Friday, November 16, 2001
Harry Potter’s Coming to Town
Good morning—It’s November 16th. Do you know where your magic wand is? If I say “Expelliarmus!” to you, do you know the antidote spells that will keep your wand from flying from your hand at an inopportune moment? When you awoke this morning, were you staring at the lush draperies of your magical four–poster bed at Hogwart’s School for Witchcraft and Wizardry . . . or were you caught, embarrassingly, in some poor Muggle “Posturepedic” facsimile? Ah, what’s an unmagical person to do . . . .
Well—head to the theaters of course! For today Harry Potter comes to the big screen. As a huge fan of the books, and generally a huge curmudgeon about commercialism for kids, I find myself surprisingly willing to be swept along (on a Nimbus 2000, of course) by the thrill of it all.
Oh, I am ready for the critics—ready for those who will bemoan “Oh, it’s not like I pictured—so and so doesn’t sneer enough or that one’s hair isn’t bushy enough and the castle is too this and not enough that.” We must remind ourselves that novels and films are not the same—they provide different, though often complementary, thrills.
I must, however, admit to pangs of mourning for what had been a purely literary phenomenon, driven by word of mouth as friends passed along worn volumes to other friends, uttering those same words that so famously changed St. Augustine’s life: “Take up and read!” Now, there are plenty of folks I know who have refused to hop on the Potter bandwagon even before there were rumblings about a glitzy movie. There is enough of the snob in many of us that makes us sniff suspiciously at the “popular"and defend our old standbies: “Rowling’s no CS Lewis or JRR Tolkein!” Witness the recent brouhaha over another novelist, Jonathan Franzen, who pooh-poohed Oprah’s invitation to appear on her Book Club because he wanted to remain, in his unfortunate words, part of “the high-art literary tradition.” Well, call me low brow, but if the power of literature is to move us—emotionally, imaginatively, intellectually—to places that will help us get outside ourselves and see the world anew, isn’t it a GOOD thing that more folks are reading? I am heartened, not depressed, by the mountains of Muggle money going to the four books Rowling’s got on the NYTimes Best Seller list that celebrate platonic friendship and the power of schoolwork to help wage justice against evil.
My own daughter, like so many other children, has bloomed as a reader under the spell of Harry Potter. I watch her now, rereading her favorite parts of the books, scratching out spidery letters to her second grade friends with a feather dipped in “ink” she fashioned from black water color paints, sending tricky riddles in emails to her pals while in the persona of Rowling’s characters. I think of the rich possibilities for imaginative play from my own childhood obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Our group of neighborhood kids spent hours reenacting and doing riffs on countless scenes of pioneer disaster, suffering, and mayhem in our suburban backyards and basements. Plague of locusts one day, raging chimney fire the next, blinding scarlet fever after that. The imaginative world of those books allowed us to get outside ourselves, to try out roles of power and powerlessness, and to work out our sometimes competing senses of justice. The “ideological work of child’s play,” as scholars remind us, shapes us as citizens. Books that inspire children to fashion complex worlds for that play—worlds that value intellect and wit over brute force and beauty—are surely worth their weight in Gringott’s gold.
In a holiday season when catalogues in my mailbox are hawking camouflage outfits for dolls and even, I kid you not, camouflage-print onesies for babies ("It’s camo for kids!” the headline cheers.), the world of Harry Potter holds appeal as an alternative. Not, as some might think, because the books allow us to fantasize about magic as the solution to our problems. Most often in Rowling’s books, in fact, magic only reveals how complicated the world is. No—the real source of power in Harry Potter’s world is intelligence. The great force of Good at the story’s center, Professor Albus Dumbledore, is, after all, both a scholar and a school headmaster. How many other popular books can you name in which, at the peak of narrative excitement, the characters rush to the . . . library to do a bit of research? Getting out of pickles at Hogwart’s School involves not brute force, but the heady pleasures of playing chess, solving riddles, and recalling material learned in classes and written up in lab reports. If zillions of kids—and their parents—leave theaters in the next few weeks dreaming of the adventures one can have at school, well . . . you won’t hear this Muggle complaining. And if, in the midst of the visual fireworks, the film manages to capture any of the scholarly thrills depicted in the book, perhaps you’ll join me in toasting the event with a goblet of pumpkin juice and couple of chocolate frogs.