Emby Quinn's Journal

Mm, I love being snarky!
A completely unsolicited rippage, brought about by this wank. I cannot leave the stupid alone. Otherwise the stupid might think it's okay.

"...an imbecility of arbitrary invention."

What an appropriate title for this essay. Finally, a little truth in advertising!

My remarks about Blaise Zabini have aroused a great many responses, most of them of the know-nothing kind - "I do not want to see any problem, therefore there is no problem". I think a little elucidation is in order - not for the twerps who indulge in insults or write reams of prose to show that they have failed to understand anything I said: I do not hope to convince any of these anyway. This is for my friends, some of whom seem bewildered by the whole episode.

Oh, so this is a rant in reference to responses to another, undisclosed rant. And anyone who disagrees with anything fpb has to say is a "know-nothing", apparently.

The title of this post comes from one of C.S.Lewis' greatest critical essays, A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST. The fact that Lewis' particular point is rather misguided does not detract from the importance of the concept embodied in his expression. "Invention", that is what most people call "artistic creation", cannot be "arbitrary". If it is, it is "imbecile", that is weak and centreless (that is the meaning of IMBECILLIS in Latin, and Lewis spoke Latin as easily as English). Any imaginative enterprise must be centred about some reality of perception and imagination.

So Lewis is misguided, but you're using his words to illustrate your point? Uhm.

Take for instance JRR Tolkien's Ents. Do you imagine for a minute that they might just as easily have been swift-spoken as slow, impulsive rather than slow, small rather than large? Of course not. The Ents are imaginative projections of the reality of trees as we perceive it, through the lens of our own human consciousness. But had they been anything else than they were, they would not have worked; and, for that matter, they would not have been the work of a genius.

Whoa, we just went from Narnia to Middle Earth in .0325 seconds. I think my brain just got whiplashed.

The same point might be made for any feature of any work of narrative genius. Do you imagine for a second that MACBETH would have worked as well had it been set in any country but Scotland? - starting, of course, with an Englishman's view of Scotland, tribal, savage, and ridden with superstition and the supernatural. But imagine it set in, say, Normandy. Or, if you are Hijja, Swabia. Imagine HAMLET opening with any other opening but that of a few frozen sentinels on the battlements of a grim castle, bearing a cold north wind and talking about the threat of war. Imagine the Iliad featuring a bunch of disciplined and reasonable soldiers. Imagine Donald Duck without the squawking.

This is where fpb tries to make us all awestruck with his knowledge of superior literature. Oh, and Donald Duck doesn't squawk. He quacks.

Well, the imaginative centre of the Harry Potter novels is an English school. Not any school: an English school - one that belongs in a tradition that goes back, with many changes but without any breaks, to the English Reformation, and, in another sense, to the Dark Ages. The oldest school in England - King's School Canterbury, where I happen to have studied - is the oldest school in the world, descended in a straight line from the missionary school of St.Augustine of Canterbury, the Apostle of the English, and traditionally held to have been founded in 597AD. It is a tradition that is in many ways widely different from any other; and while there are wide differences between state and independent schools, they are even to this day more like each other, and still more rooted in the ancient ethic of the "public" schools of old, than they are like any other institution in the rest of the world.

Having never attended an English public school, I can neither confirm nor deny the statements in this paragraph. I could probably check the facts about King's School with a quick run through Wikipedia, but it's not germaine to the point, so I'll let it stand.

The distinctive English educational tradition is reflected in Hogwarts in all sorts of details, from the habit of boarding, to the rural setting, to the special school trains laid on for the starting day, to the division in "houses" and the deliberately fostered house spirit and inter-house rivalries, to the co-option of students to authority through the prefect system, to the frequent mention of cold weather (a lot of old boarding schools had famously inadequate heating), to the importance of amateur sports, to the uniforms. These things are more typical of independent than of state schools, but state schools still reflect enough of these distinctive English traditions that, really, anyone who has been in an English school will feel at home when reading a HP novel.

(For that matter, a few of Hogwarts' features reflect more the ancient English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, than any kind of high school: for instance, the place of its Headmaster among the political Great and Good, the title of Professor for the teachers, and the fact that they apparently engage in research. In the end, you might say that Hogwarts is based on a general English view of education; and, among all educational experiences at school and university, on all those which are most English.)

It is around the solidity of this imaginative projection of the English ideal of education, that all the mad imaginative elaboration of Harry's career can be built. It works because anyone who has been in an English school will find the atmosphere, the ethics, the mood, familiar to the point of homeliness. And the virtue of this grounding of fantasy in imaginative reflections of reality is such that even people who know nothing about England will sense this basic groundedness, this credibility, this, in the end, humanity.

Get to the point, fpb. While we're young, if you would.

And now let me repeat what I said before, and see if this time someone will actually bother to try and understand instead of going off at irrelevant tangents about Cameroon or promiscuity. Hogwarts is clearly an imaginative version of normal English schools, most like but not wholly like private "public schools", but definitely rooted in that reality. It follows that if it is untrue to the English school experience in any major way, then it hurts itself. And all English schools, both state and independent, are now multi-ethnic. JKR inserted blacks, Irish boys, Indian girls, and so on, because that is what one would find in any school in Britain today; and she was right to do so.

It's what one would find just about anywhere today, unless you're in a Pentacostal private school in Alabama.

A black Blaise Zabini does not fit. "Blaise Zabini" as a name indicates Italian descent. "Zabini" is a flagrantly Italian surname, and "Blaise" is the name of a Christian saint whose cult is pretty much restricted to Italy and France. One of the parish churches I used to attend as a child was San Biagio (St.Blaise's), Monza.

"Blaise" is not exactly an Italian name. If the character were of Italian descent, wouldn't he be named Biagio instead of Blaise? As for "Zabini", surnames aren't always a distinct indication of ethnicity. One of my best friend's last name is Duval, which suggests a French origin, but his family is actually German. My own legal last name is O'Quinn, and yet I am not Irish. I also know someone with the last name of Holloway who isn't even related to any Holloways.

For historical reasons, Africans with Italian names - as opposed to French, English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, or Portuguese - may be counted on the fingers of one hand. A black man with an Italian name is unlikely. Nothing else in the picture of Hogwarts is unlikely, not with the kind of unlikelihood that demands a sub-story to be explained. You need no explanation for the Patil twins, the Weasleys, Viktor Krum (a splendid image of a sporting hero - one feels one has seen him in some stadium or some racetrack already) or Dumbledore.

Because of the variety of surnames adopted by the kidnapped and enslaved over the centuries, how is a black named Zabini any less likely than one named Poitier? Or Smith, for that matter?

These figures are part of the imaginative reality of Hogwarts, that is, an imaginative projection of a modern English school. The ease with which one identifies their types is not the ease of stereotype, but of archetype; several of them have entered the language (e.g. Willow in Buffy 7.01 telling Giles that he had gone all Dumbledore on her). I consider that, as compared with them, a black Blaise Zabini in Britain simply does not work. It has nothing to do with race, religion or any of the other fetishes that people like to wave at you when they have no arguments to offer: it has to do with the capacity to be easily identified and understood as a person.

So you say. I call racist bullshit. Why not just say all blacks should be named Umbutu or Mohammed and have done with it?

Suggestions about Cameroon or talk about America or Belgium are very, very much off the point. One thing that is canon is that Hogwarts takes in ALL the magically gifted children born in the British Isles (I do not know whether this includes Ireland) and nobody from outside. If there are any Italian-African half-breeds, the best place to look for them is, a), in Italy, or, b), in Africa. Or possibly in the United States, where there are large Italian-American and African-American groups. Britain just does not make sense. It is easy to understand why brown-skinned girls called Patil or a black boy called Lee Jordan would be there; it is not easy to understand why a black boy with an Italian name would be, and that makes all the difference.

Well, it includes an Asian girl named Cho Chang, so why not? Can you state with absolute assurance that there are no blacks with Italian surnames anywhere in the United Kingdom? I didn't think so.

A lot of people had a lot of things to suggest to explain this. The point is that all their explanations were exactly that - explanations. And a good, sound, well-made character should need no explanation. He or she should stand as naturally in his or her imaginative background as a tree in its native forest. Who needs to invoke Belgium or Cameroon to explain the Weasleys? Dobby? Diagon Alley?

Sure, let's have all our fictional characters fit neatly into nice little cubbyholes so we don't have to think too much about them. So much less effort that way. But it's not stereotyping, oh nooooo!

Blaise Zabini is unlikely. He does not belong in the otherwise perfectly realized imaginative world of Hogwarts. As JKR presented him, he is "an imbecility of arbitrary invention"; arbitrary being the key word. There are many ways in which an African could have an Italian name; just none that is natural, and none that does not, by demanding an explanation, draw attention to its own unlikelihood.

Obviously Blaise Zabini does belong at Hogwarts, because the creator of the Harry Potter universe put him there. Arguing otherwise is not only pointless, it's pretty damn disrespectful to J.K. Rowling. You're basically telling her that she's an idiot.

And when she invented that name, JKR knew what she was doing. She is a modern languages graduate. She speaks French and has experience of Spanish and Portuguese. Her ethnic names, including things as obscure as Bulgarian, are always correct and credible: it was only some time after I read GoF, for instance, that I found out that Krum was actually an early Bulgarian hero-king. So, when she designs something that to any ear that knows Italian is an obviously Italian name, I have to take it that she meant it exactly as it sounded. And when she very improbably makes the same character out to be black, then I say that she has gone back on her own work.

Or maybe she just felt like making the character black? Or maybe it's an important plot-point that comes up in Book 7? Whatever the reason, it's JKR's story, so just let her tell it and stop bashing her already.