Harry Potter: A Global, Long-term Project?

by Hemma Poledna

The world is inhabited by three races - Mud-, Half- and Pureblooded. (The mudblooded: their ancestors are only muggles, i.e., humans; halfbloods are half-magician, half Muggel, but the pureblooded have only magicians among their ancestors). A brain flies through the air; a magic wand impales an eyeball; a monster drones, "Bow down before death." Amputated body parts and blood are the sacrifice needed in order to restore a body to the truly evil hero Voldemort, before whom Harry bows down. This mixture of racism, violence and occultism is not something taken from a bloody slasher film but is rather the content of a very successful contemporary children's book, the fifth volume of the Harry Potter series by Joanne K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Anyone who has children as relatives or friends or anyone who is involved in teaching children or has children of his own has already heard about Harry Potter. The front pages of daily newspapers have hyped the day before the release of these books as "The biggest success since the invention of the printing press." "Never has a book sold so quickly." "People are standing in lines to pick up their copies of the fifth Potter book." "Our children are reading again." Children who have never voluntarily picked up a book in their lives. That's a fair sampling of the commentary on the Potter mania. What is going on here? Just what are our children reading? Is it really just a harmless modern fairly tale, simply an entertaining story that holds their attention? Or is it really not a children's book at all?

In February of 2004 - after the fifth Potter volume had appeared - the Munich youth commission issued a report that made some waves. The city agency responsible for the protection of children deemed Harry Potter a book not suitable for children. "The novel tells a complex and dark story, which leads its readers into a state of mind somewhere between anxiety and rage, states which are resolved in scenes which are both brutal and bloody. Young readers simply don't have the media sophistication to resolve this tension or to discharge the worries and anxieties they have picked up while reading these books."

Not long ago, a book appeared which is dedicated to understanding the Potter phenomenon in a way that is both fundamental and independent. The book is Harry Potter - Good or Evil? by Gabriele Kuby. The author is both a writer and a sociologist, and she proposes in her extremely interesting book the thesis that Harry Potter is a cultural long-term project "that has formed an entire generation and as a result social reality." In her book she answers the question, Is Harry Potter good or evil? Her answer is unambiguous: Harry Potter is evil, a case which she makes step by step in her 160-page book, backing up her conclusion with many citations from the text of the novel.

Kuby examines J.K. Rowling's technique from a Christian perspective, how the normal state of consciousness gets modified in the course of reading the book, how inhibitions are broken down, and how normal points of orientation, especially the criteria distinguishing good from evil, are dissolved through confusion and disempowerment. She describes what happens when the human world is denigrated and the world of witches and magic is glorified, just as she debunks the apparent battle between good and evil, which Harry is engaged in. In doing this she nullifies the oft stated argument of many critics, who claim that Harry Potter is pedagogically valuable because he is engaged in the battle between good and evil.

Harry Potter presents evil as a part of everyday existence. As one example, "during a Quiddich game, the teacher Mr. Querell attempts to kill Harry with a curse. Snape, the teacher who hates Harry, saves him by a counter-curse. Why? Dumbledore explains: 'Your father did something which Snape can never forgive. He saved his life. Professor Snape can't stand being beholden to your father. . . I am certain that he has tried to help you this past year, because he has the feeling that he and your father would then be even. Then he could continue to think about your father and hate him with a clear conscience.' This is totally confusing: someone who hates Harry saves his life. He does it with a curse, and he does it so that he can go on hating him." (p. 69).

The Harry Potter books lead their readers into a closed universe of cruel monsters, blood-smeared spirits, malevolent and sadistic teachers, horrifying spells and curses, without letting them know there is a way out of this world, worse, without a hint that anyone is seeking a way out. Harry and his friends' greatest fear is that they will be expelled from Hogwarts, the school for magic and witchcraft. Then they would have to enter into the world of the humans, or Muggels, and that is a loathsome prospect.

In place of the human world, the reader is confronted with world of threatening and disgusting creatures. The mixture of human and innocent childlike elements with death-bringing destructive elements is both cruel and frequent. One example: "Alraunen have pseudo-human characteristics in the Potter novels, and they are used as a kind of raw material which returns relatives or those who have been cursed back into their original states. The students at Hogwarts have to report the Alraunen. A small and extremely ugly baby is pulled out of the dirt as some kind of root. Leaves are growing out of its head. It has pale green speckled skin. When these babies cry, they are deadly. The baby Alraunen grow up, have parties, mate, all in order to be sliced up and cooked."

Each volume is more disgusting and cruel than the last. Fathers who hand their sons over to be tortured and mothers who stand by and do nothing about it. What is a child between the ages of 6 and 14 to make of such stories? The little person is also formed by his spiritual food.

Gabriele Kuby deals with the issue of whether this is good literature, just as she deals with the question of the source of the fascination these books exert. "How is it possible that the global western culture, made up of individuals who presumably want the best for their children, end up raising the next generation on Harry Potter books?" Her answer is interesting: only a sick culture would consider a magic wand enticing.

What can parents do? Gabriele Kuby deals with this question too. She encourages the reader to discuss the issue with others, with teachers and parents. In this regard, she concludes her book with 10 arguments against Harry Potter, which she recommends that parents copy and distribute.

The author also writes that she experienced dark moments while she was reading the Potter material in the course of her research. We can be thankful to G. Kuby for the fact that she plowed her way through several hundred pages of Potter material in order to understand it better. Her work can be of great assistance in discussing Harry Potter with children and teenagers, and in dealing with the daily battle with the products of our multimedia capitalist world.

 

Ten Arguments against Harry Potter:

1) Harry Potter is a long-term project to change our culture. Young people's inhibitions against involvement in magic are destroyed. As a result, these forces reoccupy the culture which Christianity had overcome.

2) Hogwarts, the school for magic and witchcraft, is a closed off world of violence and cruelty, of curses and spells, of racial ideology and blood sacrifice, of disgust and possession. A sense of constant threat hangs over the heads of the book's young readers.

3) Harry Potter doesn't fight against evil. From one novel to the next his affinity with Voldemort, who is totally evil, becomes clearer and clearer. In the fifth volume, he is possessed by Voldemort, which leads to the total destruction of his personality.

4) The world of humanity is debased; the world of witches and magicians is glorified.

5) There is no positive transcendental dimension. Everything which is supernatural is demonic. Divine symbols are perverted.

6) Harry Potter is no modern fairy tale. In fairy tales, magicians and witches are clearly figures of evil, from whose evil influence the hero is delivered by acts of virtue. In Harry Potter, no one wants to do good. 7) The ability of the reader to distinguish between good and evil is deliberately lamed through emotional manipulation and intellectual confusion.

8) It is no favor to the younger generation to seduce them playfully with magic and to fill their heads with images of a world in which evil rules, a world that is not only inescapable but desirable as well.

9) Everyone who is interested in diversity of opinion should be on guard against the mass blinding and thought control that is imposed on them by the gigantic multi-media concerns.

10) Since the Harry Potter books engage in the systematic destruction of belief in a loving God, the use of Harry Potter books in schools is intolerable and contradicts the spirit of our constitution. Refusal to take part in Potter-related activities in school should be guaranteed on grounds of both religion and conscience.