Nick Jeffery and freshly Shorn & Clean Shaven John Granger sit down to discuss John’s two posts about the symbolism of the Letter ‘G’ in Strike 8. Part One of the series did the necessary work of demonstrating that, yes, the letter ‘G’ is all over Hallmarked Man, from the online guess that the murderer carved that initial into ‘William Wright’s back to the Witness G echoing with Green-jacked Gorilla-bearing man and a bit of calligraphic terrorism on the Agency door at street-level. The first also covered the accepted Masonic interpretations of why the ‘G’ is featured in the Compass and Square symbolism of their fraternity.

Part Two was a deep dive into more esoteric meanings given to the ‘G’ by Freemasons and by Rene Guenon, notable Perennialist, and into what associations Rowling-Galbraith tried to make between the seventh letter and the key hallmark of the book. It concluded with three answers to “So What?” including some fun speculation about a possible shape for the series, a shape highlighted in Strike 8, and with a discussion of whether Rowling-Galbraith’s subliminal artistry with ‘G’ worked or failed.

Perhaps the biggest take-away of this series of posts was to introduce subliminal coloration as the common denominator of Rowling-Galbraith’s signature seven Shed tools. Nick and John open their conversation about the letter ‘G’ with that subject and everything they discuss in the end folds back into that covert artistry.

As always, the Dynamic Duo covet your comments and feedback as the best follow-up to their conversation. Please jump right in!

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The Ten Questions and Relevant Links

1. Okay, John, let’s talk coloration. You mentioned some examples in famous authors’ work in Part One of your deep dive into Letter G Symbolism in Hallmarked Man; do we have coloration in Harry Potter? Another Strike novel?

* ‘Donegality’ in Planet Narnia, Michael Ward, the subliminal artistry of C. S. Lewis’ Narniad;

* From ‘Literary Alchemy: Sacred Science, Sacred Art, and the Alembic of Story’

C. S. Lewis, according to Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia, also felt appreciating the “manner of the author,” his “various special tricks,” especially those connected to creating atmosphere, were critical to understanding the style of the Greats.

Again and again, in defending works of romance, Lewis argues that it is the quality or tone of the whole story that is its main attraction. The invented world of romance is conceived with this kind of qualitative richness because romancers feel the real world itself to be ‘cryptic, significant, full of voices, and the mystery of life.’ Lovers of romances go ‘back to fruit tree for its taste; to an air for… what? For itself; to a region for its whole atmosphere – to Donegal for its Donegality and London for its Londonness’ (Ward, 16).

Donegal was one of Lewis’favorite vacation spots as a child in Northern Ireland. Ward defined Lewis’ stylistic atmosphere as his ‘Donegality:’

By donegality we mean to denote the spiritual essence or quiddity of a work of art as intended by the artist and inhabited unconsciously by the reader. The donegality of the story is its peculiar and deliberated atmosphere or quality; its pervasive and purposed integral tone or flavor; its tutelary but tacit spirit, a spirit that that the author consciously sought to conjure, but which was designed to remain implicit in the matter of the text… the more influentially to inform the work and so affect the reader (Ward 75).

Ward’s concern is especially with Lewis’ character Aslan, in whom this donegality is “concentrated and consummated” as a “Christologically representative character” (Idem), but the thesis of Planet Narnia is that the “kappa-element,”[xiv] Lewis’ phrase for the informing, hidden “tutelary but tacit” style of a work, is astrological symbolism, each of the Narnia chronicles representing one of the seven traditional planets. Ward argues that Lewis’ subliminal artistry, the “inner weave” or style of his work in Nabokovian language, is the embedded mythological and astral metaphors to be found beneath the surface of each story. Twain is supposed to have said, “”If you would have your fiction live forever, you must neither overtly preach nor overtly teach, but you must covertly preach and covertly teach.” Lewis, believing as he did that “an influence which cannot evade our consciousness will not go very deep” (Lewis no date), wrote in astrological glyphs to reach covertly his reader’s unconscious depths or noetic heights.

* ‘The Eyes of Deathly Hallows’ in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, John Granger, and, briefly, here, and 2010 lecture at New York Public Library; and

* ‘The Cross Symbolism of Troubled Blood,’ John Granger

2. You list those eyes and crosses and I confess it didn’t strike me on my first and repeated readings that there were so many of those. What made you notice all the ‘G’s in Strike 8?

* I confess that I didn’t make anything of the letter ‘G’s repeated appearances in Hallmarked Man until I saw that Rene Guenon, the most famous and profoundly metaphysical of the first 20th Century Perennialists, had written a brief essay in his youth, ‘The Letter G and the Swastika.’ I made that discovery inadvertently when looking for something else in Fundamental Symbols, a posthumous collection of his writing (downloadable as pdf here).

3. Let’s play ‘Name a G passage;’ I’ll start with the G supposedly carved into William Wright’s back and you name another until we’re both out of examples...

Robin’s research into the death of ‘William Wright’ in the Ramsey Silver shop vault begins with an online observer saying out of the blue that a ‘G’ was carved into the victim’s back and that this was tied to the Secret Word of Freemasonry and the legend of Hiram Abiff’s martyrdom. Rowling-Galbraith has Robin mention this to Murphy at their first unofficial briefing on the case and Murphy all but explodes; he denies it was a ‘G’ and says he heard it was a “hallmark” instead.

The letter is associated with Freemasonry as their symbolic center (GAOTU) via a telephone message and in Strike’s meeting with ‘Hiram’ Hardacre.

We learn after Robin’s being attacked in Harrow’s that she was ‘Witness G’ in her rapist’s trial, the letter being to her something like a secret identity.

Strike not long thereafter finds a blood Red Letter ‘G’ painted on the street level door to the Agency which he hopes is a Masonic terrorist marker rather than the pointed suggestion that the Angel of Death is coming for Witness G.

I’d add that the Gorilla mask and doll of the Green jacket man that haunt Robin have some of their subliminal effect on her and the reader because of the initial guttoral sound of ‘Gorilla’ and ‘Green.’

4. The Freemason connection is the most interesting one even though the Masonic G isn’t carved into Powell’s back (it’s a Salem Cross and the only other twice played symbol is the orb and cross pendant Strike buys for the charm bracelet Christmas present). Who knew that the capital ‘G’ was such a big deal in Masonry?

5. At the end of Part One, I thought you’d pretty much covered the symbolism and were going to close in Part Two with what God and Geometry are about in Hallmarked Man, hence the coloration. Instead you wrote that the G being a one-letter acronym wasn’t enough. Why not?

* not Masonic -- no edges!

* not ancient Greek, Hebrew, or Sanskrit,

* not tied to craft symbolism,

* not a symbol!,

* the catechism answer “By letters four and science five, this G aright doth stand in due art and proportion’.”

6. So was Guenon’s essay the key to Rowling’s use of the letter ‘G’?

* Yes and no!

* His Symbolism of the Cross, Lord of the World, and The Great Triad chapters help a lot but from ‘The Letter G and the Swastika’ we learn that

* yod is God is gamma,

* catechism answer means four gammas or four yodhs which both yield swastikas (gammadion cross),

* GAOTUmeans Christ the keystone/cornerstone,

* the sequence of jumps from letter ‘G’ to Murphy’s Salem Cross...

7. Who backed Guenon up on this connection so you weren’t using the Perennialist hammer to drive in a screw or fasten a bolt?

* Cockburn, Crypto Curry, Albert Pike (via Tamara/Tamspells!)

8. If I accept the preponderance of ‘G’s in Hallmarked Man as coloration/Donegality (I do) and the meaning of the symbolism per your readers (I’m withholding skeptical judgement), what effect was this supposed to have on me the reader so I can tell you if it worked or not? If it was supposed to confuse me, boffo job!

* Nabokovian potustoronost,

* numinous quality in the air,

* Robin as ‘Witness G, ‘

* Strike channeling Tyler Powell at finish in Ironbridge

9. Will we see Freemasonry and its symbolism in Strikes 9 and 10?

Maybe! [Rowling-Galbraith] certainly has made us long for a big pay-off with respect to ‘G;’ see Sarah Keeler’s idea that it may be a pointer to Gillespie reappearing in Strike 9. I love that possibility and it certainly is in keeping with the HogwartsProfessor working thesis that Hallmarked Man is what it is to set up the next two books. If we’re going to see characters and themes bleed between the first book of the last three and its successors, why not its symbolism?

If I had to bet money on it, though, I think we probably won’t see more Freemasonry or Big ‘G’ payoffs. It kills me to say that given the investment I’ve made in books about the Masons (they’re on a shelf beneath the dust-collecting little library on Mormon history and scriptures I collected while writing about Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight books). I just cannot see her weaving the Mason characters from Hallmarked Man into story lines that give us resolution with respect to Charlotte’s and Leda’s supposed suicides twenty some years apart, Shanker’s family history, and the mysteries around Strike’s time with the military police, especially the IED that nearly killed him.

10. I thought you promised not to get into the Strike Series Shape Sweepstakes? You’ve already said you think it’s a seven part ring with a triangle-trilogy addendum and in Part Two you give us a Harry Potter shape for the decalogy structure -- or is it Christmas Pig?

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