by Dave,
I give a presentation at the College English Association in a couple of weeks discussing storytelling in relationship to videogames. In all my reading for this, one book I’m focusing on is by Marie-Laure Ryan, titled Narrative as Virtual Reality. In one part of her book, she begins discussing how immersive a book can be, writing about certain authors’ abilities to conjure vivid details. Yet, the hook for readers isn’t always an ability to reconstruct the precise mental image the book is describing, but our ability to assimilate the information and attach it to something more vivid from our past experiences. She calls the end result “spatial immersion”:
Spatial immersion is the result of a “madeleine effect” that depends more on the coincidental resonance of a text with the reader’s personal memories than on generalizable textual properties. Just as the taste and smell of a piece of madeleine dipped into a cup of tea took Marcel Proust back to the village of his childhood, a single word, a name, or an image is often all the reader needs to be transported into a cherished landscape — or into an initially hated one that grew close to the heart with the passing of time. [...] In the most complete forms of spatial immersion, the reader’s private landscapes blend with the textual geography. (121-22)
Since Harry Potter resonates so thoroughly for us, I thought I’d ask you to share how much this idea influences your reading. For instance, how many of us read Dumbledore and think of a cherished teacher, or a grandfather? Do we read Snape’s character (his deep introversion and unrequited passions) and find something from our childhoods? Does Hogwarts or the school grounds remind us of a particular place full of glee and fun?
For me, the last question is the loaded one. Hogwarts, especially the Gryffindor Common Room and the Room of Requirement, have always reminded me of a recurring dream I used to have as a kid about living in a house with a secret hidden library that only I could find. I distinctly remember tall, cramped bookshelves, along with a circular window that no one else ever seemed to notice from the outside. I was also a wee bit shocked when I saw the exact same image, almost detail for detail, pop up in The Spiderwick Chronicles while watching it in the IMAX theater weekend before last. I’m absolutely sure I took this image from something I saw as a very young child, but I’ve never found the source for it — and I think it explains my affinity for libraries today. Aside from all the books, I like to just walk around in them, looking at the architecture and details.
Thus, I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed not just the books’ description of the place, but the film versions of these settings, too. They have never been perfect recreations of my mental image, but they played with the same ideas: something old and hidden that seemed to be “alive”, or somehow sentient — that the place could decide to reward people somehow.
Another part of the books that I always identify with is Hagrid. Growing up in the rural hills of Southeastern Kentucky, Hagrid becomes an amalgamation of people from my memories, especially my brother-in-law and his love/respect of the outdoors (he avidly hunts and fishes). My sister and brother-in-law live in a beautiful house built as far back into the foothills as you can travel by car. To go any further, you need an ATV, or you’re walking. Thus, everytime I read about the Forbidden Forest, the woods surrounding their home comes to mind.
There is a point to this, besides the reminscence. I think it might shed light on some of the reasons why we react to certain issues (Gay!Dumbledore) or to HP movie adaptations in the ways that we do. For instance, I can accept Dumbledore’s sexuality, at least in part, because this detail does not at all factor into my mental picture of him: the abstract grandfather. Snape is compelling to me not just because Rowling has developed a sophisticated portrait of a complex character, but because I can indentify with some of his sense of alienation and his deeply internal nature — the latter trait is so strong in me that this post, short and sanitized as it is, has taken quite a while to write, and it’s something my wife has lamented more than once. And, despite the fact that Harry’s our hero, I can fully understand Ron’s occasional loathing of him — Harry Potter is flawed, but Rowling’s portrait of him is so often romanticized that I just can’t identify with the kid.
So, fire away with as much detail as you’re comfortable sharing!
Red Rocker on 
Chelsea on 
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
reyhan
03.15.08 at 3:32 pm
Dave,
I agree that Hogwarts as shown in the movies seems to have a strong sense of time and place. The images resonate with me, especially as portrayed in PoA. They convey age, and tradition, and knowledge and mystery, in equal measures.
But I think their appeal is universal, and I think it’s because due to our shared culture (news, books, magazines, books, movies, television and, reluctantly, videogames) we have a shared sense of what certain things look like and sound like. Most of us have never been inside a traditional English public school (i.e. Eton or Harrow or Winchester), but we share certain expectations: old buildings, most probably Gothic but maybe with bits of Tudor or Georgian thrown in; narrow rooms and staircases, but also vast halls with high ceilings, old wooden desks, four poster beds, long refectory tables, teachers in robes, students in uniforms; very strict rules of discipline, and of course Houses and a heirarchy of position amongst the students. Hogwarts is all that.
The really interesting thing for me is that Hogwarts, as shown in the movies, is not one place. The interiors are filmed in different places (and often no place at all, just a studio), the buildings are from different places, and the location shots are different as well. I think that Hogwarts as seen at night is actually CGI.
Google locations for filming for the movies, say PoA, and you get the Glenfinnan Viaduct (background for the conversation between Harry and Lupin), Loch Shiel for Hogwarts’ Lake, Glencoe in the Highlands for Hagrid’s hut, and St. Paul’s Cathedral for the geometric staircase. Google it for OotP, and Blenhein Palace is added to the list.
What that tells me is that Hogwarts is not one place. It’s a compilation of images which the Art Director pulls together to convey that sense of traditional public school sitting on the edge of wilderness and mystery and menace.
And what that tells me is that in looking at Hogwarts what we’re really seeing is not a specific place, but a very talented artist’s attempt to capture as closely as possible a shared cultural image.
Very artificial and totally convincing at the same time.
Dave the Longwinded
03.15.08 at 4:58 pm
Reyhan, yes, you’re right. But what my reading on this subject is telling me is that our internalizing of those images is just as important as any decision made by the art director. Not to drag up the author/reader issue, again, but it’s a similar concept.
Our ideas of these images are stereotypes, constructs, or whatever term you might prefer are important. What I’m wondering is how the books connect to our personal memories/reflections in some way. I have really visceral reactions to some portions of the books — even minor moments because they always conjure certain memories and ideas that are deeply affective.
In language studies, we talk a lot about semiotics, which is basically theorizing how a word is attached to the concept or thing it signifies:
spoke utterance = sign
written word = signifier
object/place/thing/concept = signified
In postmodern thought, there is no inherent linkage that always binds all three elements together — a radical departure from thousands of years of philosophical, theological, and scientific thinking. This is a brilliant observation:
Yes!
Logos in Greek is a word that combines “thought”, “logic”, “word”, “mind”, etc. into once concept. Thus, the connections between thoughts, words, and their objects was often taken for granted. Umberto Eco relies on this connection when he talks about visual and written symbols as divine conduits used throughout literary history. John Granger’s work relies on it in his assertions about why HP is so popular: the Christ story touches a remnant within all humanity still attached to the Christian understanding of the sacred.
But, I just want to know what, in their most potent moments, the books make us think about! I’m interested in the fun side of this thought: what do we experience when we read?
reyhan
03.15.08 at 7:21 pm
Dave,
So, unlike Queen Bess, you do want to make windows into men’s souls.
OK.
The challenge in trying to figure out what the books make us think about is the fact that we’ve seen the movies. Gambon doesn’t leave too much of an imprint on Dumbledore for me, but Rickman, once seen will forever be Snape. Ditto Radcliffe, Watson, Grint, Smith, Griffiths, Shaw, Coltrane, and a few others, although not all.
So I’ll talk about Dumbledore. To me he was a lot like God: distant, wise and arbitrary. Gentle, but not always kind. Extremely arbitrary, especially in OotP. When he started crying tears at the end of OotP I felt profoundly disappointed. Almost betrayed, that this character whom I’d put on a pedestal was not only human, but was coming across as rather pathetic. I totally understood why Harry’s rage was not assuaged. I didn’t blame him for thrashing the office: I would have done it too, in his shoes.
The Dumbledore we saw in HBP was almost a stranger to me. He was so clearly following his own agenda, using people, ie. Slughorn and Harry, and using them so ruthlessly and cold bloodedly. No problem. He was a new character, one that I enjoyed. His assisted suicide at the end made me feel profoundly sorry for Snape because he (DD) was so clearly calling the shots. I was a little shaken by the plea: “Severus”, but still, this was not a crucifiction, it was Christopher Walken in the Suicide Kings.
The revelations about his past in DH didn’t have too much of an impact on me because they seemed to be about another person. The real man was gone, slipped away from our grasp, and would never be accountable for misdeeds committed both while we knew him, and before. He would forever remain distant, inscrutable, and incomprehensible.
So you can well imagine my reaction to King’s Cross when Harry was given a chance denied to most of us: to speak to someone who had played such a huge role in his life, but who had always been inaccessible, or accessible only on his own terms, to have that person speak honestly about the past and express his thoughts and feelings openly and honestly. And to affirm his love.
So for me DH is a double whammy. Harry’s walk in the forest with its sense of a burden too heavy for any man, let alone a 17 year old boy, breaking our hearts. And then King’s Cross, with its miraculous (Matthew’s word) sense of giving back everything that had been lost, plus much more.
There are other experiences of course. But that’s what I mainly feel when I read the books.
revgeorge
03.15.08 at 7:47 pm
reyhan,
Excellent post. I guess we could say of DD that we never really knew him. I think Jo perhaps did the biggest snow job on us with DD. People talked about the intricacies of Snape’s character & motivations but he seems almost straightforward compared to DD.
reyhan
03.18.08 at 12:41 pm
Dave,
I realized some time ago that I didn’t give the response you were really looking for: what personal images / memories the word images in the books and the images in the movies evoke.
I must confess that for the most part the word images have been supplanted by the images in the movies. When I “see” Hogwarts in my mind, it is the Hogwarts of the movies. And the images evoke only a few personal memories.
For some reason, the glossy finish on the refectory tables resonates with me: I can almost feel it under my finger tips. I don’t know what childhood memory it goes back to, but it’s there. (Now all I need is for someone to tell me that the tables aren’t polished to a high gloss, and I’ll know that I’ve truly lost my bearings!). The steep hillside where Hagrid’s hut is perched, with its rocky outcroppings also evokes memories: the Canadian Shield north of here, with its similar geography, hiking on the Rideau Trail, farms and cottages in the Rideau Lakes. For some reason, Hermione’s hair is evocative: I had a friend in grade school with hair like that. The inside of 12 Grimauld Place evokes something, I don’t know what; nightmares perhaps, because it’s so narrow; I can smell the damp and the mould. Snape’s or rather Rickman’s long shirt cuffs remind me of something. And Maggie Smith is every middle-aged female teacher I ever had, or rather, my grade 9 English teacher, who was Scotch Presbyterian and very thin and very strict and left me with an abiding love of English literature.