A Brief Meditation Sparked by Seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Last night after cleaning up from our little Thanksgiving feast (rotisserie grilling a turkey for the first time. My goodness, it was great!), overcoming trypotophan-driven inertia (okay, maybe over-eating-driven inertia), we went out to a local multiplex and took in the penultimate Harry Potter movie.

Me, I enjoyed it a lot. As did auntie. As did Jan.

And I look forward to the conclusion. Which, I think won’t be like when the family walked out of the theater after watching the last of the Matrix series when auntie declared, “Thank goodness that’s over.”

Now there are things to criticize in the Harry Potter phenom, particularly with the books.

No doubt the superstructure, plot, meta reality, whatever, for Rowling’s little alternative universe is slight. And the writing rarely rises above the mediocre. (Although, it adapts to film rather nicely, I find.)

So, no wonder there is a crowd that disdains the whole thing. In what has become a fairly widely read op ed, A. S. Byatt, one of the literary luminaries of our day has pretty much dismissed the whole Harry Potter phenomenon. She writes how “Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing ‘secondary worlds.’ Ms. Rowling’s world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature — from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from ”Star Wars” to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that clichés endure because they represent truths. Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child’s own power of fantasizing.”

True enough.

And, no doubt, these books did capture a generation of children, allowing the free running of their imaginations. As have, I believe, the movies.

And who knows how many kids became readers just because of these books. A point not to be missed.

I read the books. And, while the writing did annoy me more than once, I was also enticed enough to keep on and read all of ’em.

And, now, I’m nearly through the movies, as well.

And, I’m haunted by Byatt’s ultimate dismissal. “Ms. Rowling’s magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ‘only personal.’ Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.”

I’m less impressed with the last part about the “only personal.” One can do a lot with the personal. Byatt herself has done this admirably. 

But, I think she’s right about the lack of the numinous in Rowling’s universe.

It’s all surface. What you see is what you get. There isn’t anything deeper there. And, not in the good way.

Now I think it also fair to ask why she need do that? She’s not trying to present aspects of religion into her project, which is the most common way writers have given heft to their fantasy worlds. I find myself thinking of C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle & J.R. R. Tolkien using Christian motifs. Or, Philip Pullman’s powerful reaction to Christian motifs in his Dark Materials trilogy. (As an aside, I’m deeply saddened by the failure of the filming of the first volume of that series. Seems it too dark, too complex for the market it was aimed at…) For that matter in movies, the first of the Matrix series, which draws upon Gnostic themes (not to my mind Buddhist, as some have thought. A lovely argument could be had here…). A great movie, the Matrix, I thought, undone as a series through over production and the morass of ever more over the top special effects. Walking out of the theater with the family after seeing the last of the Matrix series I was exhausted…

And, yes, these books and movies tend to have something more to them than we’re going to find in Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

But, so what?

As Byatt said herself they do indeed trigger a “child’s own power of fantasizing…”

Or, an adult’s.

And there are ways in which the prosaic alternative universe she presents has its own power.

A small thing, probably. But, okay for me.

I say thumb’s up.

See it, and enjoy it!

And, later, maybe, in bed, read the Golden Compass.

There’s room in this universe for both…