Posted on 07/18/2005 9:57:30 PM PDT by Eurotwit
What accounts for the success of the Harry Potter series, as well as the "Star Wars" films whence they derive? The answer, I think, is their appeal to complacency and narcissism. "Use the Force," Obi-Wan tells the young Luke Skywalker, while the master wizard Dumbledore instructs Harry to draw from his inner well of familial emotions. No one likes to imagine that he is Frodo Baggins, an ordinary fellow who has quite a rough time of it in Tolkien's story. But everyone likes to imagine that he possesses inborn powers that make him a master of magic as well as a hero at games. Harry Potter merely needs to tap his inner feelings to conjure up the needful spell.
"Tonstant Weader fwowed up," Dorothy Parker reviewed A A Milne's "Pooh" stories in the New Yorker, and I am sad to report that reverse peristalsis cut short my own efforts to read J K Rowling's latest effort, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. In any event I am less interested in reviewing the book than in reviewing the reader.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but complacency is the secret attraction of J K Rowling’s magical world. It lets the reader imagine that he is something different, while remaining just what he is. Harry (like young Skywalker) draws his superhuman powers out of the well of his "inner feelings". In this respect Rowling has much in common with the legion of self-help writers who advise the anxious denizens of the West. She also has much in common with writers of pop spirituality, who promise the reader the secret of inner discovery in a few easy lessons.
The spiritual tradition of the West, which begins with classic tragedy and continues through St Augustine's Confessions, tells us just the contrary, namely, that one's inner feelings are the problem, not the solution. The West is a construct, the result of a millennium of war against the inner feelings of the barbarian invaders whom Christianity turned into Europeans. Paganism exults in its unchanging, autochthonous character, and glorifies the native impulses of its people; Christianity despises these impulses and attempts to root them out. Western tradition demands that the individual must draw upon something better than one's inner feelings. Narcissism where one's innermost feelings are concerned therefore is the supreme hallmark of decadence.
A culture may be called decadent when its members exult in what they are, rather than strive to become what they should be. As God tells Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, Man all too easily grows lax and mellow, He soon elects repose at any price; And so I like to pair him with a fellow To play the deuce, to stir, and to entice. [1] What characterizes the protagonists of great fiction in an ascendant culture? It is that they are not yet what they should be. The characters of Western literature in its time of flowering either must overcome defining flaws, or come to grief. Austen's Elizabeth Bennet must give up her pride; Dickens' Pip must look past the will-o'-the-wisp of his expectations; Mann's Hans Castorp must confront mortality; Tolstoy's Pierre must learn to love; Cervantes' Don Quixote must learn to help ordinary people rather than the personages of romance; Goethe's Wilhelm Meister must act in the real world rather than the stage. Goethe's Faust I have long considered the definitive masterwork of Western literature, first of all because its explicit subject is the transformation of character. As Faust tells Mephisto, Should ever I take ease upon a bed of leisure, May that same moment mark my end! When first by flattery you lull me Into a smug complacency, When with indulgence you can gull me, Let that day be the last for me! That is my wager! [2] Failure to correct defining flaws, of course, leads to a tragic outcome, as in Dostoyevsky or Flaubert. More consideration is required to portray characters who change rather than fail, to be sure; that is why the late Leo Strauss thought Jane Austen a better novelist than Dostoyevesky. Finding the right partner in marriage, after all, is the most important decision most of us will make in our lives. Whatever good we otherwise might do has little meaning unless another generation draws its benefit, and that character of the next generation depends on the character of the families we might form. If we take inventory of all the married couples we know, how many of them can be said to have done this with due consideration? Courtship is a high drama that should keep our teeth on edge. Instead, we relegate the subject to the genre of romantic comedy, and to the consoling familiarity of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.
The more one wallows in one's inner feelings, of course, the more anxious one becomes. Permit me to state without equivocation that your innermost feelings, whoever you might be, are commonplace, dull, and tawdry. Thrown back upon one's feelings, one does not become a Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker, but a petulant, self-indulgent bore with an aversion to mirrors. To compensate for this ennui one demands stimulus. That is the other ingredient in J K Rowlings' success formula. Magical devices distract us from the boredom inherent in the characters, and one cannot gainsay the fecundity of the author's imaginative powers. She manufactures new enchantments as fast as Industrial Light and Magic churns out new computer-generated graphics for the "Star Wars" films, or amusement parks erect faster roller coasters.
Pointy hats, it should be remembered, were made to fit on pointy heads. Rowling's fiction stands in relation to real literature the way that a roller coaster stands in relation to a real adventure. The thrills are cheap precisely because they could not possibly be real. The "boy's own" sort of adventure writing popular in Victorian England had a good deal more merit.
When we put ourselves in the hands of a masterful writer, we undertake a perilous journey that puts our soul at risk. Empathy with the protagonist exposes us to all the spiritual dangers that beset the personages of fiction. In emulation of the ancient tale in which a seven days' sojourn among the fairies turns out to be an absence of seven years, Thomas Mann sends Hans Castorp to the magic mountain of a tuberculosis sanitarium - but it is the reader is captured and transformed.
We are too complacent to wish upon ourselves such a transformation, and too lazy to attempt it. We find tiresome the old religions of the West that preach repentance and redemption, and instead wish to hear reassurance that God loves us and that everything is all right. We have lost the burning thirst for truth - for inner change - that drives men to learn ancient languages, pore over mathematical proofs, master musical instruments, or disappear into the wild. We want our thrills pre-packaged and micro-waveable. Above all we want our political leaders, our pastors, our artists and our partners in life to validate our innermost feelings, loathsome as they may be. I do not know you, dear reader; the only thing I know about you with certainty is that your innermost feelings would bore me.
Western literature, along with all great Western art, is Christian in character, including the product of a putative heathen like Goethe, whom Franz Rosenzweig correctly called the prototype of a modern Christian.[3] It is Christian precisely because it deals with overcoming one's "inner self". A jejune Manichaeanism pervades the Potter books as well as the “Star Wars” films, and I suppose a case could be made that such a crude apposition of Good and Evil corresponds in some fashion to the emotional narcissism of the protagonists.
In that sense, Christian leaders who disapprove of the whole Potter business simply are doing their job. According to some news reports, Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, disparaged Rowling's books in a private letter written two years ago. But according to NZ City on July 18, "New Zealand Catholic Church spokeswoman Lyndsay Freer says there is some question over the validity of the letter. She says more importantly, Vatican cultural advisors feel the book is not a theological work and is just plain children's literature. Ms Freer says it's wonderful children are being encouraged to read, and the Potter books are no different from the likes of Grimms' Fairy Tales and Star Wars." How reassuring it is that the ecclesiastical authorities of Auckland have taken the initiative to correct the pope on this matter.
An educated woman, with a degree in classical literature and an almost encyclopedic knowledge of legend and folklore, steals her ideas from a two-bit conspiracy theorist? Riiight.
No one ever thought of using a snake as a symbol of evil before Icke. </sarcasm>
What HP book first has Draco in it? And what reptilian chracteristics does Draco have?
Given the technology in the "Star Trek Universe," I don't know that would really be the case.
You need to remember that given the sort of technology they "have," there really aren't any economic models in our "real universe" that would actually corespond...
Imagine unlimited cheap power supplies, based on anti-matter. Combine that with the replicators they have. If you can create anything of value (gold, jewels, etc...) using a replicator, any sort of a standard economy would collapse. Nothing would haven any sort of commercial value any more.
Again this doesn't necessarily lead to marxism. But then it wouldn't lead to any sort of realistic economic model that we would have either.
Mark
Make your point, assuming you have one.
There are some of us who are pretty much hopeless like that... During the Sandra Bullock movie, "The Net," when she was tracing the IP address of the "bad guys," they showed the results of her trace, and without thinking I blurted out, "That's not a valid IP address!"
I couldn't believe I did that, and neither could anybody I was with that day! I wonder why I don't get invited to movies any more...
Mark
LOL!
See #176 (above). The "Gorn" (reptilian lizard man) from a Star Trek episode circa 1968 thereabouts.
For convenience sake, I offer Harold Bloom's commentary on Potter. It mirrors my own 100%. Yes, yes, I know. I'm a curmudgeon, a party pooper, and likely a mugwup. Can't be helped. It's in my DNA.
Snake in the Garden of Eden.
And isn't David Icke the one who thinks that the English Royal Family, the Bush family, and pretty much everyone in power are actually all lizards wearing people suits ala "V" staring Kirstie Ally?
Of course, I was thinking a touch farther back than Star Trek, anyway . . .
Draco Malfoy is in the first book, and he (and his father) are members of "Slitherin" house.
Mark
Agreed.
Nerd alert: You are thinking of the beautiful Jane Badler, not Kirstie.
Nerd alert 2: replicators cannot reproduce "gold-pressed latinum", hence its value as a currency medium in Deep Space 9.
I'm a big nerd, but for different reasons. LOL I watch too much E! True Hollywood Story. Kirstie Ally was in Star Trek 2.
The...uh...Star Trek allusion was itself somewhat tongue-in-cheek and bewitched with whimsicality and silliness. Sort of like Captain Kirk's outfits.
Something about snake bites and venom may have a connection on the anthropological level. Although the rumors of snake men and/or lizard men extraterrestrials always keep things interesting and lively! An Ickes/Potter hermeneutics delivers.
Having read the books, can't say that I agree with you there. Hogwarts (the Wizardry school the characters attend) is a very intense seven-year school. The book clearly points out the enormous amount of homework that needs to be done and students are routinely in their dorms until well past midnight catching up on it all. Many of the teachers are portrayed as ruthless and as having little tolerance for slackers in their classrooms.
On the other hand, I completely agree on the "Karate Kid." Those movies always annoyed the hell out of me for the same reason you describe. Also the "sensi" in the Karate Kid movies was obviously overweight and probably had trouble climbing a set of stairs in real life.
Sounds like the plot of "Buckaroo Banzai".
I think it's just cause snakes are icky. (Icky, get it?? HAhaha! Okay, nevermind)
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