Book 1 Chapter 5: Diagon Alley

This week I sat down with some coffee and these honey-and-jam cookies I made. Honey can be really helpful for gluten free baking, because it provides a little extra stickiness that GF flour lacks. They’re still pretty crumbly, though.

This chapter starts when Harry wakes up and tells himself that the previous night was a dream, only to be quickly proven wrong by a magic owl and the giant sleeping on the couch. Said giant takes Harry into London to buy everything he needs for school, where Hagrid marvels at the strangeness of the Muggles, the Muggles marvel at Hagrid, and Harry marvels at his first encounter with the wizarding world.

This chapter exemplifies one of the things that I still genuinely love about Harry Potter, which I can only call ways of looking. Harry has been raised with the Dursleys trying to force any signs of imagination out of him, screaming at him just for mentioning a dream in chapter two and implying that they’ve given him beatings in chapter four. It’s been drilled into him to the point that, before Harry’s even awake in this chapter, he scolds himself for the impossible things in his mind, telling himself “firmly” that “When I open my eyes I’ll be at home in my cupboard.” He hasn’t even been allowed to dream that there could be anything better than his current life.

Now that Hagrid has shown up, Harry’s full of questions that he actually gets answers to, about wizard banks and the Ministry of Magic and what the difference is between a stalactite and a stalagmite. (Hagrid is close but a bit off when he says “Stalagmite’s got an ‘m’ in it.” It’s C for Ceiling and G for Ground.)

What’s more important, though, is that Harry can see things for himself without forcing away thoughts of the miraculous, as he does when the chapter starts. He watches as Hagrid exclaims over parking meters, as Muggles stare at Hagrid, as the patrons of the Leaky Cauldron treat Hagrid as a familiar sight, and as they treat Harry himself as a marvel. Harry himself is fascinated by all of the strange things he sees in Diagon Alley, but the obnoxious pale boy he meets while getting measured for his robes couldn’t be more bored with everything. That kid can’t even be bothered to get his own wand, which is supposed to choose him.

Throughout the chapter, we repeatedly see characters fascinated by things that other characters treat as humdrum everyday realities. Clearly, there is more than one way of looking at the world, and the things that we see could be completely different if we can imagine another’s perspective. The book seems to be criticizing the Dursley’s unwillingness to see and encouraging the reader to actively look, to pay attention to things that seem ordinary or plain. Something completely unremarkable to you may seem outlandish to someone else, as the parking meters do to Hagrid. Something plain could be hiding something incredible, like the “tiny, grubby-looking pub” that Harry almost misses, which grants entry to the wizarding world. Likewise, you could be failing to appreciate the interesting things you’re always surrounded by, as Draco does.

The reader is encouraged to look, and to look with imagination—something I genuinely and wholeheartedly appreciate about the Harry Potter books. I think of Ursula Le Guin, who (although she was famously unimpressed with Harry Potter¹) wrote frequently about the power of the imagination. For example, in her essay “A War Without End” published in The Wave in the Mind, she wrote:

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.

Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.²

I absolutely agree with Le Guin on this point: change begins with imagining what that change will be. But I think there’s more to it than that. Author and professor Jeff Kripal commented in an interview³ that “we lack a sufficiently robust theory of the imagination,” suggesting that visions or dreams may be ways that we experience otherwise incomprehensible phenomena. We experience something which we know to be imaginary and yet “pertains to something that is not imagined.”

The imagination, then, can be thought of as a tool that is severely under-utilized in modern society. But it hasn’t always been that way,⁴ and it doesn’t have to stay that way. There are scholars like Angela Voss, whose article “A Methodology of the Imagination”⁵ describes several scholarly approaches to the imagination and outlines four levels of interpretation that lead from the literal to the all-encompassing. Such an approach may be the antidote to a problem that I see as pervasive in society, which is an obsession with the literal, empirical, and rational and a poor understanding of the personal, the emotional, and the spiritual.

If we turn to imagination in the sense of the fictional, I think of Susan Sontag, who once wrote:

“…a great writer of fiction, by writing truthfully about the society in which she or he lives, cannot help but evoke (if only by their absence) the better standards of justice and of truthfulness that we have the right (some would say the duty) to militate for in the necessarily imperfect societies in which we live.”

(Quoted on The Marginalian⁶

And I’ll use that quote to wrangle this tangent into relevancy, because it describes something specific I see in this chapter: Rowling may have been writing truthfully about society when she described discrimination, but the “better standards of justice” are only evident “by their absence.”  Draco’s hatred of Muggleborns goes unchallenged by Harry, which is understandable considering how new the wizarding world is to him.

But Hagrid’s defense of Muggleborns is lukewarm at best. When Harry tells him what Draco said (that “people from Muggle families shouldn’t even be allowed in”), Hagrid’s first response is, “Yer not from a Muggle family,” implying some superiority of Harry’s family. Hagrid goes on to talk about the amazed reaction Harry had received in the Leaky Cauldron, and it feels like an afterthought when he adds, “Anyway, what does he know about it, some o’ the best I ever saw were the only ones with magic in ‘em in a long line o’ Muggles—look at yer mum!”

It's in character for Hagrid to be more concerned with comforting Harry than with confronting societal issues, but it does leave something to be desired. Hagrid is introducing Harry to the wizarding world, so it seems like he could be providing a little guidance. This is the very issue that Voldemort used to rise to power in the conflict that killed Harry’s parents, and yet Harry isn’t given any context to understand that.

The hatred of Muggleborns is a central issue to the series, and yet—to the best of my memory—Rowling never really does anything with it. There’s no changing of hearts or minds; everyone who starts bad ends up bad, and everyone who starts good ends up good. There aren’t any systemic changes that would improve the situation. There’s a failing of the author’s imagination.

However, that vacancy leaves room for the reader’s imagination. For example, Naomi Westwater teaches a virtual class called “Harry Potter & Wizard Supremacy.” In it, she uses the Harry Potter series to illustrate how supremacy works, and how we can recognize it in the real world. In an episode of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text that discusses her work, Westwater says:

“Racism is not going to be resolved in my lifetime, but it is something that I feel like I have to continue to work on. But I can't be burnt out on it in one year and then just kind of be like, Well, I worked really hard for one year and now I'm exhausted. So we all have to think about how can these things be sustainable? And usually what that means is whatever you're already doing invite an anti-supremacy like action into what whatever you're already doing instead of having to go out and, you know, reinvent the wheel for yourself. All of us are already reading Harry Potter and kind of soaking up this world and these texts. So let's continue to do that. And just for, you know, this time, let's do it and this new lens and invite this new framework into the text that we already love.” ⁷

I haven’t taken her class myself, so I can’t go into any detail here, but the project strikes me as an excellent example of someone using the power of the imagination to a practical end. Although the Harry Potter series encourages imagination, the text itself doesn’t entirely succeed in that regard. Yet, the very fact of its failure allows a reader to engage in an act of imagination to practice envisioning another world.

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References

1. “Chronicles of Earthsea.” Interview with the late Ursula Le Guin on The Guardian, 9 Feb 2004. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin

2. The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, by Ursula Le Guin. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/the-wave-in-the-mind

3. “Jeff Kripal on the mystical humanities.” The History of Emotions Blog from The Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions. February 20, 2014. https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2014/02/jeff-kripal-on-the-mystical-humanities/

4. Dr. Angela Puca on her YouTube channel, Angela’s Symposium. “Christian Kataphatic Origins of Visualisation.” Mar 24, 2024.

I recognize that I’m really stretching the limits of relevance here, but it was too interesting not to include.

5. “A Methodology of the Imagination,” by Angela Voss. Eye of the Heart: A Journal of Traditional Wisdom, vol. 4, 37-52. https://mythcosmologysacred.com/a-methodology-of-the-imagination-by-angela-voss/

6. “Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Good Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers,” by Maria Popova. 3/30/2015.

7. “Owl Post Edition: Wizard Supremacy with Naomi Westwater.” Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. 5/27/2021. https://www.harrypottersacredtext.com/episodes/owl-post-edition-wizard-supremacy-with-naomi-westwater/

Also see the class’s page on Westwater’s website: https://www.naomiwestwater.com/live-shows/2021/6/1/happy-potter-amp-wizard-supremacy-virtual-class