thing? Yeah, I guess I can talk about one. Just one. One. One small thing. The act of reading. And especially if you learn to read symbolically and to perceive the transcendent truth on the other side of the art, it's an act of learning how to discover meaning. And I think that is part of the intent, intense appeal of these books. There's more and more to discover on each new read in the book. I read about the publication history. It talked about how when the first two books came out, people really enjoyed them. But it wasn't until book three that they had enough of the book that they could see. Wait a minute. The stuff happening in book three, she foreshadowed in book One, they started to realize there was a plan and there were layers of meaning. And that's when people started obsessively rereading them, looking to. To figure out the clues, looking to put it all together. This ends up being a lesson in how to interpret reality in the modern era. In our secular, materialist world, we think that we determine meaning or we impose meaning, or each person is creating meaning for themselves in an essential, meaningless world. What we know from psychologists, from neuroscientists, from all of them, is that that overwhelms our brains, it overwhelms our nervous systems, that to put that kind of pressure on you, that in any given situation you have to craft a meaning for yourself in a world of meaninglessness ends up overwhelming us, making us depressed and anxious and despairing. But when we find ourselves in the act of discovering meaning, of putting puzzle pieces together, that's actually super comforting to our brain, and it's an antidote for despair and anxiety. Human beings find great comfort and joy in being involved in this act of discovering meaning. I think that's what happens when we read, and I think that's what happens when we read these kinds of books over and over, and we start to see all these different layers of meaning. We can puzzle out the meaning. We can see that we have not been handed a Ziploc bag of fragments that mean nothing and told to build something out of it, but that there's a unifying picture under there, that we can puzzle it out, that we can fit it together, and that it does fit together, and it does mean something. And it's so satisfying. And so one of the things that's happening as we read this book is we are learning how meaning works and how you don't create it, but you puzzle it together. You develop eyes to see, just like with when I explained that there's the ring structure in the book that sent many of you off into putting those puzzle pieces together. And I think that that is part of the appeal of these books. It's certainly the appeal of a romance. And if I explain all of that, that will definitely shoot me into a very long rabbit trail about how romances work. But it does put the reader, just like last time I said Harry Potter himself, the character is going to go on a journey and discover that his life has meaning. As we journey with him, we discover our life has meaning. All life has meaning. And when you engaged in the act of reading, you are again reminded that there is meaning here. This isn't random, it's not meaningless. There's a meaning, and it can be discerned if you have the eyes to see it. And again, the meaning, like I said with the prism idea, the meaning doesn't come from the thing itself. It doesn't come from the beam. It comes from looking along the beam to the thing behind it. So, yeah, I think there's so much going on here, and I think that there's a reason why these books have captured people's imaginations. I think that. That in a secular, materialist age that thinks that there is no meaning, going on a quest with Harry Potter and finding out your life actually has meaning, not just meaning, but, like, cosmic significance, I think that was deeply, deeply comforting to people. And I think the act of learning how to take the fragments and find that there's a unifying picture here, if you have eyes to see, I think that's also a deeply comforting and hopeful experience. Experience. And I think that's part of the function of art and what it means when we say that art is iconic. All right, any final comments, Mr. Banks? I feel like I got on my hobby horse there a bit.
- [103:42]
A
You mentioned the inevitability of any contemporary writer of fantasy, including Rowling, being influenced by Tolkien and by Lewis. I think that's basically true. Here's one thing I. I don't see as much Tolkien in this as other. Other visible influences. Will say one thing, though. Tolkien and Rowling are both writing about worlds which are pregnant with magic, where you don't see any religion, or at least not very much.
- [104:18]
B
Well, you have Christmas, but you don't have it much like Tolkien.
- [104:21]
A
Yeah, they're not. Not much explicit religion.
- [104:24]
B
And, you know, Tolkien got heat for that, just like she has, and it really hurt him.
- [104:29]
A
Christopher Hitchens actually said he really liked the fact that you have, like, you know, basically good kids who have strong moral codes, who don't seem to be religious in any. Any obvious way. So. So he thought that this was kind of a. Yeah. Kind of an app. Well, not an apologia for atheism, but like on. On our side.
- [104:47]
B
Yeah, I think that's a misread. It's generally accepted that you. Tolkien felt like if you introduce explicit Christian theology, like all the characters, like the hobbits all go to church, for example, that. That destroys the fairy world and the symbolism. So the whole symbolism of the fairy world is Christian, and. But you will destroy the symbolic, you know, unity of the thing if you.
- [105:11]
A
If you just use Father Christmas saying into Narnia.
- [105:14]
B
Well, that's. That's. That's that's how, yeah, but, you know, know, his book is deeply Christian, and he said it's deeply Catholic, and he got a bad review in a Catholic magazine that said it was a shame he didn't write a Catholic book, and that hurt him so bad. It's like, what book did you read? It's Catholic through and through. And J.K. rowling, well, she is a Christian, and people find that shocking because they didn't know it. And, but I read an interview with her where she said she tried not to make a big deal about her faith, faith while she was being interviewed, while the books were being written because she thought it would telegraph the ending of the book. That's how deeply Christian it is. I also read an interview with her in response to, to people criticizing the book and saying, you know, it's not Christian. Christians shouldn't read it. And she quoted a blogger or an article or something where a Christian had said, you know, if you have eyes to, I'm paraphrasing here, but basically, if you have eyes to, to see. Rowling has written a great defense of Christianity in this book, and she said, finally, somebody gets it. So I think the same thing is going. Now, I would disagree that there's not Tolkien elements here. We haven't got to it yet. But I, so I, I, I read the entire series ahead of the podcast because I wanted to have the shape of the whole series before I came back and talked about book one. And I just so happened to be reading this book, the Philosopher's Stone, at the same time that I was reading the Hobbit. And it was so close, the stuff that was happening, that I, I kept getting Mirkwood Forest and the Forbidden Forest mixed up. And in my Hobbit class, I kept calling it the Forbidden Forest. And then we all laughed because, like, yes, it's the Hobbit. It's totally the Hobbit. But we'll talk about more of that when we get into some chapters where they're going to go into the Forbidden Forest. But, yes, the Tolkien influences is definitely coming.
- [107:05]
A
I just haven't seen it. I'm a newbie.
- [107:07]
B
You are a newbie. You're new. You're newbie. All right, well, that's a lot for you to chew on. And next week, we'll finish this book and hopefully be, be able to bring it to some kind of, you know, crescendo and conclusion. And we will be getting into the deep, deep symbolic meaning of the story once we get to the end. And I hope hope you're going to enjoy that. I'm excited about it and I'm excited for all of you who've never read these books before and I just, just, I kind of envy you. That's so fun. So. All right, well, again, you can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find out about the Harry Potter class. You can join Our patreon@patreon.com Literary life to get in on our spoilers threads. We have two different threads, one with no spoilers and one with spoilers. The spoilers people. Man, you guys are going to town on these books. That is amazing. Well done to all of you. And again, welcome to our new listeners and our new Patreon members. I hope that you hope you've been learning a lot and I hope that you're intrigued to go check out some of our other episodes in our back catalog. Go find out why detective novels are actually displaced romances as well, and jump in with some of these other books that we've been reading. Thanks for joining us on this journey. 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 morning, 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.
- [109:22]
A
The Fairies by William Allingham. Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren't go a hunting for fear of little men, Wee folk, good folk trooping all together. Green jacket, red cap and white owl's feather down along the rocky shore some make their home. They live on crispy pancakes of yellow tide foam. Some in the reeds of the black mountain lake with frogs for their watchdogs all night awake high on the hilltop the old king sits. He is now so old and gray he's nigh lost his wits with a bridge of white mist Column kill he crosses on his stately journeys from sleeve league to Rosses or going up with music on cold starry nights to sup with the queen of the gay north northern lights. They stole little Bridget for seven years long. When she came down again, her friends were all gone. They took her lightly back between the night and morrow. They thought that she was fast asleep, but she was dead with sorrow. They have kept her ever since, deep within the lake, on a bed of flag leaves, watching till she wakes. By the craggy hillside, through the mosses bare. They have planted thorn trees for pleasure here and there. Is any man so daring as dig them up in spite, he shall find their sharpest thorns in his bed at night. Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen. We daren't go a hunting for fear of little men, wee folk, good folk, trooping all together. Green jacket, red cap and white owl's feather.