by John Granger
As much as the Harry Potter novels are postmodern, though, there is very little about them you could call “relativist.” There is a very real evil in the stories—Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters—and resisting them is a necessary and important thing. Those who waffle about fighting are cowards, collaborators, and traitors; virtues of bravery, especially sacrificial courage and love, loyalty, and honesty are celebrated in every book.
Ms. Rowling transcends the contradiction of the postmodern myth by replacing the Pure Blood belief that poisons the Wizarding world with a central narrative of love. In this scheme, love is the central and greatest power, the core reality, and in it there is no constitutive “other.” The other, by definition, is embraced by love. The only ones excluded are those who cannot love, and Dumbledore tells Harry flat out, “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all, those who live without love” (Deathly Hallows, chapter thirty-five).
But this belief in love is not easily won.
Choose to Believe, Harry!
Here’s the problem with love as a core belief: There is no way to get there by argument or demonstration. You have to make a choice to believe in order to get there, and, as skeptical as we are trained to be about our ability to know anything, choosing to believe in something seems ridiculous.
The day after Deathly Hallows was published Ms. Rowling told Meredith Vieira of the Today Show that the book was largely about her “struggle to believe.”
MV: Harry’s also referred to as the Chosen One. So are there religious—
JKR: Well, there—there clearly is a religious—undertone. And—it’s always been difficult to talk about that because until we reached book seven, views of what happens after death and so on, it would give away a lot of what was coming. So . . . yes, my beliefs and my struggling with religious belief and so on I think is quite apparent in this book.
MV: And what is the struggle?
JKR: Well my struggle really is to keep believing.6
Her struggle is “quite apparent in this book” because Harry’s biggest challenge is to “choose to believe” in Dumbledore. Twice in the beginning of Deathly Hallows he is asked to choose to believe and he balks both times.
“Don’t believe a word of it!” said Doge at once. “Not a word, Harry! Let nothing tarnish your memories of Albus Dumbledore!”
Harry looked into Doge’s earnest, pained face and felt, not reassured, but frustrated. Did Doge really think it was that easy, that Harry could simply choose not to believe? Didn’t Doge understand Harry’s need to be sure, to know everything? (Deathly Hallows, chapter eight [emphasis on “choose” and “everything” in original])
Ms. Rowling draws our attention to choice and belief again in chapter ten when Harry and Hermione argue about whether to believe like Doge or to join the Skeeter skeptics like Auntie Muriel:“Harry, do you really think you’ ll get the truth from a malicious old woman like Muriel, or from Rita Skeeter? How can you believe them? You knew Dumbledore!”
“I thought I did,” he muttered.
“But you know how much truth there was in everything Rita wrote about you! Doge is right, how can you let these people tarnish your memories of Dumbledore?”
He looked away, trying not to betray the resentment he felt. There it was again: Choose what to believe. He wanted the truth. Why was everybody so determined that he should not get it? (Deathly Hallows, chapter ten)
Harry decides after the debacle in Godric’s Hollow, where his faith is broken along with his wand, that he doesn’t believe and cannot choose to believe in Dumbledore and his mission:And his fury at Dumbledore broke over him now like lava, scorching him inside, wiping out every other feeling. Out of sheer desperation they had talked themselves into believing . . . that it was all part of some secret path laid out for them by Dumbledore; but there was no map, no plan. Dumbledore had left them to grope in the darkness, to wrestle with unknown and undreamed-of-terrors, alone and unaided: Nothing was explained, nothing was given freely . . .” ( Deathly Hallows, chapter eighteen)
After reading “The Greater Good” chapter in Skeeter’s Life and Lies book, he reaches bottom:“Look what he asked of me, Hermione! Risk your life, Harry! And again! And again! And don’t expect me to explain everything, just trust me blindly, trust that I know what I’m doing, trust me even though I don’t trust you! Never the whole truth! Never! “ . . . I don’t know who he loved, Hermione, but it was never me. This isn’t love, the mess he’s left me in . . .” He closed his eyes at her touch, and hated himself for wishing that what she said was true: that Dumbledore had really cared. (Deathly Hallows, chapter eighteen)
And yet in desperation in the Malfoy Manor basement and on reflection in Dobby’s grave, Harry does choose to believe. In the golden pink of dawn, Harry makes his decision. He knows but he doesn’t seek the Deathly Hallows. He chooses to believe in Dumbledore and in the mission he was assigned:Harry hesitated. He knew what hung on his decision. There was hardly any time left; now was the moment to decide: Horcruxes or Hallows?
“Griphook,“ Harry said. “I’ ll speak to Griphook first.”
His heart was racing as if he had been sprinting and had just cleared an enormous obstacle. (Deathly Hallows, chapter twenty-four)
Dumbledore may have left him clueless about important things, but he didn’t leave him without an important teaching about choice. “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities,” he says at the end of Chamber of Secrets. I think we all understand this in the sense of knowing that choices matter more than birthright. If what we believe about what we cannot know for sure, however, comes down to personal choice, as Harry says, then Dumbledore’s teaching about choice is resoundingly relevant. “What we choose to believe” about subjects lacking demonstrations or refutations will “show what we truly are.”
For Harry Potter and his readers, the process of overcoming prejudice is actually less vital than the agonizing postmodern dilemma that Harry expresses in a question to Dumbledore in Hallows: “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?” (chapter thirty-five). Is this a reality I can count on? Or, in other words, is it just the deluded product or projection of my prejudices and assorted mental filters?
When Harry, while digging Dobby’s grave, makes his choice to believe in Dumbledore and pursue Horcruxes rather than Hallows, he follows Dobby’s heroic example. Dobby was a self-actualizing house-elf, remember, who, contrary to all programming and house-elf beliefs, chose to believe in Harry Potter. In this choice he won his freedom. Neville, too, in choosing to live his final year at Hogwarts in anticipation of Harry’s return and as he imagines Harry would act, chooses to believe in something good, true, and beautiful, something greater than himself. In this choice, Neville achieves heroic stature and the courage to best Voldemort and kill Nagini with the Sword of Gryffindor in the Battle of Hogwarts.
As a postmodern writer, Rowling is obliged to offer prejudice consequent to unexamined belief as the great evil her heroes will resist and her villains will embody. Her series reads, consequently, like the “4,100-page treatise on tolerance” and celebration of misfits that we expect in the politically correct Age of Rudolph, Hermey, and Barney. Ms. Rowling escapes the trap of relativism and there being no ultimate evil, however, by portraying the choices Harry makes to transcend his prejudices and individual imaginings. Becoming his own person in service to truth and virtue is the centerpiece of his final transformation.
The choice that ultimately reveals who we really are is our decision whether or not to believe. Making that choice collapses all metanarratives or prejudice fostering myths other than the resounding metanarrative of love.
From Morality to Metaphor
“Definitely morals are drawn” is the author’s fair conclusion7 about her work. We have the softened didactic message of the schoolboy novel and the never-quite-horrifying but still edifying gothic atmosphere of the stories. Harry Potter’s larger moral message, as we’d have t
o expect, is the primary moral teaching of our historical period, namely, that prejudice is evil and that choosing to believe in reality greater than oneself is the means to transcend it.
We saw as we moved from the “surface” to the “moral” layer of meanings in Harry Potter that the two bled together; the setting was a good piece of the morality of the story and couldn’t really be separated. Now, as we approach the allegorical layer just underneath the moral, we see a similar blending of morality and allegory. Voldemort and his Death Eaters are de facto Nazi-fundamentalist straw men representing postmodern evils, and Harry, Dumbledore, and friends are the Rainbow Coalition of self-actualizing individuals freeing themselves of their psychological and social bonds. The atmosphere and setting, when understood as postmodern “double coding,” become part of the means by which Ms. Rowling draws her simultaneously conventional and, as will see in later chapters, radically traditional moral teaching.
PART THREE
The Allegorical Meaning
CHAPTER SIX
The Satirical Harry Potter
The Allegorical Journey Harry Takes with Gulliver
into Plato’s Cave in Order to Make a Point in
Mockery About Government and News Media
Igive plenty of talks about Harry Potter at major universities, at fan conventions, and at local libraries and bookstores. There are two or three questions that always come up at these events: I’m always asked if I’ve met Ms. Rowling, and I’m asked whether she herself told me the things I had just explained. I know why this sort of question comes up. Readers who love the Harry Potter novels, but who missed the allegorical, mythic, even religious meanings that I point out, are profoundly skeptical that anyone else was right in having seen it, short of a direct confession from the author.
Frankly, I understand this skepticism. It isn’t every author who deserves such serious digging. Every story has surface hooks, story formulas, and narrative drive—and all of the stories written in the past forty or fifty years have a postmodern moral or two. But allegory and beyond? Believe me: Very few bestsellers reward a look under the hood in search of their hidden political criticism and philosophical meaning.
The original title of Ms. Rowling’s first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was changed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the American publication. Her publisher was certain that no American reader would buy a book with the word “philosophy” in the title. But the truth is that it’s hard to get a grip on literature in general and Harry Potter in particular without a little Plato.
The good news is that Plato was a great storyteller. Plato even insisted in the Seventh Letter that he had never written a word of philosophy in his life. His genre of choice was the dialogue, after all, the ancient world equivalent of a screenplay, rather than dry treatises. Plato wrote philosophical dramas featuring Socrates, his teacher, in dynamic question-and-answer sessions with fascinating people, many of whom were well known Athenians. Plato is more like Shakespeare and Steven Spielberg than Spinoza or Speng ler. He doesn’t dictate doctrine; he tells stories and asks his friends what they think (and then some more questions about what they think . . . ).
One of his better stories and probably the most famous is the Cave Allegory (Republic, VII, 514a-520a). It goes something like this: Imagine human beings who live deep down in a cave with their heads and necks bound in such a way that they can only look straight ahead and at a wall opposite the entrance. They have no idea they’re living in a cave. Their light doesn’t come from the entrance but from a fire “burning far above and behind them.” In front of this fire there is a wall that acts like a puppet-show box. On the top of the wall, people who are not chained down carry figures of men, animals, and other things so their shadows are projected on the far wall. These shadow projections are the only things the cave prisoners can see and know. The shadows are their reality. “Such men would hold that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of artificial things.”
Socrates, who tells the story, then describes a prisoner who is liberated by force, that is, freed from his chains and dragged out from the wall of shadows past the fire and wall over which the figures are held, and up to the cave entrance and out into the light. This is not a happy man. At first, he is unable to see things in the light as they are because he only recognizes image-shadows as reality.
Then, in the light outside the cave, he is all but blinded, “. . . his eyes full of [the sun’s] beam and . . . unable to see even one of the things said to be true.” Slowly, though, his eyes will adjust to the light and he will be able to see shadows, reflections, objects, people, and finally the stars, moon, sunlight, and the sun itself. Finally, he could understand the sun is “the source of the seasons and the years, and the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions [in the cave] had been seeing.”
In the previous chapter, Socrates has explained a “metaphor of the Sun” in which the sun is a natural cipher for “the Idea of the Good” or God, “what provides the truth to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows.”1 The prisoner able to see and know the sun in the Cave Allegory experiences the illuminating truth that is the “real reality” behind the shadow images in the cave’s darkness.
Socrates also makes it clear that this “enlightened” or “illumined” prisoner is in for a very hard time. He’s quite happy now that he sees things as they are and feels nothing but pity for his friends back in the hole. But what happens if he goes back into the cave?
First, it’s clear that this return would be something he’d try to avoid at all costs. Better a slave in the sunshine than a king in what C. S. Lewis called the “Shadowlands.” But if he did go back, he’d be in a fix. While his eyes adjusted, for one thing, he’d seem a moron whose eyes were damaged by his time outside the cave. If he tried to free the other prisoners and help them escape, Socrates is confident that the slaves would kill him rather than question the reality of the shadows.
“Don’t be surprised,” therefore, that the prisoners who have come back “aren’t willing to mind the business of human beings” who think shadows are reality and truth. “Their souls are always eager to spend their time above.”2
Socrates finally spells out what the Allegory is about. We are the people in the cave. Our understanding of reality, the ephemeral quantities of matter and energy we think of as “real things,” are just shared beliefs about shadows projected up on the cave wall. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful, the greater reality of things, are only knowable in escaping the cave and knowing the Idea of the Good itself, “what provides the truth to the things known.”
What does this have to do with literature?
Good question.
The first part of the answer is in realizing that this isn’t just Plato’s otherworldly fantasy. This story for shadowlanders like you and me about the nature of reality and how we know (or don’t know) is pretty much the Christian consensus. Since much of English literature, from Beowulf to Joyce’s Ulysses, was written by Christian writers for Christian readers, it almost has to be understood in light of Plato’s Cave Allegory.
Stories in the Western tradition can be sorted pretty much into two piles: a heap for those that reinforce the delusions of the shadows projected on the cave wall and another for the ones that make us feel our chains, stretch our necks, maybe even give us an imaginative experience of the noetic reality in the sunlight. Reading books is either an enlightening and liberating experience (and, yes, the Cave Allegory is one of the reasons we talk about “enlightenment” the way we do) or just entertainment to distract us from the darkness, smoke, and discomfort of life underground.
Either way, uplifting or dissipating, everything written is more or less an allegory. The words on the page, the stories, sentiments, and sentience of them are not the things referred to but signs that make us recall or imagine them. And finding meaning in everything written involves going dee
per into the allegory and reflecting on what the story is calling up within us.
If you’re reading an average bestseller, the search pretty much ends when the roller coaster action comes to a stop; beyond story and moral (or lack of morals), it’s time for another book. The “good stuff,” though—what we call “classics” or “great books”—on second, third, and fourth readings reveals political and social commentary or allegory and, in real treasures, an escape from the cave via a truly mythic experience. Mircea Eliade, the great historian of religion, said that all reading in a profane culture like our own serves a mythic or religious function because of our “suspension of disbelief ” while reading or watching a movie. This disconnecting from our selfish concerns lifts us to a better place, something like the place religious ritual and sacraments are meant to take us.3
He’s right, of course. But there are writers who deliberately take us up to the mouth of the cave and force us to look out, who make us return again and again for a refresher course. The books we will be talking about in this second half of Harry Potter’s Bookshelf to illustrate the allegorical and mythic layers of meaning are the greats. We’ll be looking at them because Ms. Rowling has built on them as models, and the Harry Potter novels achieve the same resonance in the heart that thrills and engages readers profoundly.
Laughing at Idiots and Self-Important Gits: The Joys of Allegory in Satire
Plato is right, at least in my experience talking to readers, even to Harry’s biggest fans. Once we move beyond the shadows on the cave wall Ms. Rowling has given us, the surface and moral meanings we’ve explored so far, most of us don’t have the tools, experience, or beliefs to look further. We need an easy and fun stepping-off place to see what’s beneath the story. Political criticism or satire is a great place to start. “The main purpose of any satire is to invite the reader to laugh at a particular human vice or folly, in order to invite us to consider an important moral alternative.”4 Satire is about laughing; who doesn’t want to laugh, especially at folks who deserve to be laughed at?