"Same-as-Difference": Narrative Transformations and Intersecting Cultures in Harry Potter

Seven years after Rowling's tousle-headed, bespectacled student wizard first appeared in print, the Potter books still lead the best-seller lists.¹ The long-awaited fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, sold five million copies on its first day of sale and has been reviewed by thousands of Amazon readers (Kirkpatrick). What makes the Harry Potter books so readable and so popular?

Answers to this question, and critical approaches to the series, have been as varied as Rowling's audience is vast. Theories of child development have been applied to show how Harry Potter's story contains elements that appeal to young children and adolescents, which are recognized and appreciated by adults (Damour). Other critics, who locate the books within various genres, suggest that Rowling is tapping into—and transforming—established formulae (Steege, Stephens). Blending boarding school and fantasy, Rowling has created a character who has been identified as a "fairytale prince, a real boy and an archetypal hero" (Grimes, Pharr, Black). Rowling's handling of morality, technology, gender, class, status, and ethnicity have all been examined (Whited, Schanoes, Gallardo-C). Rowling's prose, too, has been considered, rejected, and defended (Bloom, Duffy). The common denominator, the starting point for all these critics, is Rowling's runaway success, and the common thread running through their analyses is "transformation." Familiar elements of our culture, language, class, authority, genre, are transformed through narrative, so that the ordinary becomes extraordinary (Natov, Lacoss). Transformation occurs not just at the level of plot and character, but also in Rowling's presentation of overlapping cultures that are similar yet different .This contributes greatly to what Roland Barthes called "La passion du sens"² or "the passion for meaning" as Peter Brooks translates it (Brooks 19). The passion for meaning drives a narrative, the "what happens next" hook, fueling the reader's need to know the whole story. In the case of the Harry series, I argue, it is not just the reader's desire to find out the sequence of events that powers the narrative, but also an appreciation, whether conscious or unconscious, of Rowling's narrative transformations.

Narrative transformations occur when the story changes, whether we use the phrase as part of a linguistic or psychoanalytic analysis. Psychoanalytically, narrative transformations do not so much change the desires or the facts as the participants' perceptions of relationships and their dynamics. Thus the plot (to borrow the Formalist distinction) remains the same but the narrative, the connecting flow, and thus the story presented to the reader/auditor is changed (usually for therapeutic effect). Todorov reaches similar conclusions in his essay on narrative transformations, though his work is focused on syntax rather than interpretation. For Todorov, a narrative transformation occurs when a predicate—a single action—is expanded, either simply, by adding an operator, or as a complex transformation, by grafting two predicates together (Todorov 225).³ Just like the psychoanalytic understanding, the facts remain unchanged but are transformed by narrative, which changes the relationship between those core facts.

Such a shift in relationship creates "same-as-difference" and we see it occurring throughout the Harry Potter books. Core facts remain the same from first to last, but the reader's perceptions change as the stories and characters grow in complexity and acquire a history. Our understanding moves in a hermeneutic circle, as clues or references planted by Rowling in earlier books are only appreciated in the light of later events, usually moving from a mood of comic relief to one of tragic intensity. Polyjuice potion, for example, is comical in Book Two when the students use it—Harry and Ron become the hulking bullies Crabb and Goyle, and Hermione accidentally gets a cat face—but an instrument of torture and potential agent of destruction when used by the fake Mad-Eye Moody in Book Four. However...