It's been easily more than twenty years since I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone; I didn't exactly hate it but I didn't think I'd read a great book, and I've never felt much compulsion to re-read it. (And I gave up on the series after the fourth book.) But recently I've had the occasional thought about going back to the first "Harry Potter" book, because I'm slightly fascinated with the notion that it functioned like a sort of inadvertent, chaos-magicky spell, one that had lasting consequences—for Rowling acquired the glamour of a Great Writer™, carrying aloft the torch of British letters and the ostensible preëminence of British writers, especially in the genres of fantasy and children's literature. Rowling (so we're told) belongs with Tolkien and Roald Dahl (ugh) and C. S. Lewis (even worse) as a champion of imaginative literature. Her reputation is so many orders of magnitude more impressive than her writing that I myself am perfectly prepared to accept that J. K. Rowling benefits from a bit of supra-natural assistance.
And yet I think it's probable that Rowling herself has no use whatever for magic. I've joked in the past that if you pestered Rowling on her personal opinions about the occult or the supernatural, she'd likely explode: "Stop talking nonsense, there's no such thing as 'magic', you bloody fool!" I could be quite wrong about this, but Rowling strikes me as a thoroughly worldly and cynical person with thoroughly conventional principles. But I think it's possible for a person to be explicit in their rejection of the magical or the preternatural, and declare their adherence to strictly "rational" and positivist ideals, while still clinging to an unstated and unacknowledged, and maybe even unsuspected, wistful and tenuous sort of hope in the existence of miracles and magic, especially when times are tough. "Maybe something will turn up. Stranger things have happened. Maybe tomorrow everything will be different." Such desperate hopes live on in the human imagination, in spite of logic and reason, in defiance of all bold assertions of perfect rationality; a wish for miracles is the kind of secret that people learn to keep even from themselves.
It's well-known that J. K. Rowling was in a miserable place when she started working on Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone; we know this partly because she laundered the story into "inspiration porn". Capitalist media loves the myth that anyone can turn their troubled life around and make billions of dollars if they want it bad enough and work hard enough; Rowling (or her press agents) have been quite willing to tell their own version of this myth. Here's a typical sample, in some rag called "Thrive Global": "J.K. Rowling on How to Deal With Failure in Life and Work". It's propaganda but still there's truth in it: the years during which she was writing her first "Harry Potter" manuscript, roughly 1990 to 1995, were bad ones for Jo Rowling. In particular, her mother Anne died at the end of 1990 after many years of illness and decline, and that proved significant for the development of Harry Potter—for he is himself an orphan, and so Rowling's pain at the loss of her mother became his pain as well.
And there's one other important thing that happened in the wake of Anne Rowling's death: Rowling wrote the climax of the novel. At least, that's what this 2003 article in an apparently defunct online magazine has to reveal (emphasis mine):
J.K. Rowling: After I began to write "Philosopher's Stone," something horrible had happened. My mother died. She was only forty-five. Nine months afterwards, I desperately wanted to get away from everything and took a job in Portugal as an English teacher at a language institute. I took my manuscript with me in hopes of working on it while I was there. My feelings about Harry Potter's parents' death became more real to me, and more emotional.
In my first week in Portugal, I wrote my favorite chapter in "Philosopher's Stone" - The Mirror of Erised. I had hoped that I would've been done with the book by the time I was back from Portugal, but I came back with something better, my daughter, Jessica. The marriage didn't work out, but the best thing I had ever had came into my life.
Rowling had only recently lost her mother when she wrote her self-insert character, Harry Potter who had also lost his mother, miraculously pulling the secret to magical transformation out of a "mirror of desire". Is it too outlandish for me to believe that, in such a mood of writing in defiance of pain and loss, J. K. Rowling furtively hoped that such magic could be real? Things would get worse for her, too; after the loss of her mother she endured years of precarious underemployment, a miscarriage, and a catastrophic marriage to an abusive man, during which time "Philosopher's Stone" remained unfinished; if Wikipedia is to be trusted, she was afraid at one point that she might never finish it. Is it silly to suspect that Rowling, just a little, allowed herself a fugitive hope in true magic—the miraculous renascence of her life and her languishing career, achieved with the help of the alchemists' essence of transformation?
I feel like I had more to write on this subject but I was interrupted multiple times and I've lost the moment. Anyway, I feel curious again about Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Perhaps it's worth revisiting and analyzing.
~Chara of Pnictogen
