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."
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