Turkey had a key election this weekend. The global War on Terror rages with some of my own students battling for the country. People are starving all over the world, racism exists, and misogyny cripples lives.
Yet this weekend an entire subset of the adult nation spent five hours or so reading a teen-fiction book about a boy wizard. Serious media pundits must groan inwardly at all the attention. If only as many people (8.5 million copies sold in one day!) cared about almost anything important to spend the same amount of money and passion on it!
Perhaps it is acceptable for the children to carry on about such things (they are after all children), but isn’t adult interest in Potter just another sign that we are becoming a nation of Peter Pans unable to grow up and talk about serious things?
Some adults are doing this (if you are over fourteen and wearing a Hogwart’s robe or a Star Trek uniform then you may have a problem), but some pretty serious adults such as Oxford don and World War I vet C.S. Lewis took such works seriously long before Ipods, “grups,“, or even hippies were on the scene.
Surely his comments about H. Ryder Haggard as a great story teller whose writing often failed him and who could never quite end a story as well as he started sums up J.K. Rowling’s writing. In any case, Lewis took science fiction, Haggard, and Buchan seriously.
Some defenders of grownups reading comics, children’s books, or summer block-busters just attack the entire distinction between high and low culture. Spiderman is the new Achilles . . . but the rage of Toby Maguire seems a weak substitute for that of Achilles.
There does seem to be a difference in quality and depth between “high” and “low” culture. Stan Lee (sort-of-creator of Spiderman) does not have the same contact with the muse as Homer.
Perhaps, it is o.k. to talk about this stuff because everyone else is?
Sadly, popularity is no measure of the importance of an idea. The Potter book craze could just be an example of Paris-Hilton-media-hype for nerdy kids. I am at a summer camp where interest in the Potter books shows a remarkable correlation with looking like Harry and Hermione in the earlier books.
What about the argument that the Potter books, Narnia, and superheroes are creating the myths of our new post-modern world?
That is a better argument and one that has been made by people smarter than I, but I think it fails. All of these books (including my beloved Narnia) are retellings of older, better myths to a new generation (either in their movie or book form). As such it would be better to look first at the source material (Virgil, Homer, the Bible as starters), than spending hours knowing every detail of Rowling’s second-hand mythology.
If you know your Western myths already, then one quick read of Potter will enable you to get the basics . . . at least to the level that it is likely to penetrate the average reader or movie goer. As evidence that there is not as much post-modernism in the culture as some think, the popularity of the sixties super-heroes, post-World War II Narnia, and the Victorian-school-boy-with-magic Potter books count, but again it doesn’t take much attention to discover this point.
At this point some fans are growling that the books and films need no justification. They are fun and an escape from the rigors of the age.
The fact that a thing is enjoyable does not (by itself) commend spending hours doing it to virtuous adult. Some “fun things” are wicked and some are just unworthy of the time. Spending hours playing Spider Solitaire on the computer might be fun, but it is also a time sucking trap. Taking a walk can be (at least) equally fun, but with fringe benefits.
Adults generally look for fun with benefits of the virtuous kind.
Aren’t adults reading Potter or Narnia just escaping hard reality for a fantasy land?
This argument has much to commend it, but it fails for the simple reason that such books and films are no escape! To paraphrase an essay by the late Isaac Asimov while other grownups spent the weekend worrying about baseball scores, the alleged escapists read a long book that wrestled (however badly) with issues of life, death, war, and personal sacrifice.
Most fantasy (from comics to Tolkien) repackages difficult issues in simpler form. Safe to say that Spiderman has gotten more teens to think about power and responsibility than most public service announcements or sermons.
An icon is not a picture of a person painted badly, but is (in part) a simplification of the immense complexity of the soul of a saint to show what needs to be seen. It is a window to their character. If one takes that much humbler (and more artistically annoying) modern icon the emoticon as a pop culture version of the same thing, one begins to see the value of Potter and Spiderman.
An emoticon strips down the human face even further than a great icon to communicate an emotion that might otherwise be missed by most of us.
It also trivializes it, can be ugly, but when my nine year old daughter sends me a “kiss” on Microsoft Messenger it still works.
We are not so great, at least not most of us, that we can live in the world of Platonic Forms or even of Rublev icons. Sometimes emoticons make things clear to us.
This is what Potter or the very best comics or summer blockbusters do. They are emoticons of the great myths. The great myths are icons of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The emoticons point the curious (and there are always curious) to the myths (for Potter see the lumimous Granger) and the myths bring us to virtue and to Christ.
But why not just go straight to the source? And it is there that better readers or better souls have an advantage on me. I cannot always just go straight to perfection, but must sidle up to it. The light of the sun is too bright for my eyes, so I must see it first in the sun.
Even Virgil can be too hard for my government school trained mind and so Potter helps. Helps what?
Harry Potter is an excellent role model for an average boy on becoming a great man by acquiring virtue. Spiderman learns that power and fame does not make a man happy. Narnia teaches me that beauty is real and all around me.
Of course some of these emoticons are better than others.
Emoticons can be so bad as to repulse and not attract.
Spiderman is nearly useless, but not quite. Potter is close to greatness and Narnia? Narnia may achieve it in entire paragraphs of silver, moon-lit prose.
But even the nearly useless is not totally useless and the almost totally culturally illiterate in our culture may have to start with Spiderman in cruciform to begin the long journey to the Cross.
When I turn to the Aeneid, Iliad, and Faerie Queene I understand them better, because I read Harry Potter . . . as foolish as that might seem to better men. These pop-culture books are just good enough, very, very artistic emoticons, to sneak around my defenses when I am trying to be merely entertained and still teach me something.
Sometimes I can take my Republic straight, but not always. At those times Narnia’s Professor Kirk comes to the rescue.
A practical, simpler, and better man might huff at all this fantasy.
The myths themselves obscure things said plainly in Plutarch, Aquinas, Calvin, or Chrysostom. “Let’s cut to the chase and just read them.” growls my clear thinking friends.
Again, there are noble people able to take their sermons straight, but I cannot. It is easier for men like I am to read Aquinas with their Dante in mind (first loved dimly in Narnia). Of course, since the Bible itself contains poetry, myth, and story telling of the first order, there may be something that my more “cut to the chase” friends are missing after all!
Maybe, just maybe, the world contains the moon not just because we cannot see the sun directly, but for its own beauty.
I suspect that myth itself forms the framework for the great propositions of Plato, Paul, and Plutarch and books like Potter are the emoticons, Dante the icons, and the Bible the best expression of that myth that is True, Good, and Beautiful.
Millions of the sort of kids that grow up to lead (as Hewitt points out leaders read) will have read Potter. Some few will be led by curiosity and good teachers like John Granger to the greater icons and many souls will be made better for it.
Potter, Narnia, and even Spiderman matter in a serious world because they can be signs pointing to seriousness in our frivolous age. They are outposts of big ideas made so simple as to be all but gone, but still present. They are the winsome cry of Wisdom echoing through so many streets in the City of Man as to be almost unheard, but not quite.
If the age wants heroes, then they will get some of them directly from admirable men and women raised in straight forward ways in this crooked culture. They will go to war and to weddings with minds securely fastened on the Good, True, and Beautiful.
But if the culture is crooked, some of us will come our crooked way to the Straight Path and so become useful.
God knows we need men in our age with the virtue of Harry Potter, the boy who would die for his friends so that his people could live free.