Harry Potter and the Gift of Death

So, I just ordered a book online: The Gift of Death by Jacques Derrida. Now, being as Derrida just died in 2004, there stands a pretty good chance that he knew of Tolkien's use of that title/phrase in the Silmarillion. But my own path to the JD book was through my professor in the class I am taking on St Paul's Corinthian correspondence in the New Testament. When talking to him earlier in the day I happened to mention the direction I am taking with my paper in my other class on the History of Biblical Interpretation, in which we have been taking the history of interpretation of Genesis 22 (also known as the "Akedah" or "binding" of Isaac) as a paradigm - covering everything from second temple Judaism to, last week, Soren Kierkegaard (in Fear and Trembling). Upon hearing the direction that I was going with that other paper, Dr Welborn (the NT professor) said, "you know who has an interesting book on the Akedah is Jacques Derrida." So, there is Derrida, as in the French father of post-modern deconstructionist theory, as in Rowling was a French major. As in Rowling was a classicist. As in just in tonight's class we were talking about how Foucault (also French PoMo, of whom I will have to read a fair bit next semester in a class on "the postmodern subject" ... meaning subjective, as in the role/place of the acting subject, not as in "I am studying the subject of theology" or "what subjects are you taking next term?" ) spawned a whole corpus of secondary literature concentrated on ancient Greco-Roman thought on the emotions. So, what, you might ask, were we doing talking about ancient Greco-Roman understandings of the emotions? Well, I'm glad you asked. Paul devotes quite a bit of ink in parts of 2nd Corinthians to the concept of the "pain" or "anguish" he has suffered. The Greek word used here is "lupei" and generally means psychic/psychological suffering or pain. Now, cut back to just after the Lumos conference in August of 2006. I had listened to one of the CDs from the conference, a talk I had not been able to go to while there, by Kim Decina and Josella Vanderhooft, on standard disorder types from clinical psychology as present in the HP series. I think even more now than back then that their paper topic was uniquely insightful into a key element in understanding the books. Of course, coming up to book 7 release I did a long post on what I called the "insanity chiasm," focusing heavily on therapeutic imagery (particularly "being sick") in connection with key moments such as visions (revelatory in nature, as therapy is meant to be, working out "what ails you" by first getting it out in the open) and retellings of dark deeds (such retellings done under influence of substances the sort of force the revelation, like veritaserum ... as in when Barty Crouch Jr recounts his tale under the truth serum and Harry notices that McGonnegal looks a bit disgusted, as if she had just watched somebody being sick). Now, all that is not to say that Decina and Vanderhooft saw exactly the same on all things. We didn't necessarily disagree, but they were hesitant to cast Lupin under the umbrella of psychological malady because they could not put him into a standard modern psychology category. But with this new info on his name (IE the Greek lupei as psychological pain), I feel even more confident about my reading of Lupin as, not a particular objective, classifiable disorder, but as the experience of psychological malady for the person who undergoes it. Here's an interesting fact we went through in class tonight. The Stoic system that was the most common "popular" philosophy in the Greco Roman world at the time of Paul (sometimes sort of mixed with some Platonism) had two sets of emotions they talked about, the 4 bad ones and the 3 good ones. So, why the difference in number? Well, the 3 good ones all corresponded to one each of the bads ones (so the sage is the one who has trained themself rightly and passed from the stage of being dominated by the bad ones to living only in the good ones) ... and that leaves one bad emotion without a corresponding good emotion to be turned to after becoming sagely. The reader gets 3 guesses what the name of that "bad" emotion is that is so bad it cannot be transformed into anything positive when one advances to sagehood (under the system of stoic thought, which Paul is actually arguing contrary to) ... and the first two guesses don't count. Lupei is as excluded from the life of the sage as Lupin is from the society of wizards. This is the experience of the one who is weighed down by the conception of their own illness - "My kind don't usually breed!" (DH 213 - "It will be like me, I am convinced of it - how can I forgive myself, when I knowingly risked passing on my condition to an innocent child? And, if by some miracle, it is not like me, then it will be better off, a hundred times so, without a father of whom it must always be ashamed!") Now, back to that mention of being sick in connection with visions ("your young men will dream dreams" - guess what one of the standard ancient texts that is connected withe the healing cult of the Greek god of healing, Asklepios, who just happened to have a VERY big branch office in Corinth, was - Artemidorus' work on the interpretation of dreams - apparently the dreams were supposed to provide clues to healing - and the symbol of Asklepios? a snake and a staff crossed or the snake wound around the staff - sound a little like the symbol for any institutions in HP - like the wand a bone of St Mungos?). In particular I am thinking of the vision from inside the snake in Order of the Phoenix. The almost single-minded goal of stoicism was to become impervious (sound like any HP charms discussed before, especially during brutal Quidditch matches, like one against a character who will later die at the dead center of the series, Cedric Diggory?) to lupei. Paul's rebuttal is a journey to redemption that he actually describes very heavily in terms of anguish (7 specific terms in Greco-Roman world for types of it) - that the path to salvation goes by way of being led through the suffering, not becoming impervious. But my point is: where do we see in DH the image of a misguided attempt to become impervious from invasion (which is, more than anything, suicide ... the level to which one must cut oneself off from others)" ... "Dumbledore wanted you to close that connection! Dumbledore wanted you to practice Occlumency!" (and by book 6, of course, Dumbledore fully realizes that Harry can no more do occlumency properly than he can make his hair behave, but the headmaster does not seem to be at all that concerned the deficiency in Harry's , not after the pain Voldemort experienced when trying to possess Harry in the end of book 5 ... Draco Malfoy, on the other hand, who is in such a psychologically distraught state from oppression by Voldy that he can muster the loathing to use the cruciatus curse effectively on Olivander, using it on the wandmaker without even the natural righteous anger driving it that Harry has in using it on Amycus Carrow - Draco can practice occlumency quite well, well enough to stop even so skilled a legilimens as Snape) (oh, and for the thing above on the "impervious" charm .. I am not trying to tie out a nice neat system in which the impervious charm was actually a bad thing because it is like trying to close the Voldy connection and in book 7 that is not the deal [in book 5 before the end occlumency is a good idea ... it might have saved Sirius' life if done rightly] ... I look at things more as the way certain images attune the reader to certain questions - so the impervious charm is neither good nor bad [if anything it is good as a way of keeping the rain out of your face in gale force winds during a Quidditch match], but simply meant to sort of "stick" in the reader's ear as something that is somehow meaningful in the books, meaning the issue of imperviousness, protection from invasion, psychic or otherwise etc etc) Anyway, one last thing on Lupin and lupei. There is a classicist named William Harris who is presently at Columbia U on the upper west side in Manhattan, whom my professor, Dr Welborn, was mentioning tonight, who has done a bit of work on this subject. Harris says that in the ancient world lupei was thought of as pretty much the flipside of the same coin as "orgei." So what is orgei? Well, we get certain words in English from it, used in a, to be discrete, coital context (or being as we deal so heavily with language here, maybe "conjugational" would be a fitting pun). But this usage largely comes from the cultic fertility activities surrounding the cult of the Greek god Dionysius. On the other hand orgei can be translated "anger." The connection between the dionysian sense and the "angry" sense, can best be seen in the word "madness." We can use that word of being angry or we can use it of being deranged ... or being so angry that we "lose it" ... much as, for the stoics, to be subject to lupei was to be not in control of oneself. The dionysian sense mentioned just above derives the connection from the sort of "ecstatic" state, out of control etc, often occurring in such cultic settings of this particular nature. But, aside from that specific dionysian setting, in the more general sense of being "mad" as being "out of one's mind," in the HP series, who "loses it" once a month? Who is "stark raving mad" at the full moon? Interestingly, the closest Greco-Roman literary form of that time for the section/s of 2nd Corinthians where Paul addresses the "anguish" is known as the "therapeutic letter" - which generally addresses both aspects of lupei, "anger" and "anguish." ... I always come out of the class on Corinthians with at least one or two good ideas or observations on Harry Potter ... which makes it make even more sense to me that Rowling used the St Paul quote for the headstone in Deathly Hallows (and there again is Derrida writing a book on "the last enemy to be overcome"). PS ... there again, maybe death conquered by being transformed into gift (although this is a very deep concept, and utmost caution must be observed in speaking of it, especially with one who has lost a loved one in death - some gifts are so sublime that they are agony) ... transformed, did you say? interesting, in 2 Corinthians 5:18 and 19 there is a verb that standardly gets translated in English "reconcile" (katalussoe) - God was "reconciling the world to himself" etc, but the sense of the Greek world itself is actually, "make other" - as in transformation, as in transfiguration - like I said, always a few good thought on HP from that class.