{"id":913,"date":"2014-10-02T15:42:30","date_gmt":"2014-10-02T13:42:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=913"},"modified":"2014-10-02T15:42:30","modified_gmt":"2014-10-02T13:42:30","slug":"harry-and-oliver-an-example-of-uncanny-intertextuality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2014\/10\/02\/harry-and-oliver-an-example-of-uncanny-intertextuality\/","title":{"rendered":"HARRY AND OLIVER: AN EXAMPLE OF (UNCANNY) INTERTEXTUALITY <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

This intense Harry Potter<\/em> period of my life seems never to end\u2026 I\u2019m currently teaching Oliver Twist<\/em> to my Victorian Literature class on the usual pretence that they have all read the book and can follow my analysis. Well. Since they need to learn how to write a paper, I explained to them what a conference is and why papers are written, taking the chance to publicise an oncoming event at my own university: a conference on monstrosity (December 2014, Las mil caras del monstruo, http:\/\/visionesdelofantastico2.weebly.com\/<\/a>) to which I have submitted a paper on Voldemort. Now, that caught their attention\u2026 and mine to their alertness. Three students actually waylaid me at the end of my lecture to demand that I teach again the Harry Potter<\/em> elective\u2026 a tall order!<\/p>\n

This is why I decided to use the last 15 minutes of my lecture yesterday to a) present the connections between Oliver Twist<\/em> and the Harry Potter<\/em> series, b) introduce students to the concept of intertextuality (first coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966). In the process I learned that the majority of students in class have read Rowling\u2019s saga (and enough Dickens to follow me, good\u2026). Also, that there must be something uncanny in the links between the two authors and the two characters because a girl student got goosebumps several times as I lectured (her physical reaction was certainly intense).<\/p>\n

So here we go. Intertextuality, a notoriously wide-ranging term, replaces the old-fashioned idea of \u2018influence\u2019. It is, despite the looselessness of its meaning, very useful to discuss how texts keep a dialogue with each other, which can be more or less willed, more or less direct. Some intertextuality is explicit (James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>), some implicit. We can see this for Oliver Twist<\/em> as well: Terry Pratchett wants us to see at first sight that his novel Dodger<\/em> connects with Dickens\u2019s work, Rowling is not particularly interested in establishing a connection but this is visible enough and very strong at some points. Uncannily so.<\/p>\n

Of course, as a student pointed out yesterday, the list which follows might simply be pure coincidence. Or have just dubious value, I\u2019ll add. Precisely, it was my intention to alert students to the fact that intertextuality tends to be extremely subjective, hard to prove persuasively, and always open to criticism.<\/p>\n

Now, consider (sorry about the spoilers):<\/p>\n

*Harry and Oliver are orphans. They both spend a miserable childhood, which includes a stay with unsympathetic pseudo-parents (the Dursleys, the Sowerberrys) with a particularly nasty foster mother. They\u2019re both bullied in this foster home by an older boy (Dudley, Noah).
\n*The trope of the mother\u2019s death is displaced in Harry Potter<\/em> to Tom Riddle\u2019s birth, the difference being that Merope Gaunt lets herself die after giving birth. Both Agnes (Oliver\u2019s mother) and Merope become pregnant by men who keep with them a relationship beset by problems (Oliver\u2019s father actually seduces the poor woman and tricks her into a false wedding, no matter how much he loves her; Merope bewitches Tom Riddle Sr. with a love potion).
\n*Both Oliver and Harry are protected by their dead mother\u2019s blood: Harry literally and also in the person of his unkind aunt Petunia; Oliver by his much kinder aunt Rose Maylie, who saves him from his life of crime and the persecution of the main villains.
\n*Harry and Oliver are roughly the same age (11) when they leave behind their known environment for a new world of which they know nothing: the world of wizarding and the world of crime, respectively. I might argue that Fagin is a wicked version of Dumbledore but I\u2019ll let that be\u2026
\n*Both James Potter (Harry\u2019s father) and Oliver\u2019s father, Edward Leeford Sr., are characters with moral flaws: James used to be a bully at school, as his victim, Snape, reveals; Leeford was quite dishonest about his marital situation with Agnes.<\/p>\n

Here comes my favourite bit: Mr. John Brownlow. This is a rich bachelor gentleman, with a London establishment of his own, and the closest friend of Oliver\u2019s dead father. When after many incidents Rose puts Oliver again in touch with him, Mr. Brownlow ends up offering Oliver a happy home and adopting the boy. The moment I named Sirius Black my students understood that he is Brownlow\u2019s equivalent in the Harry Potter<\/em> saga, with a difference: he dies too soon, too cruelly. Essentially, once he is rescued from Fagin and Sykes\u2019s hands (thanks to Nancy, another Lily Potter sacrificial figure), Oliver has no role in his own story, except that of offering forgiveness. In contrast, Rowling forces his boy to face his arch-enemy alone, once he\u2019s lost his protectors (Sirius but also Dumbledore, Snape). Dickens, always a sentimental man regarding children, would have been horrified at her cruelty. I am.<\/p>\n

Finally, both Oliver and Harry make me wonder about their goodness. Dickens defended himself from criticisms against Oliver\u2019s idealisation claiming that the boy represented a \u2018principle of good\u2019 beset by evil. There is a wonderful scene in which Nancy throws a tantrum, full of rage against Fagin\u2019s physical ill-treatment of the boy; her point is that Oliver will soon become a degraded criminal, there\u2019s no need to add abuse to this. Shortly after this explosion, however, Fagin tells Monks, Oliver\u2019s arch-enemy, that the boy is impossible to train for a life of crime as he has nothing to scare him with. Harry seems, likewise, impervious to the attraction of the dark side, no matter how often Voldemort insists that they\u2019re quite similar. In both cases the reward for this triumphant inner goodness is a happy (middle-class) family life with the difference, as I have noted, that the child Oliver is rescued by others from evil (imagine a nice aunt Petunia helping a stable Sirius raise Harry), whereas Harry must grow up and rescue himself.<\/p>\n

The goosebumps of the girl student and the wand watching my back as I write (Sirius\u2019s of course) suggest to me that other operations apart from rational intertextuality are at stake in this kind of connection. Most likely, I need Jung\u2019s collective unconscious and not Freud\u2019s idea of the uncanny to explain them, though there\u2019s something truly uncanny at work. Brownlow, based on a well-known Victorian philanthropist of the same name (secretary to the Foundlings Hospital Dickens knew so well) suggests that something resonates in us when we read about unprotected children. I firmly believe Freud was too focused on the little and big dramas of the patriarchal nuclear family to note other figures we set much store by, and which, somehow, Brownlow (adoptive father) and Sirius (godfather) embody. Dickens understood this, by the way, much better than Rowling, which is why he paid homage with his fictional character to the man employed in real life to protect abandoned babies.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll keep on thinking about that. You, too.<\/p>\n

Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just remember that I check them for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be available. Follow on Twitter the blog updates: @SaraMartinUAB<\/a>. Visit my web http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/<\/a>
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This intense Harry Potter period of my life seems never to end\u2026 I\u2019m currently teaching Oliver Twist to my Victorian Literature class on the usual pretence that they have all read the book and can follow my analysis. Well. Since they need to learn how to write a paper, I explained to them what a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harry-potter","category-oliver-twist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}