Happy Harry Potter Day

I was jet lagged about five years ago and I read a couple of the Harry Potter books. So in me talking about them now, you're not dealing with someone who is versed, or in fact, knows what they're talking about to any degree at all. There are several Harry Potter fans among the Ladies. Visitors to the City, who, in their search for healthy flapjacks or the meaning of life or spiritual solace, find this blog shouldn't be disheartened; the others aren't as Philistine as me. (I'm serious, by the way; check our sitemeter. The only people, apart from the Ladies and our friends, who read the blog are those asking Google why God has forsaken them (the fact that they end up here is the proof that Google is a false prophet; I can only assume the confusion arises amongst those with poor spelling*) and those trying to eat better.)

The most usual criticism is that Harry Potter is derivative. Most narratives adopt narrative motifs from somewhere else because cultures develop a cultural vocabulary of narratives. Its only really within the context of that vocabulary that any narrative we construct can make sense. In that sense you would have to say that the final episode of the first series of David Tennant Doctor who was very derivative of the Gospels. (Actually, in fairness, that wasn't just the sharing of narrative motifs. It was really intertext, what with identification of the Void with Hell, and the scene where he re-appears after the crossing from one world to another and says 'Noli me tangere'... I mean, 'Don't touch me'. In that case, the narrative motifs are being used for the same reason that they always are; that the writer is trying to express something present in narratives that share that motif.**) What strikes me as interesting about the 'narrative motifs' used in Harry Potter is that they are historically specific scenes from everyday life which mean nothing now and yet are being treated as signifiers of genre. These scenes designate, not setting, but rather that we are dealing with a magical version of our own world. I think its interesting in terms of our relationship with the past, if nothing else.

*No one got my West Australian Football League pun or, at least - more accurately - no one liked it. Could someone make the effort, if nothing else, with a bit of token laughter on this one?
** The 'Noli me tangere' scene is one of my all-time favourite narrative motifs and it turns up all over the place; its not particular to the Gospels.