The Literary Construction of Harry Potter in Page and Screen-Based ...

Invited Open Lecture at University of Sydney April 2002
The Literary Construction of Harry Potter in Page and Screen-Based Formats
Associate Professor Rosemary Johnston
University of Technology Sydney
The success of Harry Potter the book – and I am referring here to the first book, Harry Potter
and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone – is unquestioned. The success of Harry Potter the
film – despite huge box office excitement at its release, and despite its undoubted production
excellence – has been problematical. This reflects I think not so much on the film itself, but
rather on the nature of the imaginative transaction that the book provoked, even in children
who were previously not ‘readers.’ The evidence is there – from teachers, parents and
librarians – that this book and its three sequels has had enormous popularity with children
from six or seven up to early teenagers; it has also enjoyed considerable popularity with
adults and parents. Its subject matter attracted some controversy from some fundamentalist
church groups and their schools but was generally accepted by most mainstream churches as
being in the same magical spirit as the Wizard of Oz (with its good and bad witches and
irascible wizard) and, at the other end of the creative spectrum, Macbeth, with its evil
witchery of fortune-tellers and pot-stirrers.
The film of the book was much anticipated and there was considerable publicity about how
the book’s author, J. K. Rowling, was overseeing the production, insisting on artistic veracity
and fidelity to the original text. The film was shot in England – some at Alswick Castle – and
it features wonderful landscapes that are richly, unashamedly, Anglo-opulent. Its director was
an American – Chris Columbus – but its stars are of the British acting aristocracy: Maggie
Smith, Richard Harris, John Cleese, Robbie Coltrane, just to name a few. Large amounts of
money were spent in order to create the film’s special effects; there is an extensive list of
credits for graphics, animal constructions and so on, including one for Jim Henson’s Creative
Shop, which created the Troll. Well-known paintings from the National Portrait Gallery are
featured and the Gallery is listed in the credits. The amazing Quidditch game, with Henry
winning by catching the Golden Snitch in his mouth, itself cost a fortune to reproduce.
It is interesting, is it not, that so many resources were needed in order to create a film story
that as a highly successful book story consisted of no more than black marks on a white page?
That it took the efforts and complex endeavours of so many talented people to retell the story
of the book in the visual format of film?
And – the film for all its excellence, and rather unfairly, generally failed to inspire. After the
initial burst of box office activity it seemed to sink rather quickly. It was nominated in the
Oscars for the categories of Achievement in Set Decoration, Achievement in Costume
Design, and Achievement in Music (Original Score), but was not nominated for any of the
major awards, and, as we speak, is only showing once a day – at 10.30 am - to very poor
audiences at one large city cinema (I know, I was there on Saturday). The video is about to be
released but such is the secrecy – it’s not clear about what, as we have all seen the film – that
not even reviewers have been sent a copy, and my many phone calls to Warner Home Videos
were met with indifference at best, disdain at worse (calls were not even returned).
That the film failed to ignite longer term impact is a little strange, especially considering the
professional excellence of its production. Young viewers loved it, mostly admiring its
faithfulness to the book. Generally they seemed to enjoy being able to recognise and predict
and to look forward to their favorite bit (although a few noticed and bemoaned changes).
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Fidelity to the original text was Rowling’s promise to her young public, and all concerned
have worked hard to achieve this artistic fidelity.
It would be easy to say, as one reviewer does, that the film is imitative but not imaginative
(Metro, Sydney Morning Herald April). To a degree, that is true. But it is also dismissive. It is
more useful to use this as an opportunity to consider and extrapolate a more profound idea
about:
1)
film story as a retelling of book story
2)
the nature of reading and the nature of viewing
3)
the construction of ‘seeability’ and the construction of visuality. That the film did not
have, comparatively – and I stress that word comparatively, because it has made a lot
of money – the same continuing interest as the book does not have so much to do
with the film itself as with the nature of the reading process. This therefore offers a
very interesting case study for considering that process. Were the film a flop, with
bad acting and direction, it would not help this discussion.
My aim is not to decry film, or films made from books - I love reading, and I love the movies;
my father was a film director. Some books become better films than they were books. You
may not all agree, but a ready example for me is The Shipping News – this was a book that I
knew I should like but never did, until I saw the wonderful film, starring Kevin Spacey and
Judi Dench, with its truly imaginative and creative interpretation of both Newfoundland
landscape and Quoyle mindscape. This concept of mindscape is one that I will pursue a little
later.
I want to begin with some general remarks about Harry Potter the book – the page-based text.
This was an unusual book and a risky one. Publishers will deny this but they had been
progressively dumbing down books for the average child reader; while there are some
excellent more sophisticated texts, most books were becoming short, with increasingly short
sentences, short paragraphs, big print, and short chapters. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s
Stone was not a short book and the subsequent books have been long, with Harry Potter and
the Goblet of Fire (2000) a massive 636 pages.
Some of the reasons for the book’s success are as follows.
First, Harry Potter is a very clever generic hybrid. One of these genres is obviously an
English school story – a familiar but somewhat old-fashioned genre – and Hogwarts is very
much an idealised and fantasised Malory Towers, St Winifreds, St Catherines, St Barts, St
Dominics, Greyfriars, and so on.
Second, in the construction of story there are elements of other popular writers: Blyton
(children outwitting adults, children operating for much of the time without adults, lots of
eating), Dahl (grotesque adult figures, snot and other unmentionables), and C. S.Lewis
(finding other worlds not through wardrobe doors but through Platform Nine and Three
Quarters). There is also a Tolkienesque concern with the fight between good and evil, light
and dark powers, although this is not developed into any sort of a coherent conception of
another realm. Unlike Middle Earth, Hogwarts operates in juxtaposition with Muggledom.
There are other generic relationships as well. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is
clearly a fantasy, a fantasy that juggles two worlds – the Muggle world and the Hogwarts
world of wizardry and magic. The fantasy world operates as a secondary world heterocosm,
and primary and secondary worlds are clearly delineated and established.
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It is also a detective novel: A crime has been committed (the murder of Harry’s parents), and
the book seeks to solve the mystery: who is the crook? What are the clues? who is the killer’s
accomplice?
The book features a local struggle for good against evil. In the search for the philosopher’s
stone, with its explicit relationships to elixirs of immortality, power and wealth, there are
overtones – heightened in the film by the musical score – of Indiana Jones on his various
crusades searching for lost arks and Holy Grails, as well as of the classical myths of King
Midas of the Golden Touch, the goose that laid the golden egg and Jack and the Beanstalk, for
example.
However, the most significant generic relationship is to the fairy story, the story of the
weakest and smallest, the person most put-upon, the person trapped in an unhappy situation
with little or no agency. Fairy tales tell of their making good and rising to fame, wealth and
glory, defeating and overcoming large and frightening figures along the way. Harry Potter
and the Philosopher’s Stone is a Cinderella story. Harry in his spidery cupboard under the
stairs is Cinderella, Dudley is an ugly sister/ugly cousin. The Dursley parents are the
archetypal wicked stepmother/father/carer figures. Hagrid is the fairy godmother/helper (as
well as the older, flawed hero). The Hogwarts Express is another version of the golden coach;
the station from which it departs can only be found by those in the know and with the courage
to go against what their senses tell them. The train transports Harry from the Muggle world
where he is of little import to the world of school where he is very important indeed. Harry
escapes from his situation through the discovery of magical powers; he wins fame and
acclaim not by marrying the princess (although that may still happen!) but by realising
previously unsuspected skills and talents – as a magician, as the boy who lived (somehow
defeating even the terrible powers of the evil Voldermort), and as the best Gryffindor seeker
in the century in the House Quidditch game.
In narrative terms the book is structured around an odyssey – a search for personal identity,
the deracinated orphan’s search for family and roots. The ‘deepest, most desperate desire’
(p.157) of Harry’s heart, as reflected in the Mirror of Esired, is to see himself with his family:
Harry was so close to the mirror now that his nose was nearly touching that of his
reflection.
‘Mum?’ he whispered. ‘Dad?’
They just looked at him, smiling. And slowly, Harry looked into the faces of the
other people in the mirror and saw other pairs of green eyes like his, other noses like
his, even a little old man who looked as though he had Harry’s knobbly knees –
Harry was looking at his family, for the first time in his life.
The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at him, his hands
pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and
reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness.
The book is also, somewhat surprisingly, a social commentary. Consumerism, parenting, and
British customs are ironically and humorously sent up. The early incident about the birthday
presents does not just reflect on Dudley’s greed but on the Dursley’s extravagance and lack of
parental wisdom, and on a material society’s conditioning towards outdo-ism. The description
of Dudley – a little uncomfortable in the emphasis on fatness - evokes Anthony Browne’s
Piggybook, and Vernon Dursley relates in an intertextual hypertext to the father in Browne’s
Zoo; Petunia is reminiscent of the socially-conscious mother in Voices in the Park.
Harry was frying eggs by the time Dudley arrived in the kitchen with his mother.
Dudley looked a lot like Uncle Vernon. He had a thick, pink face, not much neck,
small, watery blue eyes and thick blond hair that lay smoothly on his thick, fat head.
Aunt Petunia often said that Dudley looked like a baby angel – Harry often said that
Dudley looked like a pig in a wig
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Harry put the plates of egg and bacon on the table, which was difficult as there
wasn’t much room. Dudley, meanwhile, was counting his presents. His face fell.
‘Thirty-six,’ he said, looking up at his mother and father. ‘That’s two less than last
year.’
‘Darling, you haven’t counted Auntie Maggie’s present, see, it’s here under this big
one from Mummy and Daddy.’
‘All right, thirty-seven then,’ said Dudley, going red in the face. Harry, who could
see a big Dudley tantrum coming on, began wolfing down his bacon as fast as
possible in case Dudley turned the table over.
Aunt Petunia obviously scented danger too, because she said quickly, ‘And we’ll buy
you another two presents while we’re out today. How’s that, popkin? Is that all
right?’
Dudley thought for a moment. It looked like hard work. Finally he said slowly, ‘So
I’ll have thirty … thirty …’
‘Thirty-nine, sweetums,’ said Aunt Petunia.
‘Oh.’ Dudley sat down heavily and grabbed the nearest parcel. ‘All right then.’
Uncle Vernon chuckled.
‘Little tyke wants his money’s worthy, just like his father. ’Atta boy, Dudley!’ He
ruffled Dudley’s hair.
The comparison of the descriptions of school outfits for the two boys is also socioculturally
revealing; Dudley’s preparations for his new school Smeltings – part of a long British
tradition - are set up for ironic contrast with Harry’s uniform needs for Hogwarts. Dudley’s
uniform and stick are socially approved; Harry’s uniform and stick (wand) are not, but both
are equally ridiculous:
One day in July Aunt Petunia took Dudley to London to buy his Smeltings uniform,
leaving Harry at Mrs Figg’s …
That evening, Dudley paraded around the living-room for the family in his brand-
new uniform. Smeltings boys wore maroon tailcoats, orange knickerbockers and flat
straw hats called boaters. They also carried knobbly sticks, used for hitting each other
while the teachers weren’t looking. This was supposed to be good training for later
life.
As he looked at Dudley in his new knickerbockers, Uncle Vernon said gruffly that it
was the proudest moment of his life. Aunt Petunia burst into tears and said she
couldn’t believe it was her Ickle Dudleykins, he looked so handsome and grown-up.
Harry didn’t trust himself to speak. He thought two of his ribs might already have
cracked from trying not to laugh. (pp. 28-29)
And
HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY
Uniform
First year students will require:
1. Three sets of plain robes
2. One plain pointed hat (black) for day wear
3. One pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar)
4. One winter cloak (black, silver fastenings)
Please note that all pupils’ clothes should carry name tags.
Under ‘Other Equipment’ is listed ‘1 wand.’ (pp.52-53)
In Harry Potter the film, Dudley is seen in his uniform, and these descriptions do not appear.
Indeed, one of the main differences between book and film is that the social commentary is
less obvious, and indeed not present, in the latter. Despite the enormous expenditure and
grand production, this layer of the book – which locates it among contested contemporary
concerns – is missing.
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There are other things missing as well. The book is intertextually dense, with the familiar
literary pattern of important happenings being foreshadowed by unnatural events: ‘strange
and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country’ (p7). These strange
events – reflecting an Elizabethan type macrocosm portending important events in the
microcosm - include numbers of owls, a cat reading a map, and ‘people in cloaks.’ The film
begins with these supernatural events – before the titles, the camera focuses on the address of
‘Privet Drive’ but then moves directly into a mysterious misty supernatural, with Dumbledore
and his ‘Put-Outer’ and his colleague Minerva McGonagall shape shifting from cat to
professor. The book on the other hand begins in overt ordinariness and the very ordinary
world of the Dursleys from the opening paragraph:
Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were
perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be
involved in anything strange and mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such
nonsense.
In Bakhtinian terms, this paragraph establishes a very interesting chronotope (time-space, that
is, the relationship of time and space on the one hand to people and event on the other). The
space component of the chronotope is ironically and conventionally English suburban, the
time component is contemporary but not precise; there is an old world, old fashioned feel to
the beginning of the story. This underlays description with a sense of irony that is
compounded by the voice of the narrator and the use of the second person – ‘they were the
last people you’d expect … ’ etc. Immediately, there is an introduction to a construction of
story and of an implied reader who is being taken under the wing (or cloak) of a
knowledgeable narrator: ‘When Mr and Mrs Dursley woke up on the dull, grey Tuesday our
story starts …’ (p.7). This also establishes a secure position for a reader who is in the know,
and who already resists the Dursley point of view and expects it to be wrong, despite the fact
that at various times in the first few pages the events are focalised through Mr Dursley’s eyes
and thoughts:
The Dursleys got into bed. Mrs Dursley fell asleep quickly but Mr Dursley lay
awake, turning it all over in his mind. His last, comforting, thought before he fell
asleep was that even if the Potters were involved, there was no reason for them to
come near him and Mrs Dursley. The Potters knew very well what he and Petunia
thought about them and their kind … He couldn’t see how he and Petunia could get
mixed up in anything that might be going on. He yawned and turned over. It couldn’t
affect them.
How very wrong he was!
One of the most productive ways of considering Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, as
page text and screen text, is through this Bakhtinian hermeneutic. There is a different
construction of time and space/people and event on page and on screen. The swirl of
supernatural time around the film’s opening – the space of Privet Drive as immediately
unordinary – sets the scene for a storybook but modern Mary Poppins type world, with the
cloaked figures of the teacher-magicians adding to the sense of fantasy and unbounded time.
On the other hand, the chronotope of the book’s opening accentuates the ordinariness of
Privet Drive, and then gradually introduces the extraordinary. This different emphasis is
significant because it allows Rowling to stress the importance of imagination as part of
everyday worlds as well as the Dursleys’ lack of it: Mr Dursley ‘didn’t approve of
imagination’ (p.8).
The chronotope is an important critical tool, helping us to read beyond the mechanics of
‘setting’ and to understand the ‘living impulse’ that emerges from the ‘thickening’ of time as
it ‘takes on flesh’ and fuses with space (1986, p. 84). The chronotope of the film of Harry
Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is supernatural, with the everyday world, mostly
represented by the Dursleys, around the edges. The chronotope of the book reveals the
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fantastic potential of the everyday. Dahl creates a dark vision of the everyday; Blyton
explains everything and maintains the everyday world as a firm moral centre. Rowling
exploits the everyday, infusing it with ironic stereotypes of characters and events. The
fantastic adventure is there in the middle of the everyday, and you can break through into it as
you break through the seeming brick wall to Platform Nine and Three Quarters.
In both book and film, but particularly in the film, there is a sense of going back in time in the
other world: Diagon Alley in the screen-based format is populated with the Londoners of
Dickens’ time. The use of quills and ink and candles at Hogwarts transposes the school into a
fantasy time; the relationship of time and space to people and events shifts from the
constraints of chronological reality to a fantasy chronotope that is both past and present. In
the film this is compounded by the pupils of Hogwarts wearing both academic robes (rather
than the capes of the book) and striped football-type scarves representing the colours of their
houses (Gryffindor is scarlet and gold in the book, it looks more maroon and yellow in the
film). In passing, there is a touch of Americanism in the way the students address their
teachers as Professor – as far as I know, this is not a common form of address of teachers in
English public schools.
So, two differences between text and screen emerge – one is the lack of explicit social
commentary in the film, and the second is that the film begins with the supernatural and
mysterious whereas the novel establishes the ultraconventional suburban world of the
Dursleys and reports the initial unusual events through their perspectives. It is worth
emphasising that reader positioning and focalisation inform the construction of the narrator as
omniscient but embracing of a ‘you’ who is taken as being knowledgeable, imaginative, and
most important of all, not a muggle – ‘A fine thing it would be if … the Muggles found out
about us all,’ says Professor McGonagall (p.13). This reader is treated as intelligent and
knowledgeable – superior to the clearly-unimaginative, unlikable Dursleys. Such a reader has
been given the upper hand from a very early stage of the narrative and is motivated to read on.
The book also introduces the idea of Muggles and Muggledom in a more comprehensive and
comprehendible way than the film. The obvious play on words – the English slang term of a
mug as simple and gullible, and a muggins as a person who is easily outwitted – helps to
make the word signify what Rowling wants it to. All the plays on words are much more
obvious in the book than in the film; these include Dedalus Diggle who ‘never had much
sense’ and who was probably responsible for shooting stars in Kent (p.130), pulling in the
story of Dedalus and Icarus; and ‘Little Whinging’, the suburb where the Durleys live.
Professor McGonagall is named as Minerva in the book but I don’t remember her being called
that in the film: Minerva of course was the Roman goddess of wisdom (the Greek equivalent
was Athene). Harry’s house, Gryffindor, plays with ideas of the fabulous creature, the griffin,
with eagle head and wings and lion’s body. The book refers to other mythic creatures such as
centaurs (from Greek myth, with the head, arms and torso of a man but the body and legs of a
horse) and unicorns (the creatures often represented in heraldry, with the body of a horse and
a single straight horn that was believed to have magic or medicinal purposes). The film
represents these creatures very well indeed, but without seeing the name in print they may
appear to some children as purely fantastic, without their long literary association. The
centaur I don’t think is named.
I mentioned earlier the idea of mindscape. The book is a more interior medium, and allows
readers to become part of Harry’s expanding mindscape and spirit; the film concentrates more
on the exterior/external excitement of the actual adventures. The camera does linger on
Harry’s face occasionally, implying his thoughts and responses, but on the whole there is
much less introspection. In the book, Harry’s mind seems to have a life of its own:
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Harry had a lot of trouble keeping his mind on his lessons that day. It kept wandering
up to the dormitory where his new broomstick was lying under his bed, or straying
off to the Quidditch patch where he’d be learning to play that night. (p.123)
The page-based format that is read allows Harry’s thoughts and feeling to become ‘seeable.’
Discussing the nineteenth century writer on aesthetics, Konrad Fiedler, Cassirer talks about a
concept of ‘seeability’ as part of the activity of artistic production: language and art raise
consciousness as the discursive thinking of language and ‘the “intuitive” activity of artistic
seeing and creating interact so as together to weave the cloak of “reality”’ (Cassirer 1996,
pp.83-84). The book establishes a world that is implicitly part of a larger world ‘surrounding
the text’ (Ricoeur), and represents a version of the world ‘contracted to a comprehensive
grasp’ (Merleau Ponty), offering the reading child a creative role of knowingness:
The ontological world and body which we find at the core of the subject are not the
world or body as idea, but on the one hand the world itself contracted into a
comprehensive grasp, and on the other the body itself as a knowing-body’ (Merleau-
Ponty 1962, p.408).
Bakhtinian theory stresses creativity and the role of creativity in reading:
‘[W]e may call this the world that creates the text, for all its aspects – the reality
reflected in the text, the authors creating the text, the performers of the text … and
finally the listeners or readers who recreate and in so doing renew the text –
participate equally in the creation of the represented world in the text … (1981,
p.254)
Part of this creativity relates to unfinalizability (nezavershennost) and what Bakhtin calls
‘open messiness’, both significant ideas for children’s books, and for what is clearly going to
become a series. The main plot is resolved but the secondary plot – that of Harry’s family and
having to go back home to the Dursleys - is not. It is interesting that one of the places where
screen and page formats diverge is in the final scenes. In the book, Harry completed his
exams, packed up with the others, was taken back across the lake by Hagrid, boarded the
Hogwarts Express, and arrived at the platform where they all ‘moved forwards towards the
gateway back to the Muggle world’ (p.223), and where Harry is met by the Dursleys. The film
ends with Hagrid putting him on the train, and with Harry’s words:
‘I’m not going home. Not really.’
The implication is obvious – for Harry, Hogwarts is home. In the book, the issue of home and
family is less resolved:
‘You must be Harry’s Family!’ said Mrs Weasley.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Uncle Vernon. ‘Hurry up, boy, we haven’t got all
day.’ He walked away. (p.223)
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard notes that the house/home image ‘shelters
daydreaming … protects the dreamer … allows one to dream in peace (1964, p.6). This is
clearly not Harry’s experience. Jack Zipes writes:
Meaning cannot be achieved by a human being alone. The dependence on other
beings must be acknowledged if the individual is to raise himself up and stride
forward in an upright position towards home, which as we know, is the beginning of
history, a realm without alienating conditions.’ (1979, p.148)
The film plays with images of home in a way that the book does not. We see Privet Drive as a
row of houses which are implied but not described in the book, we see Hagrid’s home and
Hagrid at home, we hear about Norbert finding a home. Children’s books of course have a
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long tradition of orphan children finding homes: Harry, growing towards adolescence, has
still to go through the process that Kristeva notes as initiating ‘a psychic reorganisation of the
individual’ (1990, p. 8), and has yet to find home. The impulse that reaches beyond the word
– Bakhtin’s idea of napravlennost – in relation to ‘home’ is reaching more towards explicit
closure in the film, more towards a sense of unfinalised challenge and difficulty in the book.
Another area of interest is the treatment of existential issues. Death is part of the book –
Harry’s parents have been killed by evil forces, those same forces want to kill Harry. In true
fairytale tradition, there is fear in the unmentionable name of Voldermort (‘You-Know-
Who’). Marina Warner writes that fear gives an aesthetic thrill, makes menace bearable ‘by
strengthening the sense of being alive.’ Hellish themes and stories help adults and children
alike to:
‘stare at the possibility of their non-being, at death itself, but … then discover that
they are alive, outside the tale.’ (1998, p.6).
The book is more explicit than the film here; some of Dumbledore’s statements about death do
not appear in the film (as I remember):
‘After all, to the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure.’ (p.215)
The richness of the page text reflects language that is dialogical, heteroglossic and
polyphonic, intonated with hypertextual links, histories and geographies (of Hogwarts), word
plays and shifts and plays on meaning. The time-space encoding of both texts is complex; the
film emphasises the time shift of the time-space chronotope and the book the space shift of the
time-space chronotope – there is always in the book a sense of the accompanying parallel
world of the Muggles, which is not so significant in the film. There is more of a sense of
Muggle as Other in the book than there is in the screen text. There is also in the book –
because of the emphasis on the written word – more of a sense of folkloric time – a time that
is unbounded by personal experience; the film has a much greater temporal immediacy.
Folkloric time is related to what Bakhtin calls Great Time – the perspectives of centuries
(1986, pp. 1-9, p.84); it is a ‘fullness of time’ (1986, p.42) beyond the personal. This idea of
‘Great Time’ is very much a part of Tolkien’s masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, which as
both film and book is frequently compared with Harry Potter. I think that part of the success
of The Lord of the Rings as film is that it has opened up and made accessible a text that many
found difficult and from which they previously felt marginalised and excluded. The deep
structure of The Lord of the Rings is not a parallel world, like Hogwarts and the Muggle
world, but a mythical realm in which the desperate dreams of humanity are played out as an
archetypal (not local) struggle between good and evil.
In both film and book versions of Harry Potter, the Bakhtinian idea of carnival and the
carnivalesque is apparent. There are huge feasts – on the train, in the Great Hall of Hogwarts
– of lollies and sweets and other unhealthy foods, and there is much emphasis on bodily
excretions and toilet humour – snot, boogeys, lavatory seats etc. Bakhtin notes that the
laughter of carnival liberates and sets free; he also makes the point that the carnivalesque
equalises. Nearly Headless Nick is a carnival character.
In conclusion and summary, there are many ways in which a comparison between the page
and text based formats and the great success of the Harry Potter book help us to understand
something about the reading process, about successful books, and about the differences of
tellings and retellings in book and film:
1)
Reconstructing a successful book into screen-based format, with an artistic and moral
brief to remain faithful to a popular text, illustrates the sheer intellectual intricacy,
miraculousness and creativity of the reading process. One reader, meeting the words
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of o n e
writer
(a
series
of
black
marks
on
a
page),
constructs/reconstructs/negotiates/imagines/creates, narrative event, character,
appearance, sound of voice, intonation, time and space, a sense of ‘beforeness’, ‘the
being-in-the-world proposed by the text’ (Ricoeur) as well as the world that is
glimpsed around the edges, or implied beyond the text (see Johnston 1998). The
hospital scene at the end of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone reads as
follows:
Harry swallowed and looked about him. He realised he must be in the hospital wing.
He was lying in a bed with white linen sheets and next to him was a table piled high
with what looked like half the sweet shop.’ (p.214)
To recreate this scene on film, there is a stone walled room with a door, windows to a
world outside, a hospital bed – with the sheets mentioned in the text - and various
other pieces of furniture, famous nursing portraits on the wall (which come to life as
the scene progresses), light and movement coming in from the unseen world outside,
a Matron in an old fashioned nursing outfit evoking various impressions of care such
as Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War, the table/trolley with the pile of
sweets, music, and three actors (the Matron, Harry and Dumbledore). This mise-en-
scene (everything placed in front of the cameras) is physically constructed to be
faithful to what the reader has constructed as mindscape in the short paragraph read
above. Reading is a cryptic process of imaginative metonymy, intellectual leaps,
releasing of data compression, interpretive figuring and refiguring: a
phenomenological montage beyond the visual, beyond the aural, beyond the sensual.
2)
Rowling enfolds her reader into a privileged position of knowingness. Her text
implies an addressee who is clever, perceptive, imaginative and ‘unmuggley’, and on
side with the narrator. She does not rely on a wiser adult to interpret the story (as C.
S. Lewis sometimes does) and does not address that adult. Her child reader is what
Bakhtin referred to in his concept of the ‘higher’ superaddressee who is part of the
organising structure of any text. This superaddressee is ‘a constitutive aspect of the
whole utterance’, whose ‘absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed ’
(1986, p.126). The superaddressee of Harry Potter is the child/reader who will
understand Harry, intimately share his adventures, and resist Muggledom. If we
extrapolate the idea to the viewer of the film, I think that we arrive at a rather
different superaddressee. Here camera angles and perspectives position viewers in a
position of dominant and aesthetic specularity. The producers want the film to look
good. The sustained use of overhead aerial shots in the film – crossing the lake to
Hogwarts, in the Great Hall, in the first broomstick riding lesson with Madam Gooch,
in the beginning of the Quidditch game and so on – is very effective in terms of
aesthetics and cinematography aesthetics, but creates a superaddressee who while
admiring is more detached, more of an observer/viewer, less an intimate
reader/participant. Words are read by the superaddressee in the page-based format
and heard in the screen-based format, where they are intonated and interpreted by
wonderful actors. One example when I think the dramatic interpretation has more
impact is when Richard Harris as Dumbledore is awarding the additional points that
make Gryffindor win the House Cup. It is also interesting to note the reasons for the
extra points: ‘the use of cool logic in the face of fire,’ ‘for pure nerve and outstanding
courage’, and, lastly:
There are all kinds of courage,’ said Dumbledore, smiling. ‘It takes a great deal of
bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. I
therefore award ten points to Mr Neville Longbottom.’ (p.221)
A/Professor Rosemary Johnston, Director CREA, UTS, The literary construction of Harry Potter
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The implied viewer is more passive than the implied reader. The nature of reading is
intensely creative and personal. The nature of viewing is more corporate and
communal.
3)
Being truthful to the text engages the pleasures of anticipation and predictability
(very important for children) but not of surprise. As Kermode has noted, we use art to
impose order on the chaos of existence (1996, p.46). In the Harry Potter book, this art
is a storytelling art, a what-comes-nextism, a flow of narrative, a celebration of
shared and creative imaginative freedoms. In the film, it is an aesthetic, visual art, a
wonderfully decorated story. It is also an aural art – with voices and sounds and
music. The non-diegetic (coming form a source beyond the narrative) music score
plays a significant role in giving cues to tension, complication and climax. The book
is highly successful and the film is excellently and beautifully produced. The film’s
strength is also its weakness: it falters is in the lack of tension (because we know the
story, and that Quirrell not Snape is the baddie), but this is also where it is strong –
prediction and anticipation are powerful types of enjoyment. The film, which has to
be swallowed in one bite, is also I think too long.
4)
The chronotope (time-space) is different in the book and the film: the book sets the
extraordinary in the ordinary, the film runs with the extraordinary. Time is fluid and
continuous, past and present entwined in layers, the ghosts from other centuries
drifting in and out.
5)
The ironic overlays and social commentaries that are one of the strengths of the book
do not make it into film.
6)
The book is less finalised than the film.
7)
The visuality of film highlights the spirit of carnival and the carnivalesque: food, tuck
shops, midnight feasts, quidditch as a type of medieval joust. The emphasis on bodily
excretions – snot, dribble, boogeys – is also carnivalesque.
8)
Intertextual links, including the Forbidden (Dark) Forest, create a subliminal literary
hypertextuality in the book, a visual hypertextuality in the film.
9)
Reading is concerned with the construction of seeability, is subliminal in its creation
of inner mindscapes, more concerned with inner vision and inner voices.
10)
Film is concerned with the construction of visuality, a more liminal construction of
mindscape, more concerned with outer vision and outer voices.
So – two different media texts, one story. A good story – children excited by reading. Not
Tolkien, no. Not Blyton either. Rowling has succeeded because she respects her readers, and
we as critics, academics, researchers and parents, need to do that also.
References
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, transl. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin.
Bakhtin, M. M. 1986, Speech Genres and other Late Essays, Introduction by Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas.
Browne, .A. 1992, Zoo, Red Fox, London.
Cassirer, E. 1996, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Johnston, R. R. 1998. ‘Thisness and Everydayness in Children’s Literature: the ‘being-in-the-world
proposed by the text.’ Papers 8:1, pp.25-35.
Johnston, R. R. 2001, in Winch, G., Johnston, R. R., Holliday, M., Ljungdahl, L. and March, P.,
Literacy: Reading, Writing and Children’s Literature, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.
A/Professor Rosemary Johnston, Director CREA, UTS, The literary construction of Harry Potter
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