Evasive Allusions

Abstract

The Harry Potter novels constantly echo the faintly familiar. The names of magical characters, the motifs and rituals of magic, the stories and histories that give body to the Magic world appear often to refer back to a shimmering vista of folklore, fairy tale and myth drawn indiscriminately from a range of sources and contexts. The books do not perform self-conscious recreations and adjustments of self-evident fairy tales as Angela Carter did in some of her stories or as Anne Sexton did in some her poems,¹ and nor do they allude to the mythic or folkloric vista in any systematic fashion. Several studies have tried to chart out the various mythic and folkloric sources that are alluded to in the Harry Potter novels,² and the list of references are impressively wide and diverse. But these allusions do not coalesce into a considered transmission of any particular mythological or folkloric system, and the novels do not even discriminate sufficiently between the allusive moment (the particular name, the specific event that recalls a fairy tale or folklore or myth) and the cultural context that the allusion originates within. These are allusions of a different sort. They have some of the effects of fairy tales: some of the escape-effects and comfort-effects that Tolkien, amongst many others, squarely attributes to fairy tales.³ But the Harry Potter allusions resist being fitted into patterns of transmission and negotiation (of social and political values, through the repetition and adjustment of cultural codes) that can be more or less unambiguously traced from a hazy source through myriad retellings and transmissions of myths, folklore and fairy tales.