The sixth book in the Harry Potter series is out, its themes and subject matter darker and more adult than the previous books. This is no surprise, since Harry is growing up, too; and the debate goes on: is the series bad for our children, for us?
This is a complicated question: we’re not talking about The Gossip Girls series, which is thinly disguised soft-porn tailored to capture young teenage girls; or the Goosebumps series: grotesque, juvenile horror stories- but neither are we talking about the goodness of The Lord of the Rings, The Narnia Chronicles, or The Little House on the Prairie books. Instead, we are talking about a cultural phenomenon, in that these books have taken hold like wildfire, and that they are the first of their kind: postmodern literature for children, with a classical facade. Thus, they are somewhat of an unknown, and in this lies the confusion about whether or not the books are ‘safe’.
No one who reads the books for the sake of the story can deny that JK Rowling is a talented writer, who has created a story that is more than just pure entertainment. She is a master on different levels- from the purely witty and entertaining, to suspense and the real depth of a classical story about good and evil, love in war, friendship and coming of age; heroism and humility, suffering and overcoming hardship. But is it truly classical? I will call it “pseudo-classical, postmodern literature”. In this term is couched the underlying danger of the series to the formation of young minds and hearts.
In order to explore this question of danger, and what it means to be a pseudo-classical, postmodern book, we’ll first go over the basic terms of literature, what makes a classical story, and what differentiates a postmodern book from truly classical literature.
Aristotle’s Poetics describes the very basic and primary elements of all story telling: it is imitation, an activity natural to us from childhood. Stories imitate reality, perhaps not the whole of it, but at least some part of it. Aristotle states that Tragedy represents the nobler, better characters among us, and Comedy represents the baser, lesser characters among us. He says, “Character is that which reveals the moral purpose of the agents- the sort of things that they seek or avoid”; and, “Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions-what we do- that we are happy or the reverse”. Therefore, it is in the actions of the characters, or the plot, that we discern the real essence of the story, the theme, as it were.
Again, a classical story is made up of some basic elements: subject matter, character, theme and plot. The subject matter is usually part of the setting, in that it is the part of the environment or outer lives of the characters: i.e., the Harry Potter series is basically about young people in
There may be need here to clarify some concepts, in order to grasp the real problems with Harry Potter. First, Aristotle spoke of imitation, of representing; or presenting again: but imitating, representing what? Reality. A thorough reading of Aristotle, the Physics and the Metaphysics, and his other works of which the Poetics is a part, convinces us that the philosopher saw all of reality as leading toward one Prime Mover, one final end which is also its beginning. Aquinas and Augustine recognized God, the Trinity, in this Prime Mover of Aristotle. Therefore, in a classical and a Catholic sense, all literature must be a representation of reality, a reality that has its final end as the metaphysical, the transcendent, the supernatural. Why? Because the metaphysical realities give meaning and order to the physical, they are the true ordering principles, based in the actions and character of the Prime Mover. Everything flows from Him, and should flow back to Him, in virtue, meaning and order, if it is to be reality. All else is disorder, or a distortion of reality. What is properly tragic, comedic, and dramatic is seen within the framework of the virtues and actions of the metaphysical realities. All else, as I said, is disorder and thus malforms the person who is imbibing the story. I will state unequivocally that for a story to fulfill its true purpose, it must lead back to God in some way, whether explicitly or implicitly: for God IS reality, He encompasses all that is true, good and beautiful; and we are not meant for anything less.
Let us then clarify virtues, in the Aristotelian sense, as well as in the Catholic sense, because they are different. One could say that the Catholic understanding of the virtues (the means toward God, the means toward Order and not Disorder) has been built upon the Aristotelian foundation, correcting it and deepening it. Aristotle spoke of the virtuous man as a man balanced between extremes- a man who was ordered and because of his right balance and order, was thus happy. Happiness, for Aristotle, was not a feeling in the individual in response to some gain, but rather a result of living a balanced life. The Catholic understanding of virtue takes the ordered happiness and fecundates it with the love of God; that balance and order are essential for a man to be able to love well; but the idea that virtues lie in the actions and the will of a person, rather than the feelings or desires, remains a Catholic ideal.
Thus, in a story that follows classical and Christian lines, all the elements of it should lead toward a representation of events and characters that evolve toward order, virtue and love-but love outside oneself, love and happiness as ordered toward love and service of The Good, God; or, as in comedy, to show the foibles involved in less-than-perfect creatures striving towards order and their final end. The transcendent informing and driving the story is absolutely essential to the story being truly ‘classical’ or “Catholic”.
One must look at JK Rowling’s’ six (to be seven or eight) books as parts of a whole story. They cannot stand on their own, thus when discussing her writing, we will be discussing the series as a whole. They revolve around the maturation of a young orphan into a young man who must shoulder the responsibility of heroism and fight the most evil person his society has ever known. The fact that it is a magical, wizarding world is problematic in two ways: one, that young people might be attracted to the unsavory, evil, disordered and stupid world of witches, and ultimately Satanism and the occult. This problem is real and has been discussed ad nauseum. The second way it is problematic is in that can be said to be a representation of unreality and thus fails as a good or classical piece of literature. This is a charge leveled at Tolkein and CS Lewis, and any fantasy writer. However, as in these other, wonderful stories, JK Rowling’s’ magical world has a real-life order of its own: one of the real delights of her books is precisely that she can make the magical, imaginary society so tightly knit, so REAL. She is a bit like Tolkein in this respect. There is a consistency and an order about it that is quite masterful. So, in the end, the magical part of the book is by no means the most unreal: the true disorder of the plot lies somewhere between the main theme and the main plot, the marrow of the stories, and it is here that we find that the story is truly postmodern and not classical or Catholic at all, and that this postmodernism actually deforms the imbibing reader.
Postmodernism is a movement of thought and art, philosophy and religion that is basically anti-foundationalist: that is, it means that there is no real foundation to anything, that it is basically accepting the individual as an independent being in a flux of ‘truths’. Thus, ‘reality’ cannot really be discerned, nor, according to the postmodernist, is it desirable or ‘good’ even to try to discern it. But by what standards do we act, or decide what is good? How do we discern evil and fight it? In postmodernism, it seems that there is a strange boomerang effect back towards the individual: as in the US Supreme Court decisions pertaining to Casey vs. Planned Parenthood and Roe vs. Wade, it is the right of the individual to decide how the moral universe is ordered and how it relates to him (paraphrased). Society is to be a framework that simply guarantees the ability of the individual to build his own moral universe- I suppose, as long as he doesn’t step on the rights of others who can articulate their position. And postmodernism even goes farther: that there is no foundation for anything that a human being can discern as being the true foundation: it is assertion of the failure and demise of the classical and Catholic, even Enlightenment, notions of reason and natural law. Frightening? It should be. It is. Estragon and Vladimir have stopped waiting for Godot and are turning in upon themselves, imploding. It is Nietzsche on psychedelics.
How does Harry Potter fit in with postmodernism? As I said, it is somewhere between the deepest and main theme, and the main plot line that we find the virus of postmodern thought. For the main theme, and the end of the main plot, is about the power of love, love born of a mother’s sacrifice of herself to defend her baby son, to overcome evil; and that this evil cannot understand the simplicity of love, and the power of “an untarnished, pure and whole soul”, because by actions born in selfishness and hatred, this evil has torn itself into a complexity of parts.
Is it apparent here that this theme has a profundity and a depth, and it is this that is grabbing people’s attention. As I said, this story is not teenage flotsam. But if the theme sounds good, and profound, where is the danger? Isn’t it rather a good story, with many powerful lessons for a young population hungry for something of substance? If one is looking with eyes formed in a foundation of truth, one will project that foundation into the story: but if one is coming from no foundation, or confusion, as many kids are, they will read their own emotions, their own perceptions of the moral universe into the book. The story does not give a representation of reality, but instead acts as a vehicle by which the reader can project his own reality.
What makes the book postmodern is that there is no reference to truth, or a reality outside itself. In fact, the ‘real’ world, the world of non-magical Muggles, is seen as comic relief- they are the lesser, baser beings, whose unchangeable position is that of those who are fumbling toward obscurity and blindness. And the magical, higher world has no transcendent reality attached to it. It is truly non-foundational, truly immanentized, truly postmodern. It runs on the ‘traditional’ social paradigms of institutions like school, home, family and work, buses, death and achievement, but there is no direction toward an end outside itself. For the world of Harry Potter, there is no foundation except itself: and thus, each part of the whole is directed at self, at the gaining of a happiness based on the individual’s perception of the universe. Now it seems that JK Rowling, in presenting Harry as the hero, is also presenting his ideas of caring for friends and seeing kindness, charity and loyalty as ends, or goods; this is her own perception of the universe, but she does not seem to be able to make a bridge into the transcendent, thus truly providing the essential ‘metaphysical viewpoint’.
One can see this quite clearly when one compares Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings. References to a higher order, a transcendental order, a metaphysical reality, are rife, and drive Tolkein’s story, providing an end outside itself, thus grounding it in reality and making it classical and Catholic. Gandalf’s and Galadriel’s pointed remarks to Frodo that “he was meant to have the ring” and “we cannot decide the time in which we were born, but only what we must do with our time”; and Gandalf’s journey into death and then “sent back to fulfill my task” are essential pointers toward the real end of the story. These raise the question: “Who is the Being who ordains, and orders it so that the characters grow in goodness?”
In JK Rowling’s’ story, these questions are never raised. The ends are circular: to the self, the circle of essential others to the self: friends, family, society- but not outward to the Prime Mover. Therefore, the reader is formed unwittingly into a very noble-seeming world of the self- a truly postmodern project. One can begin to see the malformation of characters even within the story itself, even as the author is trying to present Harry and his friends and the great Dumbledore as the virtuous: there are grotesque people within the world, in such horrifying conditions, and yet they are accepted and used as comic relief. There are the ghosts, who haunt the castle and are in a perpetual state of limbo, even retaining the wounds that caused their death (Nearly Headless Nick); and the pitiful Moaning Myrtle, who lives in the sewage pipes of the school. The odd thing is that the characters, who are supposedly the virtuous, seem unconcerned about these lost souls, and there is no transcendental explanation or resolution for their plight. It is as if they are no longer people and so don’t really matter. This is a characteristic of the postmodern, this completely immanent indifference to those outside our immediate understanding, like the unknown, inarticulate child in the womb. All of this is characteristic of the world that has shut out the transcendent, and no longer seeks judgment on its actions from a higher world, from God. This false teleology is what will malform the reader, precisely because stories are meant to teach at the deepest levels, and Harry Potter is a powerful teacher of postmodernism.
