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<\/a><\/div>\nLast night after cleaning up from our little Thanksgiving feast (rotisserie grilling a turkey<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Me, I enjoyed it a lot. As did auntie. As did Jan.<\/p>\n And I look forward to the conclusion. Which, I think won\u2019t be like when the family walked out of the theater after watching the last of the Matrix series when auntie declared, \u201cThank goodness that\u2019s over.\u201d <\/p>\n Now there are things to criticize in the Harry Potter phenom, particularly with the books.<\/p>\n No doubt the superstructure, plot, meta reality, whatever, for Rowling\u2019s little alternative universe is slight. And the writing rarely rises above the mediocre. (Although, it adapts to film rather nicely, I find.)<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, one of the literary luminaries of our day has pretty much dismissed<\/a> the whole Harry Potter phenomenon. She writes how \u201cAuden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing \u2018secondary worlds.\u2019 Ms. Rowling\u2019s world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children\u2019s literature \u2014 from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from \u201dStar Wars\u201d to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that clich\u00e9s endure because they represent truths. Derivative narrative clich\u00e9s work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child\u2019s own power of fantasizing.\u201d<\/p>\n True enough.<\/p>\n And, no doubt, these books did capture a generation of children, allowing the free running of their imaginations. As have, I believe, the movies.<\/p>\n And who knows how many kids became readers just because of these books. A point not to be missed. <\/p>\n 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 \u2019em. <\/p>\n And, now, I\u2019m nearly through the movies, as well.<\/p>\n And, I\u2019m haunted by Byatt\u2019s ultimate dismissal. \u201cMs. Rowling\u2019s 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, \u2018only personal.\u2019 Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m less impressed with the last part about the \u201conly personal.\u201d One can do a lot with the personal. Byatt herself has done this admirably<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/p>\n But, I think she\u2019s right about the lack of the numinous in Rowling\u2019s universe.<\/p>\n It\u2019s all surface. What you see is what you get. There isn\u2019t anything deeper there. And, not in the good way<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now I think it also fair to ask why she need do that? She\u2019s 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\u2019Engle & J.R. R. Tolkien using Christian motifs. Or, Philip Pullman\u2019s<\/a> powerful reaction to Christian motifs in his Dark Materials trilogy. (As an aside, I\u2019m 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\u2026) For that matter in movies, the first of the Matrix series, which draws upon Gnostic themes (not to my mind Buddhist<\/a>, as some have thought. A lovely argument could be had here\u2026). 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\u2026<\/p>\n And, yes, these books and movies tend to have something more to them than we\u2019re going to find in Rowling\u2019s Harry Potter series.<\/p>\n But, so what?<\/p>\n As Byatt said herself they do indeed trigger a \u201cchild\u2019s own power of fantasizing\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Or, an adult\u2019s.<\/p>\n And there are ways in which the prosaic alternative universe she presents has its own power.<\/p>\n A small thing, probably. But, okay for me.<\/p>\n I say thumb\u2019s up.<\/p>\n See it, and enjoy it!<\/p>\n And, later, maybe, in bed, read the Golden Compass<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n