Tolkien versus Shakespeare

Tolkien versus Shakespeare: Are you Serious?

 [NOTICE: Jan. 2018: Soon I will be trying to make it through two books on Shakespeare and his work as Catholic and I will be writing a post trying to give that perspective and the idea that there are positives in Shakespeare a fair shake and see what I think the balance or net effect is between that and the fact that I still think the same as stated below on the major issues stated there, in this post. But I have to make it through those two books first ... but I have made it through about fifty pages of the first and can tell you that, while I have found serious data given there to contemplate, the post is still going to be named "Baked on Shake" because of a certain Anglo-triumphalism that bleeds through this literary biographer's work pretty strongly at points and a certain heavy handed, actually really bombastic at points, arrogant judgmentalism against the standard post-modern bogey men that really mainly sells books to a certain popular-level conservative niche demographic using a tired "us and them" rhetoric to which that crowd has been addicted for a long time ... tedious read, to be honest, but I think useful for some information it provides that makes me have to set what I say in this present post in a larger context of considering good in the bard too. And I mean good other than wetting myself at feeling sophisticated talking about him because that is what the sophisticati (of both "conservative" and "liberal" stripes) declare that one should. END NOTICE]

This essay came out of a recent rereading of Tolkien's essay "On Fairie Stories" (for the same meet-up book club in which I read Loconte's A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War, which gave rise to my earlier essay on Tolkien's "Incarnational imagination" [well, the present essay has been in draft form for much longer, but that was the first that I got around to finishing] ... I've really enjoyed the book club so far), so, any page numbers I mention are from "On Fairie Stories" essay as it appears in the 1997 paperback edition of The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays.

So, this may be a "sorry to inform you" post for some. But ... Tolkien was not a huge fan of Shakespeare. In fact, at least in some of the bard's work, Tolkien thought he was a bit of a tosser. Official (and very credible) biographers like Tom Shippey usually admit that Tolkien had a beef with the bard but downplay it. What I hope comes out of the below is a clearer perception that the content of the beef is actually substantial.

Tolkien's own statement was that he "cordially disagreed" with Shakespeare. Shippey and others take it as light. I think Tolkien himself probably meant it to seem light, and maybe meant it to convince even himself of that. At the very least he would probably not want to overstate his dislike of the bard unless he wanted to make it a hill to die on ... because the idolization of the bard is such that, if you make any criticism (other than maybe that made in slamming the whole of the Euro-centric tradition), "academic" and "novice literary person" alike will either burn you at the stake or put you in a rubber room with a dribble cup (I do so love hyperbole :) ). And so, in order to minimalize that unless you want to die on this particular hill, a person finds it easier to convince themselves of the minimality so as to more easily convince others of it and, so, avoid those unpleasant alternatives (stakes and padded cells). But, at the end of the day, I think the differences between Shakespeare's and Tolkien's ways of thinking and literary projects are large and that Tolkien is in the right. That's my basic position whether or not Tolkien admitted the extent of it to others or even to himself.

A second thing that I have to add is that, for as much respect and awe as I have for Tolkien, the simple fact that he disagrees with something is not the final word on that thing. He also, from what I have heard, thought very little of the work of Dorothy Sayers, whose Lord Peter Wimsey material I think is amazing, particularly the four novels that concern his marrying Harriet Vain. But in the case of the beef with the bard, I think he is dead on. I don't necessarily share all of his critique of dramatic realism, but I do agree with him in criticizing (as I read him) what I would call "realism for realism's sake," which is where I think a large portion of modern drama, which began with Shakepeare, has gone.

Of course, I have to admit that some of my own desire to knock the bard down a few notches has to do with a college prof I thought was a bit of a tosser (although a good man; I'm actually very unkind to criticize his starry-eyed-ness when it enabled me to cut some corners, so I want it understood that I think he's probably a better human being than me ... but still a tosser on this) who was also sort of Mr Shakespeare (the last theater production in his retirement year was the Tempest with himself as Prospero ... and he held onto that department chair way too long ... I know a woman in that department who retired the same year as he did and so she never held the chair, but she had more right to, IMHO). He also taught the fantasy lit course and thought of himself as Mr Tolkien. I think he was right about being Mr Shakespeare but not on being Mr Tolkien, and that it would be far better to be Mr Tolkien than Mr Shakespeare.

Too Much Drama

In order to get Tolkien's beef with the bard, one has to understand his thinking on drama as a genre. But first let me just provide one quote to demonstrate how undeniable it is that, at least in certain instances, Tolkien at the very least did not have a very high opinion of him. Macbeth is a particular problem for Tolkien:

To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatist as Shakespeare. Macbeth is indeed a work by a playwright who ought, at least on this occasion, to have written a story, if he had the skill or patience for that art. (Fairies Stories, p, 141)

Tolkien statements on Drama run something like:

A drama could be made about the suffering of a victim of research in radiology, but hardly about radium itself. But it is possible to be primarily interested in radium (not radiologists) - or primarily interested in Faerie, not tortured mortals. One interest will produce a scientific book, the other a fairy-story. Drama cannot well cope with either. (Fairie Stories, p. 160)

This quote shifts a little bit in a way that I think shows some of the ambiguity that exists for Tolkien on drama: He speaks at first of a possible drama (victims of radiology) in terms that seem to make it a possibly legit thing, but then he seems by the end to be more critical of drama as being able to fulfill any possible function with the particular material. I think that there is a shifting going on between a concept of drama in and of itself and drama absolutized as the base model for all narrative. As far as "in and of itself," I think his reaction to it is probably the same as his reaction to allegory: it has it's valid uses, but they are limited (he's known for being critical, but he does note that Tom Bombadil is a fully allegorical character, symbolizing pre-fallen nature, unimpacted by the evil of the ring and always speaking in verse, as poetry is prior to prosaic, scientific language). As far as absolutization, it is when that form is taken to be the root form, the exemplar, the standard. This is what I mean by "too much drama": drama is all right in its natural, limited place, but Shakespeare's work has only drama and has come to be viewed as the exemplar of "literary art as such" ... and that is drama going beyond its natural, limited place.

Directly on Shakespeare in this regard, Tolkien writes: "And criticism in a country that has produced so great a Drama, and possesses the works of William Shakespeare, tends to be far too dramatic. But Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy." (Fairie Stories, 140).

Tolkien uses a formula that I think is important: "recognition of fact, but not slavery it" (p. 144). I think that, for Tolkien (and myself), drama in and of itself, in its natural place, is the recognition of fact (in drama, the reality of human psychology), but modern drama in the wake of Shakespeare is "slavery to it."

Drama Skewed

The previous section was called "too much drama," and the point was that, to Tolkien, even if drama is fine and good on its own, it has been over-rated and supplanted actual narrative art. My claim here may require some finessing of Tolkien's own statements (particularly as regards "objectification" and psychology), but I think it holds. That claim is that modern drama, which is at least heavily influenced by Shakespeare, has become predominantly ruled by the "slavery to fact" mentioned at the end of the last section (Fairie Stories, p. 144).

The "fact" in question here is the "human person." Tolkien speaks of drama as that in which "human character's hold the stage and upon them attention is concentrate. ... Drama is anthropocentric. Fairy-story and fantasy need not be." (Faerie Stories, pp. 159-160). He also writes:

Thus, if you prefer Drama to Literature (as man literary critics plainly do), or form your critical theories primarily from dramatic critics, or even from Drama, you are apt to misunderstand pure story-telling, and ... to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things." (Fairie Stories, p. 142)

Harold Bloom has famously said that "Shakespeare invented the human person" (he even titled the whole book that, Shakespeare: Invention of the Human). I think Tolkien would have replied (to keep with the image of slavery), "no, he just imprisoned him in quotation marks," and what I mean by this is that he would see drama as an improper objectification of "human personhood." I would actually connect it with the radical objectification done when taking the scientific model of knowledge as the standard for all knowledge, rather than itself being one narrowing of a deeper and broader base model of "knowing."

Psychology is in the fore here, although not necessarily named. I don't think that Tolkien saw no value whatsoever in psychology, but I think his mode of thought would see it as being put in the wrong place. Here I have to appeal to another system of thought for which I have not done research into Tolkien's comment on it, but I think it best encapsulates what I am trying to say. Aristotle presented the idea of "katharsis" (in his Poetics) as the role of drama: we watch, and the danger etc on stage elicits our own psychological reactions, thus releasing them so that, when we leave (or maybe after a period of rest) we are unencumbered by those excesses of emotion and can go about the business of thinking about how to live rightly and so on without being hindered by them. The point of all that for this discussion is that the psychology that happens in proper drama, under that understanding, happens between the stage and the audience, but for modern drama, it all happens on the stage and the audience only observes it in a quasi-"scientific" way.

With modern psychology (with which I do not disagree in and of itself, and actually find it quite useful as long as it does not turn man into "merely and animal" ... see the quote below from "Fairie Stories," p. 160), we are properly within the realm of science as applied to the human person, and I believe that "drama skewed," drama in the modern sense as exemplified by Shakespeare, is a reduction to the merely psychological; there is none of what Tolkien calls "the strong moral element" and "inherent morality" of stories that "lie near the borders of Fairie" (Fairie Stories, pp. 117-118).

Having introduced this category of the "scientific," I need to clarify on it, because Tolkien does actually make positive comment on science fiction stories like H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and others, or at least he finds them closer to fantasy than is drama. My point about his conflict with the scientific as a base model (in the form of psychology in drama) comes in with drama's claim to accurately represent "real" life. In the following quote, Tolkien is defending fairy stories against the charge that they blur the lines around "real" life and conflate it with the world of Fairie, and it makes sense that among those making that charge are those who defend drama as accurately representing "real" life, particularly the psychological aspect:

Fantasy does not blur the sharp outlines of the real world; for it depends on them. As far as our western, European, world is concerned, this 'sense of separtion' [of the "real" from the fantastic] has in fact been attacked and weakened in modern times not by fantasy but by scientific theory ... by the hypotheses (or dogmatic guesses) of scientific writers who classed Man not only as 'and animal' -- that correct classification is ancient -- but as 'only an animal.' (Fairie Stories, p. 160).

This is, as far as I can tell, the core definition on which modern drama, beginning in a big way with Shakespeare, operates: a "realistic" depiction of psychological phenomena. And this is "drama skewed" when it is taken as the most fundamental examination of the human situation and the height of literary art, as it is in the idolization of Shakespeare.

Incarnational Narrative

I'll make only a few brief comments here regarding what I think is at the core for what I have referred to  in another essay on Tolkien as his "Incarnational imagination," meaning the strong influence that I think his belief in the Incarnation had on his imagination. My point can be summarized in fairly short order. I think that what needs to be incarnated in a character is more than simply the human psychology, as does modern drama.

I'll also give an example here of actual incarnation in Tolkien's own work as an analogy for incarnational narrative. Sauron and Gandalf were originally Maiar, spirit beings who are beyond the races of Middle Earth, "angels," if you will, who incarnate in Middle Earth (see the "of the Maiar"
section of chapter 2 of the Silmarillion: Gandalf's original name was Olorin). The problem with Sauron is that he over-incarnated, bound too much of his angelic power to what could be done with it in Middler Earth, or at least this is how I take "poured all of his power into the ring." Gandalf also incarnates into a body, but most of his original power goes into being able to counsel the races (again, the morality factor) for their own benefit rather than into ruling them for his own.

The main point is that they both were originally beyond the races of Middle Earth, not symbols of aspects of those races, who, for the most part each represent some aspect of humanity, or at least that is how I read the races (although, for what purpose an author incarnate even the beyond-human is important, for it can be done for evil as well as for good purposes ... but that gets too far afield into the morality in the act of making a story, rather than, say, merely the morality within the story itself). Again, to be clear, I am analogizing what Gandalf and Sauron are in and of themselves (incarnations from beyond) with what story does, or at least should do, I am arguing, according to Tolkien.  The latter is to incarnate things beyond mere human psychology (morals, virtues, and the like) and then have them interact with humans (Gandalf counsels and symbolizes the virtue of helping others with counsel; Sauron dominates and symbolizes the arch-vice of domination thinking).

As one further piece of information, a model for this might be the pre-Shakespeare plays known as "everyman plays," which had an upper stage on which were characters somehow above common contemporary humans (God, biblical characters, etc) and on which was acted out biblical stories or dramatizations of relations within the Godhead and the like, and a lower stage with an everyman character and members  of a chorus that represent classes in contemporary society (the one that I have personally read was one done by a modern author imitating the medieval models, "The Just Vengeance" written by Dorothy Sayers)

Psychological Drama Disguised as Fairy Story: 

Midsummer Night's Dream

Tolkien is well noted for saying he regretted using the term "elves" because he thought Shakepseare had cheapened it (see the interesting piece called "JRR Tolkien on the 'folly of reading Shakespeare'" at www.bardfilm.blogspot.com, which cites his famous quote in Letter 151, to Hugh Brogan in 1954: "I now deeply regret having used Elves ... the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome" [p. 185 in the Carpenter edition of Tolkien's letters] ... see also other commentary like the essays in Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language, edited by Janet Brennan Croft. The authors of the essays in this edited volume rely heavily on the sourcework in Tom Shippey's JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century and The Road to Middle Earth: How JRR Tolkien Created a New Mythology). The best place to look for this is in what is possibly the bard's most famous use of the fay: Midsummer Night's Dream (Shippey relates an interesting fact about this play: It and The Tempest are "the" two fairy plays [I take it he means the only two in the bard's body of plays] and the two plays "whose plots were not borrowed but made up by Shakesspeare"; see The Road to Middle Earth, p. 184 [and see below on Macbeth for the centrality of plot for "narrative art"]... as regards an actual place Tolkien admits liking something from Shakespeare, contra Midsummer and Macbeth, in Letter 76, to his son Christopher in 1944, he comments positively on a performance of Hamlet he attended [Carpenter's edition, p. 88, in which letter can also be found his phrase "the folly of reading Shakespeare]).

I think this gets complicated, but I also think it can be figure out. Where it gets complicated is where "things," most particularly the elves, while they initially seem to be above or beyond humans, really only stand in for humans or human qualities. In Tolkien's sense, elves are in and of themselves other than human, but it is not so in Midsummer Night's dream. This is an observation that struck me in reading the play in an undergrad course on Shakespeare (taught by my Mr Shakespeare I mentioned at the beginning) even before reading Tolkien's essay. I remember it occurring to me that the fairies, especially Puck and Oberon, are basically the Freudian unconscious, as is their dark murky, confusing and trickster-laden woods at night (Shippey draws similarities between this wood and Fangorn's forest, but I think that for Tolkien Fangorn is really a rebuttal to Oberon on the model I describe below under Macbeth, rather than a fond adaptation).

My main point is that the elves do not incarnate something beyond human psychology, even something in humanity that is not "merely animal" (for we share psychology with the animals; we share the basic principles with them even when we move into the properly human psychology of a psyche that is self-reflexive, that can protect the concepts of "I" and "me" in the same way an animal instinctively protects what it needs for survival). I think that, whether or not Tolkien made the connection consciously himself, his accusation of Shakespeare as "debasing" the elves is really the fact that they represent only human psychology.

An Example of Narrative Art: The Charmed Captain of Evil.

So, perhaps the best way to really show the difference between Tolkien and Shakespeare regarding "narrative art" is to detail what is probably the single most concise example, and one that has always been in the fore of my thoughts when pondering this issue. The conceptual background for this is what has gone on above, the difference that Tolkien sees between drama and what he himself does, which he calls "narrative art." He writes that "Drama is, even though it uses a similar material (words, verse, plot), is an art fundamentally different from narrative art," (Fairie Stories, p. 142), and as noted above, that "Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama." (ibid., p. 140)

I believe that the difference lies first in the characters, and particularly their function. For drama, the point is a scientifically accurate depiction of the psychology in play. For narrative art, on the other hand, the characters are emblematic, which is to say that they represent things larger than one individual instance.

So the best way to explicate this is to go directly to the example, which is the "Charmed Captain of Evil" trope. I first became aware of this in reading the introduction chapter of David Day's Tolkien's Ring (which has some truly awesome illustration work done by Alan Lee, who is famed for his Middle Earth drawing and painting work and was the lead conceptual artist for Peter Jackson's film trilogy).

(SIDE NOTE: I should warn the reader that Day's book is not primarily on Tolkien's actual work, but rather takes it as a jumping off point for presenting his own academic research on a related topic: ring legends in ancient cultures ... although he tosses in corollaries from Tolkien's text when he can get them ... this kind of "jumping off" happens often and is perfectly fine in and of itself: academics spend much time doing research that will not directly yield much monetary, supporting-daily-living, result; one writes a second peer-reviewed monograph in order to make full professor, and it sells some in the field, but not a major amount of the kind of capital you can give your landlord; so sometimes a popular topic comes along that is related to one's area of research, like Jackson generating interest in the Lord of the Rings by doing the movies, and one has a chance to pick up on some returns that are more directly applicable to the mortgage and braces for the kids ... and more power to him, I say; the bills never stop coming) .

Day's basic set up is: Tolkien's work was immensely popular; but he didn't come up with the idea of a ring of power on his own; he took the idea from a multitude of ring legends from many ancient cultures; and his project was, as the structure for his own work with his own themes, to build a "believable source story," an "exemplar" of sorts, for the many legends. And so, in his intro chapter, Day gives a couple more specific and limited-scope examples of such traditional narrative tropes and talks about Tolkien seeing his own version as a much better exemplar than some others, say those by Shakespeare. A minor example is Macbeth's march of the woods on Dunsinane Hill, which winds up being nothing more than a trick of the light and psychological terror-driven imagination. Tolkien famously said in a letter that he was always disappointed in this as a child because he wanted it to be the actual trees marching (which I think means that he wanted nature to actually be engaging in the fight), so he wrote the ents shepherding the trees/hoorns to Helm's Deep as a "rebuttal" of sorts.

The more major example for me, the one that shows what he means by narrative art, is the one Day reveals as the "charmed captain of evil" trope.

This trope is a sub-plot, a plot device, in which there is a captain who is evil and who has some sort of protection from a quasi-supernatural source, some prophecy or enchantment, and then the captain is undone by something that the wording of the prophecy or charm failed to take into account. In Shakespeare's play, the charmed captain is Macbeth, who has a prophecy that says he cannot be killed by one of woman born, and so he is killed by Macduff, who was born c-section. To Tolkien, this is a hack's answer to the riddle on several fronts. For one (and here I embark on my own exposition beyond Day), as a philologist and immersed in the etymologies and histories of words, Tolkien would see it as a betrayal of the real and full meaning of "born of woman." The meaning of that phrase is not limited to the delivery method, as Shakespeare has it (I am not sure how much of this is Shakespeare versus how much is his source, the Holinshed Chronicles, and have not sifted the material in Shippey and others enough to discern, but one way or another, the bard was the one who either made the cheap version or championed it from the source ... either way, to Tolkien's mind, I think, he's a hack). "Born" comes from the word "bear," meaning, of course, to carry. Being "born of woman" really means to be carried by a woman in her body for nine months, regardless of whether one is delivered by the natural course or is "untimely from my mother ripped" (c-section).

But the deeper dissatisfaction comes from cutting off the possible "moral" of the story," which comes from the emblematic nature of the characters and their interaction in the actual plot. Macbeth's version provides no answer to a really meaningful riddle ... it's all a technical loophole. And so, in rebuttal (showing us how to do it right), Tolkien gives us the witch-king of Angmar, the leader of the nine nazgul, the ringwraiths. He has had a charm laid on him (as he was a sorcerer) by which he "cannot be hindered by a living man." And so, he is killed by a woman aided by a halfling. The importance, for a thinker like Tolkien, would lie in the theme of the riddle and its answer. The riddle of this particular narrative plot device, this trope, is arrogance: seeking to win by sorcery or relying on esoteric prophecies. It's not relying on your God-given wits and talents the same as any other person has to do, and it's not praying to a god and then going into battle with faith, as Tolkien and Lewis both liked to see their fellow foot soldiers of the First World War doing. It is, rather, trying to pin down the protection and make sure of it before ever taking action. It's not bravery: cowardice and arrogance go hand in hand. And so, because the riddle is arrogance, the answer must be humility: a woman (a symbol of diminutive stature in a patriarchal society) aided by a halfling (whose diminutive stature and its emblematic capacity for humility are plain enough even at first sight). Shakespeare's use of the plot device, the trope, has none of this capability to embody or to en-flesh the theme of arrogance and humility. And so it is not narrative art; it is a fraud.

It is important here to note (especially because I said above to note it here) that I have used the word "plot" several times, for that is the second major thing in what narrative art (as I am arguing Tolkien means the term): you start with emblematic characters and then you create your own plot (what he calls, in "Fairies Stories," "sub-creation") in which the way they interact, the result of their interaction, reveals your theme, the answer to the riddle (I have addressed the topic of plot in my post on narrative as a kairotic chronology).

On the contrary, supposedly (and here I am going to paraphrase what I think defenders of the bard would say) what the Macbeth  version offers is a realistic portrayal of the psychological reality of a human being caught in this struggle. But I don't really see much more than "What?!?!? I didn't win? I got gypped on that prophecy thing! I want my money back!" I am, of course, lampooning that in my imagined internal dialogue, but I think the parody gets to the heart of what Tolkien meant by "the folly of reading Shakespeare."

 

 

Flotsam and Brettsam

(Raw "kitchen sink" ramblings)

Main disagreement: MidSummer's Night as "Trivializing" world of the Fae, whether Tolkien was conscious of it in these terms or not, is grievance with reduction of human to psychology in drama sense,

It is the only instance I know of in WS in which the "non-human" is not malevolent (witches in MacBeth etc).

Stories that are actually concerned primarily with "fairies" ... (p. 113)

Harold Bloom on WS inventing the human person.

Tolkien on Drama versus "narrative art" in "On Fairy Stories." Maybe use magical 14 feet from graveyard in GoF as representative of narrative are: juxtaposition of placement of characters and plot event and so on (plot is the central one though). Drama is only about scientific exposition of psychological states. But also ask the question of whether drama might be like allegory, at least in a consistent application of the Tolkien model (whether or not he reacted more strongly against drama than too overuse of allegory).

The meeting place is the fairies in Midsummer's. In WS they are only psychology (the limitation particular to drama); in Tolkien they are something other (need to define what though).

Tolkien on fairy stories NOT being about the supernatural? This gets some into Pratchett too, especially Shepherd's Crown.Raising Steam had gone back to the roots of magic, natural philosophy, the four elements cosmology. (but this may be subject for another post).

Pope Francis and Private Property

This one has been on my to do list since 2013 or 2014 I think, as I remember hearing friends talking about it sometime within a couple months after the apostolic exhortation Evangeli Gaudium was promulgated by Pope Francis, which was  Nov 24, 2013. My point concerns the comments of some friends that took what the Pope had to say on private property as new and a sign that the current pontiff could be making big changes soon (these particular friends viewed this in a positive light). The main point in the following is not to argue a point, but to take the point as sound and offer an analogy, admitting I'm not demonstrating it conclusively, but hoping that such an analogy helps understand the content better and, thus, makes it easier to process actual arguments concerning it.

The point concerns the following statement in Evangeli Gaudium §189:

 The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good; for this reason, solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what belongs to them.

I thought my friends were getting a bit excited about nothing. The critique of the capitalist approach to the right of private property has been going on at least since John Paul II. But, while those friends were decidedly on the "left" side and looking for changes to happen, I am sure there were as many on the "right" who drift closer and closer to being traditionalist schismatics from taking statements like this to be unacceptable change: the same reading of the statement (radical change, maybe forecasting more decisive new doctrinal positions against private property and free market) just two different responses (positive and negative). 

My take on it, without even getting into John Paul II and Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII, 1891, the kickoff of the modern "social justice encyclicals") and Centesimus Annus (JP II's 1991 encyclical on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum), is that not only is its (Evangeli Gaudium §189's) conception of "rights" true (and hopefully the analogy helps to see what I think that conception is), but also, if a schmuck like me can be noticing something analogous and thinking it in similar terms in the late 1990s from a Mel Gibosn film ... it quite simply cannot be that "radically" new (meaning breaching substantially with past teaching)

The analogy is with Braveheart (1995) and particularly with the element there of prime nocte, in which English lords were stated by the English king to have sexual rights to any woman in their lands on the first night of her marriage. Pondering on this, I began to see a conception of rights other than that of unrestricted entitlement. The form that it took in my head was "rights are the guarantees of your ability to do what is right." There are obviously human rights violation in the inflicting of psychological suffering on others, but the basic and most distinctive rights violation here is the fact that it takes away form the couple what they need to keep up a particular obligation on their end, the obligation to marital fidelity. The "right" (not sharing my spouse) is necessitated primarily by the obligation (my spouse and I remaining faithful to each other ... and, yes, this excludes all mutually consenting "open" arrangements).

What is being said by Pope Francis in regard to the right of private property seems to me to be much the same: the right to private property is not meant to be had in a completely unrestricted way by the individual, but is rather always oriented to the common good, entailing an obligation to use it so to the best of one's ability.

I know this would would take a LOT more to develop more thorough arguments for it. My main point here was to post one that had been in the tray for a few years in a brief form of getting out the analogy that was my main incentive to write it in the first place, rather than getting bogged down in a whole new research and argument post. I'm not saying the situation does not get MUCH more complicated, because I know that it does, but I also think that there is a real difference between unbridled capitalism's understanding of absolute rights and a truly traditional Christian understanding of rights existing in the context of obligations to participation in the health of a whole community. And maybe, hopefully, the analogy helps in getting a better idea of what it is exactly that would need to be argued, the actual concept of "rights" being debated.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

This is not a review of the movie. My review of the movie is that it is quite good, that the characters are very endearing, and that the themes are solid (some of them ones that she picks back up from places in the Harry Potter series where she did not have the context in which to pursue them). This post is simply a collection of observations and possible theories on chiastic reading of the movie and other things. For chiastic structures, see "Merlin's Chiasm Claims" and "Flesh, Blood, Bone ... and Heart: Exploration of a Dual-layer Chiastic Structure in Harry Potter (addendum to Chiasm post)."Also look into the work of Dr John Granger at his Hogwarts Professor site, particularly his work on ring structure; he is also developing material on interpreting the Fantastic Beasts film. I began writing about chiasm on a site called Muggle Matters just as he was beginning his work on ring composition, and so we began work on the same ideas independently but have often been in touch and swapped ideas etc.

1. I am very pleased with the fact that there is a “book” (the screenplay) release because it keeps actual reading at least in the mix even if it’s not the traditional book-adaptation model, although I kind of would like a book first in which I have to engage my imagination in creating the texture and flesh of the world and characters and actions for myself first, but the Warner Bros situation is what it is and I think it’s very good that she is keeping some written form in the public production mix, which makes sense for her with her advocacy for getting kids reading more that she had with the original series.

2. Chiasm: my raw guess without processing the screenplay is that the scene where they are about to put Tina in the death potion is the crux, with the issue being the willingness to take life in the pursuit of “justice” etc. It is definitely mirrored in Newt’s continual plea not to kill his creatures. And this is the place where Grindlewald actually pushes through a death sentence, killing (although thwarted) using the actual institution of governance (those who will actually do the killing do not question at all: it is taken by them as normal standard operations that a higher up might order an execution and that they would perform it not only without question but without even any need to question or verify ... and the room was obviously designed for that purpose) . I won’t know until I look at the screenplay itself what I think the key opening element is, but my possible placement of the crux scene is because that placement fits with the major closing scene being the one in which they actually kill Creedence/obscurus and the president says "the obscurus was killed on my orders."

It’s a theme that played for her in HP in the form of having the openness to creatures like the dementors and book 4 (Goblet of Fire) being the only place we have a kiss actually performed. I have always thought there is much more significance to the line in Goblet where Harry thinks “they had already administered their FATAL kiss” ... people dismiss the death penalty as a theme there because of the other material declaring that the kiss is not death, but I don’t see, especially with as active of a supporter of Amnesty International as she has been, how capital punishment is not there as a theme, just symbolically, without the instance being an actual death, but the theme slipped back in through the language used by the character.

3. Chiasm: As per the piece I just wrote about a dual-layer chiastic structure in the original 7-book HP series made up of two chiasms, 2-4-6 on top of 3-4-5, and actually possibly a three-level structure (3-4-5 = skeleton, 2-4-6=flesh, 1-4-7=skin/face/experiential) I would suggest that there could be two rings in Fantastic Beasts. The more I think about it, the more I am beginning to suspect that layering multiple chiasms/rings might be the material way that she handles having more than one heavy theme and having them interacting with each other (although, I am not sure, but I might reserve “ring” for the whole [whether individual book/movie or the whole series] and use “chiasm” for any sub-chiasm that is less than the whole, so my 3-4-5 and 2-4-6 chiasms ... I can’t remember if John Granger did this in a talk at which I met up with him in NYC, but it feels to me like he might have at least leaned that way in the construction he did of the deathly hallows symbol). I don’t have any more on that right now other than that I think there are definitely two targets going on: the wizard handling of the repression/obscurus issue (kill them) and the no-mage handling of all magic ( also ... kill them).

So, a dual ring/chiasm would be a structuring method of handling them together, probably with the wizarding world at the center and the no-mage overlayed and mirroring it, which would then require finding a wizard crux (which I have tentatively proposed as the thwarted death penalty, but that depends on looking at the actual scene numbering structure) and a no-mage crux. On the same provisional footing, (I don’t have the published screenplay yet to count scenes and see what is at the exact center) I would guess the scene where Creedence erupts as the obscurus when Barebone is about to beat him again, but that may be too late in the sequence to be the crux ... so, perhaps at the killing of the senator because that is where it impacts the no-mage world not just at the level of property damage or individuals being killed but at the level of its actual governance of its society in the person of an elected official, which might fit with having the central wizard scene be the one in which Graves/Grindlewald uses the actual power of the government to do the killing.

If my reading of the “skeleton” chiasm in the original HP series is correct, the 3-4-5 chiasm I propose works as the skeleton structure so well because it is that of the base institution that is the context for the series, the school, which is also a very important them for her (education), AND THEN, at least in the theme level, it makes sense to be focused on some type of institutionality in this series as well, in this case more directly actual civil governance. This would seem to be supported by the beast ban in the US (from the newspapers in the intro and Tina's statement to Newt that creature breeding is outlawed and they shut his breeder friend down) and the laws of not marrying no-mages.

4. Given Kowalksi’s wonder at the magical world and the (very well-done) heart-rending obliviation scene at the end, then, paralleling the will to kill materially, obliviation may be a kind of “death” for not only no-mage wonder at magic but also of the magical side itself by killing the possibility of having no-mages wonder at it, kind of like the Holy is not Holy without the profane ... it is good and it is true (truth does not need lie in order to be truth), but it is not Holy in the original and deeper meaning of the word, “set apart,” because it is not in contact with anything from which to be set apart, no context in which to be special ... no interaction with no-mages = no context for magic to be viewed as wonderful … just more useful and a base for bigotry and violence.

5. Expelliarmus: as per my vindication in HP as far as my seeing the expelliarmus spell as important (in that it was the spell HP uses in the defeat scene, as well as it being what transfers the elder wand to Draco’s possession), in the scene in Beasts that we see in the death potion, even though we hear no spell … what spell do you think Tina does nonverbal to take the belt out of Mary Lou Barebone’s hands).

6. Prediction: the two Barebone sisters will be the centrals in the next movie, Chastity as the oppressor and Modesty as the oppressed.

7. With five movies planned, they damn well better have Jacob and Queenie married at the end ... Newt and Tina would be nice too, but I can understand with their personalities if they have them remain unattached but very fond friends kind of thing (but I think marriage could work for them), but for the personalities of Jacob and Queenie ... they better have them married at the end.

In a Hole in the Ground: Tolkien's Incarnational Imagination

Introduction

So, I am in a book club down in Pittsburgh called "The Pittsburgh Inklings" that meets once a month at a place called the Abbey in Lawrenceville (at least so far ... last night they had a band starting at 8 that, while actually quote good as a band, kind of hampered the last half hour of our discussion, which usually runs from 6:30 to 8:30, so the girl who started it on meetup is going to find out if there is music there the next night we meet and, if there is, either start earlier or meet elsewhere, but the place has become sort of a familiar feel and staple for us).

This post is from back in the summer, but copy-editing has been too busy in the intervening months to really give this subject a decent treatment here. I think it was in July that we read a book called A Hobbit,  a Wardrobe, and a Great War by a historian named Joseph Loconte who teaches at King's College in NYC. The book was all about  Tolkien and Lewis actually fighting in the First World War and the impact it had on their themes.

Their was a wealth of background, some of it very endearing. For example (just as an awesome example before I get to the main event), before Lewis and the Inklings, before the War, Tolkien had an earlier group of friends who called themselves "The Tea Club and Barrovian Society" (TCBS for short), "a semi-secret society of friends who first met in 1911 at King Edward's School, Birmingham" (p. 54), which  included Christopher Wiseman, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Robert Gilson. I mention their names to give some context for what is possibly the most endearing fact I have ever read about Tolkien, at least as regards his academic career: "Before being sent off to the war, members of the TCBS held a 'council' meeting as Wiseman's house in London. ... They talked  late into the night, sharing with one another their deepest convictions and aspirations. ... Tolkien later said it was at this moment that he first became aware of the 'hopes and ambitions' that would propel him throughout his life" (pp. 54-55).

Without combing back through the book more thoroughly (I found that only because I had TCBS written in the margins), I cannot remember if Loconte made these connections himself (in other words, I would need to research more thoroughly what exactly Loconte said and what I thought of on my own), but the main thrust of this post, Tolkien's "incarnational" imagination, is my own. Because of the word "council," many might imagine the TCBS council as mainly the model for the council of Elrond. But what it puts me more in mind of (whether I got it from an offhand comment of Loconte or on my own, I definitely latched onto it on my own) is a model for the "council" at Crickhollow, where Sam, Merry, Pippin, and Freddy reveal to Frodo that they know full well at least most of what he is up to and at least three of them do not intend to be prevented from accompanying him (Freddy stays behind at the cottage to keep up appearances). Along with this discussion, there was much food and drink and Merry and Pippin splashing water all over the place singing in the bath. I'm sure that what was behind the deep comradery among the hobbits was Tolkien's own among his friends. And the wonderings of the various hobbits about how each other are faring when they separate was, I am sure, based on Tolkien's own wonderings about his friends (in fact, Loconte describes the heart-breaking detail of Tolkien having been relieved to catch up with one of his friends at one point, joyed to find he was alive, only to find out later that he died shortly thereafter ... I believe that only Tolkien and one other survived the war ... and I am pretty sure that Loconte is the one who noted that the wonderings of the hobbits reflect those of the members of the TCBS about each other in the war).

The Main Event (of this post): "In a Hole in the Ground."

 Locont'e also recounts many other details of that war that are the backdrop for elements in the Lord of the Rings, horrifying details of trench warfare, of stumbling over corpses, or even all but dead men, half buried in mud or torn apart, or decaying, while continual bombardment by enemy artillery made any orientation nearly impossible. As he brings out all to well, the knowledge of the technicalities of trench warfare and the experience of the real-world living in it feed directly into the Tolkien's descriptions of the battle at the fields of Pelennor before the walls of Minis Tirith and the march through the dead marshes in the Lord of the Rings. The vivid details of line-upon-line of trenches being dug in the fields and then filled with fire as the network of them advanced to just out of reach of the archers and catapults on the city walls and the horror of looking down into the dead faces in the marshes were more than mere conjectures or even thorough research on Tolkien's part. They were real memories from first-hand experience of the living hell.

And here is where the main element of this post comes in, in a connection Loconte makes that sent my mind wandering down these paths, just as the opening of the Hobbit, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," sent Tolkien's imagination on the journey "to find out what hobbits were like." Loconte writes, "We don't know why Tolkien wrote those enigmatic words. But we do know what Hobbits are like: from his own account, the character of the hobbit was a reflection of the ordinary soldier, steadfast in his duties while suffering the dreary 'hole in the ground,' the front-line trench" (p. 75).

In fact, I would add that hole dwelling is not merely one fact among many about hobbits; it is the identifying fact about hobbits. I would need to check further, but I am pretty sure on this, so I will just go ahead and state it here: both when Merry and Pippin find that hobbits are not in Treebeard's old lists and when the ent informs them that he has put them in, when such a long list of races affords only a few brief details for each, the one that goes in foremost for hobbits is dwelling in holes. It should also be kept in mind that, even though Tolkien was forming some of the oldest Middle Earth tales that would become The Silmarillion as far back as WWI itself, the first published words that anybody in the wide world ever read from Middle Earth were "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

The thing is, by all laws of psychology, a man who suffered that experience of trench warfare on the front line should be the last person who could ever follow that introductory line with this: "Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort." There is no way he should have been able to associate comfort with the words "in a hole in the ground," let alone have hole dwelling be such a key defining characteristic of the Middle-Earth race with whom he most identified his beloved life of enjoyment of pleasure in natural good things and hearty good people in the shires of England. So ... how does it happen that he is precisely the author who did that?

The Incarnational Imagination

 My answer to that question is that it is the impact of his faith in the Incarnation on his imagination. To understand what I am going to say, one has to know the words involved and understand them as levels. The word used in the title of the doctrine is carnes, which is the Latin word for "flesh" and translates the Greek word sarx. This is different than the word for "body," which is corpus in Latin and soma in Greek.

"Body" (corpus/soma) is a more holistic concept of what it means to exist in a body as an entire thing. It's much more philosophically or conceptually adaptable and variable. For instance, while the ancients would not use these exact categories, their basic concept of "body" was a "mode of relation": you relate to God through bodily acts of worship (grain offerings etc); you relate to your spouse through bodily conjugal acts; you relate to the rest of creation by tilling the ground or herding cattle. In fact, scholars sometimes ask the question of "whether the serpent got it right" in the garden, since the couple did not materially die in the day they ate of the fruit, and they (scholars) answer that the text/author, even on the literal level of the Hebraic concepts involved at the time of composition, did not see the serpent as getting it right because "death" was any lessening in the quality of four primary relationships: God, other humans, the rest of creation (nature), and self. So, they did die in the introduction of the trajectory of death into those relationships: they hid from God; they were alienated form themselves in the form of shame at their own nakedness; the ground would yield thistles and thorns and yield fruit only through toil; the woman would have enmity with the snake; and as far as human-human relationships in the form of the only two humans around at the time, spouses, "your desire shall be for your husband but he shall rule over you."

(Side note: This is not the same thing as the "spiritual death" that will be interpretted from the text in the Christian Christological reading; I believe that that reading is not only an accurate translation of the idea into Christian reading but also the fullness of the literal sense as the Word of God, with God as the divine and truest author, BUT I also believe that there is a point to exploring the concepts original to the text at the time of it human composition in human language, the original concepts from which the Christian reading is a translation [not only a translation, of course, but a fulfillment ... but that very concept means that the original was not full in the first place, and I believe that what it was lacking was the fully Christian idea of "spiritual"]. ... Plus, I have heard the mistaken placement of the "spiritual" reading at that original compositional level buttressed by a claim that, as far as I have been able to tell in a fair bit of actual experience in translating biblical Hebrew, is completely erroneous: the claim is made that the Hebrew idiom used for "you will surely die" literally means "die the death" [meaning "spiritual death]"; when in fact, the idiom, which is the infinitive plus a finite form of the same verb [mot tamut: "dying you will die"] is always used simply as a radicalization of surety ... "you will surely die.")

But, to get back on track here with my main point of how "body" is a more holistic, philosophically loadable and malleable term, this concept of "body" as "defined by relationality" is very different from the concept of body that arises with Renee Descartes and rules the modern period of philosophy, in which body is define merely as "matter," which he defined as "res extensa" ... body is defined solely by its extension in the three dimensions of the physical world. Two very different conceptions of "body" are possible because it is such a conceptual term (including things like the body as metaphor for political relations).

So we see that "body" (corpus/soma) is a very holistic, quasi-philosophical concept. "Flesh" (carnes/sarx), on the other hand is a very sensory experience thing. I find it best expressed in the term "squishiness" (I also like to call it "the green wobbly bit," but that works only for those who have read Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents). It's a deeper word psychologically, which is the point of this post: what makes it possible for Tolkien to transform the psychological hell of trench warfare into the comfort and goodness of hobbit holes. The tactile "squishiness," the "flesh" experience that Tolkien had of "a hole in the ground" was the squishiness of the torn and mud-covered corpse and the foul odor of dank water mixed with the acrid mechanical charring of mortar fire (and maybe worse, recalling the development of mustard and other nerve gasses in WWI) and rotting blood.

So, here is where the Incarnation fully comes in. I said that "flesh" is a deeper thing psychologically, and this is the "levels" part. The teaching of the Incarnation is that the second person of the Trinity descended into human personhood, and I am saying that the key point, at least for this post, is that he descended not just into "body," but all the way down into "flesh," all the way down to that "squishiest" and most psychological level, and redeemed it. The original event and traditional doctrine are not called the "In-corp-eration"; they are called the "In-carn-ation." John 1:14 does not say "and the Word became body (soma)"; it says "and the Word became flesh [sarx]."And I believe it was Tolkien's deep abiding faith in the Incarnation (and real experience of it n the Eucharist) that permeated his imagination and gave him the ability to transform the words "in a hole in the ground" from the hellish "flesh-experience" of death, decay, and utter sensory chaos and pain in the trenches of WWI into the key defining characteristic of the race that most represented what he so dearly loved in his homeland.


In one of his letters, Tolkien is well-known for saying a very deep thing: "Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament." I think it is also the one great thing that enabled his immense and beautiful imagination to redeem those natural relationships he so dearly loved in spite of the psychological hell of trench warfare by which he was so brutally assaulted. 

(Please see my post on Tolkien versus Shakespeare for more of my thoughts on Tolkien and Incarntational Imagination)

Flesh, Blood, Bone ... and Heart: Exploration of a Dual-layer Chiastic Structure in Harry Potter (addendum to Chiasm post)

I'm doing this as a separate post but also linking to it from my original organizational post for John's Granger's reference purposes (Merlin's Chiasm Claims).

In listening to Order of the Phoenix recently during car trips, especially in the wake of recently doing a post for reference for Professor Granger, an idea took form. I could jump right in to the details, but I think it more important first to clarify the overall project. Basically, I think that somehow chiasm is not just a basic structuring device involving just instance, meaning just one chiasm in play.

The basic idea is that the structure of the series is an overlay of two chiasms. Excluding the connections between books 1 and 7, or rather taking the role of their chiastic connection in the structure to be primarily bookends or a inclusio, a "frame" of sorts, then what we have is a 2-4-6 chiasm and a 3-4-5 chiasm overlaying each other. It's hard for me to explain the significance of the difference between this and a singular 1-7, 2-6, 3-5, 4 chiasm, but if I am right, the overlaying of two chiasms is a very significant for reading the series as a literary work, for reading its structure beyond a single-chiasm structure.

(Warning: Due to my exposition style, the concrete 3-4-5 chiasm is not revealed until "Show Your Bones" below)

Going 3D: Body

The best analogy I can think of is that, if I am right, it turns the thing into a living body on the model of a skeletal structure with a muscular structure over top of it and operating it, while at the same time needing it [skeleton] in order to be what it itself [muscular structure] is ... muscle really isn't muscle unless it's actually operating a skeletal structure. In the end, I think 3-4-5 is the most skeleton like and 2-4-6 the more muscle/flesh (I just don't want to state it absolutely conclusively in a way that cuts off possibly productive interpretation lines that might start with pondering 2-4-6 as an underlying skeleton).

There are a whole lot of synapses firing here and I don't want to get bogged down (or maybe "bogged up"). But I will note two reasons this line of interpretation interests me. One is the one captured by the jargon people use when they talk about imagery or characters or fill-in-the-blank being three-dimensional versus two-dimensional (more intricate versus more simple). The other reason is that it involves the human body. I have a friend who fought an uphill battle at the art school where he worked on his MFA in drawing, painting, and sculpture to be able to work on "figural" art ... art focused on the human form (versus the modern/abstract vein) ... and to study that kind of art, he had to take actual medical undergrad level anatomy classes to know thoroughly how the human body is composed and works (e.g., what poses it can and cannot assume without extreme pain) ... all of which is to say that I think there is something mystical in the image, the figure, of the body, and that I think that if a piece of literature can be analyzed productively using that form and its elements, it speaks to something deeply human in that piece of literature.

Just to carry the bodily analogy as far as it can be carried without breaking (all analogies break down somewhere, otherwise they would be identities, but it's good to push them and see how much mileage you can get out of them): the 1-7 pairing is the skin. But don't mistake that as cheapening 1-7 ... it's only from the materialist/pragmatist perspective that skin is less important than muscle and bone. In a "reality as relational" understanding of the world, the skin is important because that is what we experience of each other; it is the skin level that makes up the noticeable distinctions of the face, that blushes when we're angry or bashful, that smiles and winks. Obviously it couldn't do the smiling and winking part without muscle and bone beneath, and especially muscle actually taking the initiative of the physical action, but as far as what we actually expreince of each other in our relations, it's the skin that we see.

Flesh, Blood, and Bone

"No matter what you say, blood's important."
- Hagrid, Order of the Phoenix

"We can do you blood, rhetoric, and love, we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you love and blood without the rhetoric; but we can't do you rhetoric and love without the blood ... the blood is compulsory."
-King of the players, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"

I'm putting this sentence in its own paragraph to make sure it is not missed: I like the body analogy because it fits so well with ... you guessed it ... the "flesh, blood, and bone" chapter title in book 4. I could spend way too much time on image analysis here, which I don't want to do, but I'll justify this little bit here by saying it defends against a criticism that could be used of asking "so, if you like it for that so much, why doesn't it include the blood?" If the two chiasms are skeleton and muscles, bone and flesh, then the blood is the narrative movement itself that operates within them.

Continuing on ...

So, now for the two chiasms. I already mentioned the first in my post for Professor Granger's reference, meaning the 2-4-6 structure based on the potions lesson #1 formula "bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death" (2= Lockhart bottling fame, 4= the tournament brewing glory, 6 = Snape stoppering death). So the 3-4-5 is the one to develop here. If one goes through the linked material on Muggle Matters (linked in Merlin's Chiasm Claims post) , you can see that I did a number of 3-4-5 chiasms, or at least two: Dementors and Cho. But the one I realized on a recent drive out to NYC and back listening to book 5 is, I think, more apt for this kind of "deep structuring" role ... so, as I said, I would have to call it the bones (I just don't want to cut off any productive interpretive paths that might start from considering 2-4-6 as skeleton)

Show Your Bones 

(sorry, I'm a Yeah Yeah Yeah's fan)

It's time for me to get around to unveiling the actual 3-4-5 chiasm I am talking about as the skeleton. The theme of this 3-4-5 chiasm is education, and for this deep structuring role, really only one concrete aspect as a skeleton. There could obviously be many correlations between 3 and 5 in education, such as Lupin's effectiveness versus Umbridge's uselessness.

But the one I am thinking of goes deeper and can be the bones of the series because it is the skeletal structure of the Hogwarts seven-year curriculum in the first place.

The real bones chiasm is that, in year 3, the number of classes increases, and then after year 5, they decrease (although, as Ron learns, the intensity of study does not decrease). In the linear progression aspect of chiasm, it is obviously simply the increase aspect, as is natural by definition of "linear" (the line is defined by the one thing of which it is "the line" ... in this case, increase of the "thing" ... in this case rigor in learning). In book 3 they get more courses, and at the end of book 5 they take OWLS. THEN in book 6 they drop some courses. So, in the 3-4-5 chiasm, there is this quantitative increase (as opposed to the qualitative increase that occurs in years 6 and 7 in preparations for NEWTs) that culminates in this grueling experience of OWLs.

So, on the chiastic reading, as is necessary if I am going to remain credible on my whole "book 4 has to be central" chiastic interpretation, what is the book 4 element? This is a difficult one, but I argue that the reason it is so difficult is that book 4 is so important for all chiasms and for both structure and content, which means that it is pretty loaded, making it difficult to pull things apart into separate "distinct" elements of different types like "structure" and "theme." There are definitely educational themes going on in book 4, for instance, as I have written elsewhere (someplace on Muggle Matters), I think Barty Crouch Jr is meant as an incredibly tragic figure precisely by means of his ability as an educator: he did it for the wrong reasons and out of psychological illness, but he was a good teacher, not just technically, but holistically - he had his own motivations for giving Neville the book, but when he realized that consolation was the best way to get Neville to take the book, he was able to pull off consolation well.

But if I had to pick one aspect of education in book 4 that might fit this whole thing of "increase in education," it would be the exposure to the unforgivable curses and the question of how much exposure to the real grit of the evil people must fight is appropriate for student age (although, I would definitely say that the answer is not that proposed by Draco's parroting of Lucius at the beginning of book 4, that Durmstrang is right to teach the actual dark arts, rather than just defense).

In fact, while "too much for kids?" is here mainly my own attempt to fit book 4 into the "increase in education" skeleton, it does actually pop up some in the chiasm itself in that it is what Umbridge uses as her supposed justification for the "teach them nothing" approach, that Lupin and fake-Moody exposed them to age-inappropriate material (she even critiques other teachers on the same grounds). I simply hesitate to put too much weight on classing that so decidedly in the "bone" level because, as I am thinking about it as I write, bones are harder and more material, so a quantitative matter like the number of courses or the rigor and quantity of study for OWLS fits that much better as a purely material detail than does an also qualitative concern like depth ... book 4 is just that book where quality and quantity get so intertwined, as do so many other things because of the density at the center (like water pressure at the bottom of the lake), that it is difficult to pin down anything as simply one thing or another ... it's kind of like sensory overload of multi-valence.

Hearts and Bones

(sorry, I'm also a Paul Simon fan) 

To stick in just another rising thought on the centrality of book 4, to cross it over from the strictly chiastic structuring plane into this metaphor of body: book 4 is the heart, that special muscle  in the midst of the other muscles and the skeleton.

(Ive been thinking a lot about the heart recently because a good lifelong friend just underwent open-heart surgery yesterday, and I was trying to do what small little part I can by praying a rosary, and it was the glorious mysteries yesterday, and when I hit the fourth mystery, Our Lady's assumption into heaven, body and soul, the mention of "soul" made it hit me that this was the first time since his mother's womb 45 years ago, that my friend's heart would not be being pumped by his soul, animated by it, made alive by it, "splashing inside his chest" to quote Paul Simon, while it was "offline" and his blood was being artificially circulated ... and then they would reconnect his heart muscle with his soul ... that mystical un"observable" but not un "noticeable" life force ... and it lives again)

Conclusion

So the result of overlay is the basic skeletal structure of a story about a school (which JKR loves both because of her own history in education but also the genre history of boarding school stories) on top of which operate her specific themes: glory versus love (first and foremost as "muscles" because of the 2-4-6 chiasm), self-sacrifice, psychological issues, mourning and coping with death and loss, and many others.

If I went further with this (and as a way to sum up what I think has developed out of this in the thinking while writing), it would be called "Potter's Body" and the elements would be as follows (borrowing the last from another post I wrote):

1. Skin/Face = chiastic/ring/inclusio/envelope/bookends pairing of books 1 and 7

2. Flesh/Muscle = 2-4-6 thematic chiasm (bottle fame, brew glory, stopper death)

3. Bones/Skeleton = 3-4-5 structural chiasm (education in Hogwarts''s curricular increase and decrease)

4. Heart = Goblet of Fire

5. Blood = Narrative flow (kairos killing chronos and then resurrecting it)

Epilogue: Where do we go from here.

I would add one more thing here. What I have just been going through on "body" as an image for the structure and the little mention that I made just now of my post on narrative as a "kairotic chronology" ("Story Time") and the fact that I have gone a little beyond that post by saying that karios "kills and then resurrects" chronos all lead to where I would go with all of this material, which is in the direction of the same type of "Incarnational imagination" that I speak of in the other post I just finished on Tolkien's "hole in the ground." When I speak of the body here, I don't appeal to the holistic concept of "embodiment"; I speak of the squishiness of of skin and flesh and blood and the hard strength of bone. My biggest interest would be in the direction of "Incarnational" readings with the capital "I" (and the Resurrectional reading of narrative, possible in a way consonant with Tolkien's concept of "eu-catastrophe"). I have to be careful in doing this because I also have a strong aversion to the "Christian theories of art" I have heard some people whom I have known mention and say it is there big project to develop, which generally have struck me as along the lines of mere in-corp-eration or allegory of all-but, if-not-fully, doctrinal concepts. I honestly mean them no ill-will, but I think their project is seriously misguided by Gnostic misunderstandings of "spirituality" that have plagued Christianity from the beginning and probably always will simply because we live in a fallen world, including the falleness of our minds, and we continually struggle with our misinterpretations (especially ones that so easily yield the type of power-wielding Gnosticism has been known for). And I also honestly don't mean to pick any fights, but those have tended to be expressed and formulated by those of the Reformed Protestant tradition out of which I came before becoming Catholic. So, there you have it for what it's worth: the ramblings of a barmy codger up in the hills (like my namesake, Merlin, who began as the same in the earliest Arthurian materials).

 Flotsam and Brettsam

(gag reel/outtakes)

Disclaimer: This is the kitchen sink into which I threw the raw ideas I had at the time when I first said "hey, that's an idea worth pursuing, but I have this journal issue and this book to edit, so all I can do is jot the basic ideas down" ... this really is flotsam and jetsam ... but there is some stuff here I would like to have still dumped somewhere even though I didn't work it in to the main post ... and if anybody is entertained by how a slightly mental brain works ... by all means, have at it. A mentor of mine used to say, when encouraging his classes on how to write, "we write to think," and the above essay represents the rough draft of that "writing to think" ... the below is more like the the primordial waters of chaos before getting to the rough draft.

the amount of class work in books 3 and 5. Increases in 3-5 (taking on new subjects in 3, dropping subjects in 6, so 3 - 5 = years of increased work, especially when factoring in OWLs).
1. Theme is education
2. This is more than regular chiasm. This is some sort of anchor device built on chiasm, and I think it is has to do with the fact that it is centered on education. HP has the main arc of the Voldemort story; that is the central thing. But, as a former teacher, the education theme is very deep and the structure and stage setting onto which it is overlaid is also deeply important to her.
Not to be mistaken, it's not that she is saying something here one way or the other about heavier or lighter work loads. It's that she uses progression in education in general as that structuring layer that is also a deep pervasive theme for her, and she does it through using the 3-5 chiasm connection as an anchor


Possibly also Expelliarmus: Intro in 2, triple on Snape in 3, Graveyard in 4, Zacharias Smith in 5, Draco on DD in 6, finale in 7

If books 1 and 7 are approached more as bookends for theses "structural" purposes, then what you have is a structure that is composed of two chiastic substructures overlaid on each other: 3-4-5 and 2-4-6

Another interesting issue here is the X versus the circle as structure symbols. The X definitely grips for me. That's in no way to diss the circle, because the people who have been discussing it are far more knowledgable in these studies than am I, meaning John Granger and Mar Douglas (MD is the serious big hitter in cultural anthropology who wrote a seminal work on the subject called Thinking in Circles). But I think the X holds ground too, and I more interested in just the question of why one grips so much for somebody like me and the circle/ring for them. In Chestertonian terms, you see a an opposition between the two in various writings (even naming his first novel The Ball and the Cross), and he definitely favors the perpendicular oppositions in the X/cross shape for his ideas of paradox and sees the circle as symbolic of Eastern philosophy closing in on itself etc ... but, when you move onto the plane of fully incarnational thinking (meaning based in THE Incarnation), you kind of have to think that there is going to be something that fully redeems and makes sense of both the ball and the cross, the circle and the X together. And maybe the fact that you can do this much playing around with the contrast is indicative of how rich the work is (or maybe I am eisogeting?)

Merlin's Chiasm Claims

Ok, this post is a collection place post. There is a guy who is an amazing human being and a good scholar in general, not to mention being probably the most knowledgeable author on the original Harry Potter heptology as a literary work (Dr John Granger, titled "the Dean of Harry Potter Studies" by Time Magazine ... his site is www.hogwartsprofessor.com), who wishes to cite my comments on the series as chiastic in structure. He had done so before, in his book on ring structure after the 7th HP book came out. Since that time, however, the link that he cited in the book has gone dead because, in the years of my absence from writing on the Muggle Matters blog, the domain name registration "MuggleMatters.com" was let go (as was most sensible to do). So, the posts can still be found by using the same URLs but inserting "blogspot" before the ".com" ..

BUT, since I put the energy into that material at one point, and to maybe provide more of some of my ideas on chiasm at one portal, I've collected here the titles and links to all the articles I did touching on the chiastic structuring in the 7 books (the only thing I might not have included is an idea I had for a Cho chiasm in 3-4-5, and, well, I just said about as much about that as is really necessary once you get the basics of chiastic reading):

So here are two things, the two sections of this post, thing one and thing two:

1. What is a chiasm and what's it got to do with Harry Potter?
Chiasm is a structure for a text, a structure in which there are matching or connected sections at the beginning and end, usually labeled by theorists (this type of structure is a theory somebody applies, not labeled in original texts) by a letter for the first element of a pair and the same letter with a "prime" (1) behind it for the second element: so, A=Sorcerer's Stone and A1=Deathly Hallows. This theory also posits a central element in the progression that is important for interpreting the correspondences, an interpretive crux ("chiasm" takes its name from the Greek letter "chi," which is the "X" letter, and so the movement of any text, on a chiastic reading, goes in to the center [letters] and then back out [letter primes]). While it is thematic interpretation that is the goal, authors load works with little signposts that clue you in to use this structure theory to interpret, little details like "eat slugs" in book 2 and Slughorn in book 6 or the first horcrux introduced in book 2 and you find out what horcurxes are in book 6, although often even these little signposts tie into theme directly, like Hagrid bringing Harry to Hogwarts/the WW in book 1 and bringing his body to the castle in book 7. So, the best way to describe is to actually show the diagram:

A=Stone
.....B=Chamber
..........C=Prisoner
...............D=Goblet (Interpretive Crux)
..........C1=Order
.....B1=Prince
A1=Hallows

Example:
I'll give only one example here because I'm not actually sure if I included it in the posts in body text  or in comments. Many noted after book 6 how heavily the first ever potions lesson (from book 1) was mentioned in book 6, and they cleverly deduced from the "put a stopper in death" line in that lesson in Sorcerer's Stone that, in book 6, Snape either was or would be stoppering death for DD. But I claim that there is also a deeper role of that first potions lesson for chiastic structuring revealing heavy theme because the full quote is "bottle fame, brew glory, and even put a stopper in death," which I tie chiasticly to the even books, 2-4-6. 2=bottle fame (pretty much what Lockhart does); 4=brew glory (as DD says, the goal of the tournament is "eternal glory," and Harry notes that Cedric was turning away from the kind of glory Hufflpuff had not seen in ages), and 6=stoppering death (Snape trapping the curse in one hand for a year). The central one thematically is glory, as is shown in book 7 in the chapter in King's Cross Station, where DD talks about his and Grindlewald's seeking the Hallows for glory when they would triumphantly lead the WW out of hiding, and you can say that Voldy's flight from death is centered around glory too. One could even say that the whole series is about the tension between glory and love.

There is plenty of literature on chiasm in the ancient works, like John Welch's Chiasmus in Antiquity: Structure, Analyses, Exegesis, but if one wants more for here, one will have to go to the links (the two in the first paragraph below are the central expositions, but they are given again in the list as well).

2. The Issue of Web Links:

The post that John has used the link for before as the main post is a piece called "'X' Marks the Spot: The Goblet of Fire and Chiasm," which was from Jan 30, 2006, but the more thorough explanation and defense is "Merlin's Manifesto:Further Support of Chiasm in the Harry Potter series" from June 7, 2007 (seriously ... it's effing mammoth).

Here is the whole list of posts (in chronological order) that I could find dealing with chiastic structuring and its connection with theme in the Harry Potter series (apologies for meanderings in some of them):

Posts

1. "The Dust of the Ground: 4 Elements in 3 Tasks" 1/30/2006

2. "'X' Marks the Spot: The Goblet of Fire and Chiasm"1/30/2006

3. "Riddles Part 4: TheSpider " 1/31/2006
     "Riddles" Parts 1-3 linked at beginning
               Riddles Part 1: Riddles in Dark Chambers
               RiddlesPart 2: Riddles and Imagination
               Riddles Part 3: a History of Riddles

4. "Blast Ended Slugs in Books 2 and 6" 2/9/2016

5. "Remembering the X" 2/14/2006

6. "Chiastic Bookends" 3/9/2006 

7. "Chiasm and Love: Playing to Potter's Strengths" 8/7/2006

8. "Sunkatabasis: The Vertical Dimension of Love in Goblet of Fire" 8/11/2006

8. "Merlin's Manifesto:Further Support of Chiasm in the Harry Potter series" 6/7/2007

10. "The 3-4-5 InsanityChiasm in the Harry Potter Series" 6/14/2007

11. "Griffyndor vs Slytherin: Bookends in books 1 and7" 8/17/2009 


Finally, on 12/01/2016, in this blog, I completed another post on an idea of a layered dual-chiasm structure in the series called Flesh, Blood, Bone ... and Heart.