Harry Potter's Bookshelf (15 page)

One consequence of a narrative that only condemns the inevitable prejudices, intolerance, and violence that come with blinkered thinking is that because nothing can be known for certain, there is no truth per se, and, hence, no good or evil. Only
relative
good and evil based on personal or community advantage are possible in a world without an absolute truth that can be known.

Neglecting the obvious contradiction of “there is no truth” as an absolute statement of truth, relativism bordering on nihilism is one evident consequence of postmodern thinking. One need only talk to a group of teenagers to see their unblinking, unwavering faith in the proposition that everything is relative. Thinking about “good” and “evil” is to be judgmental—and, outside of being a fundamentalist or a Nazi or a Klansman, there isn’t much lower one can go than being judgmental.

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.

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.”

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.

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 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:

After reading “The Greater Good” chapter in Skeeter’s
Life and Lies
book, he reaches bottom:

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:

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.

“Definitely morals are drawn” is the author’s fair conclusion
⁷
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 to 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.

CHAPTER SIX

 

 

 

 

 

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.