I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently about the relationship of the Harry Potter books to Christianity. When I started talking to my Mom about this, she said I should write something that she could give to a friend of hers who is interested in this subject, so here is the first of, I hope, a number of posts addressing some of the most interesting connections in that regard. So, first of all, Hi Mom, and second of all, howdy to William Burroughs who, though deceased, speaks through his words, one of which was that the word is a virus. Continue reading ‘Harry Potter and Christianity, part 1–The Word is a Virus’
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As our readers seem to have a penchant toward Potter-y, I imagine many will enjoy one of Joel Garver’s recent posts on a rock concert at the Free Library of Philadelphia. The artists in performance took their names from characters and themes of the Harry Potter series. Wizard rock, as Joel points out, is quite a growing phenomenon.
What’s more, you can download some of the songs for free.. a whole album, actually, of which two of the songs, tracks 5 and 14, are based on the Harry Potter series. The album, called Fanfiction by the Shorthand Phonetics, can be downloaded by ctrl+clicking here, and included such magical hits as “All too Platonic” and “Lady Hermione’s Library is On Fire because of the Burning Minds Sparking Each Other to Ignite and It’s Consuming My Flammable Ashen Heart”
enjoy
P.S. this post from kottke.org on Chinese adaptations of Harry Potter is hilarious.
Neil Gaiman’s Stardust is due out any day now, and is already getting great feedback. I read the book recently, and even passed it on to a friend as he headed off to Italy for a month. He read it quickly. I’m hoping – hint, hint – that he’ll acquiese and review it for us here before we’re all spoiled on the film.
Anyway, it’s so short, and really good, so all of you, put down the theology, and the social constructivism, and the Duns Scotus – I won’t even say Harry Potter, since those of you that are still reading or haven’t finished, as Aron says, have bigger problems – go get Stardust from your local library or independent bookstore, and get cracking. You have about 13 hours from now… 16 if you’re Pacific.
From Salon.com: This is a picture that looks to have been made with pleasure, for our pleasure, as opposed to something we’re supposed to be impressed by.
Is Harry Potter a Christian? Well, lets start this conversation off with the basics, and I should note that my jumping off point is the two Bible quotations which appear on two noteworthy tombs in book 7 of J.K. Rowlings masterful series (By the way, this post has spoilers galore, but if you haven’t read book 7 by now you’ve got bigger problems anyway, and I would suggest professional help) So, to the quotations. Where your Treasure is, there will your Heart be also, and, The Last Enemy that shall be Destroyed is Death. Love and Death, then, are the themes which dominate these books, but as I always tell my students when we’re examining the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is Jesus’ most extended answer to the question of what Christian love is, Jesus gives a brand new look at love, going beyond even what the prophets had envisaged, present in his teachings, the full glory of which is seen in his death and resurrection. The message of HP is this: Love, fearing not the specter of the power of death, works a greater magic in this world than any deeds of muggles or wizards. Harry is clearly not as powerful as Voldemort, or even, as the latest movie makes splendidly clear, his legions of death-eaters (Helena!), but as Dumbledore unceasingly drones, Harry has a power of which the glorious V-cake knows not. Clearly, the entrance into victory over this serpentine monster is Harry’s baptism courtesy of his mother, that is, his love of love over any of the fruits of this world (Faux psychoanalysts take note—he loves love more than he loves his mother). His life is forfeit in the way that St. Paul’s was, not a stoical suicide his, but rather the uncontainable energy released by the breaking of these rusted bonds. What effect? He gives up his life for his friends, and he does die. And his soul goes to the place where souls go (Lord forgive Joanna for saying that “it’s all in our heads”), and then he simply returns, as simply as Christ rising from the tomb with a sternly confused look on his face as in Piero della Francesca’s rendering of it, Roman soldiers slumping in earthly defeat.
Next up: We’re hoping for a masterful post by Dr. Ramey of Rowan Univ. fame on John Milbank and the surnaturel, and I’m already asking myself how one can live in a world created by and for love, in which love is stronger than death, though no stranger to it, without the storyteller himself. Even if to simply put the idea “all in our heads”. . . . .
At least, about 2.5 hrs into the newest installment of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (hereafter PC), I felt like it was a neverending story. Not that it was that bad, but rather that it could have been shorter. Kate and I agreed that PC would have been more coherent, less like the runon sentences you occasionally read here at TLOU, had it been shorter – this coming from someone who just watched all three Lord of the Rings movies in their extended versions! As many of the reviews have indicated, the push for action and CG suffocated the drama, although Johnny Depp’s schizophrenic routine really added a new element to the Jack Sparrow character. I’m not going to try draw any profound conclusions from the movie, because if there were any, I probably lost track of them at that 2 hour mark.
Speaking of Lord of the Rings, thanks to Jay for drawing Aron’s and my attention to The Children of Hurin (click the link for an interesting writeup), a new volume edited by Christopher Tolkien, an expansion of Tolkien’s notes on a shorter story from the Silmarillion, and the newest addition to the TLOU bookclub. Summer reading, anyone?
I guess I should have just posted my proposal! But don’t ask me for more (that is, until the proposal gets accepted and I actually have to write the paper)
Considering the importance of the Imaginary register in children’s literature, it is no surprise that the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, the best selling children’s books ever, has some fairly typical imaginary/fantasy elements, such as wizards and witches with improbable powers. Rowling, though, has stated that her books are simply “about death”—the one element which fantasies seem to always miraculously avoid. While the genre of fantasy in its purest sense obviates death, and thus the dimension of theReal, Rowling’s book are structured such that the Imaginary realm is always running into its own limit, the paths of fantasy always being surprised by the stroke of death.
The structure of Harry’s fantasy world, and consequently the structure of the books themselves, is centered on the loss of his parents, but especially that of his father, whose specter makes an appearance in book three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as part of a unique time travel sequence. Unlike most time travel sequences which are structured such that an alternative time thread must be created which runs parallel to the “real” time, and which functions as a powerful fantasy of how life could be “if only. . .” the sequence in this book maintains only one history—but with a twist. When Harry and his friends go back in time to ensure that Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, is able to elude capture, we realize that everything they go back in time to do had already been accomplished by their time traveling selves. This would merely be a typical time-traveling conundrum were it not for the intrusion of the Real in the form of an impasse within the Imaginary. At the end of the initial narration Harry is saved from a gruesome death by the apparition of a stag controlled by what he takes to be the ghost of his deceased father. In the second narration the time traveling Harry, in a moment of shock, realizes that it was not his father who had conjured up the saving image but that it is his present, time-traveling self that must take the responsibility to perform the difficult charm.
The time travel sequence reiterates a theme that is present throughout the whole series, namely, that Harry must come to terms with his desire that his father could save him, or the fantasy that he might never have lost him. When Harry steps into the place that he had reserved for his father by performing the conjuration himself, we have a moment analogous to what Lacan referred to as the “traversing of the fantasy.” At this moment the fantasy dies, yet inasmuch as Harry is able to act from the place at which his fantasies had controlled him, we witness a sublimation in the Lacanian sense, that is, a re-structuring of the relationship of the Imaginary order to that of the Real, such that the Imaginary does not function to block the Real, but to maintain it, as well as the subject’s minimal distance from it.
I just finished writing up a proposal for this book on Lacan and Children’s Literature in which I argue that one of the powerful things about the Harry Potter books is the way in which the Imaginary order is always cut by the Real, by Death. Harry’s biggest fantasies concern the care that his parents, or Sirius, or Dumbledore might provide him, and as the books progress these supports get taken away from him, one by one. I also argue that the structure is that of a mobius strip, such that the opposition between the Imaginary and the Real is intrinsic to the structure of the fantasies of the characters. Rowling herself said the books are about death, which, in my opinion, the (pure) genre of fantasy has always completely obviated. Rowling, though, sets out like she’s going to give the traditional weight to the imaginary elements (the overblown powers, the ridiculous dualisms) but then always manages to be very surprising in the way these fantasies run into their very own Real limits. The books are theologically right on, as well, for the very simple fact that Harry loves because he is not afraid to die.
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