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the ‘canon’ to answer it, she came to it with a joyful fascination, re-encountering both the darkness and the levity she had encountered the first time around. She had bought the books to read to her grandchildren, only to find she was taken in herself. One set of keys to the books’ secrets, she began to think, could be drawn from her own discipline. As she told the Irish Times after her commencement, she felt that, ‘coming from the psychoanalytic point of view, there had to be an unconscious reason. For one thing, it deals with a lot of the issues that people have growing up. The very few people who have written psychoanalytic papers about it are agreed on that. Somehow, it gets into deep issues which start in childhood but can come back again at any stage in life.’ Here we are reminded that the generation that grew up with and loved Harry Potter were the recipients of a well-considered gift. JK Rowling knew, starting out, that her readers would have to grow up, so why not have Harry do so too? Potter would not be frozen in time, like Tintin or the Hardy Boys: he and his friends would have to try to leave childhood things behind, reach maturity, confront death while maintaining a hold on life, and finding their truer selves. As a child, Pyle describes herself as reading maximally, as always carrying a book around - not though of being especially attracted to fantasy and the fiction of elaborate imaginary worlds. Her connection to Trinity would come to seem as preordained as Harry Potter’s destiny: ‘I'm attached to Trinity from before I was born. My parents met on their way to have tea with their tutor. In those days, tutors used to have tea parties for their students, and they met looking for the house where it would be.’ In an institution very different from today’s, she would find herself confronting lines of men in bathrobes crossing the front square to use the communal showers. Find herself endlessly signing in and out. ‘We had to sign out of Trinity Hall, sign in at Front Gate, sign into the reading room, and then do all the signing back out again. And you were not supposed to forget.’ Men and women were not supposed to be found together in their rooms, but couples would find a way. ‘Later on, Fergus, my husband, told me about a couple. She was always in and shaking out his blankets in his rooms in the morning.’ It can be remarkable to experience vicariously the atmosphere of “theocratic” Ireland through the eyes of the 60s generation, including moments when the veil would fall. A lover of old and middle-English, she wanted to complete her degree in those subjects, but, despite having studied them in her junior year, was told there was insufficient interest from others to make a minimum cohort for the class. Not completing her first degree with this specific focus (the same subject that Tolkien taught, one notes), seems to still smart her: yet any appreciator of Beowulf and the Seafarer should detect the consistent line from this interest to her recent study of the psychology and mythology of Potter. Encouraged by her late partner, Dr Christopher Moriarty, Pyle’s study carries a lightness of touch, as well as an incisiveness, despite making use of so much learning, of the riches and findings from a long immersion in her career subject. Take, for instance, the intriguing Chapter 5, ‘Alchemy as a Metaphor for Learning’, wherein she studies the use that Rowling makes of themes from alchemy throughout the Potteriad . The epic series begins, if you need to be reminded, with The Philosopher’s Stone – the name of an alchemical legend around an object that would help its possessor transmute base metal into gold. Here Pyle brings out the interwoven metaphors: growth and development,
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and artistic creation likewise, represent a transcendent change, departure from 'base' mundanity into a new state of being. Says Pyle, 'There's a paper by a psychoanalyst called Christopher Bollas about abnormal normality – these people that have absolutely no imagination, everything is just as it seems for them. The Dursleys portray that perfectly. Harry, of course, is the opposite, he's the imaginative one. So Vernon Dursley has a breakdown when owls and things come because that's outside anything he would regard as even possible. You can watch him breaking down gradually as he travels, and finally ends up in a hut on a rock, with absolutely nothing.' As she writes in the thesis: Because alchemy is so much based on learning in all its forms, I see the subject as being not only a metaphor for learning, but also as a metaphor for understanding the series as a progression towards transcendence: learning and transcendence were the twin goals of the early philosophers and remain so today for those who look for something in life beyond the materialist goal of the ‘abnormally normal’ Dursleys. With interest from Pyle herself in 'transmuting' her study into a book for a wider audience, publishers would be wise to take note: this rare and deep work might well reach a lot of curious muggles who were fans of the books in their formative years. As a train of geniuses from before and after Winnicott have shown, understanding our truer selves – what we enjoy, as well as what we fear, and why – tends to lead us back to memories of early exploration. Wrote Winnicott, in The Concept of the False Self : ‘Poets, philosophers and seers have always concerned themselves with the idea of a true self, and the betrayal of the self has been a typical example of the unacceptable.’
