30 November 2008
The Magical Amish
04/12/08 19:27 Filed in: Harry Potter
I've recently become a frequent visitor to the "You
Tube" library of videos, wandering up and down its
many corridors, checking out the wide variety of
items it has to offer. The other day, on one of my
wanderings, I stumbled across a fascinating little
video in which a young woman (maybe 12 or 13)
recorded her immediate reaction (live and almost
unedited) upon completing her first reading of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
I was amazed at the level of raw emotion on display. The young woman was so overcome at times that she actually had to turn off her recorder and take a moment to compose herself before starting it up again. My first thought was to marvel, yet again, at the tremendous impact of the seven novels on their reading public. Then I wondered how Jo Rowling must feel if and when she comes across these kinds of tributes in cyberspace and sees, first hand and unedited, how strong an impact her books were having. Then I started to recall recent studies that have been done on how the young people of the 21st century are seeking and finding community in cyberspace to share and deal with even their most intimate personal issues: parents divorcing, family members dying, break ups with boyfriends or girlfriends, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts.
After a while, however, the irony hit me. This young woman's video on You Tube captures her emotional reaction to the final novel about a group of 21st century kids who have, apparently, completed rejected the cyber age.
What does that say about the millions of people who love Harry Potter?
Especially the young fans?
I find it amazing that the most successful collection of children's novels in the 21st century involves a clear repudiation of science and technology. Children are putting aside their cell phones and iPods, their XBoxes and Wiis, turning off their TVs and their internet connections, to read these books. And the children in the books — even though they apparently live in the same time and place as their fans — never (and I mean never) access the many technological wonders of the modern world. I don't think that the words "internet" or "e-mail" appear even once in the seven books.
I have long compared the Harry Potter series to the Star Wars series of the 1970s and I think the comparisons are valid (see other posts on this website) both with regard to the internal world of the two series and with regard to the fan phenomenon they have created. But the original Star Wars series was all about technology — even the good guys, who embraced magic (sorry, the "force"), had space ships and blaster guns and androids and light sabres. Harry Potter carries in it a distinct, unchallenged distrust of technology.
There is, in fact, little or no science in the books. The closest course to Science at Hogwarts is Potions, which seems a little like chemistry but really isn't. These people trust magic but never seek to explain how it works. Even when we are privy to the lessons the students are taught, we find very little interest in explaining why things work, why a potion is effective, how an effect is created.
Harry's cousin, Dudley, loves his technology. He has TVs in every room and a computer upon which he plays. It's no surprise, then, that Dudley is portrayed as the worst kind of child, spoiled rotten and a bully to the core.
The only person from the wizarding world who shows any interest at all in scientific questions is Arthur Weasley. He takes Muggle cars apart and marvels at their trains that run underground. He states in book six that his greatest ambition is to figure out how airplanes stay up, yet he shows absolutely no interest in understanding how broomsticks stay up.
Let's face it, the wizarding world in the books of J.K. Rowling is practically Amish in its rejection of technology. If it weren't for the Hogwarts Express — an actual train — we would find absolutely no remotely modern technology among the witches and wizards.
What do we make of this? In an era where we find it impossible to get young people to put their technology aside even for a minute, why is this Amish world of magic so insanely popular?
It's possible, just possible, that the children of the 70s still hoped that technology could be trusted to save us from ourselves, from the damage we've done to the planet, from the damage we threaten to do to each other, and that the children of today no longer share that trust. And J.K. Rowling has tapped into that in creating an alternate world that is free of the nastiness that technology threatens to bring.
(An interesting side-note to this issue is the fact that the second trilogy in the Star Wars series, released at about the same time as the Potter books, continued to cling to technology and was, at least from what I can see, significantly less popular than either the original trilogy or the Rowling books).
Interesting. And yet the same kids who are loving the books are also streaming their immediate emotional reactions to those books through You Tube in cyberspace. Hmmmm...
And of course I wonder at the relationship between the wizarding world and the Muggle world in Rowling's creation. We learn that witch burning in the 14th century was a waste of time because the witches just cast a spell that caused the flames to tickle rather than burn but what about pollution and nuclear weapons? What about disease and starvation?
An interesting future story (and one that has been featured numerous times on Star Trek) might be what happens when the wizarding world decides that it MUST intervene to stop the Muggles from destroying the planet we all share. Interesting.
I was amazed at the level of raw emotion on display. The young woman was so overcome at times that she actually had to turn off her recorder and take a moment to compose herself before starting it up again. My first thought was to marvel, yet again, at the tremendous impact of the seven novels on their reading public. Then I wondered how Jo Rowling must feel if and when she comes across these kinds of tributes in cyberspace and sees, first hand and unedited, how strong an impact her books were having. Then I started to recall recent studies that have been done on how the young people of the 21st century are seeking and finding community in cyberspace to share and deal with even their most intimate personal issues: parents divorcing, family members dying, break ups with boyfriends or girlfriends, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts.
After a while, however, the irony hit me. This young woman's video on You Tube captures her emotional reaction to the final novel about a group of 21st century kids who have, apparently, completed rejected the cyber age.
What does that say about the millions of people who love Harry Potter?
Especially the young fans?
I find it amazing that the most successful collection of children's novels in the 21st century involves a clear repudiation of science and technology. Children are putting aside their cell phones and iPods, their XBoxes and Wiis, turning off their TVs and their internet connections, to read these books. And the children in the books — even though they apparently live in the same time and place as their fans — never (and I mean never) access the many technological wonders of the modern world. I don't think that the words "internet" or "e-mail" appear even once in the seven books.
I have long compared the Harry Potter series to the Star Wars series of the 1970s and I think the comparisons are valid (see other posts on this website) both with regard to the internal world of the two series and with regard to the fan phenomenon they have created. But the original Star Wars series was all about technology — even the good guys, who embraced magic (sorry, the "force"), had space ships and blaster guns and androids and light sabres. Harry Potter carries in it a distinct, unchallenged distrust of technology.
There is, in fact, little or no science in the books. The closest course to Science at Hogwarts is Potions, which seems a little like chemistry but really isn't. These people trust magic but never seek to explain how it works. Even when we are privy to the lessons the students are taught, we find very little interest in explaining why things work, why a potion is effective, how an effect is created.
Harry's cousin, Dudley, loves his technology. He has TVs in every room and a computer upon which he plays. It's no surprise, then, that Dudley is portrayed as the worst kind of child, spoiled rotten and a bully to the core.
The only person from the wizarding world who shows any interest at all in scientific questions is Arthur Weasley. He takes Muggle cars apart and marvels at their trains that run underground. He states in book six that his greatest ambition is to figure out how airplanes stay up, yet he shows absolutely no interest in understanding how broomsticks stay up.
Let's face it, the wizarding world in the books of J.K. Rowling is practically Amish in its rejection of technology. If it weren't for the Hogwarts Express — an actual train — we would find absolutely no remotely modern technology among the witches and wizards.
What do we make of this? In an era where we find it impossible to get young people to put their technology aside even for a minute, why is this Amish world of magic so insanely popular?
It's possible, just possible, that the children of the 70s still hoped that technology could be trusted to save us from ourselves, from the damage we've done to the planet, from the damage we threaten to do to each other, and that the children of today no longer share that trust. And J.K. Rowling has tapped into that in creating an alternate world that is free of the nastiness that technology threatens to bring.
(An interesting side-note to this issue is the fact that the second trilogy in the Star Wars series, released at about the same time as the Potter books, continued to cling to technology and was, at least from what I can see, significantly less popular than either the original trilogy or the Rowling books).
Interesting. And yet the same kids who are loving the books are also streaming their immediate emotional reactions to those books through You Tube in cyberspace. Hmmmm...
And of course I wonder at the relationship between the wizarding world and the Muggle world in Rowling's creation. We learn that witch burning in the 14th century was a waste of time because the witches just cast a spell that caused the flames to tickle rather than burn but what about pollution and nuclear weapons? What about disease and starvation?
An interesting future story (and one that has been featured numerous times on Star Trek) might be what happens when the wizarding world decides that it MUST intervene to stop the Muggles from destroying the planet we all share. Interesting.
Re-Reading The Half-Blood Prince
02/12/08 18:33 Filed in: Harry Potter
I finally got around to re-reading (I think for only
the second time!) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood
Prince, the sixth installment in the celebrated
seven-novel series by English author J.K. Rowling. I
added the exclamation point for the simple reason
that I have read the first, second, third, fourth and
seventh books at least four or five times each. And
the only reason I haven't read the fifth book,
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,
as often is because I find it so effectively unhappy
and claustrophobic that I find reading it emotionally
and psychologically difficult.
My reticence with regard to The Half-Blood Prince comes from a different source: I simply didn't like the book the first time I read it. So I didn't go back to it for the longest time.
I read it again this past week. Did I like it better? Maybe. Do I understand why I find it to be somewhat less successful than the other books? I think so. Did reading it again help me appreciate, once again, just how great a writer J.K. Rowling is? Undoubtedly.
I think I find The Half-Blood Prince less compelling than the others simply because it is mostly a launching pad for the bewilderingly good seventh and final book. Rowling packs the sixth book full — too full, I would argue — in order to prepare for the last novel.
The main, suspense plot develops when two more minor plots (Harry's private sessions with Dumbledore and Draco Malfoy's deadly assignment from Voldemort) come together in the final 50 or so pages. Up until that point, however, we are caught up in a spin cycle of minor plots: Dumbledore preparing Harry for his showdown with Voldemort; Harry suspecting Draco of nefarious acts but getting no sympathy from the others; Harry benefiting from hand-scrawled notes in an old Potion text book (once owned by the titular Half-Blood Prince); all of our young heroes struggling with their hormones as they deal with puberty; Harry taking on his first season as Quidditch Captain; the introduction of a new potions master, Professor Slughorn, who holds the key to the puzzle of what makes Voldemort tick; the students facing their Apparition tests; and much more.
To prepare us for the grand finale, Rowling needs us to emerge from the sixth book with an understanding that Voldemort has attempted to render himself immortal by tearing his soul into pieces and hiding the bits in various objects (known as Horcruxes), that it is Harry's job to find and destroy these Horcruxes and then to kill Voldemort himself, and that Dumbledore will not be around so that Harry and his friends face this daunting task alone.
It's a tall order and not one that lends itself to the creation of suspense.
On the other hand, my recent re-reading of The Half-Blood Prince has helped me to appreciate how beautifully written the book is. There is poetry in these pages as Rowling shows that she is as capable a writer for adults as she is for children:
Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty. And Harry felt, as he had felt about the phoenix song before, that the music was inside him, not without: it was his own grief turned magically to song that echoed across the grounds and through the castle windows (p. 573).
She also proves herself a virtuoso at presenting gripping scenes of absolute authenticity, leading her reader to read the scene and the characters within it in a certain way, and then turning that understanding inside out at a later date. The scene on the ramparts of the Astronomy tower, where Dumbledore finds himself poisoned and weak, wandless at the hands of his enemies, with Harry, invisible and paralysed, forced to watch, is an epic, heartrending scene.
But somebody else had spoken Snape's name, quite softly.
'Severus...'
The sound frightened Harry beyond anything he had experienced all evening. For the first time, Dumbledore was pleading...
Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there was revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face. (p. 556)
You read that and you are convinced that Harry has been right all along about Severus Snape, that Dumbledore was wrong in trusting him. It is true and real and authentic and nothing is left out. As readers, we are right to read the scene that way. Just as we are right to read Snape's running battle (of spells and of words) with Harry later in the book as more clear evidence of Snape's hatred of Harry, his treachery toward Dumbledore and his loyalty to Voldemort.
It's spellbinding writing and absolutely right. And yet, as we find out at the end of book seven, our reading of it — which is fully justified every step of the way — is completely wrong. Snape is one of the good guys. Miraculously, when we reread these sections from book six, knowing the truth after reading book seven, we find that Rowling didn't cheat, that not one word is false. Once we know the truth of the situation, her descriptions of the original events ring just as true. We interpreted them in one way because Rowling has very adeptly led us to that interpretation — it is right for that time. But, as we discover when we go back to the scenes after reading the final novel, the truth is there too. We simply allowed her to lead us away from it.
Just like Harry, we distrusted Snape, we doubted Dumbledore. Just like Harry, we found out we were wrong.
And Rowling was right every step of the way.
That makes me think about what Snape would have been going through as he carried out Dumbledore's wishes up there on the tower. To honour the man, he had to killhim. His revulsion and hatred were not focused on Dumbledore as we originally believed but on the act of horror Snape has to carry out in order to live up to his word, to help out his friend.
So, sure, The Half-Blood Prince is not the most effective of the Harry Potter novels but, my goodness, it offers some magnificent writing.
My reticence with regard to The Half-Blood Prince comes from a different source: I simply didn't like the book the first time I read it. So I didn't go back to it for the longest time.
I read it again this past week. Did I like it better? Maybe. Do I understand why I find it to be somewhat less successful than the other books? I think so. Did reading it again help me appreciate, once again, just how great a writer J.K. Rowling is? Undoubtedly.
I think I find The Half-Blood Prince less compelling than the others simply because it is mostly a launching pad for the bewilderingly good seventh and final book. Rowling packs the sixth book full — too full, I would argue — in order to prepare for the last novel.
The main, suspense plot develops when two more minor plots (Harry's private sessions with Dumbledore and Draco Malfoy's deadly assignment from Voldemort) come together in the final 50 or so pages. Up until that point, however, we are caught up in a spin cycle of minor plots: Dumbledore preparing Harry for his showdown with Voldemort; Harry suspecting Draco of nefarious acts but getting no sympathy from the others; Harry benefiting from hand-scrawled notes in an old Potion text book (once owned by the titular Half-Blood Prince); all of our young heroes struggling with their hormones as they deal with puberty; Harry taking on his first season as Quidditch Captain; the introduction of a new potions master, Professor Slughorn, who holds the key to the puzzle of what makes Voldemort tick; the students facing their Apparition tests; and much more.
To prepare us for the grand finale, Rowling needs us to emerge from the sixth book with an understanding that Voldemort has attempted to render himself immortal by tearing his soul into pieces and hiding the bits in various objects (known as Horcruxes), that it is Harry's job to find and destroy these Horcruxes and then to kill Voldemort himself, and that Dumbledore will not be around so that Harry and his friends face this daunting task alone.
It's a tall order and not one that lends itself to the creation of suspense.
On the other hand, my recent re-reading of The Half-Blood Prince has helped me to appreciate how beautifully written the book is. There is poetry in these pages as Rowling shows that she is as capable a writer for adults as she is for children:
Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty. And Harry felt, as he had felt about the phoenix song before, that the music was inside him, not without: it was his own grief turned magically to song that echoed across the grounds and through the castle windows (p. 573).
She also proves herself a virtuoso at presenting gripping scenes of absolute authenticity, leading her reader to read the scene and the characters within it in a certain way, and then turning that understanding inside out at a later date. The scene on the ramparts of the Astronomy tower, where Dumbledore finds himself poisoned and weak, wandless at the hands of his enemies, with Harry, invisible and paralysed, forced to watch, is an epic, heartrending scene.
But somebody else had spoken Snape's name, quite softly.
'Severus...'
The sound frightened Harry beyond anything he had experienced all evening. For the first time, Dumbledore was pleading...
Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there was revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face. (p. 556)
You read that and you are convinced that Harry has been right all along about Severus Snape, that Dumbledore was wrong in trusting him. It is true and real and authentic and nothing is left out. As readers, we are right to read the scene that way. Just as we are right to read Snape's running battle (of spells and of words) with Harry later in the book as more clear evidence of Snape's hatred of Harry, his treachery toward Dumbledore and his loyalty to Voldemort.
It's spellbinding writing and absolutely right. And yet, as we find out at the end of book seven, our reading of it — which is fully justified every step of the way — is completely wrong. Snape is one of the good guys. Miraculously, when we reread these sections from book six, knowing the truth after reading book seven, we find that Rowling didn't cheat, that not one word is false. Once we know the truth of the situation, her descriptions of the original events ring just as true. We interpreted them in one way because Rowling has very adeptly led us to that interpretation — it is right for that time. But, as we discover when we go back to the scenes after reading the final novel, the truth is there too. We simply allowed her to lead us away from it.
Just like Harry, we distrusted Snape, we doubted Dumbledore. Just like Harry, we found out we were wrong.
And Rowling was right every step of the way.
That makes me think about what Snape would have been going through as he carried out Dumbledore's wishes up there on the tower. To honour the man, he had to killhim. His revulsion and hatred were not focused on Dumbledore as we originally believed but on the act of horror Snape has to carry out in order to live up to his word, to help out his friend.
So, sure, The Half-Blood Prince is not the most effective of the Harry Potter novels but, my goodness, it offers some magnificent writing.