Not above the influence... or, How I live my life by Harry Potter and why I'm not ashamed of it

Did I ever tell you who taught me how to foster a mix of analytic curiosity and wonder at how the world works? His name was Atrus. You probably haven't heard of him, he doesn't live on this world...

Or, how about the time Hermione Granger taught me how to better understand my morning prayers? It was in the middle of book seven, when they were on the run in the woods...

I could even tell you the number of times that Edmund Pevensie or Eustace Scrubb confronted me about the power of selfishness and the joy of repentance...

...I'm not even going to bring up why I secretly wish choral conductors used batons when leading ensembles...


I probably haven't mentioned any of this because I'd imagine you'd probably look at me rather funny. If you didn't cast a stare that said straight-up "you're a weirdo," then you'd at least probably heave a sigh and think "how immature." At least, that certainly seems to be the mentality I get from the general world these days. But does that really make a lot of sense?

I'm hardly going out on a limb to say that stories (books, films, video games) are a mirror of our own societies. Nor is anyone shocked when some argue against them because they're too violent or dark (think Quentin Tarantino or Grand Theft Auto). But you rarely get discussion about how the good stuff does its job. At that point, we generally tend to stop at sentimentalism.

Now, I'm not trying to make a point about violent movies, or the negative influence of video games. Although it's perfectly worthy to talk about, and closely related, that's a different discussion for another day... For now I'm hoping to strike something more positive. However, the one point I do have to establish before moving on is that we are affected/effected by what stories we see. [editorial note: I hate that semantic spelling issue, so from this point on, don't read into the implications of my word choice on that one.] You just can't get around the fact.

Think about this for a moment. We don't like movies that fail to affect us. Have you ever gone to a suspense film that flopped? It's a frustrating and embarrassing ordeal to go through. When you go to a thriller, you want to be scared. Likewise, when you go to a romantic comedy, you want to believe at the end that storybook-happy-ending-discovery-of-love-in-the-rain really can happen. (Which, I also assume, is why people generally take their significant other with them as well, in hopes that they'll get the same feeling, too.) So really, it's there.

And if you do a little historical digging, you'll see we're really one of the first societies to ignore the fact. Plato had all kinds of things to say about what Art is good for a society in The Republic. Despite being a prominent humanist and Enlightenment scholar, Jean Jacques-Rousseau petitioned the Swiss government to keep theater illegal in Geneva. Remember the entire tradition of banned books?

Now my question is why do we then brush it off so superficially today? Moreover, why is it that when the occasional person really admits this, that they're labeled obsessed or a freak if they show it?

Well I for one will come right out and say it: I read a lot of fiction, much of it fantasy and sci-fi, and those books have taught me a lot about how to live. Really. All those examples above are true, and I could give dozens more. Sometimes, I'm downright exhausted after listening to a piece of music or watching a movie, because I didn't just watch and hear what happened, I personally experienced it. As in, those things were added to my experiences, which I will draw on in the future to decide how to act and feel.

I am quite convinced I'm not extraordinary in this fact. Though I'll readily admit that perhaps I'm more self-aware or sensitive to it than others. But I'm not so sure that makes me the odd one.

There are many aspects to this that I haven't touched yet, such as the danger of escapism, or the complexity of exactly what it is we "experience," but I'll leave it at this point before going further. I'll just throw in one final challenging question.

What ways have stories taught you? You just might be surprised if you really look into it... you don't have to be a bookworm either, we've all watched far too many movies, video-games, books, an television shows to be except by lack of stories...

Disapointing Fantasy

Here I'm going to introduce one type of regular entry I hope to regularly put onto this blog. I'm calling it the NPRKJ, or the "National Public Radio Knee-Jerk." Basically I'll present a story which I ran into while perusing the NPR.org stories of the day, and share my knee-jerk reaction to it. It's not my fully formed and crafted position, it's just a quick (sometimes not so quick) response.
-D.A.

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The story Morally Complex 'Magicians' Recasts Potter's World left me very frustrated and disappointed. It did so because it came so very close to addressing a fundamental aspect of good literature, but then went the exact opposite direction.

Here's a quick lowdown, the author Lev Grossman was heavily influenced by writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, particularly Lewis, but disliking the moral clarity of such stories, decides to rewrite the same story only with "believable" characters who are more gritty at match his worldview. This means the college students do drugs, have sex with each other, and generally act like rebellious and selfish kids.

Now, on a bad day, I'd tend to take this personally and get really riled up against Grossman, but really it's not him, and it's not the "gritty realism" either, though generally you need to convince me why I should be interested in reading something with that kind of content. You really do have a world like that here, let's be honest, the moral caliber of most U.S. Universities isn't exactly stellar... But we're not talking about real life here, we're talking about fantasy. And it's this bigger fact that I'm trying to make. Grossman, like a few other authors these days, don't use the genre for its highest purpose. (In fact, as we go farther along, we'll see he's doing something worse, but we're not there yet.)

Here's a telling quote:

Grossman: Voldemort and anyone like that in a fantasy novel, any big, bad villain, has a kind of powerful organizing presence on the universe. You know who's good, you know who's evil and you know what magic is for. It's for fighting evil. Well, when you take that away, suddenly the universe gets a whole lot more complicated...

There's that word "complicated." The NPR headline said "Morally Complex" story... but the truth is, it's not morally complex. It's just morally ambiguous. You can't even say it's "misguided" because at this point, it's not even trying to teach something. This is precisely the opposite of what fantasy is about.

Fantasy is a creative writer's dream of a literary form, because it basically let's you do anything and the reader tends to go along with it. The sky is purple? Ok. People can shoot magic beams from sticks? Ok. The adventure happens in a rip of alternate-reality? Sure. But here's where the line between cheap entertainment and real literature is drawn. Because that's not all there is to a book.

At its very core, fantasy is a genre of moral allegory meant to inspire, it offers a vessel to "Be all you cannot be," in order to come away with something. And this is where I become be disappointed, and sometimes frustrated, when I find these kinds of books. Without resorting to quote Spider-man, not every author who writes a fantasy book uses rises to their level of power and responsibility. Some don't even still believe you can inspire people. And worse, since we live in a pretty ugly nihilistic society, sometimes you get people who want to deliberately inspire the wrong things. It's not the author's fault per se, but it still causes a knee-jerk reaction in me. And once you get to this point, that's when I have to start drawing a line in the sand and saying "this is bad."

I hit that point when in the interview Grossman described what he did with his own heavy critical allusions to C.S. Lewis' Narnia series and his intentions of re-interpreting it. This is what he says:

Grossman: I remember being very angry as a child and as an adult at Aslan. I always felt that here is a world that had a, you know, a proper god in it, a god who you could see, who would come down and change the course of events, but he didn't do it very much, and he would often let battles go on and events really spin out of control, and people would die before Aslan would step in. Why would a God not help people in every possible way that he could?

So basically he's admitting that he doesn't like "god" and therefore he's going to re-write the story where his characters get a chance to confront him and accuse him of doing it all wrong. Does this sound familiar?

It's always just so annoying when you get an author who has a great imagination and plenty of craftsmanship in creating a world, but they do it to spite God instead of glorify Him... it's even more annoying because I've recently found myself more of the opinion that you really can't justify that kind of literature and say "but it's just so well written" and writ- off the anti-God message. That suggests you're not reading properly, either being ignorant of the power of themes in a book, or deliberately ignoring them. In each case, the book isn't being used properly.

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Now, to close up, with all NPR KJs, I'd like to give a list of links to further consider some of the icebergs I smash into above. Here ya go:

Fortunately, this was not the only story out this week. For a great list of books to read that are wonderfully positive examples worth reading and celebrating, listen to author Leslie Blume's summer reading list.

If you ever feel like really getting into the Theodicy debate, where you really ask "What if God really did come and help us all the time like we ask," listen or read this essay by Frederica Matthewes-Green.

Also, I can't close this out without leaving a link and recommendation for a great interview discussing the purpose of stories and fantasy as moral tools. The second half of this podcast hits the nail right on the head summarizing why we need literature, and what it's good for. (Click here for the mp3 directly, otherwise here for a pop-up viewer.)