Okay, so “gamerize” is a term I just made up. But, as a full-time grad student, now, I have some license to do such things. In fact, it’s sort of expected of us so long as we take at least ten double-spaced pages to define the term. But I’ll spare me the pain of writing it, and you the torture of reading it…

As the title of the post suggests, there is, in fact, a video game adaptation of The Inferno due to be released on February 9th, called Dante’s Inferno. It’s published by Electronic Arts, and is developed by one of EA’s in-house teams, Visceral (more on EA later***). As you can tell by the screenshot above, the game takes significant liberties with Dante’s medieval classic.

Below is a story trailer for the game from IGN’s website. There is an age gate, but the trailer is safe for work, so to speak.

The early reviews I’ve seen have painted the game as a hack-&-slash bit of mayhem. These games tend to emphasize twitchy controls, quick reflexes, and button combinations that need precision timing to be executed well. Hence, Dante’s emotional journey from the original poem will, uh, take a back seat so that players can slay the undead and pull some killer stunts.

That said, it does appear that some shell of Dante Alighieri’s original story is intact, just slanted through the prism of mainstream gaming culture. I’m actually somewhat surprised this hasn’t happened earlier. Game developers have pilfered ancient Greek and Roman mythology for decades, and medieval Europe has certainly been the inspiration for a whole swath of game culture, digital and otherwise. From what I can tell, Dante’s Inferno looks much more like a mash-up of the original poem with other heroic and anti-heroic inspirations. The game is clearly ripping some of its elements from the current pinnacle of the hack-&-slash genre, God of War (a game revolving entirely around Greek mythology). For some reason, I can’t help but think of both Gilgamesh and Beowulf when I see the trailer. And, much as Dante himself was aware, a hero traveling through an underworld — literal or otherwise — is a motif with which all of us here at the pub are very familiar. Travis’s 2007 Prophecy presentation provides a superb explanation of the Hero’s Journey and the role that death plays in its fulfillment. (And for those of you either haven’t seen it or could use a refresher, it’s a pretty nifty examination of some key characters and their roles in HP, as well!)

As a number of game and media scholars have pointed out in recent years, games are fertile proving grounds for players to pursue hero quests. The framework lends itself quite well to game development, providing a near perfect template for pacing a player’s progress through levels while narrating a character’s development into a persona players connect with. Whether you’re playing games like this, which generally means you’re playing alone, or if you’re playing online in a massively multiplayer game, the steps to the Hero’s Journey appears all over the place. If you’re not familiar with massively multiplayer games — usually called MMOs — are often built around a system that demands the player run through a series of trials before heading off to a main mission. Sometimes, these can be small tasks, such as gathering resources like gold or weapons. In other instances, players might have to defeat one major enemy character before moving on to bigger, badder challenges. Though there are clear differences between the Hero’s Journey as we have come to understand it and what often happens in games, there is also significant overlap making the influence pretty clear.

***EA is a controversial company in the gaming world for a number of reasons. Gamers most often complain of the quality of games, which can often be shoddy and half-hearted at best. On the business side, EA’s reputation might best be described as “the Microsoft of the gaming world.” They are, in fact, the largest third party game developer in the world, which makes them (at least at one point) the second largest software company in the world — right behind Microsft. EA has thrown that muscle around quite a bit over the last few years. Combined with their size and financial clout, EA has been able to sew up the rights to the National Football League in an exclusive deal that forbids any other company from making an NFL game. They can make football games, but not using the NFL license. Many gamers felt like this was a huge problem because, at the time, EA’s Madden NFL franchise had been suffering a steady decline in quality. Many consumers interpreted the move as a way for EA to squelch competition to Madden rather than rising to the challenge of improved game design driven by a competitive market.

The company also courted some controversy last year when the game’s development was first unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (aka E3), which is the single largest annual video game event in the United States. A small band of protesters showed up to voice their displeasure over the game’s content, claiming it was sacrilegious and anti-Christian. Very quickly, though, some in the game community sniffed a hoax, which EA confirmed a few days later. They hired a group of folks to pose as concerned Christians unhappy with the game’s violence and use of religious iconography.

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This chapter opens with an ominous moment: Harry searching for a place to bury Moody’s eye. He does so under “the oldest, most gnarled, and resilient-looking tree he could find.” Harry’s symbolism is clear, and the scene will be repeated later.

All-in-all, this chapter has an Empire Strikes Back feel to it. Our heroes are stuck in the wilderness, hunting for clues to puzzles they know are important, but coming up empty. As Rowling writes it, the scene reduces the three of them to “three teenagers in a tent whose only achievement was not, yet, to be dead.” The dark magic of the locket, now being passed among them to diffuse its effect on any one of them, is taking a severe toll. And it is most assuredly the prime cause of discord within the tent.

Hermione’s realization that this is so does little to assuage the Horcrux’s effect on all of them. Endless boredom and hunger in the midst of the stress of being hunted like animals isn’t helping the situation. It all creates a vicious psychological cycle within the trio, most notably Harry: “[He] was starting to fear that Hermione too was disappointed by his poor leadership. In desperation he tried to think of further Horcrux locations, but the only one that continued to occur to him was Hogwarts, and as neither of the others thought this at all  likely, he stopped suggesting it.” In other words, out of fears over his lack of leadership, Harry quits being a leader. Any reader who has paid close attention to the series knows Harry has to be right, or at least on the right track. The importance Hogwarts holds for Voldemort and others is unmistakable. All of them are ignoring the evidence, from Ginny’s possession and Voldy’s other repeated attempts to penetrate the school, to what Harry learned in his Pensieve lessons in Half-Blood Prince.

But, what we do learn very clearly here is that the other Trio (Ginny, Neville, and Luna) are trying to wreak a bit of havoc at the school. More importantly, Harry, Hermione, and Ron learn from their eavesdropping exercise that the true Sword of Gryffindor has gone missing — hidden, perhaps by Dumbledore, to keep it from the hands of those who don’t deserve it. But, the most significant piece of information they learn while listening to Griphook and the others at the riverbank is that the sword can be used as a weapon against Horcruxes. Hermione realizes the sword has absorbed some of the effects of the basilisk’s venom. Harry feels that some answers are “tantalizingly close.” Yet, they’re just out of reach.

And the chapter ends in catastrophe. Ron’s emotional implosion pushes the group over the edge, leading to the Trio’s collapse. He storms out of the tent angry, misanthropic, and believing that Hermione has chosen Harry over him. We’ll learn later the true outcome, but I count this moment as one of Rowling’s most significant red herrings in the series. Upon my first read, I was convinced that this fracture doomed Ron. For a while, I waited nervously to see Harry and Hermione stumble across his body somewhere. Thus, the later moment when Ron rises to his real potential is all the more emphatic and powerful to me.

What makes this book so hard to read is the persistent pounding of death in every corner, upon every page. Chapter 15 opens with a burial, one that will be echoed painfully later. The Horcruxes presense, the pervasive fear and hunger, and final moment when it seems that the central friendship in the series is fully broken all make this one of the darker chapters in the entire HP saga.

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With our fearless pub proprietor taking another step towards celebrity this week, I’m left to lay out some news. Check the Press Release below! (And yes, we can all say, “We knew him when…”)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW YORK (Oct. 12, 2009) – PotterTeeVee will launch this week with a live webcast straight from Midtown Manhattan this Monday evening. New York City Harry Potter fans welcome literary scholar Travis Prinzi to speak about the spooky, eerie and gothic elements of the Harry Potter stories. This seasonally-appropriate lecture entitled “Harry Potter, Dracula & Frankenstein: Fear and Gothic Elements in J.K. Rowling’s Best Selling Novels” will be hosted by the Tutuma Social Club at 7pm on October 12, 2009.  PotterTeeVee is proud to stream the entire lecture live as its first official broadcast following the network’s launch this week.
A new media resource for both the casual Harry Potter reader and rabid fan alike, PotterTeeVee offers free broadcasts of live events, music and original programming from the Harry Potter fan community. PTV strives to provide the best in live and on-demand content for the international fan community of the Harry Potter books and films. Though based in New York City, the web channel will be broadcast via Livestream from all four corners of the globe for the enjoyment of Potter-lovers everywhere.

“Harry Potter, Dracula & Frankenstein” will be attended by some of New York City’s most dedicated Harry Potter fans, The Group That Shall Not Be Named, the New York Harry Potter Meetup Group, another of PotterTeeVee’s partners. In addition, by choosing Livestream this event has the potential to reach thousands of viewers online, allowing fans unable to attend to benefit from this fun, intriguing and educational presentation.

Travis Prinzi is the author of Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds and editor of The Hog’s Head Conversation: Essays About Harry Potter. He has spoken at numerous seminars and Harry Potter conferences including Prophecy 2007 and most recently, Azkatraz 2009. Mr. Prinzi expressed excitement about PTV’s upcoming launch, saying “I’m honored to be helping launch PotterTeeVee on Monday night. It’s going to be a great resource for Harry Potter fans, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

The archived recording of the webcast will be available at http://www.livestream.com/potterteevee and soon at http://www.potterteevee.com. To keep up with updates at PotterTeeVee, follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/potterteevee or become a fan at http://facebook.com/potterteevee.

ABOUT POTTERTEEVEE
PotterTeeVee (www.potterteevee.com) is a not-for-profit web channel for broadcasting live events, original programming and music from the world of the Harry Potter fandom. PotterTeeVee strives to become the leader in live and on-demand original content for the worldwide fan community of Harry Potter series. Though the Harry Potter fan community spans the globe, PotterTeeVee operates primarily out of New York City.

ABOUT LIVESTREAM
Livestream (www.livestream.com) provides everything needed to easily webcast live, build an engaged audience and monetize these efforts. Founded in 2007, the company is based in New York and includes Gannett Co. as a minority shareholder and investor. Producers can use Livestream to create live, linear and on-demand Internet television to broadcast anywhere on the Web through a single embeddable player widget.

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Chapter Five keeps up the feeling established in Chapter Four.  For six books, Harry’s journey away from the Dursleys has involved a bit of whimsy and adventure.  Yet, Chapter Four is an all out firefight, and Chapter Five shows us an intense aftermath as everyone comes down from their stress-induced combat high.  We see brutal wounds that are not easily healed.  Fear.  Paranoia.  Lupin argues with Harry that “the time for Disarming is past!”  And, of course, we learn of Mad-Eye’s death.

Three things strike me most from “Fallen Warrior”:  1) the pervasive paranoia, 2) Harry’s assertion that killing is “Voldemort’s job” and not his own, and 3) the loss of Mad-Eye.  Everyone is suspicious of nearly everyone else.  Harry is questioned.  Kingsley questions Lupin.  Arthur threatens his interrogators as he tries to check on George.  This moment, combined with his argument with Lupin, shows us a side of Harry that is emerging, but still needs to come out.  Harry’s leadership is apparent.  As suspicions mount and a palpable feeling of accusations mounts, Harry disarms the situation:

“No,” Harry said aloud, and they all looked at him, surprised: The firewhisky seemd to have amplified his voice.  “I mean…if somebody made a mistake, ” Harry went on, “and let something slip, I know they didn’t mean to do it.  It’s not their fault,” he repeated, again a little louder than he would usually have spoken.  “We’ve got to trust each other.  I trust all of you, I don’t think anyone in this room would ever sell me to Voldemort.”

His assertion of faith in his comrades has some effect, but it’s not a John Wayne/Sergeant Stryker kind of moment.  It’s telling that Fred and George respond the most enthusiastically.  They are symbols of lightheartedness throughout the series, and not even their humor and optimism can quite overcome the heat and fear of the moment.  But, we see the potential in Harry’s character here.

Of course, he still can’t fathom his leadership responsibilities as he immediately argues that they’re all better off without him around.  His impulse is noble in its way, but obviously flawed.  If Harry really is the “Chosen One”, everyone in the Burrow’s living room is a target, no matter where any of them happen to be.  Harry hasn’t yet quite grasped this reality.  There’s certainly plenty of room to debate why he’s still stubborn here.

But, the chapter’s title points us to the most telling symbolic event contained within: Mad-Eye’s death.  “Harry could not quite comprehend it.  Mad-Eye dead; it could not be… Mad-Eye, so tough, so brave, the consummate survivor…”  Any obvious sense of security continues to be ripped from under Harry’s feet.  Of all the Order’s warriors, Mad-Eye Moody represented best both strength and leadership.  His courage proved unflappable, and his battle-sense was keen.  That he has fallen so randomly (partially through Mundungus’s cowardice) has to be a shock — and a tremendous reminder to Harry (and everyone) concerning just how “real” his fight has become.  After Dumbledore, no other character’s death could have achieved this emotional effect quite so compellingly.

Of course, in the final 2 pages we learn that Scar-o-Scope is still functioning, and we get the first hints that it may, in fact, be working the other way around.  But the pervasive fear and paranoia overpowering every character only allows us to see it as an extension of the disaster that was the end of Order of the Phoenix.  Looking back at this moment, I’m also forced to pause and rethink something Travis brought up with Chapter One.  Clearly Voldemort is practicing Legilimency on Snape.  But, just how powerful is Voldemort’s ability if his mind has been tapped and he doesn’t realize it?  Is this our first bit of foreshadowing that Voldy’s power is more myth than fact?

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I finally got my copy of Hog’s Head Conversations today.  I saw PDF proofs earlier, but it was so much nicer to see the book-as-final-product.  Before I go any further, I do want to thank both Travis and Bob Trexler for their work.  In addition, they were both invaluable to helping polish my own work in the book.  I’m happy and humbled to be presented alongside likes of John Granger, Amy Sturgis, and our two guest bloggers, Gwen and Danielle.  Nothing like reading a couple of those essays to make one realize how special it is to be a part of Hog’s Head Conversations.  Thank you to everyone involved.  I hope my little contribution lives up to everyone else’s brilliance!

Anyway, on to this post’s purpose…

How characters learn and know things in books has fascinated me since I was in grad school.  Harry Potter is no exception.  After my first read-through, I was struck by the steady connection between visibility and knowledge or learning.  Three major magical objects serve as devices through which the books explore this connection: the invisibility cloak, the Mirror of Erised, and Dumbledore’s Pensieve.  All three play huge roles in key moments as Harry learns how to understand himself and the world around him.  

Harry often seeks invisibility when he’s confronted by a problem.  The Invisibility Cloak is his primary tool for achieving this.  Whether he is sneaking out of Gryffindor Tower for the first time to skulk around the Restricted Section, or he’s learning something about how his parents died in Hogsmeade, or he’s contemplating his own death on the way to confront Dumbledore Voldemort [my mistake], “his father’s cloak” is nearly always close at hand.  Only Harry’s wand spends more time at his side.  Being invisible isn’t just a tactical advantage as Harry sneaks around.  Invisibility also allows him a measure of control over himself and his environment.  His world is a strange blend of mixed perceptions.  In the Muggle World, the Dursleys have gone to significant lengths to make Harry as invisible as he could be.  But the Wizarding World describes him in Christ-like language as “The Boy Who Lived.”

In a sense, being literally invisible allows Harry to simply be — he can just exist in the most immediate way, unfettered by anything else.  The imposed isolation inflicted on Harry by the Dursleys serves their purposes, not Harry’s (at least not intentionally).  Harry isn’t truly invisible.  Instead, the Dursleys treat him much like an enslaved, colonized other.  His invisibility is a form of repression in the Muggle World.

But in the Wizarding World, the Cloak allows Harry to control his freedom and his status.  His migration from one realm into another rockets him along a bewildering path, removing his anonymity for another form of oppression — unprecedented celebrity.  But the cloak is a way of recovering a middle ground between both.  In Philosopher’s Stone, he feels a sense of wonder and excitement and curiosity as he dons the Cloak.  The language is contrasted with his emotions as he sits in class, the object of stares and whispers of his classmates and professors.

The Mirror of Erised is one of the most famous magical objects in the series, and perhaps all of contemporary fantasy literature.  We know what it reflects back to Harry — his “deepest, most desperate desires.”  That Harry sees his family is certainly important, but so is the way Harry interacts with it.  His initial contact with Erised describes him as wanting to touch it, treating the mirror like early audiences used to treat theater screens or televisions.  Almost immediately, Harry wants some kind of physical contact with the image, but quickly realizes that cannot happen.  Instead, Harry recognizes it is telling him something, and he even takes some fairly big steps in recognizing what he is being shown.  But the true test of Erised is recognizing what the image means for and about Harry.  He has to interpret the image in some fashion.

The art of interpretation essentially becomes Dumbledore’s primary lesson for Harry in both HBP and DH.  And the Pensieve is the most important instructional tool.  Harry and Dumbledore reconstruct Voldemort’s fragmented narrative from the memories of others (sometimes fragmented, as well).  Harry’s final lesson on his path to knowledge is to learn that “knowing” doesn’t necessarily equate to “certainty.”

Taken together, the three objects chronicle how and what Harry learns.  And they always point what Harry has learned back onto himself and his own identity, at least for the reader if not for Harry himself.  The theme of choice is always integrated into these moments, as well.  Harry has to choose a good way to understand Erised’s reflection.  His interpretations of the Pensieve memories often involve choices he must make about himself versus Voldemort.

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Half-Blood Prince’s final chapter opens with a favorite device of Ernest Hemingway, the simple declarative sentence:

“All lessons were suspended, all examinations postponed.”

It really is one of Rowling’s finer moments as a writer, poignant and rich with subtlety.  In this one statement, she wipes away all the carefree wonderment of childhood with pointed irony.  Hogwarts shifts in symbolism from a place of comfort and safety where the worst worry was two parchments on werewolves for horrible Professor Snape, to a place in which parents are spiriting their children away as fast as possible because Snape has murdered the headmaster.

We see the Centaurs and Merfolk gather and pay their respects in ways I believe would have left Dumbledore deeply honored.  His entombment is rich with symbolism, as Harry thinks “for one heart-stopping moment, that he [sees] a phoenix fly joyfully ino the blue.”  Yet, the “next second the fire had vanished,” and a brilliant “white marble tomb” sits in its place.

In Dumbledore’s death, Voldemort has seemingly gained a devastating victory. Harry and Hogwarts no longer have their protector.  The last bastion of paradise is now vulnerable — very vulnerable. Hogwarts has become, in one sense, a graveyard.

A palpable threat glares at us from the edges of this chapter, never clear and explicit, but there nonetheless. It peers at us from the Riddle mansion. The effect is amplified in the explicit declarations that our enchanting rhythm of nearly six long books has been broken.  We’re no longer tied to time as it is dictated in school.  Instead, everyone’s concerns take on much more urgent tones, emanating from a great emergency — war and death. Like the disjointed feeling new-minted graduates experience upon leaving school for “the real world,” so, too, with the Wizarding World as we’ve known it. Rowling is playing with an emotional realism like never before. Even as the Trio debate whether or not Hogwarts will be open in the next year, Harry makes it clear to readers that it doesn’t matter:  “I’m not coming back even if it does reopen.” The chapter’s overriding emotion is not only sadness, but anxiety.

Harry understands his childhood is over.  Yet, Rowling isn’t ready to declare him “ready.”  To lift a line from another heroic opus, Harry must complete his training.  In Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Yoda’s warning to Luke refers to a need to complete both a physical and mental training that prepares him to confront ultimate evil in the form of his father.  The trope is a common one, and often serves as a way to remove our Hero’s wise mentor out from under him.  In Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore is taken from Harry so that Harry has to complete his heroic quest on his own.

I’ve always argued that HBP’s central plot thread is Dumbledore’s intense efforts to educate Harry in a more hazardous, yet consequential, way of engaging Voldemort — the fine art of speculation and inferrential reasoning.  The Pensieve lessons are always about piecing together incomplete pieces of Voldemort’s past so as to anticipate his plans.

Yet, there are sharp indications that Harry still has much to learn now that he has been thrust prematurely into his adulthood.  Trying to decipher who might be R.A.B, his feelings betray him:

He did not fell the way he had so often felt before, excited, curious, burning to get to the bottom of a mystery, he simply knew that the task of discovering the truth about the real Horcruxes had to be completed before he could move a little farther along the dark and winding path stretching ahdead of him, the path he and Dumbledore had set out upon together, and which he now knew he would have to journey alone.  There might still be as many as four Horcruxes out there somewhere. … He kept reciting their names to himself, as though by listing them he could bring them within reach.

This picture starkly contrasts what we’ve seen from Harry before.  Whenever confronted with a problem, excitement and curiosity have coursed through him, often uncontrollably.  Philosopher’s Stone describes his first use of the Invisibility Cloak in terms of pure adrenaline:  “The whole of Hogwarts was open to him…”  Yet, in two years Harry has watched both Sirius and Dumbledore die as his intelligence and heroism failed him.  His rash dash into the Ministry’s aptly named Department of Mysteries ends in tragedy.  One year later, he can do nothing whatsoever to fight off Dumbeldore’s killers.  In two crucial moments, Harry believes that his greatest attributes have betray him completely.

Now, harry must rely on the kind of reasoning (incomplete as its bases may sometimes be) in order to think through the journey in front of him. And we see examples of incomplete thoughts seeping forth from Harry:

Neville and Luna alone of the D.A. had responded to Hermione’s summons the night that Dumbledore had died, and Harry knew why: They were the ones how had missed the D.A. the most… probably the ones who had checked their coins regularly in the hope that there would be another meeting.

The ellipsis points the reader to something omitted here.  Harry attaches a kind of childish need-to-belong to their loyalty.  Yet, I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to add that Neville and Luna missed the D.A. the most because they believed in its cause.  It was surely one of the first places either had experienced social acceptance, but they also chose what was right over what was easy. And Neville will prove it in grim and terrifying fashion at the end of DH.

Harry’s breakup with Ginny is another pointer that Harry hasn’t quite thought his plan through.  As Harry laments what might have been, Ginny’s response is both knife-edged and sympathetic:  “‘But you’ve been too busy saving the Wizarding World,’ siad Ginny, half laughing. ‘Well…I can’t say I’m surprised.  I knew this would happen in the end.  I knew you wouldn’t be happy unless you were hunting Voldemort.  Maybe that’s why I like you so much.’”  Without question she resents his choice here, but accepts it without too much protest.  There’s a sense in which she seems to say to him, “Do you really think my safety is what matters now?  Don’t you see my importance to you in all of this?”  Harry hasn’t quite recognized in his friends and true love what we as readers see in John Granger’s eloquently explicated alchemical narrative.  All of them are absolutely important for Harry’s efforts to overcome Voldemort’s plan.

In addition, we witness the Trio speculate on Snape’s motives by looking at the past hinted at in Harry’s illicit Potions book.  Snape’s lineage leads Harry to conclude quite simply that Snape is “just like Voldemort.”  As determined as Harry needs to be, this reads alongside what we learn in Deathly Hallows, as a warning against thinking dismissively.  Admittedly, Harry is thinking emotionally.  But, if we learned anything from Dumbledore in the last three chapters, it’s that facing a crisis with a calm mind and steady courage is absolutely important.  Harry has to relearn this now that his challenges have grown more sinister.

Other moments Harry takes notice of are just as compelling in light of Deathly Hallows.  The appearance of an anonymous Elphias Doge foreshadows his role in DH.  Harry dismisses the man’s eulogy because “It did not mean very much.  It had little to do with Dumbledore as Harry had known him.”  Immediately, Harry flashes to his first vision of Dumbledore and his wonderfully odd welcome to Hogwarts:  “Nitwit! Oddment! Blubber! Tweak!”  What Draco and the other Malfoys want to construe as Dumbledore’s senility, Harry recognizes as Dumbledore’s playfulness.  In light of Doge’s highly romanticized view of Dumbledore in DH, the one Harry so desperately wants to cling to, his entire performance here reads as a bright warning to Harry not to read too much into Doge’s sentiments.

Harry declares he is “Dumbledore’s man through and through,” but this final chapter is full of flashing warnings of Harry’s biggest fight to come.  He’s faced down Voldemort multiple times on pure instinct, and he’s felt the warmth of victory and chill of defeat.  He’s even forced Voldemort from his mind and body.  Along with that metaphor in Order of the Phoenix, “The White Tomb” shows us that one of Harry’s greatest foes yet to come is his own self.  Dumbledore has armed for this battle more than perhaps any other.

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Today’s guest post for chapter 26 of the Half-Blood Prince read-through is from one of our longest-standing patrons: Red Rocker!

In Chapter 26 of Half-Blood Prince, we witness Harry and Dumbledore make their way into a large, dark cave, take an enchanted boat to a rocky outcropping in the middle of a dark lake, dispose of the green potion of awfulness in a particularly awful manner, fight off some inferi, and grab the fake amulet and run, attended by fireworks.

They are alone in the cave, save for the aforementioned inferi, who are so featureless as to be characterless. Voldemort’s enchantments live on, but he himself is a topic of conversation only. For all intents and purposes, Harry and Dumbledore are alone.

But it’s a crowded place, all the same.

Look in the shadows, and you can see a crowd of myth masters: The unknown story tellers of Norse and Roman mythology are present. The blind poet Homer is there. I suspect Plato and his mouthpiece are there too because it’s really hard to think of a cave, without thinking of The Cave. Dante Alighieri is there, and his Roman mentor and sometime traveling companion, Virgil. Not surprisingly, Tolkien is there, puffing on his pipe, reminding Sam to keep Frodo from touching the water. And not surprisingly at all, David is there, singing praises to the Lord.

Not much doubt about where Chapter 26 takes place: the old Norse word for “cave” is “hellir”. Our word “hell” comes from Norse mythology: the dark goddess Hel, Queen of Shades. But if doubt remains, we can refer to Roman mythology, where the name for the gods of the underworld was “Inferi Dii”.

The trip that Harry and Dumbledore take to the underworld has been done before, and the rites and rituals are known: when Odysseus and his men visit the Underworld in Homer’s Odyssey, they make a sacrifice of blood, which attracts the spirits of the dead. Odysseus fends them off, until he finds the dead man he came to speak to. He uses ram’s blood, while Harry and Dumbledore use Voldermort’s preference: their own blood.

Plato’s Cave? Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch. But there is a strong theme of reality vs. illusion. So much in the cave is deception: the invisible archway, the hidden boat, the intangible potion, the fake amulet. Reality is not available to Harry at all who only sees the shadows dancing on the wall. Dumbledore, though, can see the “invisible truths lying under the apparent surface of things which only the most enlightened can grasp.” So it’s Dumbledore who finds the invisible archway in the wall, feels out the invisible chain that pulls in the hidden boat, intuits the presence of the invisible island, the hidden locket, and the secret enchantments placed on the cave by Voldemort.

And then there’s Dante’s trip to the lowest levels of hell, in the company of his spirit guide, the poet Virgil. In the eighth ring of the Eighth Circle – Counselors of Fraud (Sins of Malice division) – they encounter Odysseus and friend, who walks wrapped in flame, his punishment for his schemes and conspiracies that won the Trojan War.

Reminds me of the Jason Cockcroft cover for HBP: Albus Dumbledore and friend, surrounded by rings of fire. Any other resemblance of character or motive may or may not be spurious.

And for the grand finale, we get a reading from Psalm 23:

‘I am not worried, Harry,’ said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. ‘I am with you.’

It’s one of JKR’s strongest chapters. And the strength comes from the voices of all the shades whose words she’s listened to and heard. And repeated in her own words so others too could hear and understand.

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• The Flight of the Prince, by Lily Luna
• The Lightning-Struck Tower, by Red Rocker

That’s the question being asked by Philadelphia Literature Examiner’s Peter McEllhenney. He answers, “no,” not great; but they are literature. I’m not really sure what that means. It is a very interesting article, however, assessing Rowling’s strengths and weaknesses. I wonder the extent to which Hog’s Head patrons will agree and disagree.

The question caught my attention immediately, because the first 60% of Hog’s Head Conversations contain essays which, in one way or another, answer this question, “yes” – primarily the two essays that start the volume: “The Literary Value of the Harry Potter Books,” by Colin Manlove, and “Repotting Harry Potter: Popular Lit Made Legit,” by James W. Thomas.

Rowling’s strengths, according to McEllhenney, are her storytelling (his assessment of this is spot on) and her characters (who, if not very complex, he says, at least “engage our sympathy” and “are vividly drawn.”)

Her weaknesses are her “prose style” and the oldness of her themes and insights. The first I won’t touch here; we’ve discussed it before, and you can feel free to pick it up in the comments if you’d like. The second baffles me.

Nothing new about the themes? What makes something great literature is not the same thing that makes something a great dissertation or article in an academic journal. “Newness” has got nothing to do with it. In fact, Great Books evoke the great old themes of humanity, not anything “new.” We’re talking about “ancient human desires” (Tolkien) like love’s victory over death here.

Further, I’d disagree that her “insights” into those themes are “nothing new.” She’s managed to communicate these old themes to a whole new generation of readers who’d never pick up Homer or Dante; it’s old themes in a new story. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s first aphorism in Aids to Reflection begins:

In Philosophy equally as in Poetry, it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.

I think Rowling accomplished this, and I think it puts her in the “great” category.

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THH’s readers are a smart set — well informed and willing to stretch their imaginations.  I’ve always imagined that we come from a tremendously wide variety of ages, backgrounds, philosophies and worldviews.  I’ve also figured, in the last few days, that many of us have at least been distantly aware of the turmoil in Iran.  It is not my intention to get political here, and please do not take this post as such.

But, I sometimes find myself reminded of the power of a word, description, or scene.  It’s easy to read a scene like Harry’s walk in the woods with his family to what he knows will be his death, and understand that he has accepted it.  But, an honest mea culpa: as much as I love literature, it’s sometimes easy for moments like these to remain somehow abstract in my mind.  Again, I understand so well what that scene is after.  But, I always tell my students that the true power of literature is its ability to make the reader feel what it’s after. 

Harry’s scene near the end of Deathly Hallows took on a whole new light for me yesterday when I stumbled into this passage via Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish:

I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow.  Maybe they will turn violent.  Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed.  I’m listening to all my favorite music.  I even want to dance to a few songs.  I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows.  Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see.  I should drop by the library, too.  It’s worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again.  All family pictures have to be reviewed, too.  I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye.  All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them.  I’m two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that.  My mind is very chaotic.  I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure.  So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them.  So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism.  This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children…

It’s an anonymous passage from an Iranian blogger prepping to confront the trials happening today in his country.  Reading it even now, I find a lump in my throat and I’m pushing back a few tears.  And reading past my initial shock and trauma yesterday, I couldn’t help but think of Harry’s walk. The conscious decision to very possibly and knowingly walk into the face of death became extremely concrete to me.  The description of simple, mundane parts of this person’s world, their importance to him or her, the 7 words stretching the note’s reach into the future…

I wanted to share this, not for some sort of activist reason, but as a reminder (if only to me) of the real nature of what I teach my students.  As much as we analyze (especially me — it’s what I’m trained to do) and put together what we think, I often wonder if we should be asking “What do we feel?”  Both good and bad…  The real reason I want to read something like Harry Potter is because of its ability to make me reimagine my world and my place in it.  As different as so many of us are, literature and deep, respectful desire to understand one another is what has brought us to this place, as ethereal as it is.  And I’m so happy we have that ability.

And on a final note…  Amidst all the human tragedy spilling through Iran at this moment, I sincerely and deeply hope this person gets another day with his or her family — and many more after it.

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BBC’s special, The Narnia Code, which is about Michael Ward’s excellent work, Planet Narnia, is available online for another 6 days!  I plan to watch it sometime this weekend.  Don’t miss the opportunity!

Johnny did an interview with Michael Ward for The Hog’s Head just prior to the release of the Prince Caspian movie.

Find Michael Ward at his website.

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