It is perhaps wrong to allow myself to digress when the main job is not largely done, when little if any systematic analysis is visible yet. But I want to scrutinize and muse about a detail in the mind of Shirley, the lace-doily murderess/traitoress.
The novel proceeds with over a dozen different points of view. This is not simply an omniscient narrator; there is one of those too; rather, we see the world through the eyes of one character after another. In most vignettes, there is a single third-person point of view, with perhaps some interpolations from the omniscient narrator. The omniscient narrator is reliable, but the third-person limited narrations are not. For example, when Shirley says that she and Howard have the same attitude toward the death of Barry Fairbrother, that he is as delighted as she is, that might be true – but don’t believe it just because Shirley said it. In these passages, Rowling was working to capture the mind of the speaker, not just the world around the speaker.
Consider the paragraph about Shirley’s internal response: “None of the delight frothing and fizzing inside Shirley had been apparent while Howard had been in the room. They had merely exchanged the comments proper to sudden death before he had taken himself off to the shower. Naturally Shirley had known, as they slid stock words and phrases back and forth between them like beads on an abacus, that Howard must be as brimful of ecstasy as she was; but to express these feelings out loud, when the news of the death was still fresh in the air, would have been tantamount to dancing naked and shrieking obscenities, and Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside.” (p. 16-17)
First, note that Shirley might as well be “dancing naked and shrieking obscenities.” Her deep and completely disgusting evil is not excused or made less because it is hidden. In fact, her “invisible layer of decorum” is another disgusting evil. To have a temptation, and to fight it off, and to defeat it, silently and out of sight – that’s a good and noble thing. The layer of decorum hides the fight – the struggle and the victory. But Shirley is not fighting evil in her heart; she embraces it, delights in it – and hides it behind good manners. She is a hypocrite.
But it is the image of the beads that fascinates me, that makes me so digress. Shirley describes conversation as an exchange in which two speakers slide beads back and forth on a wire or a string. That’s a provocative image for dialogue. Gavin also thinks of communication as beads strung together, although his beads are not stock phrases, but rather omissions or vacancies. Gavin’s attempts at communication are a fascinating exercise in a book that explores vacancies. Gavin is totally self-centered, and refuses to love. He believes that he is communicating his lack of love and commitment to Kay, when he omits decent acts: “he strung them together in his mind and checked them off like beads on a rosary. He had never said ‘love.’ He had never talked about marriage. He had never asked her to move to Pagford.” (p. 22)
The image of beads on a string also appears in the Potter series, when Harry Potter is dueling with Lord Voldemort, in the graveyard at the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and again at the very end of the whole series, when Harry kills Voldemort. In the duels, their wands form an arc of light between them, with beads of light sliding back and forth depending on who is in charge.
Still digressing …
What are these wands? For that matter, what’s a wizard?
A wizard is someone who does wiz-dom. Is that wisdom, or is it a caricature of wisdom – like astrology next to astronomy? Wisdom is hard to define; it’s an odd word. It’s an appropriately odd word for a remarkable reality. Wise: adjective; wise man, noun; wisdom, abstract noun – what’s the associated verb? How do you “do” wisdom?
You can “have” wisdom, you can “speak” wisdom, you can “hear” wisdom, you can “recognize” wisdom, you can “embrace” it or “reject” it, you can “long” for it. How do you “do” it? There’s no verb. Wisdom gives rise to action; it is powerful, the greatest power. But you don’t “do” it. Wisdom “is.” Wisdom “causes.” But still, you don’t “do” it. Wisdom is at the still point in a turning world.
Wizards do things. Principally, they are wise, and they teach. But they also do magic, with wands. But what is this wand? Wands aren’t real; they are symbols for words of power. When wizards (in Harry Potter’s world) take action, it involves both words and wands. There are some spells that some accomplished wizards can cast without vocalizing, but that’s a specialized trick, not the norm. And in any case, it seems to involve sub-vocalization (I think – I never did it).
Wands are the objective correlative for words of power. Words can be empty noise, but they can sometimes be creative, can be powerful enough to cause changes in the world. When words change things, it feels like magic.
Back in the novel: Barry was something of a wizard, in the sense that his words changed people. It wasn’t magic, although it was hard to explain. He reached Krystal and changed her: how? Part of his power was that he was also from the Fields and had credibility. Part of his power was that he really did understand her and care about her. Part was that he had ideas about what she could do that was startlingly significant (sports, join a rowing team). It was because he laughed, and because kids trusted him with their silly foolish music. He got Krystal out onto the river of life, making her way successfully on the river. On the Orr River (the river of life demands wisdom facing either-or choices), he helped her to make good choices. He was a man of integrity, who meant what he said: he wanted to help Krystal, and he spoke, and he acted – and his feelings and thoughts and words and actions were all aligned. Is all that wisdom? Love? Sanctity? Wizardry?
Communication is always magic. The concept of taking thoughts and emotions inside one person and transmitting them to another person is bizarre. It’s clearly impossible, except that we do it all the time. When you scrutinize the way we move thoughts and feelings from here to there, it gets weirder and weirder; having a bone box with a muscle flapping inside (a skull and teeth with a tongue inside), blowing air over the top of the muscle to make the air vibrate (speaking), so that the hearer can use a little drum to pick up the vibrations (ear-drum), to transform them into tiny electric pulses to the brain, which transforms specific noises into specific meanings – that’s all totally implausible, obviously impossible, simple nonsense – or pure and effective magic. And when you start rubbing dye on chewed and flattened bark (writing on paper) in order to communicate thoughts and feelings across time and space, so that I can embrace the ideas of Socrates and the emotions of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – well, that’s some deep magic indeed. I’m not even going to mention the internet and all the data stored in “the cloud.”
The beads of communication that Shirley (and Howard??) passed back and forth were empty. They were trivial, and/or unreliable, and/or evil. Mostly empty. Another vacancy.
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