6th
John Granger’s developing argument for how Harry Potter is an extended morality play on the journey through life of Christ as Everyman:
“The books themselves – which include paintings opened by a secret word or knowing touch to a greater, concealed world within, offer repeated examples of an “inside being greater than its outside,” 2 and eyes with more and less penetrating insight or vision3—indicate that they work on levels beneath the surface narrative. The tradition in which Ms. Rowling writes, too, requires attentive reading. It is the Romantic, subversive tradition of symbolist literature beginning with Chaucer, Dante, and Shakespeare, which is to say, the Medieval imagination as understood by Blake, Coleridge, and Ruskin and furthered by 19th and 20th Century satirists and fantasy writers, to include MacDonald, Orwell, Chesterton, Sayers, Goudge, Lewis, and Tolkien. In reading Ms. Rowling as a writer of this tradition, I have tried to follow the examples of D.W. Robertson’s work on Chaucer, Northrop Frye reading Spencer, John Ruskin on landscape painting, Coleridge’s“ transforming vision” and natural theology, and Dante in his instruction about unveiling his own work…I have argued since 2002 that the symbols or images central to Harry Potter are the trio of Harry, Hermione and Ron as, first, a soul triptych of Spirit, Mind, and Body, and, second, as an alchemical work in progress, with Ron and Hermione acting as alchemical mercury and sulfur and Harry as leaden Philosophical Orphan becoming the Philosopher’s Stone.
