One attraction of the Harry Potter series is the unlikely hero/prince in disguise emerging from obscurity to battle the forces of evil, and (as the latest installment quite specifically asserts) if you just believe in yourself, have talent, and persevere, you will prevail, an attractive premise for awkward individuals in a challenging world, and an easy message to associate with Rowling from her single-mom, financially-challenged-to-mega-billionaire perspective. I haven’t seen her whole story, or how exactly she picked up an agent, and I suspect, like the character she created, she had more resources available in the manner of connections, in spite of her financial challenges, than are readily apparent.
As I never tire of remarking, The first Harry Potter novel amused me. I only got through half of the second one before the humor wore out and I concluded it was going nowhere. After that, there was nothing left but the movies, an endless procession of gaping snakes and sentimental conversations. The other part of it, that hundreds of millions of people don’t agree with me, is merely an unfortunate phenomenon of the emperor’s new clothes.
What the latest movie emphasizes, as for the Lion King, Avatar, and other commercially-crafted, sentimentalized fantasies, is not just an unrealistic opportunism that depends on aristocratic empowerment in the Western Tradition, but ultimately on a restatement of the determination that real evil resides in difference. Another attraction of Harry Potter as narrative has been the apparent variation of the relative forms in which good and evil are represented, such as diminutive elves or a tyrannical minister of magic in the character of a 50s soap-opera Mom, but these are misleading. Unfortunately, ultimate evil in the character of Voldemort still adopts the traditional darkness and deformation invested by reptilian knock-offs. Everything else becomes comic relief. The essential struggle depends on the traditional powers of darkness, represented by Voldemort and his corrupted ministry, against the rebellious keepers of the light, in contention for control of the source (the wand and wizardry), but the rebellion itself is an ironic one, because Harry Potter is the real heir of exclusion.
The powers of good, as the realm of Hogwarts perceives good, reside in the obligatory fair-skinned anglo adventurers of the North. I don’t know that Rowling ever specifically designates the racial and cultural origins of the characters aside from nationality and cultural connections, but the culture of the English boarding school is a little difficult to overlook or escape. The imperial colonial heritage that implies also creates a somewhat paradoxical and perplexing issue in terms of Potter’s popularity. Is Harry Potter a celebration of English Imperial High Culture (to which even oppressed colonial subjects apparently aspire, or at least the subaltern), or is it really an ironic indictment, or both, or something else? And does it matter? Perhaps it matters if Potter’s popularity represents an uninformed acceptance of cultural oppression, as for Edward Said. The giant snake, for instance, is not only a creature out of mythology, but a creature out of the mysterious colonial African and Oriental realms.
Colonial imperialism was not all bad. At the very least it provided an opportunity for the indigenous inhabitants of conquered cultures to study their oppressors from a privileged observation point, not necessarily a pleasant and inspirational view, but sometimes a pragmatically productive one. Europeans investigated the world and inadvertently displayed themselves for what they were in various contexts, opening themselves up to degrees of retaliatory appropriation. That however is fundamentally another argument. Whether to the effect of domination or to the opposite effect of opportunity for resistance, the Harry Potter character remains closely associated with the normative imperial conventions of the English boarding school culture.
I am not a great advocate for alternate lifestyles, but I would think that anyone in that position would be looking skeptically at Harry Potter, whether for the sake of disability, sexual orientation, or any number of various unique personal attributes. In the main characters, there are neither deformities, nor failures. These are the perfected champions of the aristocratic tradition, with the possible exception of impaired vision, although spectacles themselves indicate a kind of symbolically ironic intellectual affirmation, the need for spectacles suggesting keen vision of another kind. Doubt and adversity are permissible. Failure is never an option, quite consciously. That Harry, Hermione, and Ron may get tired of trying and make mistakes is expected. That they could fail isn’t even really contemplated. This is the conventional escape from reality in which skillful manipulation of a conventional quest engages a hopeful audience, yet distracts them from the more subtle stereotypes of power and domination. If the characters represented a rag-tag bunch of morally challenged individuals, there would be an element of aspiration to diversity, but what they represent in their conceptual form is an Anglo-European heritage of conventional hetero-sexual and political relationships, good-hearted, loyal devotion to each other and to an orderly society, however magically endowed the society may be, and disturbed, if at all, only by the acceptable dimensions of competition for sexual pairing. Even the introduction of jealousy and revenge, while conflicted, only emphasiszes the conventionality of the relationships. There is nothing fundamentally deviant or diverse in these characters. Only their opponents represent any inclination to resistance, and resistance only privileges evil. Hagrid, the one prominent, sympathetic character who sometimes seems to hover unarguably at the fringe of resistance, has been relegated to a kind of exile on the Hogwarts frontier, a somewhat tragic, yet cautionary condition.
True evil, whether greed, power, or only self-indulgence, results from failure to recognize that individual interests have detrimentally impacted social considerations, a denial of personal enlightenment and a threat to every stable relationship, personal or social. An authentic representation of such evil often reflects the mode of Rutger Hauer, evil disguised as beauty, or evil closely connected to beauty, but Harry Potter represents a simplified version, an older, more traditional narrative mode, the dark mode of primeval fear established in the Western tradition and the literature of colonial imperialism. Harry Potter validates that evil in the name of, not even sacrifice, but in the name of determined performance. Dobby the elf, for instance, sacrifices freedom and life for the sake of Harry Potter and his quest, but is only a subordinate, and therefore expendable. Harry accords the subordinate a noble ceremony, but the nobility is not the recognition of equals, for that cannot be. It is only a generous gesture to what is after all just an inferior creature that sacrificed itself in a noble gesture of its own, noble gesture for noble gesture. Why isn’t the undefineable Dobby himself (it/herself?) pursuing the dark, snake-like character of Voldemort? Because Dobby is just a free elf, not an aristocrat, and free or not, can never be an aristocrat in Harry Potter’s world. Narratively the primary characters with whom the reader identifies cannot be sacrificed, but in addition, Dobby is an inferior, only worthy to rubber stamp a cause incurred by the aristocratic knight-er(r)ants. The opposition to muggles and mud-bloods associated with Voldemort’s camp isn’t really an issue as much as it is a reflection of Harry’s own awkward unrealized aristocrat status and a distraction from the true nature of the relationship. Harry is the endowed aristocrat. The opposition’s preoccupation with mudbloods does not reflect an authentic fear of contamination. It reflects a fear of reflexive exclusion. Who is the real aristocrat?
It would not do for a true commoner to invest the cause of the quest. Perhaps the unrealized attraction of Harry Potter is appeal of the aristocrat in disguise (and that we all secretly want to be aristocrats, a kind of sceptre envy). Aspirations to social consciousness and benign self-enlightenment are only pretense. Unfortunately for the aristocratic urge and regardless of the appeal, aristocracy depends on the permanent subjugation of the majority and is therefore both inherently unstable and inherently tyrannical, which is like saying aristocracy begets evil. Everybody should have the opportunity to be aristocrats some of the time, also part of the Potter appeal (vicariously identifying with the aristocrat), but as a matter of enlightened self-interest and social justice, nobody should have a permanent endowment of aristocracy. That is where Harry Potter fundamentally fails as a contemporary moral allegory. It appeals to an aristocratic imperial nostalgia that is both lost and impossible, and through the stereotypes it invokes, likewise potentially destructive.
Voldemort’s reason for being is ultimate power/supremacy, a somewhat ironic representation of death (as for the vaguely ethnic Tale of the Three Brothers within the tale). The language of the name suggests something ambiguously Eastern European, perhaps including a casual leer at the Dutch, a traditional English opponent, with linguistic connections to desolate moors and the grotesque, shadowy growths associated with decay, distinct from the cheery Dickensian irony of Dumbledore, Umbrage, Weasley, and Potter, or even the quasi-mythical Western-European and agrarian-fertility connections of Hermione Granger. In spite of the nod to the quest for supreme power, the implication is that the capacity for evil is not a force inspired strictly by human involvement, but a force derived from the momentum of a mysterious and mythical antiquity. Evil exists in the world as an independent force, perhaps residing in corruption for the sake of bad choices, but otherwise independent of human intervention. Not just any old derelict champion will do. Only chosen human beings, invested by light, perfected by the mythical gift of wizardry, who meet the demanding standards of tradition, are called worthy to contend with the dark forces of difference, and those representatives of the aristocratic heritage are not complicated or hampered by the “imperfections” of diversity.
Here’s Thinking for You
Iffy
As I never tire of remarking, The first Harry Potter novel amused me. I only got through half of the second one before the humor wore out and I concluded it was going nowhere. After that, there was nothing left but the movies, an endless procession of gaping snakes and sentimental conversations. The other part of it, that hundreds of millions of people don’t agree with me, is merely an unfortunate phenomenon of the emperor’s new clothes.
What the latest movie emphasizes, as for the Lion King, Avatar, and other commercially-crafted, sentimentalized fantasies, is not just an unrealistic opportunism that depends on aristocratic empowerment in the Western Tradition, but ultimately on a restatement of the determination that real evil resides in difference. Another attraction of Harry Potter as narrative has been the apparent variation of the relative forms in which good and evil are represented, such as diminutive elves or a tyrannical minister of magic in the character of a 50s soap-opera Mom, but these are misleading. Unfortunately, ultimate evil in the character of Voldemort still adopts the traditional darkness and deformation invested by reptilian knock-offs. Everything else becomes comic relief. The essential struggle depends on the traditional powers of darkness, represented by Voldemort and his corrupted ministry, against the rebellious keepers of the light, in contention for control of the source (the wand and wizardry), but the rebellion itself is an ironic one, because Harry Potter is the real heir of exclusion.
The powers of good, as the realm of Hogwarts perceives good, reside in the obligatory fair-skinned anglo adventurers of the North. I don’t know that Rowling ever specifically designates the racial and cultural origins of the characters aside from nationality and cultural connections, but the culture of the English boarding school is a little difficult to overlook or escape. The imperial colonial heritage that implies also creates a somewhat paradoxical and perplexing issue in terms of Potter’s popularity. Is Harry Potter a celebration of English Imperial High Culture (to which even oppressed colonial subjects apparently aspire, or at least the subaltern), or is it really an ironic indictment, or both, or something else? And does it matter? Perhaps it matters if Potter’s popularity represents an uninformed acceptance of cultural oppression, as for Edward Said. The giant snake, for instance, is not only a creature out of mythology, but a creature out of the mysterious colonial African and Oriental realms.
Colonial imperialism was not all bad. At the very least it provided an opportunity for the indigenous inhabitants of conquered cultures to study their oppressors from a privileged observation point, not necessarily a pleasant and inspirational view, but sometimes a pragmatically productive one. Europeans investigated the world and inadvertently displayed themselves for what they were in various contexts, opening themselves up to degrees of retaliatory appropriation. That however is fundamentally another argument. Whether to the effect of domination or to the opposite effect of opportunity for resistance, the Harry Potter character remains closely associated with the normative imperial conventions of the English boarding school culture.
I am not a great advocate for alternate lifestyles, but I would think that anyone in that position would be looking skeptically at Harry Potter, whether for the sake of disability, sexual orientation, or any number of various unique personal attributes. In the main characters, there are neither deformities, nor failures. These are the perfected champions of the aristocratic tradition, with the possible exception of impaired vision, although spectacles themselves indicate a kind of symbolically ironic intellectual affirmation, the need for spectacles suggesting keen vision of another kind. Doubt and adversity are permissible. Failure is never an option, quite consciously. That Harry, Hermione, and Ron may get tired of trying and make mistakes is expected. That they could fail isn’t even really contemplated. This is the conventional escape from reality in which skillful manipulation of a conventional quest engages a hopeful audience, yet distracts them from the more subtle stereotypes of power and domination. If the characters represented a rag-tag bunch of morally challenged individuals, there would be an element of aspiration to diversity, but what they represent in their conceptual form is an Anglo-European heritage of conventional hetero-sexual and political relationships, good-hearted, loyal devotion to each other and to an orderly society, however magically endowed the society may be, and disturbed, if at all, only by the acceptable dimensions of competition for sexual pairing. Even the introduction of jealousy and revenge, while conflicted, only emphasiszes the conventionality of the relationships. There is nothing fundamentally deviant or diverse in these characters. Only their opponents represent any inclination to resistance, and resistance only privileges evil. Hagrid, the one prominent, sympathetic character who sometimes seems to hover unarguably at the fringe of resistance, has been relegated to a kind of exile on the Hogwarts frontier, a somewhat tragic, yet cautionary condition.
True evil, whether greed, power, or only self-indulgence, results from failure to recognize that individual interests have detrimentally impacted social considerations, a denial of personal enlightenment and a threat to every stable relationship, personal or social. An authentic representation of such evil often reflects the mode of Rutger Hauer, evil disguised as beauty, or evil closely connected to beauty, but Harry Potter represents a simplified version, an older, more traditional narrative mode, the dark mode of primeval fear established in the Western tradition and the literature of colonial imperialism. Harry Potter validates that evil in the name of, not even sacrifice, but in the name of determined performance. Dobby the elf, for instance, sacrifices freedom and life for the sake of Harry Potter and his quest, but is only a subordinate, and therefore expendable. Harry accords the subordinate a noble ceremony, but the nobility is not the recognition of equals, for that cannot be. It is only a generous gesture to what is after all just an inferior creature that sacrificed itself in a noble gesture of its own, noble gesture for noble gesture. Why isn’t the undefineable Dobby himself (it/herself?) pursuing the dark, snake-like character of Voldemort? Because Dobby is just a free elf, not an aristocrat, and free or not, can never be an aristocrat in Harry Potter’s world. Narratively the primary characters with whom the reader identifies cannot be sacrificed, but in addition, Dobby is an inferior, only worthy to rubber stamp a cause incurred by the aristocratic knight-er(r)ants. The opposition to muggles and mud-bloods associated with Voldemort’s camp isn’t really an issue as much as it is a reflection of Harry’s own awkward unrealized aristocrat status and a distraction from the true nature of the relationship. Harry is the endowed aristocrat. The opposition’s preoccupation with mudbloods does not reflect an authentic fear of contamination. It reflects a fear of reflexive exclusion. Who is the real aristocrat?
It would not do for a true commoner to invest the cause of the quest. Perhaps the unrealized attraction of Harry Potter is appeal of the aristocrat in disguise (and that we all secretly want to be aristocrats, a kind of sceptre envy). Aspirations to social consciousness and benign self-enlightenment are only pretense. Unfortunately for the aristocratic urge and regardless of the appeal, aristocracy depends on the permanent subjugation of the majority and is therefore both inherently unstable and inherently tyrannical, which is like saying aristocracy begets evil. Everybody should have the opportunity to be aristocrats some of the time, also part of the Potter appeal (vicariously identifying with the aristocrat), but as a matter of enlightened self-interest and social justice, nobody should have a permanent endowment of aristocracy. That is where Harry Potter fundamentally fails as a contemporary moral allegory. It appeals to an aristocratic imperial nostalgia that is both lost and impossible, and through the stereotypes it invokes, likewise potentially destructive.
Voldemort’s reason for being is ultimate power/supremacy, a somewhat ironic representation of death (as for the vaguely ethnic Tale of the Three Brothers within the tale). The language of the name suggests something ambiguously Eastern European, perhaps including a casual leer at the Dutch, a traditional English opponent, with linguistic connections to desolate moors and the grotesque, shadowy growths associated with decay, distinct from the cheery Dickensian irony of Dumbledore, Umbrage, Weasley, and Potter, or even the quasi-mythical Western-European and agrarian-fertility connections of Hermione Granger. In spite of the nod to the quest for supreme power, the implication is that the capacity for evil is not a force inspired strictly by human involvement, but a force derived from the momentum of a mysterious and mythical antiquity. Evil exists in the world as an independent force, perhaps residing in corruption for the sake of bad choices, but otherwise independent of human intervention. Not just any old derelict champion will do. Only chosen human beings, invested by light, perfected by the mythical gift of wizardry, who meet the demanding standards of tradition, are called worthy to contend with the dark forces of difference, and those representatives of the aristocratic heritage are not complicated or hampered by the “imperfections” of diversity.
Here’s Thinking for You
Iffy
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