Diagon Ally

Granger makes the observation that Diagon Alley is a place representative of the world of magic and its capability to produce wonder by looking at the world in a new way, i.e., diagon-ally". Here is my observation from the book, how I think they helped show it in the movie of Chamber of Secrets, and what I think it all means. The Book: In Chamber of Secrets, when Harry travels by floo-powder for the first time, it is revealed that it's important to speak clearly. In the book it is more just that she emphasizes speaking clearly when saying the name or you may wind up someplace else. And this is precisely what happens to Harry. In this occurrence in the book you only really can get that he says it wrong, and the element is left at the point of it being a general thing about the floo powder system, you have to be clear. But what I will describe below as present in the movie provides for a narrowing of the scope particularly to Diagon Alley itself. I suspect that even if Rowling did not intend this consciously that she would allow the observation as something that flows out of her work - a sort of way that the meaning grows. The Movie: That "e" is "Alley" is really important! Without it the words would sound more like what she is actually doing with the name, it would sound more like like the word "diagonally." I have listened to the movie section a number of times and I really think it sounds like he (Daniel Radcliffe) was intentionally told to make it sound like the word "diagonally." I don't know how much she was involved in this particular aspect of the second movie but from the DVD it does seem she is good friends with Chris Columbus, the director of movies one and two, and advised him on a number of things. The Meaning: If you look at what she has done, turning the "new perspective" word "diagonally" into a name of a place and then forever after conceive of the meaning of the word and phenomenon as just that, as "what she did with a word," then you're getting things wrong. The power of imagination is not to "nail down" literary devices and the like, taking them apart like a frog on a high-school biology dissection table and leaving them pinned up to show your academic work. In other words, if you're going to get to the magical place that is this story and the wonder it should inspire, you have to think of it as Diagon Alley, not as "diagonally." It is good to look deeper and get what she is doing and doing so can enrich your experience of the books. But never let "literary analysis" go to the level of forgetting that first experience of standing with Harry and watching what you thought was a mundane brick wall behind a dumpy old tavern turn into a doorway to a world of wonder. If you try to replace the story itself with the intellectual understanding of its theme and structure, you will NOT lose the story altogether, as if you never had it ... rather you will wind up with something worse - you will wind up in Nocturn Alley. By-the-By: In no way do I accuse Granger of doing what I am talking about. If you read his book, wonder drips off of every page. You can tell he is the kind of guy who realizes that while analyzing a book like this opens up deeper and deeper meaning, a special place is always accorded to that "first reading." He realizes that you should always go back every once in a while and read the book like the first time you read it, when you were hanging on the edge of your seat just to see where the story went (looking for spare moments in the day to steal away and read just a few more pages) - that first time you encountered the story as a story and simply fell in love with it. Stories are their own language - we can understand them more deeply through delving into symbolism and structure, but there is still a unique thing to the kind of understanding a story conveys when you read it simply as a story ... it's great, you get to be a kid again for just a little while. Note: There is one Biblical scholar who notes this as an important theological principle. Gordon Wenham has written a book call Story as Torah. Torah is the Hebrew word for "law," and the point is that "stories with a moral" are accorded a very unique place. The "proclamation" style that we associate with "law" (The 10 commandments) occupy literally only a few verses out of the whole Pentateuch, and the other laws, as ordinances for physical observance, are all tied to the specific entrance into Canaan. What of the rest of the Pentateuch and what it should mean for Christians? The whole book of Genesis is an epic story ... and I think it is a story that must be there to understand the "law" - that it is a unique way of giving the law.