Chiasm and Love: Playing to Potter's Strengths
| Ok, this is not a Lumos piece (which I am trying to stick on when I am not going gaga over Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski on the amazingly long comments thread Sumara and I have going the recent Pirates and Potter post ... some really interesting stuff there though [don't you just hate shameless plugs? LOL] This is one that springs from some of the other work I have done here and which I have been dwelling on because of a possibility Pauli and I have discussed briefly amongst ourselves, and I wanted to get the material out. Recap: I have noted the chiastic "x" structure (see the side bar) in which book 4 is the central element and therefore the interpretive key. Thus the elements appear first in the early books (1,2,3) and then there is a development or deepening of them in the latter book (5,6,7, respectively) by way of an element in book 4. Love and Strength I have tonight realized another chiastic element with books 2,4 and 6. The central thing is love, the "deeper magic" in the series. And I think it plays out in these 3 books in a development of the idea of Harry "playing to his strengths," which is basically Barty Jr's advice. disguised as Moody, on the first task in GOF, (one of the sources for this is other recent conversations on Barty Jr as the "ghost of a good teacher".) In Book 2 you have Harry and the rogue bludger. Many suggestions are made by Wood and the others, such as pulling in the ref (which would have maybe forfeited the game) and having Fred and George concentrate on protecting Harry from the rogue bludger (which would probably have lost the game because the remaining bludger would have pummeled everyone else) ... but what does Harry do instead of these offered plans? He plays to his strengths. This boy can fly like the dickens and he knows it, and he beats the rogue bludger by catching the snitch by utilizing just that strength. And in book 4, following the advice of another rogue, he beats the dragon by flying like the dickens again. In book 6 we see Dumbledore drive home Harry's real strength, his ability to love. Both he and Harry reach a point of exasperation or almost exasperation over this point. "Yeah, Yeah, I know ... I can love" (resisting the urge to add ... "big deal") - "Yes, Harry! You can love!" Love in the Lake But the love development (which is the primary development from book 2 to book 6 - playing to his "love" strength rather than just his flying strength) appears in book 4 in the central task of the tri-wizard tourney, the lake-bottom rescue, where Harry defeats the water element by using the earth element, the gillyweed plant. Here he begins to play to that strength that Dumbledore emphasizes so heavily in Book 6 - Love. Basically, I have noted that in the triwizard tourney Harry confronts all 4 elements in 3 tasks: air and fire in the dragon, water in the lake and earth in the hedges of the maze in the Quidditch pitch. At the bottom of the lake, in the very middle of this "4 elements in 3 tasks" structure, at the bottom of the lake, I believe you have "3 types of Love in 4 Hostages." There is the famous passage in the Gospel of St John, 21:15-19, where Jesus ask Peter 3 times if he loves Him. This is fairly common Bible study and Sermon material ( I would be surprised to find that Rowling does not know it and the specifics, since she would have had to at least dabble in Greek for her classics major). Some of the irony here (St John's Gospel is thick with ironies) is that two different Greek words are used for love here. Jesus as Peter if he has "agape" love for him - that is unconditional and self-sacrificial love. At least the first two time Peter replies that he has "phileo" love for him - that is "brotherly love." In the traditional discussions of love in Greek there are 3 forms of love - the third is "eros," which is indeed the word from which we get "erotic" and it can mean that (and in good ways, but ways that are properly private between husbands and wives) but it can also have the broader meaning of something like "romantic emotion" in general. So, let's look at the lake bottom. You have basically a masculine and feminine form of "phileo" ... Ron is like a brother to Harry and Gabriella is literally Fleur's sister. Then you have two pairs left, and basically you have all 4 elements in two romantic (or "eros") relationships. Water and Fire are paired (like Slytherin and Gryffindor) in Krum and Hermione, and Earth and Air are paired in Cedric and Cho. 2 Loves in 4 relationships. But, just like the pentangle that I discussed in connection with one of the Lumos talks, you MUST have that 5th angle/point of the unity ... and here you MUST have that third kind of love, Agape. It cannot be just any of the 3 forms of love Dumbledore is calling Harry (in book 6, as his strength) to put into practice in book 7. Book 7 will be chiastically paired with Book 1, where we learned of Lily's unconditional and self-sacrificial Love that protected her son, and so in Book 7 Harry will be called to practice that same Agape love as the strength Dumbledore is hammering home so hard in book 6. Growing in Love So, in book 4 we have the central development of that progression. First, it is self-sacrificial love he practices at the bottom of the lake (gives a nice word play, doesn't it, to the characterization of that love as "deeper magic"). Harry knows that by sticking around to make sure Gabriella gets saved he is forfeiting the fact that he actually got to the hostage site first. He forfeits "winning." But, secondly, it is in the graveyard scene at the end of the book that Voldemort effects his "dark resurrection" in which, because he uses Harry's blood, he is now able to touch Harry's skin, as he was not able to do before. Lily's love no longer protects him in the same way as it did up till now, and thus book 4 is a "cruxt," a turning point. From here we need to have revealed to us further love protection. In book 5 we find that it is Petunia's "charity" (which is genuine, however begrudging it is) in taking Harry in and giving him a familial-blood (phileo) home, that protects him. In Book 6 we find Ginny (his "romantic/eros" connection finally) protecting him in different ways (for one, she protects the Quidditch standing of the team he captains by catching the snitch, directly after which they "catch" each other ... and remember this whole chiastic pairing element began with Quidditch in book 2), and him seeking to protect her at the end. Finally, in book 7, I believe, we will have the culmination in Harry fulfilling the destiny of his mother's Agape love in book 1 by actualizing his own power for the same within his own soul through an act of his own will (an act I think will involve the reconciliation with Snape, towards whom Lily practiced compassion and charity ... even if he isn't a Vampire, I agree with Granger on the Snape-Lily connection as lab partners who have a genuine respect for each other as persons.) |
Comments on "Chiasm and Love: Playing to Potter's Strengths"
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jkr2 said ... (August 08, 2006 6:39 AM)
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Merlin said ... (August 08, 2006 10:45 AM)
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jkr2 said ... (August 08, 2006 4:55 PM)
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Merlin said ... (August 08, 2006 6:37 PM)
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Merlin said ... (August 08, 2006 7:06 PM)
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jkr2 said ... (August 09, 2006 6:32 PM)
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Merlin said ... (August 10, 2006 2:08 AM)
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Anonymous said ... (August 10, 2006 7:59 AM)
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Merlin said ... (August 10, 2006 11:08 PM)
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jkr2 said ... (August 13, 2006 5:34 AM)
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Merlin said ... (August 13, 2006 3:04 PM)
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Anonymous said ... (August 15, 2006 4:41 AM)
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post a commenti just loved that .... (that wasn't intentionally fascetious!)
but at the end i have to put my fingers in my ears and 'lalalala' because when you put it like that it sounds like harry will die.
i think the charity part of petunia's role will be more significant than we realize too.
jo
Jo
Yeah, I was typing that part with crossed fingers too ... I really want Harry to live, for there to be some way that he shows that self-sacrificial love without dying and is able to go on living in the other forms of love too, marrying Ginny and having a family and all.
But I guess I will have to wait and see and accept Rowling's story as she writes it.
absolutely accept what she writes.
i'm not one of these 'she'd better xyz....'
it's her story after all.
but i still really, really, really want harry to live....
jo
me too :)
And I was just thinking about this and realizing some more on it.
I thought about the line: 3 loves in 2 pairs" and "all 4 elements in the 2 pairs, Water-Fire and Earth-Air" and thinking "well, it would have been impossible NOT to have all 4 elements in two pairs somehow if each champion is not paired with his/her own kind, since you have all 4 elements in the 4 champions, wouldn't it? so maybe I didn't show that much." but then I thought "wait a minute ... Harry is with Ron and both are Gryffindor/fire and Fleur is with Grabriella and both as Bauxbatons/air ... so the two middle pairs are the only ones NOT with a hostage of their own kind"
All of this to say that it all works out way too neatly for there not to be something there ... the "phileo" loves are in pairs of similars (like being from the same family), one male paring and one female pairing. Then you have the romantic pairings, and they match up pretty much exactly along the lines of opposites. Hermione, as a fire/Gryffindor is paired Krum, who's ship arrives by rising from the lake and who's school, Durmstrang, winds up haning out with the Slytherin table in the great hall; and Cedric as Hufflepuff/Earth is paired with Cho, who is Ravenclaw/air.
as they say, "opposites attract"
But here is the interesting question ... Cho being feminine for air/wind fits with the works fine because it is cool-headed Hermione who symbolizes thought (unattached tothe whims and distractions of physical passions etc), versus Ron as the hot-headed side, in the horizontal level of the alchemical crucible.
but what do you make of the Gryffindor/fire being female and the Male being Water/Slytherin? I would have to agree, as a male, that Rowling is right that women are oft the more courageous (she has made comments about Lily's courage being more of a reasoned out thing - she was presented with a real option, specifically given the chance to step aside - whereas James' death, she said, was due more to a sort of instinctual thing of protecting his family) ... this also sort of works out in the Cedric-Cho thing (Cedric as earth is natural ... Cain was the first "tiller of the soil" ... fortunately for the "farmer" type, the next mentioned "tiller of the soil" was a savior figure, Noah ... of course he got himself in trouble tilling the soil after the flood by getting drunk from the yield of his vineyard)
Interesting stuff.
one thing i do love in rowling's work is the affirming of the type of courageous mothering.
i know this is partly because of her own mother passing away, and that she is a mother herself.
still i appreciate reading it. i like the distinction showed with harry's parents. they both died trying to protect him. his father's death is still significant and moving etc, and i'm not in anyway making a heirarchy out of this, but the particular significance of being offered an option and still choosing to protect.
mothering is pretty much like that every day.
ok, i'll stop being soppy now.
jo
Being soppy is quite all right :)
And ... I am here to comment that I am officially going on record, because of what I have in this post, that I think Harry will live ... I am prepared for being wrong, but I think it fits more that he lives - and mainly because of the connection between eros and Agape love (which, my friend Dom was just telling me tonight that I guess there was a group that were fairly upset at Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, that he basically stated that eros and Agape are not mutually exclusive loves, or something to that effect ... I will have to look it up in the encyclical itself ... but if what I am thinking here is correct this all fits nicely with the title of one of Granger's upcoming books, The Pope Hates Harry Potter? Hardly!)
I've been contemplating this whole thing at the lake bottom in GOF(and I need to go to the text of book 4 and look up the physical positioning to see if I remember rightly that Ron and Gabrielle and the 2 "phileo" are on either end with the 4 elements in two pairings of romantic love in the middle, Ie center stage ... I do have that nailed down yet). But basically you have these two instances of romantic love cnter stage and then Agape. I think that there will be a return in which Agape love eventually permeates Harry's life on the level of both phileo and eros, the latter in a healthy marriage with Ginny. Like I said, I could be wrong, it could be that the instance of eros/romantic love being fulfilled
by the connection with Agape established at the lake bottom will be Ron and Hermione, which would fit the Alchemical structure all right but I think Harry fulfilling it in marriage to Ginny woudl complete the lake bottom image better. Like I said, it is her story and will be written however she writes it and I trust her to write a story that makes sense and is good and I could be wrong on this one, but we shall have to wait and see.
There are many other things I am thinking in regrards to this, and they are, as the lake bottom, very deep waters, and ones that I will not write about publicly out of necessary respect for the fact that a persons private life is private and that we the populace should not go assuming we have the right to discuss certain things just because they were made public knowledge.
Some of it has to do with what has been discussed with Kim and Joselle on the psychological realism in the works and the dementors, and particularly real world episodes of clinical depression and in conjuction with what.
Other of it has to do with prevalence of marriage/family imagery in the works and the comparisons I have made previously on the UVB.
I will say this here in support of Red Hen's theory of the dementors being connected to the real underlying "evil" and the importance of the fact that the MOM had chosen a stance of allying itself with the dementors. The chiastic structure does not have to fit all instances - but, as with most overarching structures, it is usually a telling sign when something breaks the convention. We have the dementors introduced in book 3, so they should, chiastically, end in book 5 (not necassarily come to an end, as in be killed or something, but cease to be a prominent factor) ... and the being discussed in book 6 is an imbalance in the chiastic sturcture, but I think it is one with a postive purpose (IE versus simply an unavoidable thing, since you have them how do you take them out and have that be believable? ... there is actually a neat little inner chiasm of actual dementor presence "on screen" in books 3-5, with the kiss of Barty Jr in book 4 and the attack on Dudders in book 5 ... actually with the kiss in book 4 this supports our one friends argument that Barty is a "too far gone" character and my answer that he can only be the "ghost of a good teacher" - if both Red Hen is right that the dementors have contributed to the making of Voldy and Kim and Joselle are right that Voldy is, in the work itself, a genuine sociopath ... the dementors helped make Voldy too far gone, Voldy helped make Barty too far gone, and then a dementor under the accompaniment of the minister of magic makes it beyond doubt that Barty is too far gone)
... anyway, you have the discussion with the muggle minister of the fact that the dementors are breeding and this is causing the mist. This is directly in the context of a discussion of the culpability of an authoritative ministry, in that the prime-minsiter has just been asking himself the specific question of how could his administration reasonably be blamed for the recent events - and then you have Fudge appear and drop the info about dementors breeding. But, keep in mind that this book is chiastically linked with book 2 ... so where is the element in book 2, since there are no dementors there? Well, what do you get in book 2? You get Voldy's past (Tom Riddle).
It's very latent at this point (the pairing of books 2 and 6 being chiastically linked in the issue of Voldy's past: Tom Riddle and, on RH's theory, which I am buying right now, dementors)but I think it is really there.
Why would eros and agape be mutually exclusive? Heck, I think in the best marriages, you'd have all three "flavors" of love going on. I'm still trying to figure out what's so offensive about this idea.
In any case, I must admit that before I ran into this and some other sites, I hadn't thought of the "adult" themes in the series. I was catching glimpses of parallels to Dickens, but I didn't see the overall structure and I'm finding this very interesting.
I'm one of those "Harry will die" people (because I saw the necessity of Frodo, etc. going into the sunset in LOTR), but I will definitely not be disappointed if he really does turn out to be the "Boy Who Lived". That would be a good ending, too.
Meep, Yeah, I was kind of surprised when my friend was saying he had read about contention on the eros and agape deal.
It's entirely possible Harry will die ... but I'm holding out hope for the kid getting married :)
it's funny how we (ie humanity) need to divide things to describe them and then can't put them back together.
i think it's like male/female, the types of love etc etc etc.
eg if you look at an element - CO2 comes to mind, we can divide them up and describe carbon and we can describe oxygen, but together they are something new and different, and real.
perhaps the eros/agape thing freaks out the "the physical world is lesser and just a little dirty" types, so agape love must be totally separate from eros?
maybe?
cheers
jo
Jo,
yeah, I think that in the end, in a fallen world, the Incarnation is hard to get and we wind up with a lot of hang-ups on it (and I definitely mean "we" concretely including myself and not using general language just to be nice - which is not what I'm saying you were doing, I just definitely feel the need to say, I got the hang-ups as much as anybody).
What I have talked about as "methexis" or "participation" is really hard to get (basically because as a result of our fallen state our two halves constantly war with each other ... a disunity happened and, like you said, it's hard to get them back in harmony we often feel like old Humpty Dumpty ... actually HD was about a canon on a Church wall taht was viewed as protection for a town that was of the monarchist persuasion, and it was thought tha as long as that canon stood atop the wall of the Church the town was safe from being taken over by the the "democracy" camp people, so the latter targeted the canon and brought it down ... "and all the king's horses, and all the kings men, couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again" ... heard that in a homily a few weeks ago).
I mentioned in the posts I have had on the whole "participation" thing (such as on Aurthur Weasley's push for the Protection of Muggles Act) that I picked that term "methexis" up from an Italian patristics scholar name dEnric Mazza in his book on Mystagogical Catechesis (which was post-baptism catechesis applying Biblical typology to the Sacraments), which dies out at the end of the 4th century. It dies out because of the same thing we're talking about. Mazza, in the 6th and final chapter of Mystagoy, talks about why it died out and uses a French scholar named Reale's work on what R. called "Plato's Second Voyage." The term "methexis" itself is from Plato's vocabulary and Reale argued that Plato was much closer to Aristotle (who refered to the soul as the "form" of the body, that which gives it form, shape, function, movement etc) than he (Plato) was to even the "Platonists" who immediately followed him after his death at the "acadamy" in Athens. It was with the Platonists that "dualism" (spirit=good; matter=evil) really took power and by the time of Middle and Neo-Paltonism, it was in full form ... and this is Mazza's argument for why Mystagogical catechesis fell out.
Typology is about symbolism, and that is about a real participation between symobol and that which is symbolized, not just the arbitrary or mechanical correlation of allegory(St Ambrose, one of the "Mystagogical Fathers" speaks of it as an "ontological density")
So, in love, even on the level of "physical drive" human love has a positive meaning beyond mere "instinct." The biological drive for procreation that we share with animals is, in the human person, given a new dignity becuase it really flows from the power of agape love in that the "offspring" is not just "offspring," they are real human persons for whom we can make sacrifices of actual Agape love.
And, as is what is behind Granger's emphasis on the Golden Soul, it is the soul that is the wedding ground. The mutual compassion and care between man and woman (even when it is compassion in the form of one biting their tongue in snapping out about something in the other that really irritates them) and the valid psychological interdependancy of husband and wife is the kind of "school" where children learn how to love and how to take care of each other(which is another reason I like Hogwarts as an image)
To look at it through an "organic" model: the love between husband and wife grows into a community of love, the family. And eros is not just a "means to an end." It is not like the practice of the Manichees (the gnostic cult to which Augustine belonged and the left and spent a good deal of his life as a Christian thinker battling against) where the "upper level" gurus and all were celibate but the lower members of the sect were allowed to indulge the sexual drive because "what can you do?" The Manichean way really gave no diginity to marriage, since it was just an outlet for a evil you couldn't really get rid of, but really the marriage bed was seen as not much different from a bed in a brothel (although you might be able to hook more Christians into the sect if you officially said that it is different) ... eros is both physical and psychological, the drive for companionship (and one that you can be secure in, have some stability in, trust theother person to be there for you because you have this sacred bond of vows in matrimony) ... it all works together, eros, phileo and Agape, in the family.
Anyway, That's my thoughts on it anyway :)
Some *fascinating* ideas here. I have to admit I've not seen Red Hen's take on the Dementors, which I always considered a really fascinating dilemma - obviously what's done with them is inhumane, but I don't support the genocide of a group of sentient beings, either - but I'll definitely be sure to check it out, as I do love her essays.