| by Dan McVeigh "Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we tried to | |
prevent him because he does not follow in our company." Jesus said, "Do not
prevent him, for whoever is not against you is for you." --Luke 9.49-50
| | IN 1961 Samuel Taylor Coleridge's remains were moved from Highgate Cemetery in London to a church close to where he had lived for some years before dying in 1834. Among the dignitaries present were admirers Agatha Christie and T. S. Eliot. Eliot, once asked to write a brief blurb on the earlier poet's life, began it, "As a child, S. T. Coleridge read The Arabian Nights." Coleridge's letters recall how those Middle Eastern tales about beggars and jinns, terrified sailors, and rocks as big as hills had excited his childish imagination. One might even suspect a distant source for "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." So Eliot was hinting that a schoolboy's wide-eyed flipping of pages in the 1780s had proved a seminal event in all of British Romanticism. The role of the child's imagination also fascinated Coleridge's contemporaries William Blake and William Wordsworth. Seeds, of both flowers and weeds, are planted early. In planning his and Wordsworth's 1798 Literary Ballads, Coleridge said that his own poems intended to explore a preternatural world to show how commonplace were the truths lying behind it, "so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth, sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" (Biographia 168-69). Wordsworth's poems were to do the opposite, "to give the charm of novelty to things of every day," to reveal the marvel lying behind what we take for granted in daily life, the dew on morning grass, the stars reflected on midnight ice beneath one's skates. Indeed, Coleridge came to see the child's imagination as the origin of all artistic creativity: | |
To find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the
Ancient of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then
sprang forth at the first creative fiat, characterizes the mind that feels
the riddle of the world and may help to unravel it. To carry on the
feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's
sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for
perhaps forty years had rendered familiar ... this is the character and
privilege of genius. (Biographia 49)
| | Historically the early nineteenth century was the beginning in the English language world of "children's literature" as such (as opposed to essentially adult works like Gulliver's Travels or Robinson Crusoe). Charles Lamb, one of Coleridge's closest friends, wrote a children's version of Shakespeare's plays; Coleridge's gifted daughter Sara wrote poems for children; in the next generation would come Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, Thomas Hughes, and many others. Today thirty-five year old British novelist J. K. Rowling writes in this Romantic tradition. (1) Her Harry Potter series has become a phenomenon in the United States. In terms of plot the series is complex. Currently it has reached four books in its quest for a final seven; eleven years of age in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry will therefore be seventeen in the last volume. Presumably that will be in relatively few years from now, though since the early books were in the vicinity of 300 pages and the fourth is 734, one can only hope this. Rowling's is, then, a large imaginative structure, one whose general outline she has had in mind from the beginning, and which when completed may prove a worthy successor to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. There, however, is the rub. As everyone except most of her young readers knows, controversy swirls in some quarters. Though Rowling herself has said she believes in God, not Wicca, and that she attends church more than occasionally, many Christians distrust the books. (2) Predictably these anxieties have increased now that the first of a series of movies has been released. Coincidentally, a more critically applauded version of Tolkien's trilogy has also been filmed, and a reissuing of Lewis's Namia series is in the works. With the Inklings' religious credentials being as impeccable as Coleridge's and Eliot's, there is some struggle over Rowling's relationship to them. At first glance, and probably second as well, a Christian cannot oppose all children's fiction that includes witches and magic, because of Tolkien's and Lewis's prominent employment of both. (3) Gandalf, love it or hate it, is a white wizard, and the only way to enter Narnia is through magic (Voyage 3). However one takes them, Inkling parallels with Harry Potter are obvious and acknowledged by Rowling herself. In a few cases, as in her Voldemort's cousinship with Tolkien's shadowy Sauron, they are striking enough to have led to the charge of weak imitation bordering on plagiarism. Rowling has declared that her books are not about "magick" in the sense of Wiccan practice, but about imagination. Though not everyone believes her, "magic" as analogous to spiritual energy or insight is certainly in a Christian Romantic tradition. Lewis and Tolkien both insisted that fantasy did not involve a neat transference from Christian belief system to imagined realm. Charged with didacticism, Lewis flatly denied that he first drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out `allegories' to embody them. | |
This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way at all. Everything
began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a
magnificent lion. At first there wasn't even anything Christian about them;
that element pushed itself in of its own accord. It was part of the
bubbling. (Of Other Worlds 36)
| | Magic will not be rule-bound: Aslan is not a tame lion. Rather than neatly correlative to Christian storyline, fictional magic may be transferred "from our inward nature," suggesting the "inside" of human life that we adults take for granted. One might recall Thoreau's comment about how extraordinary a sunrise would seem if one occurred only every thousand years, or Tolkien's championing of Nature in the face of industrial blight. In this respectable tradition, literary magic awakens one to that world of spirit that is in true command of the material universe: "Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!" (4) A prosaic blindness to wonder, to the possibility of miracle, is the true black magic, the spell of the Emerald Witch (see Silver Chair 51-61). Rowling's series being unfinished, any commentary on it must remain provisional. Surely the arch-villain Voldemort will not turn out to be Harry's "real father." Nonetheless, in medias res, any plot twist is possible. Yet with this caveat, it seems useful to sort out a critical tangle. Rowling is normally classified as a fantasy writer. In fact, however, she has with unusual cleverness joined two literary traditions, the "school" series genre begun by Tom Brown's School Days in the 1850s, and the fantasy-heroic tradition of such works as The Wizard of Oz. Harold Bloom claims that this centaur doesn't trot, but inexplicably the series' youthful audience does not share his opinion. (5) In fact, these books work from two traditions bonded together: one realistic in its Wordsworthian focus on growth and education, the other a Coleridgean attempt to grasp truth through "shadows of imagination" like the Ancient Mariner's voyage. Critical clarity might pour balm on parental anxieties. For instance, the notion that Harry and his friends must be entirely good or bad makes some sense in the conventions of fantasy, but none at all in the Bildung universe of the school series, in which the whole point is to learn, sometimes through mistakes or misbehavior. On the other hand, some of the comedy involved in Hogwarts magic (the Weasley twins' swelling Dudley's tongue with prank candy, for instance) seems nasty to the point of cruelty when literalized--like Swift's or Flannery O'Connor's dark satire taken without a sense of humor. One need not enjoy Rabelaisian exaggerations, bawdy or barbed. But it is a critical error to mistake them for what they would be in another genre. It is not clear to me that the Potter series is Christian, though in spirit it may be. But clearly Rowling writes in a specifically Christian literary tradition. The catch? That tradition is one whose High Church roots--Anglican and Roman Catholic--make assumptions built into Rowling's use of it inaccessible to a significant segment of American Christianity. These assumptions grow out of a sacramental view of the universe, the belief that the world for all its heartaches is comic and that truth is always on the startling other side of the real and concrete. This is the world mirrored in the frequently violent fiction of G. K. Chesterton and O'Connor, for instance. Sacramental vision equally offers Lewis's spirituality of childlike joy: the incarnate God is "the God of corn and oil and wine. He is the glad Creator" (Miracles 194). Not all Christian parents will welcome Harry Potter (never mind wine!) into their homes, and it would be foolish to call their taste "wrong." Tolkien, after all, detested the Church of England and sniped at his friend "Jack's" Narnia series (see Carpenter 151, 201). Nonetheless, one can explain why Harry Potter is not against us, if that pronoun is used to include Christianity in general, and not just one subsection of it. "Hocus Pocus," one may recall, originated as a term used to deride the central sacrament of the Roman Catholic Church. | |
Jesus was driving out a demon that was mute, and the crowds were amazed.
Some of them said, "By the power of Beelzebub, the prince of demons, he
drives out demons." --Luke 11.14-15
| | Harry Potter is an English orphan in the hands of his aunt's family, the Dursleys of Privet Drive. Like the stepchildren of fairy tales, he is treated harshly and despised, while the pig-like legitimate son Dudley is spoiled. But at age eleven Harry is finally told who he really is: the son of two wizards, James and Lily Potter, who died trying to save him as a baby from the attack of Lord Voldemort. On Harry's forehead is a lightning bolt scar, left from whatever mysterious power protected him and weakened Voldemort, whom almost everyone in the series is afraid even to name. An abused child among Muggles, in the concealed world of wizards Harry is famous. His future lies in his adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in which he will learn both to follow in the footsteps of his parents and to pursue the truth about their death. Part of the series' interest involves the gradual revelation of what lay behind earlier incidents. In the first volume Harry finds himself understanding a Brazilian python. Not until the third book does he discover that he is a Parselmouth, an extremely rare human who can speak the language of snakes, a disturbing signifier of potential treachery and gift of the ancient wizard Salazar Slytherin. The fourth book makes clear that Harry is indeed linked dangerously to Voldemort himself, whose "pet" is a huge serpent named Nagini. It must be hazardous to predict how the whole plot will be resolved, though Harry does appear on a path to reunion with his mother and father. He has already encountered them in stages, first by voice, then in visions of their specters. Harry's mother's heroic love saved his life; his fiercest desire is to be a brave wizard like his father. Conversely, to follow the Dark Lord one has to betray or (preferably) kill your father, as young Barty Crouch has done (Goblet 690). Harry is the common clay with which the Great Potter can work wonders; on his journey he must confront Death and conquer it. After all, as the wise Hogwarts headmaster and greatest wizard of his age, Albus Dumbledore, tells Harry, "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure" (Sorcerer's 297). Series tracing the progress of a schoolboy or girl were popular in the United States early in the twentieth century. Titles abound from the nineteen teens and twenties like Pauline Lester's Marjorie Dean, High School Junior, Alice Emerson's Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall, and Jessie Graham Flower's Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School. Rowling's opening pages offer subtitles: Year One at Hogwarts, Year Two at Hogwarts, and so forth. She would not know these American series, but the lineage traces its ancestry back to Tom Brown, who goes to Rugby in the early 1830s, the time of Coleridge's death and Dickens's first novels. Hughes also sent Brown to Oxford in a highly moralistic sequel. So this is one subset of the Bildungsroman, an account of youth maturing over the course of time, as in Jane Eyre or David Copperfield or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the young readers' line at least one must call it a thoroughly "moral" genre, with its attacks on snobbery, phoniness, and bullying, and its celebration of the character building provided by sports. Tom Brown is the son of a prosperous but not aristocratic squire. The name "Brown" itself connotes a certain Victorian British type, hardheaded, patriotic, energetic, sentimental about fairness to the unprivileged and always ready for a fight. Though he accepts the class system, Hughes insists that whenever one class does not mingle with another (as in fairs or in church), it becomes narrow and decadent, a threat to society as a whole (see 58). His is a confident muscular Christianity tied together politically by an affection for the past and local customs, the "unity" provided by the Church of England, and a common bond to Britishness. In this tradition there are usually a few Hermione Grangers, eager beavers in the classroom; Rugby's are the devout, mild mannered Arthur and the budding naturalist "Madman" Martin. But academic learning normally takes a back seat to character building. In sending off ten-year-old Tom to Rugby, Squire Brown doesn't care how much the boy studies: he wants Tom to become "a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian" (88). The later "school" series follow Hughes's lead in making protagonists like Marjorie Dean and Grace Harlowe comfortably middle class and therefore surrounded at a private school with somewhat richer students, a few of them villains, and a poor girl whom they will befriend. Surely some of the appeal of Rowling's own series is that it allows any poor child whose parent struggles to earn a few quid in Liverpool to identify with Harry Potter, who overnight finds himself enrolled at a prestigious private academy, complete with robust feasts, roaring fireplaces, and "common rooms." In this genre social classes mingle in a formal, rule bound prosperity, creating the need for what the energetic but humble Marjorie Dean at Sanford High School calls "democracy," the sticking up of individuals for the whole school and not just their faction of it, the rich city girls or the overbearing junior class. Hughes links these prep school values with the duties and burdens of empire; his Rugby is a miniature Britain, with class antagonisms, man bullying man despite a common enemy--the Devil, sensuality and selfishness, the Russians in the Crimean War. So the defeat of wealthy bullies plays an indispensable role. At Rugby the nasty Flashman holds a group of Goyles and Crabbes to him with imported game and candy. Of Grace Harlowe's bright but impecunious friend Alice the villainous patrician Miriam Nesbit complains, "Why should girls of good Oakdale families be forced to associate with such people?" (Flower 90). So Draco Malfoy's lazily aristocratic drawl ("My father told me all the Weasleys have red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford" [Sorcerer's 108]) recalls numerous benighted predecessors. What will happen to Draco we can only speculate. With help, Tom Brown humiliates Flashman in a tussle and the boy is expelled for public drunkenness. Marjorie Dean's snobbish nemesis, Leslie Cairns, however, is finally won over to the forces of good. One might indulge in hope for Malfoy, therefore. But given his Spenserian moniker ("Dragon Bad Faith"), and his bloodcurdling turn toward evil in the last pages of The Goblet of Fire, one should doubtless resist optimism. A second traditional element is the sturdy schoolmaster or mistress, on the students' side against the forces of evil, snobbery, bullying, tattling. Dumbledore, wise yet cunning, opposes the mean-spirited snobbery of pure-blood wizardry because it divides those who serve good: | |
"Lord Voldemort's gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We
can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and
trust. Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are
identical and our hearts are open." (Goblet 723)
| | In these school series he has had many predecessors, male and female, the most distinguished being a real man, Thomas Arnold, Matthew Arnold's father. Arnold became headmaster of Rugby School in 1828. By emphasizing duty and character in a sturdy Anglican mode he made it the model for future English public schools. Also a Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, he died at the young age of forty-seven, a loss that concludes Tom Brown's School Days on a tragic, elegiac note. So this school tradition, despite Joyce, is a soberly moral one, rather conservative for that matter--in Arnold's son's unsympathetic term "Hebraic." School life offers not just a growth in knowledge but in self-knowledge. Perhaps this is really the central problem Bloom has with the Potter series, despite his dubious claims of lack of originality and poor writing. He has made it quite clear, perhaps most crankily in his 1992 The American Religion, that he detests moralism, especially of the Christian variety. Rowling's fiction recalls that of a whole set of writers, including the Inklings, about whom Bloom is anxious. Throughout these school series, certainly, "the way of the transgressor is hard"--a bit of wisdom from the first Psalm intoned by a Grace Harlowe comrade (Flower 22). Whatever is to be Harry Potter's eventual fate, Tom Brown surely is not led into an awakening to his godlike potential or Gnostic sense of oneness with the universe; Rugby teaches him that all of life is "a battlefield ordained from of old, where ... the youngest must take his side, and the stakes are life and death" (154). Neither does stepping through Platform Nine and Three-Quarters at King's Cross Station leave evil behind one. On the contrary, the stakes are still life and death. Moral decisions, selfish or unselfish, courageous or timid, have become heightened, more immediate and intense. In this whole tradition sports are central. In the American series studies themselves are largely ignored, being far less important than the grudge match in basketball or the May dance, but they are deemphasized even in Tom Brown. Inventively, Rowling has fun with her classroom teachers, differentiated easily because of their magic fields: Snape's Potions, McGonagall's Transformations, Lockhart's and Lupin's Defense against the Dark Arts, and Sybill Trelawney's Divination of dubious academic value. But sports are important too. The wizard sport Quidditch has supplanted soccer, cricket and all the rest, with elements of many of them, but especially the rough and dangerous rugby. In these series the interplay between fierce competition against other "houses" or grades and the reliance on comrades hastens the growth of character. (6) The battle of Waterloo, English patriots like Hughes have long harrumphed, was won on the playing fields of Eton. As a Seeker Harry Potter has the most prestigious but also vulnerable position on the Gryffindor team. If he catches the Snitch, his side will win, but if Malfoy does the enemy will. Nonetheless, to avoid broken bones, Harry always has to be protected by teammates from the two Bludgers. Swarmed by the rest on defeating Slytherin, Harry feels so ecstatic he could have summoned up the world's best Patronus against the dementors (Prisoner 313)! So the eleven year old girl who commented to one critic of the series that she loves Harry Potter because "he can do whatever he wants to do" (Abanes 38) wrongly maps Harry's journey. A Dudley Dursley is taught vanity, bullying, and snobbery at his elite private school, Smeltings; so is Eustace Scrubb at C. S. Lewis's comically "progressive" Experiment House (Silver Chair 1-2). In contrast, Hogwarts bases its education on merit, so that children of different races, genders, classes, and levels of ability can learn the "magic" of comradeship and working for the good of all. Though juvenile readers doubtless enjoy students' getting the best of adults, they also appreciate parent figures. Dumbledore, a charming old British word for bumblebee, is far more a true "father" to Harry than the highly literalistic and therefore Pharisaical Vernon Dursley. Were Christianity a Rowling target, the Dursleys would likely be pious churchgoers; in fact, they are pedestrian materialists, those recognizable betes noirs of virtually all Christian writers. Were parents or family themselves a target, the Weasleys would be neither numerous nor loveable. In all of these fictional schools rules are important but not ultimate. Jesus, of course, was accused of breaking more rules than Tom Brown. To break a rule, leading to demerits for your house or a dangerous attack by a troll, is both a reflection of real life and a part of growing and learning. Hogwarts regulations are a constant presence and infractions are punished in proportion to their gravity: detention with Filch, or an embarrassing white beard for finagling with an Aging Charm. Expulsion is possible. But the rules are means, not ends. Though a would-be Head Boy and wizard bureaucrat like Percy Weasley never grasps this, the most important achievements have little to do with rules. In contrast, Harry impulsively will break a Triwizard Tournament rule by telling a disliked opponent, Cedric Diggory, what he and the other competitors have discovered about the next event; fairness and honor are higher "rules." Now, Harry, Hermione and Ron no doubt fracture far more rules than are usual in these juvenile Bildungsromane. But that is because of Hogwarts's non-realistic superstructure: the fantasy genre to which Rowling has affixed the Hughes model. In critical terms, blaming Harry and Ron for naughtiness while ignoring the larger plot involves a confusion of genres. Like Lewis's young protagonists, they act like children, but ones startled into a higher, dangerous calling. Tom Brown indulges himself in a day of hooky to fish or a fight to avenge a friend, and Hogwarts students will break regulations for similar motivations, to eat candy at Hogsmeade or play a mean joke on a classmate. Like Tom, like our own children, they are either caught or not, and either learn from the punishment or not. But to flatten Hogwarts into one's neighborhood school is to ignore its nature. Its address is not Privet Drive. Tom Brown never sneaks out of his room in an Invisibility Cloak to fight a Dark Lord. More precisely: though in a spiritual sense, Hughes's Rugby is as besieged by the Devil as Hogwarts, or Victoria's empire, or all the World, Satan's machinations there are of a more subtle kind than Voldemort's. But wise adults like Dumbledore or McGonagall understand that for Harry to break a Hogwarts rule for a larger purpose, and at serious personal risk, is no more to practice self-indulgence than if he were to cure a paralytic on the Sabbath. One may take this point a bit further. In the Potter books, "rules" as such, more than in Hughes or the idiosyncratic yet proper Inklings, do tend to be something of a whipping boy. Rowling's books surely have something of Huck Finn in them, and well-meaning Aunt Gertrudes will itch to trim Harry's hair and pin him into a stiff collar. But this squeamishness does not necessarily imply a superior ethical sense. Many Christian parents enjoy the series without qualms, and for all her apparent iconoclasm, Rowling does make moral points, often ingeniously. One sees the beginnings of sexual attraction as her boys and girls grow older. In a series in which the main characters enter at age eleven and will end up seventeen, why should this be forbidden territory? The hundred veela who cheer on the Bulgarian side in the Quidditch World Cup dance provocatively before the crowd, and "wild, half-formed thoughts started chasing through Harry's dazed mind" (Goblet 103). Now fourteen, he and Ron almost jump out of the stands. But comically, Rowling turns adolescent lust into a lesson. Infuriated by the referee, the veela suddenly shed their beauty: "their faces were elongating into sharp, cruel-beaked bird heads, and long, scaly wings were bursting from their shoulders" (111); a chapter on, Hogwarts boys tell wild fibs to impress these sirens (125-26). The moral implication is wholly classical. The vividly drawn impostor Mad-Eye Moody carries a flask and suggests some of the characteristics of the derelict. Yet in general (as in both Narnia and the Shire) the books portray drinking wine and occasionally liquor as convivial, relaxing, and at times medicinal. In one special case, Beauxbaton's flying horses drink only single malt whiskey. Hagrid's disheveled and somewhat wild appearance makes him "slightly alarming," but the carelessness and drinking problem mask what is essentially a "very kind nature" (Goblet 179). So temperamentally Rowling values most a somewhat eccentric spontaneity and generosity, like Mrs. Weasley's or Hagrid's. Her villains are malevolent egotists, enemies of the spirit of "corn and oil and wine." Voldemort, the Ubermensch, believes that "there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it" (Sorcerer's 291). Like Milton's Satan or Lewis's Screwtape, he can understand a thousand and one things, but never the power of love. Yet these villains' power to destroy often comes from the shackles of materialist convention which bind the mediocre sort that Stalin memorably referred to as "useful idiots." In Rowling, whatever is rule-bound and power-hungry, even if not aligned with the Death Eaters, is a satiric target. When the pathetic house elf Winky gets in trouble, Harry and the Weasleys naturally feel sorry for her, while Percy argues petulantly, "A high-ranking Ministry official like Mr. Crouch deserves unswerving obedience from his servants" (Goblet 154). Dumbledore himself, fond of odd jokes and amused at youthful high spirits, is loveable and offbeat, far from "Hebraic." Diagon Alley is Greenwich Village, not Wall Street. The ramshackle Weasley house, the Burrow, feels like a home to Harry because quite opposite to 4 Privet Drive it is an adventurous and therefore forgiving place, with scoldings and hugs, multiple plates of bacon sandwiches, and distracting howls from the attic ghoul. The parallel with Hogwarts discipline, feasts, and odd irritations like Peeves the Poltergeist is obvious. So far more than with Hughes or the Inklings, readers whose sense of morality centers strongly on discipline and propriety are unlikely to enjoy Rowling's fictional world. She has more of Twain in her--the Twain whose satire resembled not a sniper's rifle but a sawed-off shotgun--than the Christian apologists in this line do. Among writers for adults Fielding and Flannery O' Connor similarly come to mind, along with Rabelais and Swift. For Potter readers this is not a matter of being right or wrong critically, or even of lacking a sense of humor, but of imaginative participation: the principles with which one enters the books may not permit one to relish their irreverence or exaggeration or bawdiness ("Can I see Uranus too, Lavender?"), to chuckle or snicker along with one's children, to maintain the "poetic faith" required for such satire. Just as only the child at heart can enter Narnia, Hogwarts is invisible to outsiders. Looking at this magnificent thousand year old castle, a Muggle sees only "a moldering old ruin with a sign over the entrance saying DANGER, DO NOT ENTER, UNSAFE" (Goblet 166). Some readers take the sign at its word. For them perhaps it reads DANGER, DO NOT ENTER, YOU MAY BE MADE FUN OF. | |
"I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven." --Luke 10.18
| | So this "school days" tradition is Wordsworthian, if that among other things means realistic and didactic, centering on an individual's spiritual growth. But Rowling has linked this tradition with an even more important one in children's literature, that of fantasy. Harry is virtually defined by name--Petunia Dursley considers it a "nasty, common name" (Sorcerer's 7)--as a mn-of-the-mill English boy, who, orphaned, finds himself to be a wizard and the son of wizards, an heir marked by a lightning bolt. May we call him a prophet unrecognized in the country of the Dursleys, who hide him under their staircase? Like all prophets, he is peculiar, uncanny--well, different.... And the adventure of fantasy is different. It begins with the humdrum, the everyday. Alice's cat runs into a hole. At a farewell party on his eleventy-first birthday Bilbo says goodbye to the Shire. During a game of hide and seek you crawl into a wardrobe. You knock--and the door is opened! You step through London's shabby Leaky Cauldron. And then--Diagon Alley! The looking glass. A golden path. One's life--one's vision--is transformed. Can I, poor little me, explore the unknown? Help the tormented? Stay the course? Perform heroically? The small, through potion or incantation, is turned large, and Alice faces the Queen of Hearts, four children the White Witch in a snow land where Christmas never comes, Frodo Baggins, eventually, the Dark Lord Sauron himself. And so as in Hughes's Rugby the common world turns out to be beneath the surface, within an enchanted attic--or perhaps the human soul--a vast and dignified place, "a battlefield ordained from of old, where ... the youngest must take his side, and the stakes are life and death" (154). The adventures in these fantastic realms, that is, are like the God of whom St. Paul spoke to those skeptical Athenians in the Areopagus, seemingly distant but really very close. They reflect in exaggerated and dramatic form everyday realities; they take seriously the idea that we see heaven (and presumably, hell) only through a glass, darkly. Surely it is not incidental that Coleridge, Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis were all evangelically Christian. Like Chesterton's remarkable The Man Who Was Thursday, all use the fantastic and paradoxical and fugitive to glimpse the other side of God. Tolkien's trilogy never mentions God at all: though it is a thoroughly Catholic work, he wrote, the "religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism" (Miller 44). The Christianity could not be explicit. Still, the white wizard Gandalf knows all along that some power is at work beyond any visible in the Third Age, and in the depths of Mordor, at his lowest point, Frodo's faithful friend Sam Gamgee | |
saw a white star twinkle for a while ... and hope returned to him. For like
a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow
was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever
beyond its reach. (Return 199)
| | At the end of that fantastic adventure the Commedia, Dante glimpses the encircling lights of the Triune God, and within, they are pinta della nostra effige, painted with the face of our own humanity. Secular humanism? No: Incarnation. The moral values this mythic tradition echoes are those of the "schoolboy" genre, though in highly dramatized terms. Victory ultimately depends on loyalty, perseverance, courage, and finally self-abnegation. In the pious Hughes line, a Tom Brown learns by praying with a younger "soft" boy, Arthur, and becomes a more open Christian in so doing. In myth a Beowulf can sometimes only win by facing his own death, by an act of self-sacrifice. Tolkien and Lewis were scholars and literary critics. Lewis speculated that in the story of mankind "truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History"; myth is "at its best, a real though unfocussed gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination" (Miracles 161n). In this sense Adonis and Osiris adumbrate through psychic experience those fundamental truths about human existence that the Creator by becoming Man actually took on Himself in the world of our senses. Myth is not an enemy: Jesus is its creator, not its product. To defeat the Dark Lord Sauron in The Return of the King, Frodo Baggins must throw away the ring that promises all power. Harry Potter can gain the Sorcerer's Stone only because he does not desire to use it. In this whole line the battle is ritually climaxed by a heroic act in confronting the dragon: the White or Emerald Witch, the Wizard, the Dark Lord, and so on. Voldemort awaits Harry. Who knows how this series will end, of course, especially since Rowling is strikingly fond of false leads and reversals of expectation. But for the time being, the confrontation and victory over evil scenario seems inevitable. "Voldemort" sounds like a German-French mixture meaning "Full of Death," and he taunts his young prey and enemy before a duel, "Bow to death, Harry" (Goblet 660). His Dark Mark is a huge skull with serpent's tongue summoned up by the spell "Morsmordre" (128). Of course Lord Voldemort (he has granted himself the title) is symbolically that Satan whom Jesus saw fall like lightning from heaven. His fevered goal is immortality and total control of all other beings. In defeat he hides in Albania, the most insistently atheist of twentieth century countries. Dumbledore's Phoenix contains the inner fire of life and issues tears that heal. In contrast, like the devils in The Screwtape Letters, Voldemort's life must be drawn out of others. Coincidentally or not, his lackey Wormtail's name echoes "Wormwood," Screwtape's nephew, and "Wormtongue," the renegade wizard Saruman's toady. In Voldemort's duel with Harry he uses a Cruciatus curse. He does not request faith--he demands submission. He torments his own followers and kills them when they disappoint him. As noted before, Voldemort resembles in many points Tolkien's Sauron, who also is called the Dark Lord and the Enemy, whom the good fear to name and who forbids his followers to do so. Sauron too in defeat assumes a shadowy disembodied life. Like the Nazism Tolkien was always charged with allegorizing, Mordor's siren call is "Knowledge, Rule, Order" (Fellowship 340). Dumbledore's warning about Harry's enemy echoes an elf's sage advice in Return of the King that "in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all who still oppose him" (451). Voldemort, indeed, is a Satan but also a Dracula, the chilling human embodiment of the primordial draco or dragon. Indeed, the Hogwarts motto is Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus--A sleeping dragon must never be tickled. Bram Stoker's 1898 Dracula is a perversion of Jesus, as Satan is of God the Father: everything in the salvation story is twisted, turned inside out. Instead of shedding his own blood to save others, Dracula sucks that of others to keep himself alive; he offers not eternal life but eternal death, Undeath; he remains always, in a word Stoker uses over and over, "selfish," ancient and brilliant, but unable to understand the slightest thing about love. In similar fashion, the magic spell that revives Voldemort is a striking inversion of Christian rebirth, employing his father's bones, his servant's flesh, his enemy's blood. He cannot revere his father, be a servant, forgive an enemy. Like all devils, tyrants and vampires, Voldemort can only recognize love as a mysterious opponent, the one thing that makes no sense at all: of Lily Potter's sacrifice of life for her baby he comments regretfully, it was "the old magic, I should have remembered it" (Goblet 653). It seems obvious, then, that Rowling writes in a Christian tradition--indeed, two of them. A few adherents to Wicca claim to enjoy her series. (7) Still, a good deal of her fictional magic is nightmarishly black, in traditional Grimm brothers' hue. Any parent may read one of the books and not like it or feel it could harm her child. Who knows? She may even be right. But perhaps many who fear the series have not read the books at all. That is a shame. Their tone is dark sometimes and satiric constantly, but also whimsical and hearty and slightly raffish. Mischievous, Rowling surely is. But she is also civilized, with a touch of impishness, like Tolkien and Lewis and Chesterton, who relished laughter, wine and ale, pointed debate, and church on Sundays. Though not for everyone, Rowling's world is no New Age competitor to Christianity; as we have seen, it is packed with traditional notions of goodness and vice. One of Hogwarts' major holidays, for instance, is December 25: | |
The Great Hall looked magnificent. Not only were there a dozen
frost-covered Christmas trees and thick streamers of holly and mistletoe
crisscrossing the ceiling, but enchanted snow was falling, warm and dry,
from the ceiling. Dumbledore led them in a few of his favorite carols.
(Chamber 212)
| | In the same season, the snow covered wizard village of Hogsmeade "looked like a Christmas card" (Prisoner 200). Now, this is a world about as New Age as Currier and Ives prints, or Dickens Village ornamental cottages! Such passages hardly make the books apologetic: but they remind the reader of Christian assumptions, and perhaps leave her open to Christian possibilities. For the most part, Christianity in the Potter books is subterranean. Chapels and religious services would seem intrusive in the Inkling "subcreations" as well. But Christian symbols are not absent from Hogwarts. Dumbledore rescues Harry from destruction with a Phoenix, the ancient mythical bird that dies and is reborn in its own flames, whose tears heal wounds. As far back as A.D. 200 and throughout the Middle Ages the Phoenix symbolized the resurrected Christ, who set a pattern for all in His conquest of that which is "Full of Death." For that matter, Harry,s eleven inch wand is made of holly and a feather of the same phoenix that Voldemort's own is made of. In Goblet of Fire the two wands war against each other. As he hears the song of the phoenix, Harry's wins, summoning up the specters of those killed by the Dark Lord's. Possibly, three novels down the road his enemy will turn out to be Harry's "real father," moving the storyline into another tradition, the Gnostic or Manichean one preferred by a George Lucas, a line in the contemporary world tied to comparative mythology. In contrast, Lewis warns that central to all "magic' is that it "not be separated even in thought from spirit's own obedience to the Father of Spirits (Miracles 179). Jill, the girl in his The Silver Chair, finally breaking through from the Emerald Witch's underworld prison, finds that she | |
had come out in the heart of Narnia. Jill felt she could have fainted with
delight; and the music--the wild music, intensely sweet and yet just the
least bit eerie too, and full of good magic as the Witch's thrumming had
been full of bad magic--made her feel it all the more. (192)
| | Will Harry's magic stay obedient to the Father of Spirits? We cannot know. The religion in his own series, Lewis said, was originally unpredictable, "part of the bubbling." According to Tolkien, many years of work on Lord of the Rings had gone by before it started becoming consciously Catholic. (8) Perhaps Rowling herself does not yet know whether her story is Christian. But so far Harry seems in that line of descent. At the end of Book 3, he pursues evil into the Whomping Willow and disarms his father's old boyhood friends Black and Lupin. Then he stops them from killing the traitor Pettigrew. If not quite an act of "forgiveness," this is certainly a conquest of self, of passion for revenge, in the tradition of both Tom Brown and Frodo Baggins. Until Frodo drags himself to Mount Doom--no, until poor Gollum and his Precious actually destroy the Dark Lord--there is no guarantee that Sauron will lose. Yet a fantasy that is the inside of real life is not arbitrary. It may bend or break "roles"; it cannot do without them. A Christian cannot believe that the devil can ultimately be victorious, or misunderstood by God. Satan cannot defeat Christ. But until the end of our pilgrimage, he can defeat us. This is the possibility Harry faces. The series' growing darkness disturbs some readers. But by its nature Gethsemane comes near the end, and the apostles' flight. Yet this "end" turns out to be an illusion, a beginning whose reality was clouded all the time by the black magic of evil. We need not take Rowling at her word about God and Wicca, though we probably should. Having innovatively combined two genres, it is artistically unlikely that she will fundamentally transform either. Specifically, it would take an almost inconceivable turn of plot to recast Voldemort into either conqueror or victim. That which is Full of Death will not win in this story. | |
People were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them, and when
the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. Jesus, however, called the
children to himself and said, "Let the children come to me and do not
prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Amen, I say
to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not
enter it."
--Luke 18.15-17
| | Thoreau counseled, "Read not The Times. Read the Eternities." To Lewis, no literature was worth reading as a child that was not just as worth reading at age fifty. Surely the ultimate appeal of tree children's literature, that which proceeds from imaginations which feel "the riddle of the world and may help to unravel it," is that it addresses the fundamental questions of the child gazing up, like Dante, at the stars. Who am I? Why am I? Where am I going? In what story line do I live? Only adults, and perhaps modern adults at that, can answer these questions, "No one in particular." "For no particular reason." "Nowhere." "In any storyline you wish." This is a world with six billion people in it; recent scientific investigations of light waves indicate that it is some fifteen billion years old. Some adults quiver at this, the sheer numbers, the size and age. How can humans be as special as they have always thought? But true writers, like children themselves, have always been wiser than the latest New York Times editorials on overpopulation and euthanasia and abortion. Harry Potter, like every child in every cradle, to almost every parent, wears a bolt of lightning on his forehead. J. K. Rowling's books whisper to children that their hearts tell them rightly: in the world that counts, there need be no Muggles. The Gospel leaves us only a few fragments about Jesus' boyhood. He grew in wisdom and strength, so it was a true human childhood. He must have seen and smelled Egyptian nights along the Nile. He learned how sand burned His feet and caught the scent of olivewood parting beneath His adze. He fastened, solemn-eyed, on ancient stories about His people and their destiny, about the creation and destruction of the world. He laughed at Samson and despised Pharaoh; He learned from the wisdom and sins of David and Solomon. As a small boy, did Jesus see a traveler lie beaten by a road? An old woman in the Temple bent under her poverty? A wick flickering in otherwise total darkness? One may imagine so. Surely He heard, perhaps with grieving heart, the cry of lambs and pigeons sacrificed under the knife. And somewhere, maybe everywhere, He was learning a central truth: if one does not enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, one will not enter it. Notes 1) She is sometimes mistakenly taken to be Scottish. Born in Bristol and raised in Winterbourne and Tutshill, England, she has resided in Scotland with her sister for some time. Divorced, she has recently remarried. 2) By all reports Rowling seems circumspect about relating her own religious views to the Potter series. But in interviews she has said she attends Church of Scotland services "for more than weddings and christenings" (see "Religion and the Harry Potter Series FAQ," ed. Penny Linsenmayer, p. 2, at www.12k.com/*SYMBOL 126 \f "Symbol" \s10svderark/lexicon/faq/religion.html. Downloaded 1/13/02). One may always suspect evasion for purposes of marketing or avoiding negative publicity, of course. It is worth noting, though, that in present day England there seems little pressure on writers for children to sound Christian; Philip Pullman trumpets his atheism, for instance. 3) It should be acknowledged that in terms of connotation "witches" are not equal to "wizards." The former is habitually a negative term and the latter a positive one; "Liz is a real witch at the office" hardly implies the same thing as "Rich is a wizard at what he does." Inevitably, given the contemporary world, Hogwarts is coeducational, which means that in these books "witch" does equal "wizard." In contrast, Tolkien and Lewis are traditional in their usages, so that witches in the Narnia series are malevolent, and a female who wields magic in Middle Earth must be an elf-queen. Hogwarts gains much in interest by its coeducational status, but the positive portrayal of "witches" is an insuperable obstacle for some readers with a more traditional notion of who witches are. One may suspect that were Hogwarts to accept only boys, half the hubbub would die down. 4) "Dejection: an Ode," 1.49. In Miracles Lewis observes, "If we are in fact spirits, not Nature's offspring, then there must be some point (probably the brain) at which created spirit even now can produce effects on matter not by manipulation or technics but simply by the wish to do so. If that is what you mean by Magic then Magic is a reality manifested every time you move your hand or think a thought" (179-80). 5) "Rowling has taken `Tom Brown's School Days' and re-seen it in the magical mirror of Tolkien. The resultant blend of a schoolboy ethos with a liberation from the constraints of reality-testing may read oddly to me, but it is exactly what millions of children and their parents desire and welcome at this time." The books, Bloom claims, are "long on cliches, short on imaginative vision." There is no way of foretelling whether Rowling will be read in fifty years, but in general Bloom seems niggling. How can he know whether children will or will not be led by Rowling into reading imaginative literature in the future? 6) Graduating from Rugby, Tom Brown comments thoughtfully that team sports are really the best: "that's why football and cricket, now one comes to think of it, are so much better games than fives' or hare-and-hounds, or any others where the object is to come in first or to win for one's self, and not that one's side may win" (363). 7) For Wiccans' reaction to Rowling, see "Religion and the Harry Potter Series FAQ," p. 2. Harry's antagonists seem to find witches flattered by the attention, fans those who see in him and his friends none of the true craft. 8) "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision" (qtd. Miller 44). Works Cited Abanes, Richard. Harry Potter and the Bible. Camp Hill, PA: Horizon Books, 2001. Bloom, Harold. "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes." Wall Street Journal. 11 July 2000: A 26. Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: The Authorized Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Coleridge, S. T. Biographia Literaria. Ed. G. Watson. London: J.M. Dent, 1971. Flower, Jessie Graham. Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Co., 1911. Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown's School Days. New York: Hurst & Co., n.d. Lester, Pauline. Marjorie Dean, High School Junior. New York: A. L. Burr, 1917. Lewis, C. S. The Last Battle. New York: Macmillan, 1956. --. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Macmillan, 1950. --. Miracles. New York: Macmillan, 1947. --. Of Other Worlds: Essays & Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966. --. The Silver Chair. New York: Macmillan, 1953. --. The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader". New York: Macmillan, 1952. Miller, John J. "The Truth Beyond Memory." National Review. 11 December 2001: 43-45. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Scholastic, 1999. --. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. New York: Scholastic, 2000. --. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York: Scholastic, 1999. --. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. New York: Scholastic, 1997. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Fellowship of the Ring. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. --. The Return of the King. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. --. The Two Towers. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Dan McVeigh is Professor of English at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. He has published a number of articles in the field of British Romanticism, especially on the links binding together S.T. Coleridge's literary, religious, and political writings. His article "Coleridge's Bible" appeared in Renascence. |
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