Sorcerer's Stone: Page 210
A deep dive into the narrator of the series (it's Eldred Worple), an aside about "The Great Gatsby," the Hogwarts suits of armor, and — never mind, I'm still stuck on Eldred Worple.
Welcome back! Happy Sunday morning! This week’s issue of the newsletter is a strange one: I got so tied up on one topic that I barely made my way to the rest of the page. But hopefully you’ll enjoy it anyway! It’s a weird topic, but just wait for it — we’ll get there. Enjoy!
Page 210 of Sorcerer’s Stone starts with a fragment that’s annoyingly vague, but that, thanks to my frankly unhealthy levels of recall, I can easily pinpoint. All readers see is:
headed dog was guarding? What did it matter if Snape stole it, really?
We know from context — at least, I know from context — that Harry is in a strange mental place, because his mind is completely consumed by the Mirror of Erised (is that a proper noun? I think so). But what’s notable about this page isn’t the mirror (at least, not yet). What I notice, more than anything else, is the authorial voice that J.K. Rowling is using. We’re hearing Harry’s thoughts, but without being told that we’re hearing Harry’s thoughts. It’s not like when we hear “Harry’s temper flared” or get scenes of his internal monologue with description from the narrator; Harry’s thoughts become the story. This line is pretty much as close as the series gets to first-person narration.
To be clear, it’s not actual first-person writing; there’s still a narrator that’s not Harry. Honestly, maybe this kind of thing happens throughout the books, and I’m just remembering this one instance because I just read it. But I don’t think so. The first book is notable for that: Rowling is still finding her narrative voice, and sometimes, it makes strange maneuvers into territory that become completely impossible in later books once the narrator’s voice is fully established.
Most notably, of course — I say “of course” as if this is something that every child learns on the first day of school; more likely I’m the only person here who remembers it — there’s a moment at the beginning of this book that has always stood out. Remember the description that Rowling gives of the day Uncle Vernon goes to work and sees funny people about, dressed in cloaks, and hears a whisper about the Potters? She writes: “on the dull, gray Tuesday that our story starts.” (emphasis added, obviously).
“Our story,” obviously, implies that there’s someone telling the story. Not in the way that any story has someone telling it because otherwise no one would be able to hear it, but in a much more real, canonical way: the narrator references him/herself within the story. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, mostly because the narrator never does it again after that early page in book one so Rowling probably just opted very early against sticking with that kind of narration and moved on, but it’s still interesting to look at in terms of theorizing. The narrator mentioned “our story,” so clearly there’s a “we” that’s involved in the telling of this story — but who is the listening “we,” and who is the person who’s actually narrating it?
(By the way, this whole thesis is based on a paper that I wrote in college about “The Great Gatsby,” centered around a line early in the book, maybe even from the prologue. Nick is riffing on some nonsense or other, and he says something like “only Gatsby, who lent his name to the title of this book.” That’s really weird, if you look closely, because other than that line, throughout the text there’s no reference to the fact that Nick is writing a book. Usually, first-person narrators in fiction are just presented as main characters, not authors of the work in question. We suspend disbelief and just accept that somehow, the person telling the story just went through it and then told it; they didn’t have to sit down at a computer and find a literary agent and negotiate a book deal and all that. But in Gatsby, we find if we look closely that Nick isn’t just the main character; he’s also a guy who sat down after the events of the novel and actually wrote them all down, and titled it. That, in turn, raises a bunch of questions: is Nick’s account actually true, or is he embellishing because he wants his book to be interesting? To make a long story short, yes he is. After all, he titles the book — which, to him, is non-fiction — “The Great Gatsby,” which is clearly a novelistic title. Anyway, this entire digression has gone on long enough; basically, to make a long story short, the green light is just a green light, and we only think it’s something more significant and symbolic because Nick told us so, because he wants his book to be literary and meaningful. End of digression.)
Anyway, the question — if you remember — was: who is the narrator of the series? To make this fun, let’s say it has to be a character that’s mentioned in the books; it can’t be some retroactive nonsense like “Jolene Krakenwood, investigative reporter at the wizarding alt-weekly The Crystal Ball, who we’ve never heard of before but who has definitely existed the whole time.” It has to be someone fairly skilled at telling stories, because they obviously did a good job at writing the series in an interesting way. And it has to be someone who was either there for everything that happened, or who has enough access to the trio (and especially Harry) that they could conduct exhaustive interviews to get all the tiny details of the story.
In a way, the person has to be a really skillful journalist, because there are a lot of details that can’t have been easy to find. For instance, the scene in the Prime Minister’s office: only two people still alive know about it, and one is a muggle. So whoever the reporter/narrator is, they had to interview either the muggle Prime Minister or Cornelius Fudge, and probably both, since we get details of the minister’s thoughts to which Fudge isn’t privy. Narcissa and Draco Malfoy would have been essential interviews for the details of what happened in Malfoy Manor and in Spinner’s End. Interviews and old local news archives could have told the story of the day the Riddle family was found dead, I suppose. Whoever the narrator is, they did a lot of research and reporting, which took a lot of time.
So the narrator is someone who’s not too busy. We can also assume that the narrator isn’t someone who’s treated too harshly by the books themselves. It’s not going to be Rita Skeeter or Malfoy or Cormac McLaggen, because they all seem like awful people, and no narrator would portray themself that way. It’s likewise not going to be someone who comes off too positive, because anyone who’s that positively portrayed would have the sense not to make themselves look overly heroic and awesome. It’s not Professor McGonagall, for instance, because Professor McGonagall would be way too modest to portray herself in as awesome a way as she’s actually portrayed.
At this point, the possibilities are fairly endless, but I can think of two fun possibilities. A) Ron and Hermione are co-authors and co-narrators, and worked together to portray each other fairly, which I think they’ve pretty much accomplished. B) (the more fun one) the author is Eldred Worple.
You remember Eldred Worple? The guy at Slughorn’s party who wanted to ghost-write Harry’s autobiography? Here’s how it could have happened: the Wizarding War ends, Harry finds himself with lots of time on his hands, he’s confronted by misinformation and he decides he’s going to clear everything up. He decides he needs a writer to tell the story the way it actually happened, but the only writers he knows are Rita Skeeter, Gilderoy Lockhart, and Xenophilius Lovegood, all of whom, for their own reasons, aren’t good fits for the project. Then he remembers: I know! That guy who wanted to write about me! I was busy at the time, and I definitely didn’t need any more publicity then, but at least he seemed fairly responsible and nice!
So he goes to Worple, who is only too happy to take on the massive project. In fact, there’s enough material in Harry’s life for seven books. Worple does hours and hours of interviews with Harry; he gets secondary interviews from hundreds of sources; he gets to work writing, and when all is said and done, he’s written over a million words, over 4000 pages, and seven large books. Then he realizes that these things might do well even in the muggle world, so he thinks of Joanne Rowling, a woman who’s a muggle friend of his niece. She always seems to be struggling, even though she’s kind and resourceful. So in a borderline-illegal bit of time-turning magic, he goes back to 1990, when Rowling is riding a train from Manchester to King’s Cross, and does a little bit of mind magic, and the idea falls into Rowling’s head fully formed; the rest, of course, is history. Thank you, Eldred Worple, for all you’ve done.
Aaaaaaaaaaanyway...Eldred Worple is the narrator. Nice. So we move on. Ron says that Harry looks odd. Is this how British 11-year-olds talk — do they use the word “odd” conversationally? I hope they do. I don’t; it seems mostly the providence of British pre-teens and 76-year-old grandmothers. Ah, the British.
The next night, Harry takes Ron to see the mirror (now I’m imagining Harry and Ron sitting for a joint interview with Eldred Worple where they tell this story). For a while, they can’t find it. Ron is freezing — Hogwarts isn’t heated, which you’d think would have been magically taken care of by now; there are no fireplaces in classrooms besides Divination, as far as we know, so on cold days, are students just suffering through History of Magic in 20-degree air? — and wants to back to the dormitory; Harry refuses. We see what might be the first cameo appearance of The Gray Lady, the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw — “they passed the ghost of a tall witch gliding in the opposite direction” — but see nobody else.
The landmark that Harry uses for the room with the mirror is a suit of armor. I’m slightly confused, because I’ve never quite been able to nail down just how many suits of armor there are at Hogwarts. From the whole Mirror sequence, it seems like there are just a few, few enough that one of them could be useful as a landmark. But later on, we see what seem like a lot more: Peeves locks Mrs. Norris up in different suits of armor, Harry’s always passing suits of armor that laugh at him, they’re polished and decorated for the Yule Ball, they rush to defend Hogwarts in Book Seven (along with the statues, I think...correct me if I’m wrong). It’s a giant castle, so I’d have to think there’s a pretty substantial number of suits of armor at Hogwarts...but the mirror sequence suggests otherwise. One of life’s great mysteries, I guess.
Harry runs up to the mirror, and his mother and father are there, smiling at him again. It’s interesting that Rowling (Worple) writes “his mother and father,” as opposed to “his family.” We know from the previous mirror scene (and a tossed-aside line later on the page) that it’s not just Harry’s mother and father in the mirror, but rather his whole family. But writing “his mother and father” introduces unnecessary confusion and leaves out a lot of what’s happening. It would be like if you told the story of someone singing a song and taking a bow, and then wrote “his mother and father applauded,” but left out the part where behind his mother and father was a stadium full of 60,000 fans wildly cheering.
Harry steps aside to give Ron a shot, but there’s a problem: Ron can’t see what Harry wants him to see. Harry just sees Ron in his paisley pajamas (google “paisley” if you haven’t already, because Ron wearing paisley pajamas is a funny visual once you’ve seen them). Ron, meanwhile, is transfixed. “Look at me!” he says.
“Can you see all your family standing around you?” Harry asks. That’s where the page ends, so the rest of their conversation will have to wait.
It’s a pretty important page; it’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Mirror of Erised on Harry’s character development in book one, not to mention the Mirror’s later importance to the plot. For now, though, they’re just arguing about what each of them sees in the mirror. And I must say, Eldred Worple does a superb job documenting the entire scene.