On Critical Reception of Harry Potter and Twilight Part 9: What the Critics missed (C: Allegorical)

For Part 1 of that post on genre criticism, click here. for Part 2 on culture war critiques left and right, click here, for part 3 on artifact criticism, click here, for part 4 on derivative dismissal, click here, for part 5 on why there are four layers of meaning, click here, for part 6 on using traditional tools to interpret contemporary best sellers, click here, for parts 7 and 8 on what critics missed at the surface and moral levels of meaning, visit here and here, or just scroll down the home page.

What allegories in Harry Potter and the Twilight Saga have the critics missed? Let’s invent that simpler. You tell me the ones they have picked up. I’ll give you the three that come immediately to mind from each of these series while you search accio-quote, your news clippings file, and Potter commentary book shelf. As I discussed in Part 5, seeing the world as materialists (as we all do, like it or not), which is to say, “seeing surface reality as reality exclusive of all other understanding,” the view of alieniloquium, one thing speaking of another thing, is in our postmodern blind spot.

Three Harry Potter allegories:

The Morality Play in the Chamber of Secrets finale: You can read what I wrote about that back in 2002 here. As Dr. Scott Moore at Baylor said in duration magazine the next year, the most remarkable thing about that depiction of Christian salvation history and Everyman drama is that it survived largely intact in the movie telling of the tale. My assumption was that it survived largely considering (a) it couldn’t be improved on and (b) the film group didn’t get what it was about.

Choosing to Believe: Ms. Rowling titles the first Deathly Hallows chapter with Harry in it ‘In Memoriam.’ The title is a hat-tip to Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’ and the theme of struggling to believe through life’s agonies and the seeming absence of God which is the greater point and meaning of Harry’s adventure in the series finale and his interior victory on Easter daylight in Dobby’s grave. You may read about Harry as a Christ figure in online or book commentaries about Potter, but not the more critical allegory of Harry as postmodern, doubting Everyman (for that, read Chapter 3 of The Deathly Hallows Lectures, and, for the Tennyson connection, A.H.H. and Idylls of the KIng, order a copy of Harry Potter’s Bookshelf).

‘Hagrid’s Tale’: I’m busy revising Unlocking Harry Potter now — who knew that my finishing that work would be interrupted by writing two other books? — and one of the two new keys I’m adding is allegory, particularly of the Chaucerian kind (about which more in a minute). Have you noticed that Ms. Rowling likes ‘Tales’ in her chapter titles, not mention ‘Tales of Beedle the Bard’? I think that is largely considering the format and tradition of the fairy tale is the most advantageous for pointed allegory. Harry Potter’s Bookshelf explains how the Cave Allegory is critical for understanding Gulliver’s Travels and Harry’s adventures;the new Unlocking will take a distant look at ‘Hagrid’s Tale’ in Order of the Phoenix as an allegorical retelling of both the Cave Allegory and Gulliver’s experience (e.g., the gifts of Non-Consuming Fire and a Goblin Helmet are give-aways that Hagrid is the double-natured creature, the Yahoo with Reason, returning to the darkness with the light of the concept of the Good).

Not to mention the allegorical meanings of Beedle’s Tales… Any critics not writing here or at The Hog’s Head reading those stories as allegories?

Three Twilight Saga Allegories:

Ms. Rowling, of course, is treated like a goddess compared to Stephenie Meyer. Stephen King’s evaluation (”Rowling is great, Meyer is terrible”) is typical, even among very thoughtful and charitable readers. What these critics are lost in Meyer’s work, the reason her books have been read and re-read by millions of readers, is largely the ability of her allegorical meanings. Here are three that I think are hard to miss.

The Retelling of the Garden of Eden metanarrative from Genesis: Read the first book of the series, Twilight, the one with the woman’s hand holding out an apple on the cover and the “don’t eat the fruit of that tree” opening. Remember that a hallmark heresy of Brigham Young (disavowed by most Latter Day Saints) is that Adam is not the first man per se but God Himself. thereupon ask yourself: could that be the story of man and God, the Divine Beloved, and the difficulties of their unequal capacity and need for synergistic, loving relationship? The original title of the book was Forks. Let me say the obvious and propose that that title was to highlight “choices” and the most urgent choice is to be selflessly, even sacrificially obedient.

Twilight of the Living Dead: The second book of the series, New Moon, is the story of life after Eve has been expelled from the Garden and experiences life without God. In nearly parable like tones, the separation is a consequence of the blood spilled on her birthday and ‘God’s’ decision that is best for her. The agonies she undergoes are neatly highlighted by Ms. Meyer’s many references in New Moon to Zombie movies. that is a satire-within-the-allegory depicting both Bella’s near catatonic condition and, along with George Romero film genre’s anything-but-subtle data, the behavior of her American teenage friends, qua senseless entertainment consumers. that is life without God: pain and an particularly vapid stupidity.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mormon: I’m struck, too, as the series played out in Eclipse and the beginnings of Breaking Dawn (before it broke down, in large part), by the degree Ms. Meyer seems to be writing within these debut novels, her own coming of age as an LDS writer allegory. That’s a lot to unpack here (and that isn’t a Twilight blog, right?) but the Apollonian/Dionysian polarity and ‘be true to self’ story points that are repeatedly referenced are just the sort of thing you see in an artist’s Bildungsroman like Hesse’s Demian.

Why do we miss that sort of thing? considering of how we read and our misunderstanding allegory.

There are three ways of reading, to simplify grossly. We read to enter into and experience the reality of the story, we read to interpret and understand consciously the meaning of that experience, and we re-experience that story and re-enter

it to go “further up and further in.” But what whether in our first reading we never enter into the story? I put it to you for your reflection that skipping to analysis or just not being able to suspend disbelief (because of the writer’s failings, of the reader’s limitations and prejudices, or of both) means the interpretation will be something like a cartographer drawing a map for a country s/he has never visited.

As C. S. Lewis wrote about a botched allegory of death in a story he was reading:

that stupidity perhaps comes from the pernicious habit of reading allegory as whether it were a cryptogram to be translated; as whether, having grasped what an image (as we say) ‘means’, we threw the image away and thought of the ingredient in real life which it represents.

But that method leads you continually out of the book back into the conception you started from and would have had without reading it. The right process is the exact reverse. We ought not to be thinking ‘This green valley, where the shepherd boy is singing, represents humility’; we ought to be discovering, as we read, that humility is like that green valley. That way, moving always into the book, not out of it, from the concept to the image, enriches the concept. And that is what allegory is for. (C. S. Lewis, ‘The Vision of John Bunyan,’ quoted in Walter Hooper’s C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, HarperSanFrancisco, New York, 1996, p. 552)

Knowing humility at some level, in other words, and experiencing it in story — rather than by plucking it Little Jack Horner like from the Christmas pie with accompanying “What a good little boy am I!” – and winding up post-story experience with a more personal and profound understanding of humility is the point of allegory. The best written work is, potentially at least, a vehicle for the reader’s self-transformation, whether the reader enters into the text fully at first without pausing for analysis or deconstruction outside and away from the experience. Reading a book, entering into it in that way, is like the experience of nature’s sublimity; analysis or decryption just the opposite. Remember Wordsworth in The Tables Turned (1798):

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–
We murder to dissect.

The misunderstanding of allegory is in assuming it has to be a tit-for-tat representation of character or event with a known referent, solving the cryptogram. The point is getting deeper into the story and our transformation or chrysalis, not plum-plucking.

Beyond that, even deciphering or “unlocking” a book works whether you’re reading John Bunyan or fairy tale within a narrative but I wouldn’t look for that kind of bald allegory in stories not obviously written as Swiftian or Orwellian satire. What we need to be on the watch for in our second staged reading is exempla or allegory the way Chaucer wrote allegory.

D. W. Robertson, Jr., the great Chaucer scholar, explains that characters in medieval dramas are not to be understood as realistic portraits, individual personalities, or even types per se. They are instead exempla, “stories with an implication” (A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspective, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1962, pp 366-367), or exemplars of “weaknesses and vices” (Essays in Medieval Culture, ‘The Allegorist and the Aesthetician,’ Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1980, p. 99), virtues and strengths of society known to everyone of that date. They are allegories, in other words, the alieniloquium (“saying one thing to mean another”) of medieval grammarians and biblical exegetes, in which we are meant to see pictures for our reflection and edification.

Chaucer’s portraits, on the other hand, are not “types” at all. The Friar, for example, as he appears in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is not a “typical” friar. He is instead an exemplar of the weaknesses and vices commonly attributed to friars in the late fourteenth century. that or that friar on the streets of London might have one or two of them, but a great many friars had none of them. It is true that Chaucer’s little portrait, which is essentially a collection of attributes, has considerable verisimilitude on the outside, just as the other collections of attributes we shout “characters” in the General Prologue display a similar verisimilitude. But the verisimilitude simply serves to give the underlying concepts a local habitation and a name. The reality of these portraits is a conceptual reality, the reality of the virtues and vices depicted in them. In the fourteenth century, when humans lived together in small tightly knit groups, that kind of reality was very practical indeed, the instant and daily concern of everyone in Chaucer’s audience. Perhaps I need not add that the friar and his companions do not have “personalities.”

When I read criticism of Meyer’s work — criticism that as a rule offers no explanation for the books’ popularity beyond the supposedly universally acknowledged poor taste and idiocy of young women and romance readers — I am struck by the common thought that she doesn’t write “plausible characters” and that necessarily means she is a “terrible writer.” I’d propose instead that the “idiot readers” who love her book embrace the idealized and fractured exempla of her allegories — the Divine Man as image of God in Edward and Jacob the very human manly-mensch wolf in Jacob most notably — which the sophisticated critical readers, unable or unwilling to enter into Ms. Meyer’s sub-creation, miss entirely.

To sum up, on the allegorical reading of the Twilight Saga, we have the Garden of Eden metanarrative re-write in Twilight, in which God and Man are played by Edward and Bella, and the play is re-imagined as a gothic romance. New Moon, similarly, is the Morality Play/Harlequin romance version of the agony experienced by God and Man after Man has been expelled from the Garden and no longer walks and talks with God. Eclipse and Breaking Dawn finish the Eden Everyman re-telling by relating in story scheme the competing demands of world and the divine for the human heart in a fallen world and, ultimately, of the sacrifices, agony, and rewards to be expected in union with God.

The unreality of the stories, their bizarreness, the “UFO lands in Mayberry” aspect whether you will, even the “poorly drawn characters” are largely the intrusion of the allegorical exempla into the mundane life-and-times story of a High Schooler living in a small town. lost that reflects never having entered the story and perhaps a critical apparatus that is too contemporary, which is to say, insufficiently Medieval or Platonic.

Tomorrow, the anagogical and the series finish. Stay tuned!

To be continued.