Abstract of Paper to be Presented at Accio 2005

On being the "Chosen One": Narratives of Psychosis and Prophecy and Their Relationship to The Harry Potter Books

Steve Barfield, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, The University of Westminster.

This paper will explore a more general phenomenon in fantasy literature, but will do so with specific reference to the Harry Potter books. This is that the narrative trope of being the 'Chosen One' (as a comparable example in the Matrix) in literary and filmic fantasy occurs in a very similar form in narratives of psychosis (the psychotic imagines they are being chosen by some high power and that their view of world is right, despite everyone else's disagreement). This is also, of course, the very similar narrative of prophets in religious discourse who are especially chosen to tell or do something which the rest of the world has forgotten or ignores: 'a voice crying in the wilderness' and so forth.

What all three narratives have in common, I will argue, is not whether they are verifiable or not, as that to some extent raises problematic questions of verifiability (especially in the case of religious prophetic narratives). But that they construct the subject (individual) of the narrative in certain ways and with certain key attributes. Disbelief from society in general, being marked in some special way, through a reading of hidden signs turning the real world into a form of allegory, ambivalence to being chosen and so on. I will show how all of these are interwoven in the Potter narrative and argue that the common roots of these three narrative and the way Rowling so cleverly articulates them is one of the reason's for the books' phenomenal success and is one which initiates the complex kinds of identification between readers and the character of Harry Potter in the novels.

I will if there is time suggest some more cultural and psychoanalytic reasons for such narrative using Lacan and the relationship between the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.

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