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July 23, 2007
It's a huge cultural phenomenon. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter that is, not the colourful theatre of our federal politics.
Bruce Petty
Potter is literary/culture phenomenon that is part of the late-capitalist culture industry judging by all the past fuss and hype amongst kids and adults, and the books selling millions of copies before they even hit the shelves.
The Adelaide response is described by Kerryn Goldsworthy at the delightful Pavlov's Cat ; the Canberra response by Ampersand Duck.
The Harry Potter series are fantasy books about wizard and witches learning the arts of sorcery and witchcraft. Judging from the two films I've seen, the texts are mostly set at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a school for young wizards and witches. They focus on Harry Potter's fight against the evil wizard Lord Voldemort, who killed Harry's parents as part of his plan to take over the wizarding world.
It's the magic stuff that is culturally interesting.
Though good and bad are clearly delineated with moral certainty, I wonder what Christians make of a series of children books centred on the occult? Isn't sorcery and witchcraft based in paganism? What does the light of God say about that? If Christianity condemns the occult, then why should Christian parents lightly accept books that endorse what God has so seriously forbidden as the deeds of darkness? Or are our Christian and literary cultures disconnected?
The Potter texts do encourage readers to believe that there is an underlying order to the world, that following simple rules was always the right thing to do, and that behaving in the “right” fashion would always have the right results. The real world is a complicated, ambiguous and uncertain place creates intolerable stress, and the defensive reaction to this stress is a retreat to somewhere safer and more predictable; a magic world in which the unpleasant facts of the matter are simply denied and their occasional intrusions explained away as being most likely the result of some shadowy magic.
Is the Potter phenomenon a current example of Adorno's argument about late capitalism, irrationalism, and weak, dependent, fascism-prone personalities in need of the authority of astrology — lying at the very heart of so-called enlightened modernity?
Adorno argues in The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture that those who embrace the occult are people who have gone beyond the naive acceptance of the authority of science, but who don’t know enough, or who have not sufficiently developed “the power of critical thinking,” that they can replace science (quantum mechanics) with anything better: “Does the occult, like astrology bring it all down to earth?
He argues that astrology does not supply a new sort of religion; but that it makes the alienated individual more at home in the world of consumerism and the “drabness of a commodity society.” In this respect more than in any other, “astrology resembles . . . other mass media such as movies: its messages appear to be something metaphysically meaningful, something where the spontaneity of life is being restored while actually reflecting the very same reified conditions which seem to be dispensed with through an appeal to the ‘absolute’.”
We sure have a lot of irrationalism on the political and culture right these days with the rejection of the science behind global warming, the embrace of creationism. This right wing politics is authoritarian and it is engaged in a war on science. This is not just a case of Christian fundamentalists making the authority and prestige of science is a chief cultural enemy. We also have the long corporate war against the environmental sciences (broadly speaking: eg., the epidemiology that exposed the tobacco-cancer link as a kind of environmental science). Hence the alliance between big capital on the one hand and a party of cultural authoritarians on the other.
Irrationalism does lie at the very heart of so-called enlightened modernity. The classic example is the strong belief in oracles in modern economics-----the most important of current oracles in the West is surely the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Bank. Greenspan used to speak in riddles and his statements were full of ambiguous speech. This did not conceal truths that have yet be revealed, but instead conceal the fact that the oracle is revealing nothing, because the future is unknown.
Though I accept Adorno's thesis that irrationality lies at the heart of an enlightened modernity, I'm not persuaded that Harry Potter fans are weak, dependent, fascism-prone personalities in need of the authority of the occult.
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Gary,
I notice that you watch the films of the Potter books rather than read them. The pleasures of reading were
lovingly described by Kerryn Goldsworthy at Pavlov's Cat in a lovely post.
The preference for film is interesting because it was the Americans (not the Europeans) who quickly grasped the power of using pictures to tell stories. Today, for many of us, going to the cinema is synonymous with watching an American movie.
Cinema is good language to interpret the Potter books as it not only provides powerful pictures, it also provides the plot, the narrative, the stories and history, the myths and the traditions.