I
The seven horcruxes are the seven books of Harry Potter, and he who finds them breaks the spell of….
What if all my evidence was fabricated? What if my arguments are slipshod? What if I have slipped into my own esoteric fantasy world? Honestly, I do not worry. Ultimately, if literary criticism is to have any relevance beyond books, the moral questions raised by this critique must be valuable whether they are relevant to Harry Potter or not. The structures and thought processes exposed by my illuminated HP should have value whether they exist in HP or not, and if they do not exist, perhaps they should. Neither literature nor literary criticism should be held hostage to empiricism.
What did Rowling intend? Why did she write an amalgam, a kind of parcel whose wondrous wrapping enthrals the unwary, uncritical and unprepared reader, and whose uncanny contents, if revealed, might produce firm and resounding denials?
What did Rowling intend by cooking up her powerful potion of pity, fear, righteous anger, humour, power, grandiose delusions and glory? Was it a calculated exploitation of children’s basest needs? If so, why does a careful inspection of the potion reveal a level of meaning that completely contradicts the meaning experienced by passive readers?
Perhaps the divided text reflects Joanne Rowling’s own history, a history of a divided person; a person struggling to reconcile humanitarian ideals with the acquisition of immense wealth; a person who throws money both at luxury and charity, hires lawyers to defend her profits and yet feels her own profits are excessive; a person who has worked for Amnesty International and (yet) tries to improve the world in the most magical and instantaneous manner possible, with money. I won’t dispute that money can be put to many good uses, and building orphanages is one, but neither orphanages nor youth counsellors can stop children from being orphaned, for that we must address cultural and psychological errors, errors that should never be sweetened in the books we encourage children to read.
But are error and evil sweetened beyond recognition in Harry Potter? In a series so crammed with signs of parody and blatant stupidity, perhaps the great and shocking question is why the majority of readers don’t notice? Yes, of course, the children must be innocent, but they should not be ignorant, and when they are, who is to blame?
Does HP cater to the market demand for hogwash and positively harmful teachings and myths, such as the necessity of treating death as an enemy and the necessity of power, competition, discrimination, labour exploitation, animal abuse, deprecating language, verbal abuse and so on and so forth? If it does cater to this market demand, who has performed the magical act of sweetening poison and ignoring the whispers of conscience, the fantasy author or the fantasizing reader?
If Harry Potter is as complex and dangerous as I have argued, and if, as I half suspect, Rowling is aware of this, why doesn’t she write a reader’s guide like this? Why is she content to let her fans stumble through her maze, like tourists oblivious to the bones on which they tread? Why does she respond to their silly questions with jokes, lies and irrelevant absurdities instead of helpful words? What does she have to hide?
The danger is not that children cannot distinguish between reality and fiction and grow up into psychopaths; what is at issue here is whether her readers are being indoctrinated into a culture that is unsustainable, a culture that charms us with its glitter and precision while off in the wings, just out of sight, it exploits third world countries, helps to drive millions annually to starvation, drives entire species into the dust and destroys the resources of the present and future. With so few readers choosing Hermione for their hero, and fewer still inspired by her limited conscience, what must we conclude?
If we must issue a moral condemnation of a book written for children, must we also, like Plato, demand the exile of persons who write anything that should not be imitated? Plato wrote,
We shall not admit into our city stories about Hera being chained by her son, or of Hephaestus being hurled from heaven by his father when he intended to help his mother who was being beaten … whether these stories are told allegorically or without allegory. (The Republic 378d)
The last line is crucial. “Whether these stories are told allegorically or without allegory”. That is, even if the story has some moral subtext or not, if it employs immoral actions, it must be banned.
But surely this is an untenable position, as representations of immoral actions can easily serve a narrative that condemns immoral actions. Besides, as surely as the Bible will not be banned for contradicting science, HP will not be banned by the gatekeepers of a culture whose ideology it seemingly celebrates.
II
According to Maire Messenger Davies, children cannot be moral beings unless they engage in meta-thinking. Children who are unable “to think about a belief as false” will never be able to distinguish between right and wrong beliefs (17). In Conflict and Concensus, Hodges reiterates the importance of being able to take a critical view of things.
Before we judge Rowling a reprobate and a cynical exploiter of childish needs, consider that the primary reason children can be exploited is that, generally speaking, parents and teachers do not prepare them to be more than passive participants in their culture; even when social activism is encouraged, somehow the tendency to blindly follow along survives. Now consider Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Ah, here’s a wondrous antidote to a culture of obedience and authority. Nearly every professor, parent and other authority figure is treated as an object of humour, scorn, or suspicion. Even the upright Dumbledore cannot avoid sniggers at his name.
Is that it, then? Is the redemption of Harry Potter its iconoclastic representation of authority in a world where authority is bogus and an absolute hindrance to intellectual development?
III
Hamil’s critique of television applies, with little qualification, to the printed Harry Potter. Echoing Ellul’s worries about passive readers of propaganda, Hamil notes that “audiences do not participate in television’s imaginative acts” (268). The television viewer is a passive receiver, regardless of whether what it communicates is realistic or not. Active thinking, that is, imagination, does not actually occur in readers of imaginative works until, by more or less consciously raising questions and creating answers they alter the received images and messages. Such altering does not occur when we read HP only on a literal level, and so anyone who reads it literally risks becoming deeply indoctrinated into its surface ideology.
Children who learn to read metaphorically, allegorically, ironically or in any other way but literally, free themselves from the danger of blindly imitating or obeying a literal text. In contrast, passive reading may be stimulating without engaging any cognitive effort.
Jacques Ellul’s argument about propaganda is relevant to this argument about polysemy and ambiguity. Ellul argues that most successful propaganda campaigns depend on a literate population – albeit a population that reads passively. The propaganda machine uses passivity by first overwhelming the reader with upsetting information, thus winning our sympathy, and then by “giving modern man all embracing, simple explanations and massive, doctrinal causes, without which he could not live with the news” (147). And all propaganda must avoid being ambiguous, for “[a]mbiguity is painful for [modern man]” (190).
Kenneth Burke says something very similar in the following, “Further, we cannot use language maturely until we are spontaneously at home in irony” (Language as Symbolic Action, 12). The mature use of language encompasses not only irony but many forms of non-literal meaning, allegories and parables included. Jesus says he speaks in parables in order to “utter things hidden since the creation of the world” (Matt. 13:35); others say he spoke in parables in order to couch spiritual truths in a language peasants understand; the present argument suggests that parables also serve to force the mind to free itself from images and overcome passivity.
This iconoclastic view of images raises serious questions about the value of imaginative literature. Perhaps HP does manifest imagination, but that does not mean it engages higher cognitive faculties more than a work void of imagination. For a work that only presents fantastic images does very little to inspire thought beyond the most immature levels. As Lewis remarked, such “fantastic” books only appeal to lazy people who want to “surrender their imaginations to the guidance of an author” (An Experiment in Criticism, 64). Ultimately, if stories are devoid of question raising devices, then both imaginative fantasy and mundane realism spoon-feed pre-fabricated images to readers. And if these images appeal to immature desires, how can readers develop the ability to think critically?
Although HP presents more than a literal or monosemic flow of ideologically conservative images, but it does too little to help children register the questions lurking beneath those images. We need better clues, and not so much secrecy. Harry, and possibly Rowling, echo my sentiment by complaining that Cedric’s hints should “have been a lot more explicit” (TGOF 378).
IV
One secret of literary bestsellers rarely addressed by literary critics is the dimension of suspense. Suspense is not a genre, it is the secret of all popular writing—that is, writing that prevents reflection, analysis, and demands that readers rush headlong in a storm of excitement, fear, hope and anticipation. Rowling masterfully builds suspense using Voldemort and a hundred other dangers and challenges that crest and recede and climax with the great showdown of the final book. Arguably, without suspense, boredom would ensue and readers would fall from the edges of their seats, utterly asleep. But without suspense, readers might also find the time and energy to care a little less about the end and spend a little more time enjoying the beginning, parts between and the nebulous present. To make that fantastic day a reality, our children must become active readers, conscientious readers, lovers of victories won without violence, lovers of laughter won without victims, lovers of interpretation as transformation and lovers of the magical power to transform words.
V
I want to apologize to all my readers for two matters, 1) for not being thorough and 2) for not providing much evidence from books 5-7. Not every sentence in the series has been analysed, so I hope other scholars will not be too zealous in revealing my hastiness and will venture to apply the patterns presented here.
Finally, while I trust that everyone understands the larger applications of this work, I am only too happy to leave the impression that I have overlooked something. For humanitarian and pedagogical reasons, expert treasure hunters should always resist the temptation of doing too much for others.
