Semiotics and Harry Potter

What if a wizard tampered with his firstness, secondness, and thirdness? What would happen? I had a vision of a wizard inhabiting secondness as a semi-translucent, flickering mirror-image of himself. And then went back to the chapter of Harry Potter I read right before bed last night, in which Lily and James go into hiding by having a Fidelius charm performed, so that only their secret-keeper could discover where they were and as long as the secret-keeper kept quiet, no one else could find them, not even with face pressed against their sitting-room window. Wouldn’t this Fidelius charm actually be a break between the signifier and the signified? Lily and James being the signified, and solid and real, but completely unfindable because the signifier was hidden inside Sirius?

Has anyone ever written about this? Did Rowling intend it? It’s too lowbrow for Borges. Eco maybe?

As one who has never heard of Semiotics, I have one thing to say…

Sirius wasn’t James and Lily’s secret keeper.

I don’t now much about semiotics either, just what I read in in-flight magazines, but I had a not-entirely-dissimilar thought about the philosophical spohistication of the idea of a secret-keeper in particular.

–Cliffy

It doesn’t touch that specific issue, but you might be interested in Gregory Feeley’s Spell It Slant: Harry Potter and the Postmodern Condition from the Fall 2003 SFWA Bulletin.