Williams, Tolkien, Landscapes, and Time

I recently reread Charles Williams's Descent into Hell for a book club I am in on the Inklings. These are some thoughts that occurred to me in reading the book for that, and they come in the form of contrast with Tolkien. The key contrasts are in the use of / instantiation in time and how that affects relationships of characters as symbolic.


 Williams, Overlay, and Identities

The central thing with Williams and time and characters is overlay. Actually he does similar with topography/landscape in other places, and Tolkien reportedly wasn't much into it (I would look that up further though to state Tolkien's dislike more definitively, but given the differences I'm going into in this post, it would seem congruent with their general ways of thinking that JRRT would be a bit down on this aspect ... I think it was in Carpenters The Inklings that I read it though). In his most concentrated work on the Arthurian material, an essay called "The Figure Arthur" that was published only posthumously with his two volumes of Arthurian poetry (the entire cycle through the eyes of the court minstrel) in a small volume known as the "Arthurian Torso" (because the essay there is only a portion, the rest was unfinished or lost), which is no longer in print but you can find a 1970s paperback used without huge amounts of effort through abe books etc, Williams talks about the kingdom of Logres and the kingdom of Britain being two opposed aspects of the historical kingdom of England (Lewis used the idea in That Hideous Strength), being, respectively, the mythical and the political. Between them in Williams's overlay topgraphy is the wood of Broceliande, which represents the tension between the two in its fallowness. In that wood is the chapel of the Fisher King, whose wound in the thigh (related to the infertility of the land) symbolizes the tension between the two leaders of the respective lands: the Pendragon of Logres and the political king of Britain. So, to Williams, the one thing of Britain in the time of Arthur (CW, like many English, unfortunately seems to be completely either oblivious or dismissive of the distinction between the actual Celtic Britons and the invading Germanic Angles who murdered them and took their island by violence) was an overlay of three realms and three rulers, the middle in each set symbolizing the tension between the other two.

In Descent into Hell, it is an overlay of characters: Pauline and her martyred ancestor, with the suicide thrown in there as a linkage when she finally overlays her ancestor and carries his pain of fear for him. There is also an overlay of staging with that suicide and Wentworth that takes after the staging of the everyman play of medieval literature, in which there was an upper stage and a lower stage: the suicide descends from his higher platform to the floor below in committing suicide and Wentworth descends out of the window to the street to follow to the succubus.

Over all, as far as time, this tends to make time static. In order for two to overlay each other, there is no movement between them on the same plane, along the same line called time ... and they have to stay still to coordinate with each other in the overlay. And one of the main points for this post is that the relation is direct contact: Pauline actually speaks to her ancestor and he actually hears her.

(It's actually a quite well-constructed passage that gives the novel a good construction: she can bear it for him because she already has born it in her lifelong living in fear of her doppleganger, which is why, when real-time Pauline is standing wondering what to do, the actual one who tells the ancestor to let her take the burden of the fear is her doppleganger behind her, and she doesn't have to turn around to see who says it, she knows because it is in the logic of the thing).

Williams accents the bi-temporality himself in Descent into Hell in a way that would also have made Tolkien less than sympathetic: Stanhope tells Pauline that they are all a bit strongly affected by or as  Elizabethan dramatists, standing in two time frames at the same time (and Shakespeare was the ultimate Elizabethan dramatist, and Tolkien was no fan of Shakespeare)..

Tolkien and the Biblical Mode:

For Tolkien, this thing of treatment of time relates to something that I have mentioned in various places in this blog, but rather than track and link to those and worry about whether I filled them out there the way that is most helpful here, it works better to give the rundown in brief again. I have stated that Tolkien, unique even among the Inklings, writes in "the biblical mode."

It's not that Tolkien uses the Bible more (his genre does not admit of using it directly the way Williams does ... Williams uses the Bible right, left, and center) or is necessarily more "true" to it. It's rather a matter that his mode of writing resembles the mode of the Christian Bible.

There are two ways he engages in the Biblical mode: 1. The first is that he has two installments that stand in a very linear relation to each other, especially in the Christian conception of the flow of the whole Bible. The Hebraic conception of the TaNaK is a little different in that the concept is more of circular radiation from a center: the center is the Torah, then it moves out to the Prophets, which involves the political identity resulting from the identity created in the giving of the Law and the land in tension with other political entities (especially allowing such alliances to impact worship), and then the Writings move onto a stage of wider interaction with the wider world, particularly the wisdom traditions.

For here, though, I'll focus on the Christian concept of the whole of the Christian Bible. The linearity (which, in the arena of the two modern writers, is what I am saying characterizes Tolkien) happens in two installments that have a certain relationship to each other, which relationship will be the particular way in which Tolkien is like the Christian concept of the Christian Bible. But first, I would like to briefly note the individual qualities of those two installments as to how Tolkien's two installments are like them. The Silmarillion is a story of peoples, the various branches of the elves, and it is very like the Hebrew Bible. When I used to teach the primeval history (Genesis 1-11), I used to give a little intro on the genealogies to tell students not to get too bogged down with them, and I used a funny movie line to be lighthearted about it: in the movie Slingblade, Dwight Yokim says at one point that he never understood any of the Bible -- "this one begat that one and that one begat this one, and low and behold somebody sayeth some shit to somebody." But there is a point, and that point is shown in the repeated used of the word "generations," a specific Hebrew word, toledoth: "These are the generations of Adam/Cain/Seth/Enoch/Noah/Abraham/Isaac/Ishmael/Essau/Jacob." The key thing is that line goes even further back than Adam: Genesis 2:4 begins, "These were the generations of the heavens and the earth in the day God created them." Part of the point in the TaNaK is to show that our people (Judaism) goes directly and visibly all the way back to the Father of the world, God. Likewise, Tolkien's tapestry of the histories of people begins with the creation of the world,

ADDENDDUM ADDED: 9/13/2017
I forgot originally to include an aspect that I noted when the reading group did Silmarillion up to Beren and Luthien (the idea for a comparison post came about only when we read Williams's Descent into Hell). The Silmarils, I think, have the character of the Ark of the Covenant in that they house a certain presence (the Shekinah in the Ark and the light of the two trees in the gems, and there is strong research suggesting that the imagery in Genesis 2 is all sanctuary [desert Tabernacle and Jerusalem Temple] imagery: gold [furniture] and gems [in the ephod], and most importantly the "tree of life" in the form of, as found in archeological research, the Menorah being a highly stylized tree of life ... Gordon Wenham had an article about all that). And both are taken captive (the story of Israel taking the Ark into battle and it getting captured by the Philistines is possibly among the oldest actual compositions in the Hebrew Bible) and fought over. Further more, all the Silmarils disappear (one used as the guiding light for Eärendil to Valinor, another into a fiery chasm, and another into the sea), just as the Ark disappeared from Jerusalem sometime probably during the occupation by Babylon between the original deportation in 597 and the final destruction in 587 (for an interesting read from a guy whose historical research method has definitely been seriously criticized [and I definitely think he gets the meaning of the relationship between Ark and Grail backward: the Ark is foreshadow of Eucharist, not the Grail a cypher for the location of the Ark, regardless of Wolfram and the architect of the north porch of Chartes cathedral using it that way] but who presents probably the most concise statement of the theories, see Graham Hancock's The Sign and the Seal, who describes how the Ark would have been removed to a miniature model of the Temple on the isle of Elephantine in the Nile for safekeeping when they could see that Babylon might eventually think it wisest to destroy the Temple and raze Jerusalem, and then, when this proved to be the case, the Ark eventually made its way to an Ethiopian Coptic church, where it rests still, only one person seeing it in a lifetime seeing it, and once that Copt priest becomes guardian, that's pretty much all he sees the rest of his life).
END ADDENDUM

The second installment, the New Testament, dwells on one single character, Christ, and begins with four accounts of his life in which he does a lot of telling of parables. Likewise, The LotR is more about single characters whose character arcs span the whole narrative and who display/represent virtues in a morality tale manner.

2. The second, and most important, way in which Tolkien writes in the "biblical mode" is in the relationship between the two installments, and this is called typological fulfillment. Characters do not overlay in the same folded time space as they do for Williams. Characters who are unique and individual to their time, with their own deal going on, still represents certain themes, and then another version of the same thing comes along later but with a little more filled in. The best example is the marrying of the two lines of the two children of Iluvatar. It happens three times. The first is Beren and Luthien, and they get a Silmaril back but then go off and live their life in relative happy seclusion because their role is pretty much to be the inception of the idea of the mingling and show that is has some good effect. But they didn't finish Melkor. In order for that to happen, another melding, this time Tuor and Idril, had to produce a son, Earendil, who would sail to Valinor to beg the Valar to come and help finish Melkor off for good. The final melding, Arargorn and Arewen, produces a line of kings that rules the peace of a new age.

In all of this, linearity and distinction of character is the mode. There is no contact between Beren and Aragorn, save the impact the story of Beren has on Aragorn (which fits Tolkien: the literature is where the impact is), but nothing on the lines of Pauline in Descent into Hell talking to her martyr ancestor telling him to let her bear the pain.

History and Myth, Sinai and Zion, Tolkien and Williams

I said just above that the Christian concept of the Old Testament, indeed of the whole Christian Bible, is different from the Hebraic conception in that the Christian focuses more on the linearity and the Hebraic on a widening circle of activity. But the Hebrew Bible itself does contain a very strong element of linearity, and in fact it is what it is known for among ancient literatures. Scholars call it the Heilsgeschicte ... "sacred history," literally "history of the sacred." This means that, rather than organizing belief and fidelity around a sacred topography with the mountain of the king god at the center, being the axis mundi (the center of the world), the the emphasis is on the sacred chronology, the history of God intervening in the real world time and space to save ... a history of sacred saving events rather than topography of sacred space. The biggest instance is the exodus. And the exodus leads to the wilderness wanderings and to Sinai, and so these are called the Sinai traditions. But the sacred topography is also present in the Hebrew Bible in the traditions of Mount Zion, the mount of the Temple, the axis mundi, the home of the king, the son of David who is God's adopted son, similar to all of those semi-divine royal sons of gods in other cultures around then. Jon Levenson, a well-known Jewish scholar, has an introduction to the thinking of the Hebrew Bible that is used a lot (I got it for an MA level intro to OT class) and is called Sinai and Zion, and his thesis is that you can organize the thinking of the whole TaNaK around the tension between these two traditions and concepts: Sinai's linear history and Zion's static topography.

So my final point would be to put Tolkien and Williams into that structure. Tolkien is like the Sinai traditions and Williams like Zion traditions. And just as Sinai and Zion can meet and work together for the meaning of the Hebrew Bible but without either losing its distinctiveness or the tension disappearing into some cheap muddled hybrid, I think Tolkien and Williams can both be read for what is of value in them without denying or ignoring the real differences.

Sinai (Tolkien) and Zion (Williams)

Thoughts from Mass: Feast of Corpus Christi

I remember when I was looking into the Catholic Church and on my way to becoming Catholic, sitting in the Church one afternoon alone and thinking about the formula "body, blood, soul, and divinity," and thinking that, with all the questions I had had in my life about what's real, here is the one thing at least acknowledging all the different levels of reality to be coped with.

Today at Mass of the Feast of Corpus Christi, I had a new thought. Some have trouble accepting transubstantiation because it's not visible, not empirically verifiable (a bedrock, bottom-line, no-negotiation verification). But maybe that very aspect is what makes it so gripping and makes it hook on for us. There is nothing in this life that IS entirely empirically verifiable, and the more meaningful a thing is, the less subject it is to verification ... like love. If love is concern for the other person, truly caring about them and wishing whatever is truly good for them, the second you turn around and try to verify that you have been loving, you have stopped loving, since you're looking at yourself instead of at them.

It's a bit of what Terry Pratchett masterfully encapsulated in the term "write only memory" in The Hogfather when he has Death trying to explain belief to Hex, the ant-farm computer at Unseen University (because somebody has figured out how to kill the Hogfather, the discworld version of Father Christmas, by killing belief in him ... and if Hogfather dies, according to Death, the sun won't rise tomorrow: a ball of superheated gasses will rise above a terrestrial plane, but that's not the same as what sunrise means to us) ... Hex finally gets it, but in order to get it, Hex says to Death "hold on, I have to open a space of write-only memory." It's a brilliant phrase because it's paradoxical in the Chestertonian sense. We usually think of "memory" as things of the past, and all you can really do is verify them. The phrase is obviously a riff only "read only memory" in technology, and really that is the only logical definition of "memory" in our modern sense. The ancient sense is a little different because the Latin memoria has an aspect in it of sense of self (the sense of who you were that set in motion current events to achieve a desired end in the future; they're wrapped up more tightly in the ancient concept) ... which I do think connects here in that, to have love, you have to be somebody doing the loving and you have to remember who you are in relation to this person, but the point is not scientific verification; the point is in the doing. Even in computers, ROM is the real form of memory in the scientific sense of the word. RAM (random access memory) is for working on things and manipulating them so that you can then put a new version in the ROM to pull out and find info or use info from it etc. The idea of "write ONLY memory" is a complete paradox. But it is what is needed for love.

People talk a lot in religious circles about the evil/danger of agnosticism, but usually it is on the level of the question of whether God exists etc. But I have always thought there is a deeper and more damaging agnosticism ... The Cure's "How Beautiful":

You want to know why I hate you?
Well I'll try and explain
You remember that day in Paris
When we wandered through the rain
And promised to each other
That we'd always think the same
And dreamed that dream
To be two souls as one

And then it tells the story of walking in the rain with his girlfriend, the "you" in the song, and encountering a poor old man with a child on his back and a young boy with him. And he has this epiphany moment about how much real beauty there is hidden in the lives of him and his girlfriend because of how the three stare at them: The father's eyes said "Beautiful! How beautiful you are!"
The boy's eyes said "How beautiful! She shimmers like a star!" The child's eyes uttered nothing
but a mute and utter joy." But this is how the song ends:

I turned to look at you
To read my thought upon your face
And gazed so deep into your eyes
So beautiful and strange
Until you spoke
And showed me understanding is a dream
"I hate these people staring
Make them go away from me!"

And this is why I hate you
And how I understand
That no-one ever knows or loves another
Or loves another

So, to return to the Eucharist, which is often called "the sacrament of love," perhaps this empirically unverifiable concept of the "body, blood, soul, and divinity" of Christ, God incarnate, being there although thoroughly hidden by the appearances of bread and wine (all the appearances, including causal power, like getting one drunk or interacting with wheat allergies), is precisely the symbol that appeals to us in our need to believe in love.


Postscript on "truth" in the scientific sense in the real contemporary 

The contrast with "empirical truth" can be seen in the thing that a necessity for love but equally as non-verifiable, the free will (love is defined as an act of the will). The "free will," which is necessary for any type of ethics whatsoever (the slightest concept of an ethical "should"), is the same sort of unverifiable thing. Where is this thing called the free will? If we can come up with possible logical explanations from self-interest for any action (which I think we can ... even if the webs of causes are intricate, I think logical extrapolations of what is observed can be made that fill in lacunae and give rough but satisfactory lim to determinist explanations for everything we call "love" or "doing the right thing" ... or the wrong thing) and we also can't see this thing called "the will" under a microscope, then saying you believe in a thing inside the human being that can make any undetermined choice at all, let alone an altruistic one, is just as hard to believe as transubstantiation.

The whole point of noting all this is not to go all philosophical/apologetic. The point is for those situations that we all have in which we're not sure whether or not to trust somebody else's motives. We know it's possible that they are completely self-motivated, and experience of a shit world definitely weighs in on the side of assuming that they are so. But maybe a belief in the the appearance of bread and wine actually being the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ can be a source of faith in others. I'm the most suspicious person I know, but even I can see that if there isn't going to be trust (belief in the possibility of charity), then you might as well lay down and die.

For that matter, the older you get, especially if you have lived with mental health issues, the more you begin to understand the tense ambiguity in the lines from Johnny's Cash's cover of Nick Cave's "Mercyseat": "And anyway, I told the truth, but I think I might have lied." If accurate self knowledge were easy, there never would have been a need for the oracle of Delphi to exhort "know thyself." For some people, belief in their own possibility of goodness is a problem; and for others, feeling like there even is some centered and solid "you" to be good is even difficult. And maybe belief that the appearances of bread and wine can actually be the physical presence of God-made-man can help with coping with that.

Sorry to burst the bubble of the Star Trek minded, but with all the technological advances we have made, we have not found the "warp drive" that leads to the elimination of even hunger and physical poverty, let alone things like despair and bigotry. We have found ways to create inhumane gasses in WWI and how to split the atom and level whole cities with a single bomb in WWII ... but not a single sign yet of that magical warp drive (WWI was especially ironic ... "the advance of science" had become pretty much its own new mythology and religion: it was going to save everything ... and then we found out some of the other things that could be done with it; not only did it not prevent evil; it provided the means to make evil hurt even more). We can't even prove most of the time that anybody really wants to help each other (I certainly have a harder time believing it after the 2016 US presidential election), no real evidence that people are actually really concerned with helping other and not just addicted to an image of themselves as helping, a little idol they can see of themselves being good. To those who roll the eyes exasperatedly and ask "how can you believe in that magical miracle stuff," in light of human experience, I think it is every bit as much of a stretch to believe in love ... the weight of evidence is much more on the side of the Cure: "that no one ever knows or loves another."

Saruman and the Danger of Sympathy

This post comes from reading some of the material in Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings concerning Tolkien's caution about some of Charles Williams's approach and learning about black magic, his caution about the situation that Carpenter describes thus:  "By the lat nineteen-twenties Williams was thoroughly acquainted with the terminology and practices of black magic."

I think that the main thing is "sympathy." In order to understand a thing enough to yourself formulate acts of predication (propositions/sentences) that accurately describe the thing, you have to enter into a certain sympathy with it and, in a certain way, participate in the logic of it. This is along the lines of Barfield's ideas on participation and the creation of meaning (I myself would say that "objective" description, "scientific" description without any participation, is simply impossible and would yield nothing but nonsense and jibberish, at least as far as the project of describing a thing either accurately or in any way that is helpful).

But, with black magic ... this is dangerous. And that is basically the danger that Tolkien points up with Saruman. Saruman the White originally started to study ring making in order to be able to combat Sauron. But he became seduced.

Another point is that sympathy not just "has to happen" for knowledge, s if their is an alternative ... it just happens. Knowledge doesn't happen without it. And while it may be ok to become knowledgeable on certain subjects, it pays to keep this fact in mind and monitor one's own thinking. To put it in terms of Harry Potter: studying the dark arts for defense is necessary, but part of what's necessary precisely for defending against falling prey to their seduction is being aware of the danger of overly sympathetic thinking (what Harry accuses Snape of in Snape's first talk as DADA teachers in book 6: talking about them in loving tones)..

One last thing I would add is along the lines of the "the higher the leap, the harder the ground" principle and also takes care of some crediting I really should do. In a 1988 article, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict) wrote about the need for sympathy in Biblical Studies, by which he meant sort of being willing to step into the world of the text and give it a benefit of the doubt as far as being coherent, rather than always looking for the inconsistencies that betray different hands. Doubtless, redaction occurs. But one should always be "on the side of" the text in looking at the canonical shape as having coherency as a whole.

This is actually the same line of thinking on "knowing" as I think is the original sense in the Hebrew Bible in places. The verb "to know" gets used as a circumlocution for sex (as in Gen 4:1) and what is behind that is that knowledge is not the removed, objective thing that scientism thinks it is; it's experiential and interactive. There is agreement among scholars (conservatives too, just not ultra-literalists, those I say have lost the battle for their minds to scientism without having any clue even that that was the matter of the battle to begin with) that the two "trees" in the Garden of Eden are a "mashal," a metaphor or a riddle. Once up on a time I wrote a course paper supporting the reading that the tree of knowledge was a circumlocution for sex and that the proscription was against enaging before told it was ok. I no longer hold that view of the original sense of that particular passage, although I do think that the "knowledge" and "uncovering the nakedness" (they were naked and not ashamed and then they were naked and ashamed), which is another circumlocution in the HB (huge list of incest relationships proscribed in Lev 18, all stated as "you shall not uncover the nakedness of ..."), do have a presence and a role as symbolizing how deep the impact was of the Fall, but I don't think that means that the act itself was sexual.

What I now think is that the riddle is meant to hide the answer. If you asked the human author, "so, if it's not a code for sex, then, for what thing is it a code/riddle/metaphor?" I think that they would answer "why in the world would you want to have that in your head?" In that way of thinking, having knowledge is have a concept inside, part of you, a form of the thing itself inside you. And we're talking about, in the world of this text, the singular event through which all evil was let into the world ... death, decay, malice, hate, murder, all of it. Why would you want to know that? To understand it even enough to "get" what it is means to have at least a little bit of sympathy. It means, sort of, to open the door of you mind and invite a form of it (a concept) in as a house guest.

So, in all of it: the higher the leap, the harder the ground. Knowledge is impossible without sympathy ... including knowledge of another person in relationship to them or understanding an ancient text or divine Revelation. But there is also the danger with knowledge of other things, which is just simply inherent in the situation when the other stuff exists if you're going to known anything about it enough to be careful of the fact that it's there. But Tolkien was probably right too that Williams got way to excited about knowing about that stuff and may not have given the gravity of the matter its full due.

SpiderMan 2: Doc Oc

This is a particular type of post that may pop up here from time to time. Once upon a time I wrote an essay on the second of the Spiderman films that had Toby McGuire in it, the one with Doc Oc. In the midst of new computers and shifting material from from one drive to another and external hard drive crashes and all the rest over the years, I have even less than no clue where any digital copy of that essay might be. But I do remember some of the main points, so I am going to try to reproduce them here to have them down for posterity before the memory of it undergoes any more slippage.

This actually may not be that long, not anywhere near as long as the original (maybe I will watch it again while on my elliptical machine sometime soon to see if that kicks anything else out of the memory, but for now I'll just put this out there just to have another post out of my queue of drafts).

The basic gist is that of a certain religious image being used to build the hero character. The image is that of priestly vestments. Priesthood is defined by sacred action. In actual religions, this is cultic, ritual action at an altar. For the superhero, the action central to the role of hero/priest is self-sacrificial saving of others from danger etc ... heroic action. And doing these actions in the suit sort of sanctifies the suit, makes it "holy." Basically, through doing the self-risking saving activity in the suit, the suit is consecrated as priestly vestments. That was the basic thesis of my original essay: among the major tropes that the film uses to build the hero character is that of priestly vestments, giving to the hero a priest motif that emphasizes the unique connection of their action to their identity as symbolized in their garb.

For me, a main point this essay serves is to do battle against the secularizers. There are people who deny the use of religious imagery in all but the most blatant cases (and there, they usually try to find some way to say "yeah, that movie/book/etc sucked"). Admittedly, there is a real danger of eisogesis when it isn't so blatant, but there has to be some grasp too of the fact that art doesn't do things with big block letter labels in neon. And the secularist way of reading gets pretty silly at times: anything that has a straight line of more than two inches can be phallic, but unless ever detail of the crufixion is there, crown and all, and damn near requiring a a cue card on screen that says "crucifixion motif," then it is obviously not that, according to them. I even know of a guy from Pittsburgh who is a musician and signed on with some guys to produce an album through their studio, basically with them backing him financially, and basically their biggest requirement was to take all the religious imagery out of the songs ... pathetic (in that instance, I think you have to dip under the two-inch margin to find the phallus).

I'll start with a nice little bit of trivia from the peripheral materials of the movie. The trailer rocked. When I got the DVD, I used to sometimes sit and watch the trailer cranked up on a serious 5.1 surround sound system I had set up in the common area of the group boarding place I was living (an old 10-room convent with small bedrooms and a ton of common space). The music for that trailer, the classical choral piece, is called "Larcimosa," which term means "most tearful [sorrowful]" and is the title of a section of the Deis irae section of the Requiem Mass.

So, probably the biggest piece of evidence I offered is that, when Spiderman goes back into action, he has to get that particular suit back from Jameson's wall. He can't just do another suit up. And the reason is that that is "the" spidey suit. In the terminology of this trope, it is the only one that will do because it is the only one that has been consecrated in priestly action.

A key point about the use of this trope is that it is further used to portray a tension between the two sides, the priestly and the lay, the superhero and the regular guy who gets to lead a normal likfe.. It is difficult to keep the former from overtaking the latter and obliterating it, to keep Peter from getting lost in Spiderman. This them obviously stretches across movie 2 and (the universally panned) movie 3 in more ostensible ways in the question of his relation to MJ: will he be able to do the normal life of getting married? But my point in this essay was that it is also represented in this film in several details/comments about the suit that might be missed at first and thought simply throw-away. They are definitely sideline and not as major elements, but I do think that they are meant to distinctly support the major elements through details on the image of the suit. And they are some fun, funny lines. There are two main instances. One is when he comes out of the laundromat with the colors of the suit having bled into his whites: he's having trouble keeping the normal guy and the superhero distinct just as he has trouble keeping the colors of the superhero's clothes from bleeding into the regular guy's clothes. In this instance I also think there is a possible latent reference to pain in the struggle in that everybody knows the word "bleeding" for this laundry phenomenon; commercials for detergent use it all the time with no worry. Like I said, it is only latent because the word is not actually used on screen ... but I would argue that it is distinctly there at the latent level ... that's not something that only some people call that laundry phenomenon: "bleeding" is so commonly used for it that it is practically a dictionary definition.

There is a further aspect of this first instance that relates also to the next one. The most glaring instance of colors bleeding is into "the whites" ... the undies (recalling here Walter in the Big Lebowski throwing out a ringer full of "the whites ... my dirty undies, dude!"), which itself has sexuality connotation because, well, that's what's housed in the whites. I don't mean anything stupid like "he's not getting laid." Sexuality here is in the larger context of life path: whether he can get married and lead a "normal" life.

The second instance is the ride down the elevator when the guy says "nice spiderman costume" and he says that it rides up a bit in the crotch. Some might dismiss this as accidental, since, if looking for a lighthearted comment on the suit, riding up in the crotch is the most natural from a standpoint of material likelihood. That's true enough, but that simply makes it convenient; it doesn't make it not also an image being used artistically for allusion. The crotch obviously has sexual connotations, and if the suit rides up in the crotch, that means it is cutting into his sexual life in the form of getting in the way of advancement in relationship with MJ, especially not being able right now to be that guy who goes with her to "get married in a church."

Another piece was the idea of the tension being represented in the shots with the mask half gone so that half of his face is Peter and half is Spiderman: half lay, half priest, all tension.

The last piece I would add I can't remember if I had it in the original or not. This is just to add to the religious imagery. In the trailer, Doc Oc brings Spiderman bound into Osborne's penthouse living room and places him on the couch before Harry, who stands over Spiderman with a knife. This is too obvious as religious ritual sacrifice to be denied. Any attempt to deny the imagery is simply being obstinate.

Things in art don't have to be neatly tied out in singular relations. Spiderman can be both priest character and the sacrifice offered by the priest. And I think it would be eisogesis to try to mesh the two together into a specifically Mass image in which there is the concrete presence of the idea of priest and victim being one (Christ). It's simply that two religious motifs are being used (religious vestments and religious sacrifice) and, because art if precisely not prosaic, it doesn't have to make sure everything ties out with a nice neat bow or that the same character doesn't get cast, at least on the level of imagery allusions, as what seem to be opposing role (priet and victim) at different points.

So, that is, in a nutshell, what I can remember of that essay.

What is "Method"? (and some miscellanious from Harry Potter)

This post is mainly going to be talking about the issue of method, but it's going to have a big example from Harry Potter studies, and I am going to go ahead and use that as a chance to piggy-back related material on HP that I have not gotten written on this blog elsewhere. Some of it will actually be a bit related to when I'm going to say about method, but some of it will be spring-boarding

So, what do people in academia, particularly in literary/text-related disciplines mean when they talk about "method"? One can sort of understand when others who are critical of preoccupation with method say sarcastically (often about others who have said it seriously), "if you don't have enough to say about content, talk about method." It does seem to be a sort of mystery filler word to make it sound like your saying something when really you're not. I knew one academic of an older and more traditional stripe (an amazing scholar and editor), who quipped "in my day method was going to the shelf and getting the next book on the subject and reading it."

I can definitely understand the exasperation with the heavy focus on it, as I have definitely questioned it myself in graduate studies. But I do think there is a real question worth examining about method. "Method" is a "meta" question, a question about how form creates content, rather than simply following it (a more "hermeneutic of suspicion" tactic notes that the idea of "objective content" is often used to mask methodological considerations, which I think is true, but I also don't think that it must end there; I don't think that the situation is either "everything is all method, no objective content" or "there is no question of method" ... I think there is an interplay between creating and following).

Method is: what questions you ask of the text, how you ask them, and why. The question of method simply puts it on the page that you have motivations when analyzing a text -- you want a particular type of information to use eventually in the form of praising the text as a good thing for whatever your particular cause to fight for or of criticizing it as a bad thing for that cause -- and that these motivations determine what questions you ask in examining a text and the type of information you get out of it. There is always motivation, and it always yields asking certain types of questions rather than others. There is never a "pure, objective" search for the bare facts of a text ... that is a myth of scientism (irony intended).

Usually methods are identified by "schools" of thought or particular camps with particular interests, such as feminist interpretation and Marxist interpretation. I mention those two specifically because the best way to explain what method is is to give an example of it and the particular example I am going to use explicates the difference between particularly those two schools when applied to the same text. I actually did use this as an example in a freshmen-level intro to religious studies course because, while I questioned whether it was the best thing for the textbook the department used (I was adjuncting) to bring it up at this point, I figured that, since they did, I might as well try to explain it to the kids.

The Enuma Elish: Feminist and Marxist Readings.

The Enuma Elish is the Babylonian creation epic. Before I get into how a feminist method and a Marxist method differ (although they would both say to dump this text), I'll give the Cliff Notes (or Sparks Notes or whatever the current version is) plot synopsis. Apsu is the father god and Tiamat is the mother god. Tiamat is a great sea dragoness symbolizing chaos. So, they beget a bunch of god children (well, in the way language is used in this older literature, Apsu begets and Tiamat bears), and eventually the kids get pretty rowdy. There are even two still inside Tiamat who are going at it and generally ticking her off. So she has finally had enough and she sets out a plan to marshal all her monsters of the sea, fell spirits of the deep and that kind of thing, and kill all the noisy and irksome young gods. When the young gods hear of this plan, they say, "oh waily, waily [to borrow Terry Pratchett's wonderful Nac Mac Feegle], the mother dragoness is going to kill us all, oh waily waily ... Marduk [one of the children gods], you strapping fellow, will you be our champion and protect us from her rage?" And Marduk says, "yes, but then I am king of the gods," and the other say OK. So, the day comes and Tiamat arrives with her army of sea monsters and MarduK pulls a William Wallace, coming out as if to parley but really going out to pick a fight. He says something to get Tiamat all in a rage and literally howling mad, so that her mouth is wide open, and he hurls his stormwind, who is named Imhulu (and is male), into her open mouth, and it holds her mouth open while bloating her belly, at which point he hurls his javelin in and kills her. He then rips her body in half, and from one half, he forms the heavens, and from the other half, he forms the earth. He is then the king god.

So, how would feminist interpretation read this text and how does that relate to method? For feminist interpretation, the most important issue and the one that is really the ground of all others is the issue of the relations between the two sexes, and most often the way in which the male sex has oppressed the female. How this impacts the questions asked is that the most natural question is which gender came out victorious.

But it also impacts what kinds of questions are asked not just in the form of "who won, and were they male or female?" It impacts what sort of details are taken into account, particularly details of portrayals of bodies. The javelin and the throwing inside are obvious as phallic and penetration, but the most interesting detail for feminist interpretation here is the bloating of the belly. Phallus and penetration can be easily criticized as male domination in singular and ostensibly unconnected acts of violence like rape, but the bloating of the belly represents all pregnancy, meaning not just pregnancies from violent invasions but also the normal run-of-the-mill "house-in-the-suburbs-and-a-good-job" lifestyle pregnancies ... those that are part of the "system" called "family" in what is presented by the powers that be as a "well-ordered" society. The bloating of the belly is part of Marduk's conquering Tiamat, the male conquering the female by making the natural mothering role a shackle that prevents career/power/fill-in-the-blank. The thing that a feminist reading will note is that this is a story of the gods and the founding of the order of the world, and thus Babylonian society would use this text to support its oppressive patriarchal structures on the "as above, so below" principle: The world and its order was founded by a male god conquering a female god, invading her, and it involved a pregnancy image, therefore our structures of men dominating women and keeping them, if not barefoot, then at least always pregnant, is right because it mirrors the lives of the gods and the way the world was created.

On these grounds, a feminist reader would say we need to jettison these texts from our revered cultural traditions. My point in this post, though, is not to agree or disagree with points made or with feminism per se or in regard to this particular text. It's mainly to use it as an example of how motivation drives and shapes the form of inquiry (what particular questions are asked).

So, moving on to Marxism, the basic synopsis I would give of that school of thought is that everything is about the struggle between two classes, the over-class and the under-class, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In the Enuma Elish, the younger gods as the underclass are about to be conquered by Tiamat, the overclass. And in walks Marduk to save the day. But Marx would say to notice that, in the end, they have not really been saved from the over-class because they are now ruled again by another over-class, Marduk. To quote The Who (as I always did in class), "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." This is a key tenet of Marxist theory: whenever a "saving" happens by an individual rather than by the State/Party as representative of the collective, the same corrupt systems will simply be re-inscribed in society, perpetuated and validated ... and this story says that is not only alright, but actually the way things are supposed to be, because that is how it happened with the gods and the creation and ordering of the world. Thus, Marxist reading will also say that we should dump these texts, but not because of what they say about abuses between genders being alright, but rather because of what they say about abuses between social classes being all right.

So, my point in taking students through that little exercise (usually I had a handout of the Enuma Elish and would go around the room with people reading) was to show how, with different methods -- different sets of questions based on different things you want to get from a story -- you can get two different "meanings" from a story (both viewed as bad by their respective camps, but very different from each other ... what if Tiamat had won: Marxism would still say this is bad, but feminism, or at least some feminists, might say it's a good story).

Harry Potter and the Fourteen Feet of Method

I'm not sure if that  title technically makes sense, but it felt like a fun adaptation of the HP title format. Anyway, another example that I tried to use to explain "method" when teaching (although this time, intro to OT) is from, of course, one of my favorite contemporary works of literature, Harry Potter. A material discrepancy was discovered, and it was not discovered by me. It was discovered by a woman named Joyce Odell, who goes by the name "Red Hen" online and was one of the better known theorists in the run-up to the release of Deathly Hallows, in part because of her connection with John Granger (she was one of the authors in his Who Killed Albus Dumbldore collection between books 6 and 7). The important thing for this part of this post is that Odell has a certain method, a certain set of questions that flow from a certain interest, and it differs from my own method, which flows from my own interest.

Actually, one of the most important things that I want to note here is that she found this detail out by her method and I did not find it out by mine. I do think that, once it was found, my method gets more to the real meaning of it, but I can't not be grateful to her for finding it, and so I do have to at least admit a usefulness to her method and, therefore, a place for her interest. I disagree on direction and other things, but in and of itself itself, it is a valid interest and set of questions. And it enabled finding this very fruitful detail, something that my method did not do. Even when methods rub against each other strongly, they can still be productive together

The Details

So, first I will describe the discrepancy. In the graveyard scene near the end of Goblet of Fire, Harry drops his wand beside the cup when Cedric is killed right beside him. So there is a tight grouping of cup, wand, Cedric's body, and Harry. The detail is clearly given on the page that they are six feet from the tombstone, Voldemort, and Wormtail. Then Harry is tied to the tombstone as Wormtail regenerates Voldemort and the latter calls the Death Eaters and gives his speech to them as they stand in a circle with the tombstone at its center. Then Voldy says he is going to prove that he is better than Harry by killing him in a duel and orders Wormtail to go get Harry's wand and give it to him so they can duel. This is where the discrepancy comes in. Now the body, wand, and cup are clearly described on the page as being twenty feet away, just beyond the circle of Death Eaters (actually, the twenty feet is revealed in a "waiting around to die" moment when he wishes he could get to his wand, but sees it is twenty feet away, and it is when Wormy goes to get the wand that the detail of being just outside the circle is clearly stated, a detail I am going to emphasize heavily in a few moments). First they were six feet from the tombstone; now they are twenty feet. Fourteen feet seem to have appeared out of nowhere ... almost as if by magic. So what is the deal?

The deal is simply that there is an inconsistency in the text.The question is what the inconsistency means. Odell's pathway to finding this detail has to do with her interest in working out an objective physics of sorts (I don't think that was her term for it, though) to the magic in HP, and in this case, particularly the avada kedavra killing curse. She notes that some people simply slump over, like the Riddles, while others are laid out spread eagle, like Cedric, and yet others are lifted physically up in the air and blown backwards over a rampart, as was Dumbledore. So, she somewhat frustratedly asks why a definitive physical effect cannot be pinned down for the AK. And it is at this point that she exasperatedly asks: beyond all those instances (the Riddles, Cedric spread-eagle, and DD), what is up with this fourteen feet that just appear out of nowhere? Maybe we could hazard a guess (in the interest of salvaging material consistency) that Cedric is blasted like DD was, although she is right to note that, if that were the intended case, it would be much better to give a more clear indication. BUT even that will not save, for there is no explanation for how the cup and the wand moved the fourteen feet. It's simply an inconsistency (and one that was understandably very vexing to Red Hen).

Now, here is where my own method and interest come in. But they don't save the material consistency because they are not concerned with it for its own sake. I do think that an author should try to pin out the details as much as possible (see my post here for the reasons), but as my post on "story time" reveals, I assume that material details will always break down in a story where an author is working on heavy themes. In that post, I claim that kairos (deep meaning) will always break chronos (material accuracy) at some point. And what I think further is that it is usually the places where the details break the most clearly that are the places in which one should look for the heaviest thematic content.

To put what I am about to say in terms again of "method": Odell's concern is an objective physics (see below for what I think is better sought as a "subjective" physics) and her method looks for quantitative values, in this case physical distances. My concern is literary in the sense of theme and, particularly here, characterization. Since characters are always in relationship to each other in a web in a story and these relationships play into the themes (whether by symbolism or by more "realist" social criticism), when I examine physical details, I do not look so much at quantities such as distance, but at positioning and juxtaposition as representative of relationality.

Basically (as basically as I can get it at least), my answer to this thing is: in one scene, JKR was making a portrayal of the leader, Voldemort, and in another, she was making a portrayal of the followers, the Death Eaters, as a group; and each of these scenes relies on some physical specifications; but they require different and conflicting specifications; and when you put them next to each other, you get an inconsistency (either JKR didn't catch it herself or she didn't think anybody else would catch it and it was just too cumbersome to fix it ... which I can completely understand, as my theory is that kairos always breaks chronos no matter how good an author is at making material details work).

But I also note that, when you get such a clear breaking of material consistency, it is a good place to look for an author's heaviest theme work because that is where it was heavy enough to break material details.

In the first scene, the characterization of Voldemort, she needs the reader to hear the words "kill the spare." These are cold and calloused words. They come from a cold heart with no humanity left in it. He does not say "the other one" or the "the other wizard" or "the other boy" or any term indicating a human ... he calls him "the spare." But in order for the audience to hear this, JKR needs Harry to hear it because of a very specific narrative perspective she uses the whole way through the series except in  very limited set if instances, a narratival perspective she borrows from her literary hero Jane Austen called "third-person, limited omniscient" (my source on this is some of John Granger's exposition, maybe as early as The Hidden Key, which came out between books 4 and 5, but at least by between books 6 and 7, when he was theorizing heavily on possible narrative misdirections in book 6). Usually narratives use one of two perspectives, either third-person, often referred to as "omniscient" or "God's-eye view," or first person, which is very subjective and so not "omniscient." This third type of perspective that JKR borrows from Austen, though, is technically third person but thoroughly subjective, and so the name "limited omniscient." Basically, while it is third person, you're really only ever sitting on the shoulder of one person, namely Harry, and getting his biased perceptions of what is going on (Snape must be trying to kill me etc). She breaks this convention only a handful of times: chap. 1 of book 1, the bucking bronco broomstick in book 1 (when Hermione sets fire to Snape's robes), the first half of the Frank Bryce encounter at the beginning of book 4, the first two chapters of book 6, and chap. 1 of book 7. Other than that, she maintains being on Harry's shoulder throughout all seven books. And what this means for the present discussion is that, if the audience is to hear how cold Voldy is when he says "kill the spare," then Harry is going to have to hear it, and that means not more than about six feet away. So, that is how we get the six feet.

When we move on to the situation when the DEs arrive and form the circle, there is a different relation schema in operation that needs a different quantity to accommodate the physical positioning and juxtaposition that is how she really characterizes the group. Basically, because she states at one point that Harry was outnumbered at least thirty to one, if she is going to have them in a circle, she is going to need a circle a lot bigger than a twelve-foot diameter ... more like forty. BUT, because of what she wants to do to characterize them, Cedric's body must be outside that circle. And you need a way to call attention to this fact, so you have the wand and the cup stay beside him so that we notice the position of Cedric's body when Harry looks wistfully at his wand and when Wormy goes to get the wand. The key thing is that the reason his body needs to be outside the circle of DEs is that, at this point, he represents the "dearly departed" and the characterization of the DEs is as excluding the dearly departed. After the Voldy commentary on the missing DEs, the circle closes up to remove the gaps, whether they are dead, in prison, or traitor. They have no room for fond remembrance, and those who have succumbed to death are simply forgotten. So Cedric's body must be outside the circle, and the circle includes twenty to thirty people, so the circle needs to be twenty-foot radius, but it also needs to have Voldy at its center, and Voldy is talking to Harry, so this larger circle winds up next to the earlier circle because they have the same center (Voldy, Harry, Wormy, tombstone) ... and you get a material discrepancy. BUT that material discrepancy was also a signpost to me for a place too look for all of this interesting literary artistry on the part of JKR.

A big piece of supporting evidence for the whole "DE circle that excludes the dearly departed" reading is that, immediately thereafter, there is a situation that so neatly works as a complete and clear reversal. When the phoenix song web/cage picks Voldy and Harry up and moves them to a plateau free of grave stones, the situation is a neat, clean, clear opposite of the DE circle around the tombstone that excluded Cedric's body as representative of the dearly departed. Now we have the circle of the cage of Phoenix-song. And who is now outside it and excluded from the central action? The DEs. And who is inside it and part of the central action? The dearly departed in the form of the shades that Harry's wand forced to emerge from Voldy's wand.

Some Background

This thing of "inconsistencies as signposts" to places where deeper meaning is at play is not original to me. It is actually a rabbinic principle in discussing the Hebrew Bible. When the Historical Critical Method finds inconsistencies in the biblical text, it takes it as a sign of multiple "hands" (redactors) and multiple source traditions or texts being melded into the single present text we have. Rabbinic thinking (rabbinic "method") may or may not have a problem with this, but even if it doesn't officially have a problem with it, what it would say is something like: "That's all well and good and may or may not be the case for the human side of the composition of the text we now have ... but the human side is not the only thing there is, and it is not the most important. The most important is what the Holy One, blessed be He, wishes to communicate in the text, for it is His text ultimately." And for them, textual inconsistencies are key places to look for deeper meaning because they are like clues left by the Holy One, blessed be He, as signs of the places to look for deeper meaning. They speak of God, in authoring the Hebrew Bible, as a lover leaving these things as a way of beckoning the beloved deeper into the heart of the text, an elusive lover beckoning and then hiding around a corner, then allowing himself to be glimpsed again as further beckoning to follow deeper into the mystery. And this is what these seeming inconsistencies really are: a beckoning by way of a clue as to where to look for the deeper meaning.

So, again, an example serves best. In the story of Elijah squaring off against the prophets of Baal, the situation is set up that Elijah issues a challenge: I'll set up an altar to the LORD and you guys set up an altar to Baal, and whoever's sacrifice goes off without a hitch is the true god. So they do this, and the prophets of Baal simply cannot get the thing done, and Elijah does some very stylish mocking (yell louder ... maybe he's sleeping and you need to wake him up ... maybe he can't hear you because he's on the can). Then Elijah soaks his altar and wood with water and even digs a trench around it and fill that with water ... no way should this ever light. But, of course, it does. In fact, everything is entirely consumed by fire from above, proving the LORD as the true god. End of story. But there is a material discrepancy: first the story says that Elijah told the prophets to bring two bulls, and so they were the ones who brought the animals, but then it says that Elijah gave their bull to them to sacrifice. So, whose bull was it? Historical Critical Method says: ah, we must have variant traditions/sources melded into one here. The rabbis say: ah, here is a riddle the answer to which is a deeper meaning.

I use the term "riddle" here not because of my fondness for HP names (well, not just for that reason), but because it is one of the translations of the Hebrew word mashal, and another translation of that word is "metaphor," and many metaphors takes the form of parables, stories. The answer the rabbis give comes in the form of a story that is called a midrash. Sometimes midrashim (Hebrew plural of midrash) are statements by rabbis in a more prosaic form, but sometimes they come in story form. The word midrash is from the verb darash, which means to "seek out." The seeking out in this case is in the form of a conjectured story or parable that would embody (not just explain) the logic that is the deeper meaning. They would not see it as "adding to" the biblical account because it is really just making explicit what was implicit but hidden. They don't view it as new "facts" in a scientific sense of that word. The meaning is there and just needed to be "sought out."

So this particular midrash tells the story of how the prophets of Baal brought the two bulls, but when the time came for each to go to its appointed altar, one for the LORD and one for Baal, the bull for Baal would not budge. And so, Elijah asks something like "Bull, bull ... why are you not going to the altar?" And the bull replies something like: "My brother bull and I were calved by the same mother and pastured in the same field and fed at the same trough, but now he gets to go be sacrificed to the LORD, the true god, and I have to be sacrificed to Baal, the false god. And when I die, the LORD will hold it against me that I was sacrificed to the false god." And so Elijah replies: "Bull, bull ... do not worry. The LORD knows your honorable intentions and your piety and that you are simply playing the role allotted to you in this event, trying to do your job as best you can, and he will not hold it against you." And so the bull trots off to be [happily?] sacrificed to Baal, at peace that it will not be counted against him because the prophet of the LORD assured him that it would not be. The moral of the story is that, no matter who actually procured the bulls from the human side, it is always only the LORD who gives, in this case represented by his true prophet.

I tell all of that in part because I spent a lot of time and energy studying such material in grad school, but mainly because its an example of how this idea of "inconsistencies as positive signposts to deeper meaning" is actually a pretty ancient principle.

Red Hen Again

Before I go on to another element in this post, I wanted to touch on my thoughts on Joyce Odell's (Red Hen's) overall project/motivation. I don't know if she ever put it in the terms I am have used above and will restate here, but it is what I have always seen her work centering around. It's a scientific approach to the magic in the wizarding world in the sense that it tries to work out the material mechanics in the fashion of there being a certain physics to the magic. Given the search for quantities such as distance, I am guessing that the main driving "force" in this physics would be something more simply body-quantitative, like mass or density or strength, but  more than anything it sounds to me like there is a desire for as much pure objectivity  as possible in the form of a physics in which as much as is possible is controlled by the objective characteristics of spells, with very little variation caused by subjective aspects of the acting (spell casting) subject other than the will to pronounce the words and do the spell, but that is mainly a guess on my part based on the types of things Red Hen says, rather than a claim that I can substantiate from her own direct statements.

I'll start by saying that I do not think it a bad thing at all, in and of itself, to be looking at such objective aspects in the effects of spells/magic. This is because I do think that JKR builds a sort of physics of magic, but I think it has the soul of the spell-casting person (the "acting subject") as its base rather than the types of more easily quantifiable things that can be described as being governed by objective "laws" like physics. I'm using "soul" here in an older sense that means the animating life-force of a living being, the Greek work psyche, from which, of course, we get our word "psychological." I think that it is profitable to look at the material quantitative differences in, for instance, something like the fact that there is enough force in Snape's AK to blast DD up over the rampart but only enough in Wormtail's to lay Cedric out spread eagle in the same place he stood. One might guess at first that this has something to do with some greater skill or focus or power on Snape's part, and since this is Wormtail we're talking about, there will always be some aspect of that in there.

But it can't be the whole picture, because Voldy was surely hale at 16 and already very accomplished, but his father and grandparents did not seem to be affected this way, laid out spread-eagle (or chairs knocked over with them in them etc). What I would suggest is that, because of the "soul" base, it is the psychological character of the caster that determines the physics / physical effects of the curse. The real point of this is that it goes into characterization. Voldemort only ever puts in as much energy as is needed to do the job, and otherwise, he is as cold as his voice. So his father and grandparents simply slump over. But it is Wormtail who actually kills Cedric, and he is all jumped up, almost in agony but in a pudgy and weak body that can't channel or power it so well (I love the characterization of his fever-pitched agitation but in a flabby weak person that is captured in the line "screeched the words to the night" ... it has a certain desperation in it), and so Cedric is laid out spread eagle but just where he stood (now that we have solved the mystery of the added fourteen feet as not meaning that his body moved). But Snape ... Snape is a powerful wizard who has honed his skills very finely ... and his psychological disposition, his "soul status," at the time he killed DD with the AK would best be described as "pissed as hell." He's in an anguish of which Wormtail isn't even capable; it would kill Wormy before he could ever get to the point where he could have that much rage marshaled and held in reserve. And when Snape let's it loose, of course DD is blasted up over the ramparts bodily.

Why is he pissed as hell? Well, in addition to the little extra I add in the next paragraph, just look at his situation. This turn of events means two things. First, he is being catapulted even further into the dark heart of Voldy's confidences, and while your average idiot in the WW might think this makes you safer from Voldy killing you, Snape is wise enough to know that it is really the other way round. In other words, if you thought the stakes and risks couldn't get any higher for Snape than they already were before the end of book 6, well, they just did. It's no wonder that he is talking about whether he wants to keep it up any longer. But DD holds him to it, and to be honest, the presumption and authoritarian tone of DD probably would have pissed me off a fair bit too. And the second thing is that there is no more DD to help him ... he's without a safety net now: he's that cop in crime drama shows who was under cover and his records had been hidden and only one person, his case officer, knows he is under cover, and then somebody kills the case officer and now there is no record that the cop isn't the criminal everybody thinks him to be ... Snape is now that guy. And that fear can also channel into the extreme agitation that makes for such a powerful AK.

I should note here that I am possibly in a minority as far as my "deconstructionist" reading of the DD and Snape relationship, or at least that is what one person, who incidentally is more "liberal" than I (and whose atheist brother ironically once said I was overly skeptical, but then he is a scientism-ist, and they are secretly some of the most ardent dogmatists around [in the close about it especially from themselves knowing]), said when she heard it. I think all that loathing on Snape's face is real, meaning not just that I think that it is the agitation of which I just spoke, but that I think that, in that moment, he really hates DD with a deep loathing. That "loathing and hatred etched in every line of his face" isn't faked. And I think that DD treated Snape in certain ways throughout to keep this possibility open in case it was needed ... and it was. DD was right about the need for at least seeming antipathy between himself and Snape, and nothing seems more like antipathy than real antipathy. That line that we see in the pensieve when DD says, "sometimes I think we sort too soon" (after the Yule ball in GoF when Snape says he is not a coward like Karkaroff), is an afront to Snape's identity. Snape sees the wrong he has done and the wrong in Voldy and the DEs, and I think he knows that characteristics in Slytherin house can present distinct temptations in that direction, but I think that he also thinks that there can be a redeemable side to the distinction of Slytherin, and in part, he would think that because he sees himself as truly Slytherin but also redeemable as truly Slytherin (remember Phineus's statement at the end, "let it be noted that Slyhterin played its part" ... This is an important idea to Snape). And what is DD's response to a person like him when he shows bravery? Somthing like: "Maybe you're not really a Slytherin at heart after all." That's a slap in the face, and Snape takes it as such. But DD is playing in the real world. Whether you agree or disagree with his tactics, you have to admit that there is a logic to engendering antipathy so that, if needed, it can help verify Snape's DE loyalty. And I don't think any of those DEs on the top of the tower, or that Voldy himself had he been there, would suspect anything other than Snape genuinely loathing the hell out of Albus Dumbledore ... DD got Snape to turn in the best method-acting performance of all time.

So, I am saying JKR's "magic" does have a "physics" to it, but a physics based in "soul" rather than objective, external, easily quantifiable aspects of the spells and "magic" as a completely objective thing. Of course, if this is the line I am going to take, I should say something about "soul" as "substance." While the soul is psychological (or "mental" as Ron likes to say) in many aspects, we also have descriptions that are more "substance" in nature, but not necessarily "solid" substance, more what I would note as the "sticky" or organic quality of the substantiality of the soul. It's not something that you can cut into sections neatly. It's a bit more the way cheese "separates" when you pull slices of pizza apart. Memory, which means basically a sense of self in ancient thought, is part of this, and look at the clingy way memories work when pulled from the temple. And then we have the instability of horcruxes that gave rise to an unintended tearing of Voldy's soul and its gravitation to graft to the "only living thing left" in the cottage at Godric's Hollow that first night. So, if the physics of magic here is more soul-based, one could expect it to be a bit more, shall we say, fluid, a bit more variable.

I should note here that this isn't really an argument in the style of many that I have heard over the years (particularly in the run-up to book 7), in the line of "this is definitely what this thing is and here is my concrete evidence" (e.g., there were some who were seriously opposed to the scar-crux theory and offered what they construed to be the objective propositional content of certain dialog lines as evidence). My way of thinking about things is a bit more like DD in the cave when Harry describes him as something like "doing things by feel." I'm not saying I am as good at doing things by feel and DD, just that it's the same type of investigation, versus more ironclad and sharp, solid-corner theories that often happen in fan exposition on HP.

So, one primary way in which this "soul as substantial in addition to being psychological" plays out in my "doing things by feel" methodology here is that I think of the AK as "soul extension," meaning extending the soul through the wand and the spell into the other person in such a way as to extinguish their soul. This sounds a bit hokey when you first hear it, but there actually is a base for it as long as you don't try to turn it into too literal of a picture. Remember that literature is largely metaphorical: something like the imperious curse symbolizes the prowess some real-world people have for manipulating others and taking advantage of weak-willed-ness, and something like the AK can symbolize doing so to the extent that you crush not only the other person's will but also their unique personality. To quote the Hatter, you reduce their "muchness" ... and this is symbolized in the fictional world by the extreme reduction to the "nothingness" of death. And I think the AK represents this extension  of one's own soul, one's own persona, into the other to the extent of extinguishing them .. killing them

In closing on that, I would add just a few little bits of things that I think can be taken as some evidence. I think that when one person kills another, the extension of self makes possible, as is always the case with physical fluidity, some "flow-back" of the victim's soul into the killer's wand, and the obvious example here is the fact that the shades that emerge from Voldy's wand in the graveyard are not static; they move and speak with the personality, the psychological traits, of the real victims. The second piece I would add is in the whole thing of DD's explanation of Harry's wand imbibing some of Voldy's magic on that night in the graveyard (as he explains in DH about what happened in GoF), in which he says specifically that this means that it imbibed some of Voldy himself such that it could recognize him later even without Voldy being using his yew wand.

(The idea of "flow-back" into something that fires may not resonate with all readers, but if you have had a doctor explain to you what an SSRI [selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor] does in the process of writing a prescription for one, it does.)

An HP-GoF-AK tidbit

So, here is some more that may or may not have made it into various posts on Muggle Matters, but even if it did, it can stand to be recorded here again to make sure, and it relates to what was just said because of the background on the avada kedavra curse.

Somebody in a comment in a Muggle Matters thread related that JKR had stated in interview that "avada kedavra" is actually the original Aramaic form of "abracadabra." I think the commentor went by JKR2, as she had the same initials. Or maybe she said JKR had said just "original" in an interview and she herself, JKR2, had looked up somewhere else that said it was Aramaic. In any event, JKR2 offered this info in response to a post I had saying that "avada kedavra" sure seemed like Hebrew to me and giving the way in which I would parse it. As far as it being Aramaic, this would make sense. Aramaic shares a lot of vocabulary with Hebrew and the grammar is so similar that, for OT studies, while I had to come in with X amount of Hebrew and then do at least three text specific courses, I had to take only a one-semester primer in Aramaic. The only people using Aramaic at the time from which the term would have come into Southern Italian Ren. would be Jewish (originally, it was the lingua Franca of the Persian empire) and would meld much Hebrew vocab into any Aramaic grammar, especially as, when these people are of a kabbalistic/magical turn of mind, they see the language in which the Scripture was written as having a power in itself. (I heard a cool paper at Lumos in 2006 on Jewish name magic as the base model of the "fear of the name" ... and, indeed, JKR did use the trope of name taboo in book 7).

So, here is my parsing and a little primer on how we get from "avada kedravra" to "abracadabra." A couple bits of information are needed first. The first is that biblical Hebrew is written differently than languages in the West from Greek on. Only the consonants are letters in the line in Hebrew. The vowels are written above and below the line as "pointing." In fact, back past a certain point in the history of the biblical text, the vowel points were not written in; they were simply memorized from oral instruction in synagogue reading and education. And in any setting like this in this culture, where the phrase is not part of an actual concrete text being copied out, where it is just a singular phrase, the pointings would not be written out.

The second bit of info is that, because the vowels are not letters, that first "a" is not an "a," even though it is easy for a somebody who has not studied the language to get confused on that, since the first letter of the word is the letter aleph and our natural tendency is to say "ah, 'a' and 'aleph'" (which does indeed work with Greek, since the first letter in Greek, alpha, is a vowel). The Hebrew letter aleph, like the letter ayin, is not a vowel, BUT we in the present West ALSO do not have a consonant pronunciation for either of them because they are gutterals letters (performed back in the "gutter" of the throat, like the hard g or hard ch) that were performed so far back in the throat that the way our languages have developed means that we have lost their pronunciation (doing a gutteral that far back in the throat is so counter to our linguistic habits that we find it impossible to pronounce the letter), but they are still parts of the written spelling of words, and they function to hold vowels that have been attached to them as vowel points. But they are also kept for two other reasons. The first is that they are part of the holy text, and you don't mess with that. But the second is that the root form of any verb is a three-consonant string called its "trilateral root," and this is a core building block. Words can become really long with nouns that came from participial forms of verbs, but it all flows out of that original trilateral root. So, it just doesn't fit to jettison one of the three consonants of a trilateral root in the written text simply because Westerners have lost the oral pronunciation.

The upshot of all that is that, when the content of the language is being discussed in English, it can seem like rules are being broken because vowels are dropping and reappearing ranodmly, and, in English, vowels are part of the dictionary identity of a word, part of its "lexical form," whereas they are not in Hebrew (yod and waw are unique cases as consonants that can be sort of vowel place holders, especially when they are the middle consonant in a verbs trilateral root, which verbs are often called the "hollow" verbs). The text of the Hebrew Bible originally had only consonants and pronunciation was passed down in memorizing the text in recitation in the synagogue, and then at some point at least 600 years after the time of Christ, fear arose that the pronunciation was slipping and there was a desire to preserve it, but by this time, the consonant-only text was sacred in its set form, and so there was no changing it by sliding vowel letters in between the consonants, and so the Masoretic scribes used a system of vowel "pointing" above and below the consonants (so this is what I meant above about aleph and ayin "holding a vowel"). The Dead Sea Scrolls, though, from around the time of Christ, are completely unpointed Hebrew.

The last bit of intro info is that the letters "b" and "v" are the same letter in Hebrew, the letter bet (but the "e" there is pronounced as a long "a"). The only thing that differentiates the pronunciation of the letter between "b" and "v" is what is called a dagesh, which is a small dot that can appear in the interior of some letters, changing the pronunciation. With the dagesh (בּ), bet it is pronounced "b," and without the dagesh (ב‎), it is pronounced "v," just as the letter peh (פ) is "p" with a dagesh and "ph" without it (this is called the dagesh forte, which is appears only with certain letters, and is different from the "doubling dagesh" that happens when two of the same consonant appear in a row and one of them is replaced by a dagesh in the other, so "min naso" becomes "minso" with a dagesh in the n/nun).

That last bit of info accounts for one of the things that must be explained in transforming "avada kedavra" into "abracadabra," which is simply how you get those two "v"s turning into two "b"s.

Now, on to the real stuff. "Avad," the trilateral root aleph - bet - daleth, is a Hebrew verb meaning to vanish or perish, and here it appears in an imperative form, a command to vanish. Then the word davar, which is the trilateral root daleth - bet - resh, means "word." The letter kaph, the "k" letter, can be used as a preposition meaning "like" or "as" when is is prefixed to a word, just slapped on the front end with not space. So, "kedavra" ("k" + "davar") means "like a word." So, "avada kedavra" is a command to "vanish like a word." The word is spoken and then in gone. In medieval magical type thinking, this was written on talisman's for those with plague fever. Basically, it was a command on the plague fever to "vanish like a word." Often it was written in a dwindling repetition, the whole word, then the whole minus one letter, then the whole minus two letters, etc., and as a person spoke the talisman over the person with fever, the fever was supposed to dwindle as the word dwindled.

So, how do we get from "avada kedavra" to "abracadabra"? We have already explained the transformation of the "v"s to "b"s in that they are the same letter in Hebrew. We have also explained most of the appearances, disappearances, and changes of vowels by the fact that the vowels are not actual letters in written Hebrew (and so it is not unusual for "davar" to turn into "devra"). The big thing we need to explain is how the "d" in "avada" becomes an "r" in "abra," and this is actually the most interesting part of all for examining magical thinking.

Remember that this was usually being written on talismans, meaning very small writing. And so it would be easy to confuse letters that look very similar. And daleth (ד), the "d," and resh (ר), the "r," look very similar, as can be seen in the parentheses just now. So, it would be easy to confuse them in small writing. But the question remains of why they would keep it around when it is so obviously an error: either the root aleph - bet - resh is not a trilateral root at all or what it means as a trilateral root probably makes no sense in context with "like a word" in the way that aleph - bet - daleth does. So, why keep it around?

The answer is magical thinking. Once you make that mistake, what you wind up with within the phrase is the letter string bet - resh - kaph, which is the trilateral root of the verb for "to bless." The fact that you have to stretch across two of the original words to get it is no obstacle because that is magic ... magic is about hidden powers and qualities, and here the "hiding" is in the form of the letters being parts of different words in the original. So, stretching across original words, far from being a hindrance to this reading, actually supports and strengthens it ... the phrase now contains the word "blessing" hidden within it, and this has magical power. The logic is that what is hidden in the phrase is that what is a curse on the plague fever ("vanish like a work") is a blessing on the person with the plague fever.

I would not call the rabbis of actual orthodox forms of Judaism magical thinkers, but there is sort of a similar way of thinking about hiddenness and "accidental things" not being accidental. The rabbis saw the inconsistencies in the text as anything but accidental: they were put there intentionally by the Holy One, blessed be He. And while the magical thinking is a distinct step out of the realm of belief in God and God's activity in the world (maybe not denying it, but also not considering it in an equation), there is still a similar thinking in saying that the string b-r-k can be meaningful even thought it came about through the accident of an orthographic mistake when two words just happened to be next to each other.

[Sidenote: I have wondered in this regard whether stage magic at one point preserved more of the origins of the words. Nowadays, "abracadabra" and "hocus pocus" are just sort of interchangeable stage magic words. But originally, as we just saw, "abracadabra" was a vanishing word. "Hocus Pocus" also has an actual etymological history, but as a word of appearing. Actually it was a slam by Protestants on the Catholic doctrine of transsubstantiation, which we Catholics believes happens when the priest says the "words of institution," which in Latin are "hoc est meus corpus," which some Protestants mocked by the rambling mashing of it into "hocus pocus." I wonder if, at some point, stage magic actually preserved this difference between the two words, one as a vanishing word and the other as an appearing word (as the words of institution cause the Body and Blood to be present where they were not before): you say "abracadabra" when you make the rabbit disappear and "hocus pocus" when you make it reappear.]

 

I will also toss in here that I think the "vanish like a word" etymology connects with the extension of soul particularly through the phenomena of language. First I will note that language is always on the page, just as are books in the instances of the diary, Lockheart's ouvre, and the HBP potions book. One can see the way magic represents language in the instance of the Sectum Sempra curse. It functions like racial slurs function do for children who pick them up from parents without knowing what they mean but get enough of the use to know it will hurt certain people, just as Harry has an idea that the Sectum Sempra will in some way hurt Draco, his enemy, although he does not know the extent, and we see that he doesn't have to know that full effect through the meaning of the spell in order for the spell to have it's full potency (much more important for the potency of spells is their public presence ... meaning the verbal potency versus the non-verbal: I think the reason is the quality of being publicly observable, but note again that I am speaking metaphorically here, not saying that I think that in the "real" WW spells are more powerful the more people hear them; when I say "publicly observable" I am saying that I think that that is what is in the real world that is metaphorized in the fictional difference between verbal and non-verbal potency).

I would characterize this in a way that has certain affinities with the thought of Derrida on language as control through structure and institution. I would say that the etymology here, "vanish LIKE a word," is turned into a meaning of "vanish BY MEANS OF a word" ... language that kills. Language that enslaves another under one's own domination to the point of effectively killing who they really are. Usually, in what I can see in life, this takes the form of a period of intense devotion to and imitation of the manipulator, followed by an eventual failure to thrive on the part of the manipulated person, after which the manipulator discards them like "the spare" or Wormtail's bloody stump of a hand (or Graves/Grindlewald saying "I'm done with you" to Creedence in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them). The "word" that begins this killing is usually something like "see how great I am? if you try to be like me and convince others to be like me, and praise me and give me your admiration and other more menial things that I want, it might heal whatever is broken or feels broken in your soul ... I'm magical that way."

Text-Critical Analysis Using Literary Analysis Method: The Added Material in HBP

This section is mainly to throw in another fun Potter thing of applying actual critical methods to HP. In the end it is going to involve applying actual hands-on literary analysis methods to another discrepancy in HP. But just at the outset, I thought I would give a brief example of the type of individual methods that are used. It's a nice way to show what kinds of "things" are being discussed as "methods" here ... and throw in another example from all that stuff I spent so long studying. The method I'll list here is for thinking about solving discrepancies between two texts that you can tell are alternate versions of the same text but there is a difference. It is a different method than the one I use below for the specific material from HP below, but both are dealing with the question of discrepancy and taking a guess at which is the original. One principle or method, one that is used especially for variations of a single word among variant extant copies, is called the lex difficilior, which means the more "difficult reading." It basically means that whichever word makes for a more difficult reading is probably the more original because: if somebody made changes, they made them in order to make it more understandable, not less.

Anyway, as for what follows, If I had to fit this one into the motivations aspect of method, I would guess (trying to psychoanalyze myself here lol) that it has to do with finding materials that challenge the Enlightenment concepts of "author" as a way to challenge what I believe to be a very Enlightenment-tinged concept of Mosaic "authorship" held among persons of a fundamentalist bent from both sides of the Protestant-Catholic aisle (and the Anglos always fall on the left side of that aisle for me ... I don't buy the whole "Anglo-Catholic special" thing ... agree to disagree and be respectful and present members find common ground of things to work on, fine, but you can keep the false assimilation bit because there are very real differences in theology that impact especially beliefs about apostolic succession ... and it's always going to be a hard sell anyway if one knows that the Anglican church began with the murder of two Catholics who are now canonized as saints for being martyrs, Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher). So, I tend to try to explore other concepts of authorship than those so dominated by an exclusive emphasis on the individual consciousness. Not sure how it leads to me asking particular questions, but it is definitely part of my being interested in the incident at all.

So, maybe I will lay that out here to get it out of the way. Both versions in what will be described below were are authorized by JKR, but one was probably not "authored" by her entirely . Now, obviously there is going to be a difference in that, as JKR is a modern author in this tight of a setting, Scholastic would not publish its version without her looking it over, so her authorization did involve her conscious reading. What possibilities there are for "the authority of Moses" in regard to the Pentateuch are obviously going to be different because, under theories of Moses not actively composing the final text that we have now, he wouldn't be around to authorize in the same way. But any theory, no matter how conservative, that is not fully Mosaic conscious, hands-on composition of the final text will be viewed by some as a sell out, and usually, it seems to me, those types are already under the sway of enlightenment and scientism without any awareness of it (some of them of the opinion that they are the ones fighting the great fight against the great evil of the conquest of faith by science, not realizing that their way of thinking is the product of that conquest already being complete ... although, by grace and God's intervention, its completion may not be final). But maybe being able to show that things aren't always as simple as matters of "authorship" in categories people like to think in with contemporary authors can be at least a small supporting role. Mainly I like working these things like puzzles though.

So, not to keep a reader waiting any longer. Some will have heard of this, some not ... I'm sure that any uproar died down a long time ago though. So, for Halfblood Prince, there was a discrepancy between the first hardback with Scholastic (American) and the first paperback with Scholastic, and although the latter was published a year after the former, the latter is actually the more original, evidenced in the fact that it matches the first hardback with Bloomsbury (UK), which appeared at the same time as the Scholastic first hardback.  So there is one complexity there: just because it appears on the scene later doesn't mean it originates later (when you get into ancient document studies, this is a valuable principle when dealing with the possibilities of oral traditions back before written document form).

[ASIDE: Such questions of dependence among variants is complex. Sometimes it is not the answer that either is dependent on the other. The Septuagint version of the book of Jeremiah is 1/8 shorter than the Masoretic Text. So, since the LXX is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which was the case: was our present MT the original from which the LXX was translated and the translators excised part? Or was there a version of the Hebrew text that was prior to the MT and shorter than the MT, and the LXX was translated form this earlier short version and then stuff was added after that to get our present MT? Both of these cases would require the MT version to contain everything in the LXX and then the 1/8 more. But this is not the case: there is material the LXX version that is not in the MT version, even though the latter is the longer. So, the theory is that there was an Ur text from which both the LXX and MT versions descended, but by separate paths ... both are dependent on that ur-text but neither is dependent on the other.)

But, such proof that the Scholastic paperback version is actually earlier than the Scholastic hardback, even though the volumes are published in the opposite order, relies on verification from the Bloomsbury source contemporaneous with the Scholastic first hardback. My interest, on the other hand, was always with being able to deduce this state of affairs even without needing the verification.

 So, here it is:

On top of the tower at the end of HBP, the Scholastic firs hradback reads:

[Draco:] "He told me to do it or he'll kill me. I've got no choice."

[Dumbledore:]"He cannot kill you if you are already dead. Come over to the right side Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Nobody would be surprised that you had died in your attempt to kill me -- forgive me, but Lord Voldemort probably expects it. Nor would the Death Eaters be surprised if we had captured and killed your mother -- it is what they would do themselves, after all. Your father is safe at the moment in Azkaban. ... When the time comes, we can protect him too."

The parts underlined in bold are the parts from the Scholastic first hardback that do not appear in the Bloomsbury/UK first hardback or the Scholastic first paperback, a year after the first hardback.

In those versions, Dumbledore's statement simply reads:

"Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Your father is safe at the moment in Azkaban. ... When the time comes, we can protect him too."

Even without knowing the situation of dates and the Bloomsbury text verifying the paperback version, if you have just the texts of the first Scholastic hardback and first Scholastice paperback with no other details, an argument can be made that the shorter text is the original and that the outline-bold material was added in. The argument of the same type as the lex difficilior but different. This one says that tight small organizations like barebones lists usually come first, whether it is in the realm of lists being easier for memory in oral tradition cultures or in the realm of a modern author planning out a work, lists come first. At the very least, knowing how organized JKR reportedly is, we know this is the case with her. The basic list is: you, your mother, your father. The rest is added in later, maybe to fill out characterization of the DEs, maybe to make it explicit what DD was proposing because Scholastic thinks an American audience is too slow witted to get what an English audience gets. I'm not really concerned with that. I just like making the argument that you can tell which text is prior (or at least make a good educated guess that should be taken seriously) based on analyzing how the structure is more direct and the list appears more straightaway in the shorter version.