Potterian Profundities

Someone once said, "Let us be grown-up and nuanced in our critiques", and I can think of no better place to begin … well, actually, there are lots of better places. But I'm going to begin by talking about Harry Potter. Lynn-nore just finished the latest one, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, last night. There's a lot of fuss around these (ultimately) seven books, most of it kind of silly. Those that have read them, don't see what the fuss is about; and those that haven't read them can't believe that any religious person would do anything of the sort. Lucky for us, there are people out there who are actually asking good questions about these books, and I would like to recommend two articles which I have found most interesting.

The first of these, "Harry Potter and the Secular City: The Dialectical Religious Vision of J.K. Rowling" is by Ken Jacobsen at Animus. Jacobsen feels that there is an underlying religious element to these works which informs their popularity. He feels they are "a re-articulation of the question for religious truth and meaning in contemporary terms," and suggests that they could also be read as "a sustained allegory of the conflict between religion (i.e. Harry) and secularism (i.e. Voldemort)." Either way, this is a fascinating article.

The second article is entitled "Harry Potter and the Disenchantment of the World." (Journal of Contemporary Religion. Vol. 18 No. 1 (Jan 2003), 3-24.) Its author, Michael Ostling, argues that "magic" in the Potter universe has been thoroughly de-sacralized. Its wonder has been commodified, disenchanted, so that even Chuck Colson can say, "the magic in these books is purely mechanical," and Mike Hertenstein, "if it makes a moral difference to you whether the carpet is powered by pixie dust or dilithium crystals, I would suggest you're missing the point." Ostling argues that the disenchantment of the Potter books parallels the disenchantment of our own day toward religion, and better resembles the gadget & novelty culture that drives Western consumer capitalism. Of special interest, though, is the way that Ostling contrasts Harry's magic and Voldemort's dark magic. Harry's is skill-based and technological, but Voldemort's seems cultish & incalculable. Yet, he continues, investigation proves that even this is really not the case. "The deeper magic, which characterizes the climatic scenes, is less instrumental or predictable, but almost as easily explicable, as the more common magic: it reduces to psychology rather than technology."

And, finally, I get a good laugh from an article entitled "Harry Loves Draco?" included in the August 30 edition of The Advocate. In it, Angie J. Han discusses the slash-fiction that simmers and pops in the tension between Harry and one Draco Malfoy. As she says, "It is not surprising that a boy with special powers, rejected by his family and stuck in a closet for 10 years, holds a particular appeal for gay and lesbian readers…Slash writers simply heighten the tension until Harry and Draco inevitably fall into each others arms."

Hmmmm...maybe all those critics sniffing-Wicca at Hogwarts magic missed the real message?