Harry Potter: Beyond the Mania

If you’ve grown a bit tired of Stewart v. Cramer, you may be in the right place today (though I think Greenwald’s analysis does merit attention).

So while the rest of the Intarwebs debates Stewart v. Cramer, I’m returning to a favorite old topic that I haven’t touched on in about a year or so — Harry Potter. As you will see further along in the discussion of the “trickster” figure, Stewart has a place even at Hogwarts.

The casual observer might conclude that the Potter craze is in its sunset, and said observer would be right. But, as with many things in our culture, where the craze ends is where the meaning begins. The next film in the series has been hampered by injuries to stunt men, a murder of one of the actors, and a profit-driven delay from the studio. Today, we learn that a test group screening the film found it seriously wanting; and I am not surprised to hear it — there has not been a truly artistic effort in that series since number 3, mainly because I suspect Alfonse Cuaron doesn’t know how to make a bad or mediocre film.

Back on the literary end of Potter, which is where it all started, of course, there has also been some distraction and conflict. Potter author J.K. Rowling’s lawsuit against the author of a Harry Potter encyclopedia ended ambiguously, in part because the law (by the judge’s own admission) isn’t clear or mature on the very point in contest; but also because of Rowling’s inability to let go of her emotional grip on the story that made her a billionaire. As I have mentioned before, she will not be able to move on as an artist until she cuts her inner ties to that wonderful but perhaps excessively explosive opening to her career.

In any event, I suspect that the screening audience’s dissatisfaction with the latest film is not merely a matter of the director’s obsession with romance or the mangling of the story. That is no doubt part of it, but I think the cultural timing, if you will, is also an essential aspect to this. The story has now been told in its fullness; we all know where it went and how it ended. Once that point is reached in any human affair, the natural impulse is to review the experience, search for meaning, and discover what you missed as the yarn unfolded. This applies to personal relationships; the working world; political contests; and of course to art. Books are no doubt being written as we speak of the financial crisis, the Obama phenomenon, the Bush era, and other political and cultural landmarks of our recent history — all of them guided by the effort to offer perspective and meaning. Most of these will fail, because they are being written to a market controlled by the corporate and its obsession with the superficial. Thus, caveat emptor.

Nearly five years ago, I was offering up a book on the Potter phenomenon, and it remains available to those who might be interested. I don’t know whether it, too, would have failed before the general public, because, though it did have an agent for a time, it never quite got the chance to try itself out on that stage. Nevertheless, it is the sort of treatment that this series needs, now that the story is told and the movies are proving to be generally unsatisfying. What follows is an example of the kind of thing I have in mind; it’s the ending of Chapter 1 of my book, in which the environmental aura of Hogwarts Castle — what the filmmakers of the series have referred to as “the Potter universe” — is discussed as a character in the novels:

Environment as Character: The Aura of Hogwarts

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn’t open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren’t really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure the coats of armor could walk. (Sorcerer’s Stone, pp. 131-132)

There is a lot of unpredictable movement in the magical world of Hogwarts: objects that seem to possess not only consciousness but a mischievous sense of humor. Indeed, by comparison, the children themselves seem rather staid and mature—they are continually portrayed in attitudes of annoyance or alarm as they react to the petty, playful assaults of magical objects and ghosts. This kind of environment, with its trick doors, moving staircases, and paintings that invent unfathomable passwords for permission to enter a room, is highly suggestive of the trickster figures of primitive mythologies and Zen Buddhism.

Rowling’s metaphors are particularly Zen-like in the way they expose the self-conscious grandiosity and presumption of goal-directed spirituality. The stairway to heaven may contain a trick step, or lead in the wrong direction tomorrow morning, just when you assume that you’ve figured it out, that enlightenment is attained. The doors of perception that seem to be portals to the right hand of God or the end-point of realization will, once you have striven to gain a grip on their handles, turn out to be blank, laughing stretches of wall.

It is at a time like this that Peeves the Poltergeist (who is introduced in the very next paragraph following the one quoted above) will appear, to drop a water balloon on your head, thus completing the lesson in the folly of spiritual self-aggrandizement. It is no mistake that the one person at Hogwarts who is most tormented by Peeves is the caretaker, Argus Filch, who is a person that we all encounter in our own lives every day. Filch is a “squib”—a person born of magical parents but having no magical ability; his petty self-absorption in the most superficial aspects of propriety and routine has thoroughly clotted his true nature. He has not an ounce of humor or human feeling in him, it seems—he is the tattletale at school, the procedure freak at the office, or still more ominously, the grownup that beats a child for playing in the mud on Sunday. Peeves is one antidote to Filch-consciousness: without the cackling irritation of Peeves’ mindless sport in our lives, we would be far more prone to falling prey to the dark and petty meanness of Filch.

The role of humor in the way of natural magic will be more fully discussed in Chapter 4; it will be worthwhile here to briefly emphasize the playful aspects of the environmental metaphor at Hogwarts and its connection to the pre-institutional stories of ancient cultures. These latter have been delightfully recorded by Joseph Campbell, in his focus on the trickster spirits of myth:

This ambiguous, curiously fascinating figure of the trickster appears to have been the chief mythological character of the paleolithic world of story. A fool, and a cruel, lecherous cheat, an epitome of the principle of disorder, he is nevertheless the culture-bringer also. And he appeared under many guises, both animal and human. Among the North American Plains Indians his usual form was Coyote. Among the woodland tribes of the north and east, he was the Great Hare, the Master Rabbit, some of whose deeds were assimilated by the Negroes of America to an African rabbit-trickster whom we know in the folktales of Br’er Rabbit. The tribes of the Northwest Coast knew him as Raven. Blue Jay is another of his forms.

Shakespeare, of course, gave the trickster an eternal life in literature, from Puck of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the Fool of King Lear. Peeves, often helped by the trickster twins Fred and George Weasley, is the modern literary incarnation of the trickster spirit, who noisily enforces attention, humility, and laughter upon those who would otherwise take themselves and their lives too seriously. For when we become too serious, we become self-absorbed; and before you know it, the passing truths of our lives are made into the concrete monuments of insular religion, science, and law.

The presence of Peeves reveals another of Dumbledore’s qualities as a leader: the poltergeist is tacitly accepted (and even encouraged) by the headmaster, who also has a taste for tipping sobriety onto its ear now and then. At the Opening Feast of the first book, Dumbledore solemnly announces that he has words of wisdom for the students, and then barks out, “Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!” (Sorcerer’s Stone, p. 123).

Indeed, there can be no inner growth without humor and the ability to embrace life’s seeming capriciousness. It is a teaching that has required repetition throughout history: Socrates was a Peeves figure, blowing raspberries within the most holy church of Athenian Democracy; literary figures from Aristophanes to Rabelais to Cervantes to Thoreau to Gogol have made the same blessed sounds, each in his own way.

This is a lesson which Mrs. Rowling repeats over and again throughout the Potter stories, perhaps in the awareness of its importance to a culture that is mired in a petty, self-absorbed Filch-consciousness—especially among its religious, political, and scientific leaders. Wherever there is pomp and self-consciousness, it is knocked flat onto its ass by a false door, a trick step, a violent willow tree, a “blast-ended skrewt,” a three-headed dog, or a ghost who can flip his head back like the cover to an ice bucket.

Modesty is the golden thread of the tapestry of magic; humor is the breath that allows Modesty to glow amid the morbid decadence of pompous ideology. One final trickster story from the American Indian mythology will be appropriate here—imagine as you read it that the “coyote’s arms” are the different departments within a modern corporation or a government bureaucracy:

One day the trickster, in the form of a coyote, killed a buffalo and while his right arm was skinning it with a knife his left suddenly grabbed the animal. “Give that back to me,” the right arm shouted. “This is mine!” The left arm grabbed again, and the right drove it off with the knife. The left grabbed again and the quarrel became a vicious fight. And when the left arm was all cut up and bleeding, Trickster cried, “Oh, why did I do this? Why did I let this happen? How I suffer!”
(from Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology, p. 269)

* * * * * * *

Movement is the metaphorical blood that both animates and nourishes the environment of Hogwarts: motion is the medium of spontaneity, of humor, of the magical dance of Nature. Movement is life, and movement across structural boundaries is evolution. So it is at Hogwarts, and in the world that its metaphors describe. In his book The Hidden Connections, scientist Fritjof Capra (still best known for his groundbreaking work of the ’70′s, The Tao of Physics) answers the question “what is life?” in the context of a “living systems” view of cellular biology:

…the cellular network is materially and energetically open, using a constant flow of matter and energy to produce, repair, and perpetuate itself; where new structures and new forms of order may spontaneously emerge, thus leading to development and evolution. (p. 31)

The more we learn of life—whether from a scientific, psychological, social, or cosmic perspective—the more we see its boundaries expanded. The limitations imposed on life by the science, law, and religion of the feudal past tend to crumble into cosmic dust before an open and receptive effort of understanding. The recognition of the organic nature of truth, its unceasing unfolding, may be considered a beginning step in opening to the way of natural magic. The truths discovered through this book will be expanded upon by every reader who encounters it in a spirit of sincerity and receptivity; there is no end to understanding, because there is no end to consciousness.