“Joyous is the lake” | Influences on the Running Grave, Part 1: The I Ching

By Dr Beatrice Groves

‘Joyous is the lake:’ influences on The Running Grave

Part 1: The I Ching

 

The Joyous is the lake… it is a sorceress.

The I Ching; Epigraph 26 in Running Grave

In the last ten years, Rowling has only given occasional interviews and among these there are two stand-out moments, both which speak to the influence of the unconscious on her craft. The first was the revelation (in the 2017 BBC documentary ‘Harry Potter: A History of Magic’) that the Masonic symbol from the 1975 Sean Connery and Michael Caine film The Man who Would be King was an unconscious influence on the creation of the Deathly Hallows symbol (I’ve written this up in a piece for this month’s Rowling Library Magazine). The second was the startling, and wonderful, answer she gave in 2019 in a BBC4 radio programme ‘The Museum of Curiosity’ when she suddenly decided to be open about the metaphors that guide her creativity:

Well, I’ve never said this before because I always think it sounds so bonkers, and, although it’s something I think about a lot, I’ve always been a bit wary about articulating it to anyone else.

But I envisage my process thus: I feel as though I go through a lot of trees which are my day to day concerns, what we all deal with all the time, and those I see as trees inside my head and then I get to a place which is my work place where there is a lake and there’s a shed. And this is my process.

I feel as though the inspiration is the thing that lives in the lake that’s very mysterious, that I never see. But it hands me stuff. And then I have to take this unformed stuff – sometimes it can be reasonably formed, sometimes it’s very blobby like molten glass or something, and then I have to take it into the shed and there I have to work on it.

And because I’ve had this metaphor in my head for many many years, when I read something that I’ve written I have a sort of shorthand that I say to myself, “too much lake, not enough shed.” When I go back over something – I should have spent longer in the shed.

And then there are some bits you think, “Oh that’s too sheddy. I’m not sure you added a lot out of the lake that day.” And in a dream world, obviously, the lake gives you something good, but then you work on it properly in the shed and you turn out the finished product. And I even apply this to other writers. I’ll read something and I’ll think “This is pure shed.”

Rowling’s ‘Lake’ seems to be related to the pools in C.S. Lewis’s Wood between the Worlds (which Rowling has spoken of before) – it is noticeable, for example, that she has to push through trees to reach her lake. But since reading Running Grave, I’ve also wondered if it might be related to the ‘Lake’ of the I Ching. ‘Tui, The Joyous, Lake’ is a trigram as well as a hexagram so it appears frequently throughout the I Ching and even on a casual flick-through it is a name that might stand out. 

In the October 2023 Q&A for Running Grave Rowling told us that it is possible that the copy of the I Ching she used for every chapter epigraph in this book had been sitting on her bookshelves for thirty years, awaiting this moment. In an explicitly I-Chingian example of randomness, Rowling caught sight of the book when mulling over epigraph texts and suddenly realised how perfectly it would ‘express some of the obliqueness but the simplicity of the Universal Humanitarian Church’s ethos.’ But Rowling provided far more information in her preceding Twitter exchanges on this topic at the end of September when @IrisD1981 ’s question ‘Why did you choose to link this story to the I Ching?’ elicited this answer:

One of the key hallmarks of a fascistic/totalitarian movement, as defined in a brilliant essay by Umberto Eco on ‘Ur-Fascism’, is that it’s syncretistic, which means it combines different forms of belief that may be contradictory. That artificial fusion enables the ideology/religion to claim it possesses an all-encompassing world view, a one-stop-shop for truth. I wanted the UHC to have incorporated religious practices from all over the world and to have appropriated aspects of other cultures, to give itself an attractive gloss of multiculturalism and diversity. I had an old copy of the I Ching on one of my bookshelves that I bought second hand years ago, and I don’t think I’d ever opened until I was creating the UHC. One morning I walked past the book case and thought ‘that could be interesting.’ I immediately knew I wanted to use it, because the I Ching is in so many ways absolutely antithetical to the UHC, containing bits of philosophy and comments on human nature, sometimes oblique but occasionally quite direct, that contradict everything the UHC – and particularly Mazu – stands for. It seemed to me that the I Ching’s conception of the ‘superior man’ – or person – as an individual of quiet strength, independent thought and wisdom couldn’t be further from the UHC’s determination to turn adherents into mindless automata fit only to parrot its talking points, effectively forbidding intellectual enquiry. I also liked the idea of Mazu posing as something she emphatically is not – biracial – and taking the I Ching as her own personal device of judgement and punishment, when it is anything but that. To tell you the truth, I became fascinated by the I Ching while writing the novel, and learned how to count out the yarrow stalks in the traditional way so I knew exactly how it worked (and when I say ‘worked’, I don’t claim it’s a divination device, but I do think it’s a very interesting tool for meditation and reflection).

Frankly this answer alone has reconciled me to Twitter Blue – it is a gift that Rowling is able to answer at length when she wants to! – and Pools followed it up with a question that elicited my favourite ever epigraph response. Pools wrote that she has ‘started using it [the I Ching] as a writing tool, to explore possibilities for characters and worlds, and to help spark ideas when I’m stuck’ and Rowling responded: ‘The Faerie Queen worked like that for me, too.’  I love this answer because it implicitly lifts The Faerie Queene above all her other epigraph texts but also because it suggests that once she has found the right epigraph text, that text begins to influence her own writing. Echoing Pools’ words here means that Rowling implies that Spenser’s poem sparked ideas for her in Troubled Blood and helped her ‘explore possibilities for characters and worlds’ – it suggests that the poetry, plots and character arcs of The Faerie Queene (which I’ve explored here, here and here) are even stronger sources for Troubled Blood than we may have realised.

Something particularly satisfying about Rowling’s twitter discussion about the I Ching is the way in which she describes her epigraph text as embodying a moral code that is oppositional to that of characters in her novel. 

I immediately knew I wanted to use it, because the I Ching is in so many ways absolutely antiethical [sic] to the UHC, containing bits of philosophy and comments on human nature, sometimes oblique but occasionally quite direct, that contradict everything the UHC – and particularly Mazu – stands for.

Rowling means ‘antithetical’ – but her misspelling of it as ‘antiethical’ works brilliantly given the context of the way in which it is the ethics of the UHC which are at odds with the I Ching. We’ve seen her making meaningful spelling mistakes on Twitter before and in addition to the insights they provide into her thought processes, they are interesting for suggesting that even long posts like this are not precomposed and copied into twitter but written out unmediated, unpremeditated.

Rowling’s description of choosing her epigraph text for Running Grave because it is antithetical to the ethos of the UHC is fascinating for the wider insight it provides into her use of epigraph texts. The ethos of The Running Grave, like that of the I Ching, is deeply at odds with the UHC – so Rowling has chosen an epigraph text that rejects the morality of the novel’s antagonists and aligns itself with that of the novel and its heroes. As I’ve argued before I think this is how the is how the Victorian women poets in Ink Black Heart work too. Rowling’s real-world celebration of these (often forgotten) female poets acts in opposition to Anomie (and other antagonists in the novel) who through misogyny and even femicide attempt to undermine female creativity. Anomie attempts to erase a woman from her own creation while the epigraphs celebrate often overlooked female creativity. And the rarified air of fairyland in Spenser’s Faerie Queene works this way too. Rowling’s choice of a chivalric romance creates a framework which throws the misogynistic horror of Creed’s evil into even sharper relief. 

We do not know far in advance of writing a novel Rowling begins scoping out its epigraphs, except in the case of Deathly Hallows, which she chose nine years before the novel came out: ‘I’d known it was going to be those two passages since Chamber was published.’ It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, therefore, that Rowling’s original flicking through the I Ching had already occurred prior to her evocative description of her creative process as the Lake and the Shed (recorded summer 2019) and certainly other Chinese texts were influencing her at this time. She had spoken the year before of the importance of the Shan Hai Jing (or strange creatures from the guideways through mountains and seas) for the Fantastic Beasts franchise and put an image of it up on her website.

 

 

(For more on the influence of this and other Chinese texts on Fantastic Beasts see here and my essay ‘The Snake Woman in Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts’). Another classic Chinese text – The Art of War – was visible in her 2020 bookshelf video on Twitter  (thank you, as ever, to Nick Jeffrey who spotted it!). Maybe in 2018, when Rowling was becoming interested in classic Chinese texts such as the Shan Hai Jing , she likewise felt drawn to take a look through the I Ching and think about the Chinese influences the UHC was going to spuriously claim for itself. 

Whenever she read it, I think it likely that she would have been caught by its use of natural images such as the mountain and the lake for deep mental states and found it resonated with her own understanding of her own creativity as a lake: ‘Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalizing force… it harbors the quiet security of a heart fortified within itself’ (Hexagram 58, The Joyous, Lake, I Ching)

 

By Dr Beatrice Groves