ENGAGING CULTURE

This weekend an entire subset of the adult nation spent six hours or so reading a teen-fiction book about a boy wizard. With 8.5 million copies being sold on the day of its release, it makes you wonder: What if that many people cared about something truly important that they would 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?

Surely, some adults are doing this. If you are over fifteen and wearing a Hogwart’s robe (or a Star Trek/Wars costume for that matter) then you may have a problem. But there must be something to be gained from these hours of entertaining reading.

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.

What about the argument that the Potter books, Narnia, and superheroes are creating the myths of our new post-modern world?

They may be bringing these stories to light, but they are creating nothing. All of these books (including my beloved Narnia) are re-tellings 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 benefits.

Some would conclude that adults are reading Potter or Narnia to escape a 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. And Harry Potter has re-taught virtue and sacrifice to a demographic generally taught to do what they wish regardless of the consequences or moral ramifications.

Potter and the very best comics or summer blockbusters are icons of the great myths. 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. The great myths are icons of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The icons point the curious (and there are always curious) to the myths 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 may have an advantage. Some of us cannot always just go straight to perfection, but must sidle up to it. The light of the sun is too bright for our eyes, so we must see it first in the moon.

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 icons are better than others. 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 my superiors. These pop-culture books are just good enough, very, very artistic icons, to sneak around my defenses when I am trying to be merely entertained and still teach me something.

Books like Potter are the icons, Dante the reflections, 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 (voracious readers) will have read Potter. Some few will be led by curiosity and good teachers 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.

Maybe, just maybe, the world contains the moon not just because we cannot look directly into the sun, but for its own beauty.