Pullman is Lockhart was Re: The Hidden Key to Harry Potter

[Kia]

No: HPFGUIDX 60285

>In the CoS section, Granger makes
>a very persuasive and novel case that the real-life model for the 
>character of
>Gilderoy Lockhart is Philip Pullman, author of the "Dark 
>Materials" trilogy. I
>found this to be particularly interesting, because it's something 
>I've *never* seen discussed anywhere in the fandom.


I think this is where Granger is taking it too far and just for this 
one argument the whole "Rowling is an inkling" becomes 
dubious and sounds like Granger just want to re-write the books 
in his line of thinking instead of giving a unbiased analysis.

Rowling herself actually likes Pullman's writing (what she stated 
more than once) and however I twist my mind around it, 
Lockhart's writing are not the tiniest little bit portrayed as good.

The problems Granger has with Pullman, are obvious. His Dark 
Materials are anti-Narnia. God is dead and religion is bad. But 
that's not enough - Pullman wrote once a very, very harsh article 
on the Narnia Chronicles and if Granger wrote this book as 
someone who believes in Christian faith than this:

"But there is no doubt in the public mind that what matters is the 
Narnia cycle, and that is where the puzzle comes, because there 
is no doubt in my mind that it is one of the most ugly and 
poisonous things I've ever read.

Why the Narnia books are popular with children is not difficult to 
see. In a superficial and bustling way, Lewis could tell a story, 
and when he cheats, as he frequently does, the momentum 
carries you over the bumps and the potholes..... And the 
American critic John Goldthwaite, in his powerful and original 
study of children's literature The Natural History Of Make-Believe 
(OUP, 1996), lays bare the misogyny, the racism, the sado-
masochistic relish for violence that permeates the whole cycle.

For an open-eyed reading of the books reveals some hair-
raising stuff. One of the most vile moments in the whole of 
children's literature, to my mind, occurs at the end of The Last 
Battle, when Aslan reveals to the children that "The term is over: 
the holidays have begun" because "There was a real railway 
accident. Your father and mother and all of you are - as you used 
to call it in the Shadowlands - dead." To solve a narrative 
problem by killing one of your characters is something many 
authors have done at one time or another. To slaughter the lot of 
them, and then claim they're better off, is not honest storytelling: 
it's propaganda in the service of a life-hating ideology. But that's 
par for the course. Death is better than life; boys are better than 
girls; light-coloured people are better than dark-coloured people; 
and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in 
Narnia, if you can face it."

must hurt. I think without a doubt, Granger dislikes Pullman and 
his anti-"Narnianism". Everything Granger values, Pullman 
openly detests. 

And this is where the Lockhart is Pullman theory is wishful 
thinking on the side of Granger. And with that little tidbit in mind
- that Granger does over-interpretate in order to get the desired 
results - the rest of his arguments have to face the question of 
how much they are actually wishful thinking.

Personally - I think the general hunt for symbolism in stags and 
red and lions and snakes is just over the top. To quote Umberto 
Eco on the wonder of symbolism: "[A]rchetypes don't exist; the 
body exists...And high is better than low, because... it's better to 
climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for 
worms... The easiest way to return from where you've been 
without retracing your steps is to walk in a circle. The animal that 
coils in a circle is the serpent; that's why so many cults and 
myths of the serpent exist, because it's hard to represent the 
return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotomys... So the 
vertical position is life, pointing sunward, and obelisks stand as 
trees stand, while the horizontal position and night are asleep, 
death. All cultures worship menhirs, monoliths, pyramids, 
columns, but nobody bows down to balconies and railings. Did 
you ever hear of an archaic cult of the sacred banister? ...anyway, 
that's how we're put together, all of us, and that's why we work 
out the same symbols millions of kilometers apart, and naturally 
they all resemble one another. Thus you see that people with a 
brain in their head, if they're shown an alchemist's oven, all shut 
up and warm inside, think of the belly of the mama making a 
baby, and only your Diabolicals think that the Madonna about to 
have the Child is a reference to the alchemist's oven. They spent 
thousands of years looking for a message, and it was there all 
the time: they just had to look at themselves in the mirror."

The original is much longer and can be found in "Foucault's 
Pendulum." My point is (besides quoting better authors at length) 
that searching for outright symbolism is a tricky and way too 
speculative business. There is a reason why symbols are 
chosen in the first place - snakes are poisonous, therefore they 
must be bad. You don't need to go back to Adam and Eve and 
the apple to come to the conclusion that the snake is a negative 
symbol and therefore the Slytherin symbolism is a negative one. 
You can go the direct way - a nest of poisonous snakes - and 
come to the same conclusion. The game can be played a lot 
more - think of a strong animal, brave, a predator, but perceived 
as "noble" - and voila - you have a lion without searching for 
Narnia parallels.  James is a stag? How many different large 
mammals can be found in the average British forest? Two? 
Three? And considering the bad reputation a wild boar or a fox 
has - James's animagus form might have nothing to do with any 
kind of symbolism.

I can play this game for hours, because sometimes the 
mundane is just that and *not* symbolism.

And yes, I heard of the quote where Rowling says that if she 
talked to much about her beliefs she would give too much away 
and Book Seven is going to tell a lot about her Christian beliefs, 
but I don't think that Rowling intionally inserts all these things as 
Christian symbols into the text. Sometimes colors are just colors 
and the name Hermione is just chosen to avoid harrasing of little 
girls with buckteeth who are named Elizabeth and not as a sign 
of things to come.


Kia