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Chapter One: A Day of Flat What. (Part One)

Harry gets a green-ink letter, feels a strange certainty that it tells the truth, writes a response and tries to reply by air-mail. In the process he shows extraordinary precocity and an unusual degree of explicit psychological insight.

Compared to partial transfiguration, super-Patroni (I can't stand the canonical plural 'Patronuses') and the Azkaban arc, this first Chapter is pretty easy fare. I think that perhaps the fact that the first few Chapters don't much stretch the reader – or, I suspect, Eliezer – is why they don't seem quite on a level with those following. Eliezer thinks this change important enough to point out right at the top of Chapter One, below only the Disclaimer, and I don't disagree with that decision.

Before Chapter One proper is a curious passage:

"Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...

(black robes, falling)

...blood spills out in liters, and someone screams a word."

This could well be an image from the climax of the entire book. Opening the book with it introduces a tension that hangs over everything that follows. As of Chapter Seventy, it has not been revisited, nor referenced; the closest we have come to a point of contact between these three lines and the body of the text is in Chapter Sixty-Three:

"[…]he imagined himself hovering above the vast triangular horror of Azkaban, and whispering an incantation unlike any syllables that had ever been heard before on Earth, whispers that echoed all the way across the sky and were heard on the other side of the world, and there was a blast of silver Patronus fire like a nuclear explosion that tore apart all the Dementors in an instant and ripped apart the metal walls of Azkaban, shattered the long corridors and all the dim orange lights, and then a moment later his brain remembered that there were people in there, and rewrote the half-dream fantasy to show all the prisoners laughing as they flew away in flocks from the burning wreck of Azkaban, the silver light restoring the flesh to their limbs as they flew[…] He'd just do whatever it took to get rid of Azkaban, that was all. If that meant ruling Britain, fine, if that meant finding a spell to whisper that would echo all across the sky, whatever, the important thing was to destroy Azkaban."

In context, the above passage fits quite neatly into the monomyth narrative as a semi-conscious answering of the Call. As a premonition, it could well be of the ultimate stage of the monomyth, Freedom to Live:

 'Nothing retains its own form; but Nature, the greater renewer, ever makes up forms from forms. Be sure there's nothing perishes in the whole universe; it does but vary and renew its form.' 

Joseph Campbell, quoting Pythagoras

 Yet this not-dream seems oddly out of order – has not Harry just returned from a quest to Azkaban? Has he not some time ago found his mysterious old wizard – Quirrell – as Hermione observes in Chapter Seventy? (Mysterious old wizards are fantasy novels' implementation of the Supernatural Aid stage of the monomyth.) Has he not some time ago decided – consciously – to empty Azkaban? So why is it only now that Sybill Trelawney gasps awake? I'll return to this subject when I discuss Quirrell and the Azkaban arc. For now let us note the effect of those three lines in Chapter One: that even as Harry truly answers the Call, his acceptance is tinged with menace and foreboding. Not bad for a few inscrutable words lodged way back when Harry doesn't know Somnium from Ambien. If only – I hate to say it –

If only liters was spelled litres.

Part Two of this discussion of Chapter One will be published in a few hours. It will deal with the rest of the Chapter, as well as the conflict between the narrative voice and that of the very British Harry J. Potter-Evans-Verres.

[quirrellinvenice-blog]

Introduction

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: if you know what I'm talking about, this is for you. I'm going to write any observations about Eliezer's longest published work that might be of interest to its readership, and very possibly look at some other fiction that's come out of the Less Wrong community.

To do lit crit here was not my original intention; I took the name Quirrell in Venice to write about gender, race and politics, making sparing use of MOR·Quirrell's world-view to create some doubt as to how closely I (or my persona) could be identified with the opinions expressed. The allusion to Death in Venice was a whim, influenced perhaps by Roissy-in-DC, influenced most definitely by the odd parallels between Quirrell* and the protagonist of Death in Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach. I have now decided that focusing on MOR is more fun and more likely to be read. The persona you encounter here is, roughly speaking, my own.

Everything I write is a potential spoiler for any published MOR chapter. Anything metatextual, whether written by Eliezer or someone else, is fair game too, especially any very important information that may have been released.

I'll start at Chapter One, which has an interesting recent revision that I want to comment on, but I will then permit myself to jump around. I have no desire to become the Light Side counterpart of this fine fellow.

I'm a frequenter of Less Wrong. I write in British English. Yes: there will be Britpicking.

*Unqualified Potterverse names generally refer to MOR characters.