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REYNOLDS |
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Potter, Narnia, and Spiderman Matter
by John Mark Reynolds [author,
academic] 7/30/07
Turkey
had a key election a week ago. The global War on Terror rages with
some of my own students battling for the country. People are starving
all over the world, racism exists, and misogyny cripples lives.
Yet this past week an entire subset of the adult nation spent five
hours or so reading a teen-fiction book about a boy wizard. Serious media pundits must groan inwardly at all the attention. If only as many people (8.5
million copies sold in one day!) cared about almost anything important
to spend the same amount of money and passion on it!
Perhaps it is acceptable for the children to carry on about such
things (they are after all children), but isn’t adult interest in
Potter just another sign that we are becoming a nation of Peter Pans
unable to grow up and talk about serious things?
Contributor
John Mark Reynolds
John
Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of
the Torrey Honors Institute, and Associate Professor
of Philosophy, at Biola University. His
personal website can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.com and
his blog can be found at http://scriptoriumdaily.com.
[go to Reynolds index] |
Some adults are doing this (if you are over fourteen and wearing a
Hogwart’s robe or a Star Trek uniform then you may have a problem), but
some pretty serious adults such as Oxford don and World War I vet C.S.
Lewis took such works seriously long before Ipods, “grups,“, or even hippies were on the scene.
Surely his comments about H. Ryder Haggard as a great story teller
whose writing often failed him and who could never quite end a story as
well as he started sums up J.K. Rowling’s writing. In any case, Lewis
took science fiction, Haggard, and Buchan seriously.
Some defenders of grownups reading comics, children’s books, or
summer block-busters just attack the entire distinction between high
and low culture. Spiderman is the new Achilles . . . but the rage of Toby Maguire seems a weak substitute for that of Achilles.
There does seem to be a difference in quality and depth between “high” and “low” culture. Stan Lee (sort-of-creator of Spiderman) does not have the same contact with the muse as Homer.
Perhaps, it is o.k. to talk about this stuff because everyone else is?
Sadly, popularity is no measure of the importance of an idea. The
Potter book craze could just be an example of Paris-Hilton-media-hype
for nerdy kids. I am at a summer camp where interest in the Potter
books shows a remarkable correlation with looking like Harry and
Hermione in the earlier books.
What about the argument that the Potter books, Narnia, and superheroes are creating the myths of our new post-modern world?
That is a better argument and one that has been made by people
smarter than I, but I think it fails. All of these books (including my
beloved Narnia) are retellings of older, better myths to a new
generation (either in their movie or book form). As such it would be
better to look first at the source material (Virgil, Homer, the Bible
as starters), than spending hours knowing every detail of Rowling’s
second-hand mythology.
If you know your Western myths already, then one quick read of
Potter will enable you to get the basics . . . at least to the level
that it is likely to penetrate the average reader or movie goer. As
evidence that there is not as much post-modernism in the culture as
some think, the popularity of the sixties super-heroes, post-World War
II Narnia, and the Victorian-school-boy-with-magic Potter books count,
but again it doesn’t take much attention to discover this point.
At this point some fans are growling that the books and films need
no justification. They are fun and an escape from the rigors of the
age.
The fact that a thing is enjoyable does not (by itself) commend
spending hours doing it to virtuous adult. Some “fun things” are wicked
and some are just unworthy of the time. Spending hours playing Spider
Solitaire on the computer might be fun, but it is also a time sucking
trap. Taking a walk can be (at least) equally fun, but with fringe
benefits.
Adults generally look for fun with benefits of the virtuous kind.
Aren’t adults reading Potter or Narnia just escaping hard reality for a fantasy land?
This argument has much to commend it, but it fails for the simple
reason that such books and films are no escape! To paraphrase an essay
by the late Isaac Asimov while other grownups spent the weekend
worrying about baseball scores, the alleged escapists read a long book
that wrestled (however badly) with issues of life, death, war, and
personal sacrifice.
Most fantasy (from comics to Tolkien) repackages difficult issues in
simpler form. Safe to say that Spiderman has gotten more teens to think
about power and responsibility than most public service announcements
or sermons.
An icon is not a picture of a person painted badly, but is (in part)
a simplification of the immense complexity of the soul of a saint to
show what needs to be seen. It is a window to their character. If one
takes that much humbler (and more artistically annoying) modern icon
the emoticon as a pop culture version of the same thing, one begins to
see the value of Potter and Spiderman.
An emoticon strips down the human face even further than a great
icon to communicate an emotion that might otherwise be missed by most
of us.
It also trivializes it, can be ugly, but when my nine year old
daughter sends me a “kiss” on Microsoft Messenger it still works.
We are not so great, at least not most of us, that we can live in
the world of Platonic Forms or even of Rublev icons. Sometimes
emoticons make things clear to us.
This is what Potter or the very best comics or summer blockbusters
do. They are emoticons of the great myths. The great myths are icons of
the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The emoticons point the curious
(and there are always curious) to the myths (for Potter see the lumimous Granger) and the myths bring us to virtue and to Christ.
But why not just go straight to the source? And it is there that
better readers or better souls have an advantage on me. I cannot always
just go straight to perfection, but must sidle up to it. The light of
the sun is too bright for my eyes, so I must see it first in the sun.
Even Virgil can be too hard for my government school trained mind and so Potter helps. Helps what?
Harry Potter is an excellent role model for an average boy on
becoming a great man by acquiring virtue. Spiderman learns that power
and fame does not make a man happy. Narnia teaches me that beauty is
real and all around me.
Of course some of these emoticons are better than others.
Emoticons can be so bad as to repulse and not attract.
Spiderman is nearly useless, but not quite. Potter is close to
greatness and Narnia? Narnia may achieve it in entire paragraphs of
silver, moon-lit prose.
But even the nearly useless is not totally useless and the almost
totally culturally illiterate in our culture may have to start with
Spiderman in cruciform to begin the long journey to the Cross.
When I turn to the Aeneid, Iliad, and Faerie Queene I understand
them better, because I read Harry Potter . . . as foolish as that might
seem to better men. These pop-culture books are just good enough, very,
very artistic emoticons, to sneak around my defenses when I am trying
to be merely entertained and still teach me something.
Sometimes I can take my Republic straight, but not always. At those times Narnia’s Professor Kirk comes to the rescue.
A practical, simpler, and better man might huff at all this fantasy.
The myths themselves obscure things said plainly in Plutarch,
Aquinas, Calvin, or Chrysostom. “Let’s cut to the chase and just read
them.” growls my clear thinking friends.
Again, there are noble people able to take their sermons straight,
but I cannot. It is easier for men like I am to read Aquinas with their
Dante in mind (first loved dimly in Narnia). Of course, since the Bible
itself contains poetry, myth, and story telling of the first order,
there may be something that my more “cut to the chase” friends are
missing after all!
Maybe, just maybe, the world contains the moon not just because we cannot see the sun directly, but for its own beauty.
I suspect that myth itself forms the framework for the great
propositions of Plato, Paul, and Plutarch and books like Potter are the
emoticons, Dante the icons, and the Bible the best expression of that
myth that is True, Good, and Beautiful.
Millions of the sort of kids that grow up to lead (as Hewitt points
out leaders read) will have read Potter. Some few will be led by
curiosity and good teachers like John Granger to the greater icons and
many souls will be made better for it.
Potter, Narnia, and even Spiderman matter in a serious world because
they can be signs pointing to seriousness in our frivolous age. They
are outposts of big ideas made so simple as to be all but gone, but
still present. They are the winsome cry of Wisdom echoing through so
many streets in the City of Man as to be almost unheard, but not quite.
If the age wants heroes, then they will get some of them directly
from admirable men and women raised in straight forward ways in this
crooked culture. They will go to war and to weddings with minds
securely fastened on the Good, True, and Beautiful.
But if the culture is crooked, some of us will come our crooked way to the Straight Path and so become useful.
God knows we need men in our age with the virtue of Harry Potter,
the boy who would die for his friends so that his people could live
free. ExileStreet
copyright
2007 John Mark Reynolds
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