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Harry Potter and the
Decline of the West
By Spengler
What
accounts for the success of the Harry Potter
series, as well as the "Star Wars" films whence
they derive? The answer, I think, is their appeal
to complacency and narcissism. "Use the Force,"
Obi-Wan tells the young Luke Skywalker, while the
master wizard Dumbledore instructs Harry to draw
from his inner well of familial emotions. No one
likes to imagine that he is Frodo Baggins,
an ordinary fellow who has quite a rough
time of it in Tolkien's story. But everyone likes
to imagine that he possesses inborn powers 
that make
him a master of magic as well as a hero at games.
Harry Potter merely needs to tap his inner
feelings to conjure up the needful spell.
"Tonstant Weader fwowed up," Dorothy
Parker reviewed A A Milne's "Pooh" stories in the
New Yorker, and I am sad to report that reverse
peristalsis cut short my own efforts to read J K
Rowling's latest effort, Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince. In any event I am less
interested in reviewing the book than in reviewing
the reader.
It may seem counter-intuitive,
but complacency is the secret attraction of J K
Rowling’s magical world. It lets the reader
imagine that he is something different, while
remaining just what he is. Harry (like young
Skywalker) draws his superhuman powers out of the
well of his "inner feelings". In this respect
Rowling has much in common with the legion of
self-help writers who advise the anxious denizens
of the West. She also has much in common with
writers of pop spirituality, who promise the
reader the secret of inner discovery in a few easy
lessons.
The spiritual tradition of the
West, which begins with classic tragedy and
continues through St Augustine's
Confessions, tells us just the contrary,
namely, that one's inner feelings are the problem,
not the solution. The West is a construct, the
result of a millennium of war against the inner
feelings of the barbarian invaders whom
Christianity turned into Europeans. Paganism
exults in its unchanging, autochthonous character,
and glorifies the native impulses of its people;
Christianity despises these impulses and attempts
to root them out. Western tradition demands that
the individual must draw upon something better
than one's inner feelings. Narcissism where one's
innermost feelings are concerned therefore is the
supreme hallmark of decadence.
A culture
may be called decadent when its members exult in
what they are, rather than strive to become what
they should be. As God tells Mephistopheles in
Goethe's Faust,
Man all too easily grows lax and
mellow,
He soon elects repose at any
price;
And so I like to pair him with a
fellow
To play the deuce, to stir, and to
entice. [1] What characterizes the
protagonists of great fiction in an ascendant
culture? It is that they are not yet what they
should be. The characters of Western literature in
its time of flowering either must overcome
defining flaws, or come to grief. Austen's
Elizabeth Bennet must give up her pride; Dickens'
Pip must look past the will-o'-the-wisp of his
expectations; Mann's Hans Castorp must confront
mortality; Tolstoy's Pierre must learn to love;
Cervantes' Don Quixote must learn to help ordinary
people rather than the personages of romance;
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister must act in the real
world rather than the stage. Goethe's Faust I have
long considered the definitive masterwork of
Western literature, first of all because its
explicit subject is the transformation of
character. As Faust tells Mephisto,
Should ever I take ease upon a bed
of leisure,
May that same moment mark my
end!
When first by flattery you lull
me
Into a smug complacency,
When with
indulgence you can gull me,
Let that day be
the last for me!
That is my wager!
[2] Failure to correct defining flaws,
of course, leads to a tragic outcome, as in
Dostoyevsky or Flaubert. More consideration is
required to portray characters who change rather
than fail, to be sure; that is why the late Leo
Strauss thought Jane Austen a better novelist than
Dostoyevesky. Finding the right partner in
marriage, after all, is the most important
decision most of us will make in our lives.
Whatever good we otherwise might do has little
meaning unless another generation draws its
benefit, and that character of the next generation
depends on the character of the families we might
form. If we take inventory of all the married
couples we know, how many of them can be said to
have done this with due consideration? Courtship
is a high drama that should keep our teeth on
edge. Instead, we relegate the subject to the
genre of romantic comedy, and to the consoling
familiarity of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.
The
more one wallows in one's inner feelings, of
course, the more anxious one becomes. Permit me to
state without equivocation that your innermost
feelings, whoever you might be, are commonplace,
dull, and tawdry. Thrown back upon one's feelings,
one does not become a Harry Potter or Luke
Skywalker, but a petulant, self-indulgent bore
with an aversion to mirrors. To compensate for
this ennui one demands stimulus. That is the other
ingredient in J K Rowlings' success formula.
Magical devices distract us from the boredom
inherent in the characters, and one cannot gainsay
the fecundity of the author's imaginative powers.
She manufactures new enchantments as fast as
Industrial Light and Magic churns out new
computer-generated graphics for the "Star Wars"
films, or amusement parks erect faster roller
coasters.
Pointy hats, it should be
remembered, were made to fit on pointy heads.
Rowling's fiction stands in relation to real
literature the way that a roller coaster stands in
relation to a real adventure. The thrills are
cheap precisely because they could not possibly be
real. The "boy's own" sort of adventure writing
popular in Victorian England had a good deal more
merit.
When we put ourselves in the hands
of a masterful writer, we undertake a perilous
journey that puts our soul at risk. Empathy with
the protagonist exposes us to all the spiritual
dangers that beset the personages of fiction. In
emulation of the ancient tale in which a seven
days' sojourn among the fairies turns out to be an
absence of seven years, Thomas Mann sends Hans
Castorp to the magic mountain of a tuberculosis
sanitarium - but it is the reader is captured and
transformed.
We are too complacent to wish
upon ourselves such a transformation, and too lazy
to attempt it. We find tiresome the old religions
of the West that preach repentance and redemption,
and instead wish to hear reassurance that God
loves us and that everything is all right. We have
lost the burning thirst for truth - for inner
change - that drives men to learn ancient
languages, pore over mathematical proofs, master
musical instruments, or disappear into the wild.
We want our thrills pre-packaged and
micro-waveable. Above all we want our political
leaders, our pastors, our artists and our partners
in life to validate our innermost feelings,
loathsome as they may be. I do not know you, dear
reader; the only thing I know about you with
certainty is that your innermost feelings would
bore me.
Western literature, along with
all great Western art, is Christian in character,
including the product of a putative heathen like
Goethe, whom Franz Rosenzweig correctly called the
prototype of a modern Christian.[3] It is
Christian precisely because it deals with
overcoming one's "inner self". A jejune
Manichaeanism pervades the Potter books as well as
the “Star Wars” films, and I suppose a case could
be made that such a crude apposition of Good and
Evil corresponds in some fashion to the emotional
narcissism of the protagonists.
In that
sense, Christian leaders who disapprove of the
whole Potter business simply are doing their job.
According to some news reports, Pope Benedict XVI,
then Cardinal Ratzinger, disparaged Rowling's
books in a private letter written two years ago.
But according to NZ City on July 18, "New Zealand
Catholic Church spokeswoman Lyndsay Freer says
there is some question over the validity of the
letter. She says more importantly, Vatican
cultural advisors feel the book is not a
theological work and is just plain children's
literature. Ms Freer says it's wonderful children
are being encouraged to read, and the Potter books
are no different from the likes of Grimms' Fairy
Tales and Star Wars." How reassuring it is that
the ecclesiastical authorities of Auckland have
taken the initiative to correct the pope on this
matter.
Notes
[1] Faust,
translated by Walter Arndt. W.W. Norton, New York
2001, lines 340-343.
[2] Op. cit., lines
1692-1698.
[3] See
The pope,
the musicians and the Jews (May 9,
2005) and Why the
beautiful is not the good (May 16,
2005) for discussion of
the Christian character of Western culture.
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