Harry Potter’s World: Magic, Technoculture, and
Becoming Human
Appelbaum@arcadia.edu
Associate Professor
Glenside, PA 19038-3295
In Elizabeth Heilman (ed.)
(2002), Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Persepctives. NY:
Routledge Falmer.
"It
is important to remember that we all have magic inside of us."
-- J. K. Rowling
(attributed to Rowling at the
Harry Potter Lexicon, 2000, Steve Vander Ark http://www.i2k.com/~svderark/lexicon/w_spells.html)
Some people are still asking, “What is it about J.K.
Rowling’s Harry Potter books that has
made them so popular?” I want to ask, “What is it about our culture that
embraces the Harry Potter books and
has turned Harry Potter into such a
phenomenon?” There are more subtle and interesting things to look at than, say,
the general content of the books: recent works by successful children’s authors
such as Jane Yolen (Wizard’s Hall, 1991), Phillip Pullman (Golden Compass, 1996), Lois Lowry (The
Giver, 1993), and Natalie Babbitt (Tuck
Everlasting, 1987), for
example, have enjoyed excellent marketing of novels that evoke parallel worlds,
magic, and folklore. Each has a preadolescent protagonist beginning to
negotiate the psycho-social crisis of individual versus group identity. Harry Potter hype may also share
characteristics with other recent promotional schemes and product tie-ins, such
as Pokemon, Power Puff Girls, Power Rangers, WWF WarZone, and so on. But to “blame”
the successes of Harry Potter on
corporate marketing alone begs the question. After all, some potential product
hypes don’t make it, whereas others do. And few of them start out as a quiet
book from an unknown author. To interpret the Harry Potter successes as one of corporate culture preying on
innocent children (Giroux, 2000) would, I suggest, perpetuate inappropriate
assumptions. I wish to debunk three of these pre-sumptions: Can we say that consumer culture has trumped all
other possible manifestations of liberal democracy? Rather it may be that
market dynamics and individual agency are far more complex. Do we want to say
that children are passive, naïve recipients of greedy corporate cultural
products? Surely children and others act as agents of social change even as
they behave in certain socially reproductive ways.
Can we understand the cultural meanings of Harry Potter stories (or any other
popular cultural artifact) as a distanced observer? I suggest that distanced
interpretations further collapse the cultural story of Harry Potter into the world of children’s literature, ignoring the
wider range of readers (including college students and other adults)[1]
and the cultural phenomena of Harry
beyond the books themselves (e.g., Harry
Potter toys; diaries and other bookstore impulse items; towels, mirrors and
other home decorating products; websites, filk[2]
and other fanware). One thing I have learned from cultural studies is that
textual analysis is not enough. Nor is it enough to present a well-honed social
analysis of popular culture phenomena (Daspit and Weaver, 1998). It is
important to understand how children and other Harry Potter fans “read” and interpret the books, cultural
products, consumer items, and fanware -- the details of the Harry Potter culture -- as cultural
resources out of which people make sense of themselves (Fiske, 1990). It is
especially important to learn from people how they “use” popular culture
resources to make sense of their lives, their culture, and their fears and
fantasies, and through such mediation, to construct new modes of meaning (Eco,
1979; de Certeau, 1984; Appelbaum, 1999).
In this chapter I describe some of what I have learned
through talking with young people in informal and formal interviews about the
ways that Harry Potter’s popularity
dovetails well with other mass culture phenomena. I focus particularly on those
aspects of Harry Potter that speak to
issues of technology, magic, and the role of science as popular culture
resources. I argue that the books and associated “fanware” are key sites for
the cultural construction of science and technology; in speaking to issues of
magic and science, technology and culture, Harry
Potter is emblematic of the kinds of cultural practices that lead to its
popularity. Within these cultural practices, we can see science and technology
mediating our “common sense.” At the same time, socially constructed
expectations produce what we know as science and what we recognize as
technology. This all happens in and out of science as practiced by scientists,
and in and out of our popular cultures. All of this is mixed up and interwoven
and, together, called “cultural practices.” Within these cultural practices
specific images and conventions are identified as icons of science, technology,
indeed, the way the world works; other images become icons for magic,
mysticism, and other categories of cultural practices that, for most of us,
serve to distinguish what we call science from what we call not-science.
These cultural practices, ways of thinking, and icons,
along with their use as metaphors, are what I think of as “technoculture.”
Technoculture is thus the amalgam of our post-modern society, heavily mediated
by and productive of science and technology, both as popular cultures, cultural
practices and icons -- and as constructed significantly via science and
technology itself. When we listen to children and learn about youth culture,
magic and technoculture stand out as essential to the project of becoming human
(Appelbaum, 1999). Popular culture narratives set up a kind of hero that
confronts technoculture through technoculture itself. And, when we listen to
readers of Harry Potter, we see that the books and fanware are not
culturally unique. They are instead consistent with technocultural themes of
morality and identity in a post-modern society. Children experience power and
violence differently from adults, and their notions of magic and technology can
be different as well. Caught up in magic and technology is the role of wonder:
How teachers respond to children’s wonderings about the natural world combines
with children’s own interpretations of that world. The combination constructs
powerful forms of cultural dynamics and conceptions of technology. In both the Harry
Potter books and in children’s lives, school functions to accentuate what
constitutes technologies, what constitutes magic and wonder, and, finally,
through consumer culture, what it means to become a human being. In this way, I
find that the books and the culture that embraces them buttress each others’
postmodern efforts to fulfill an outdated enlightenment fantasy of utopia
through technology.
For
children growing up in and with technoculture, concepts of cyborg imagery, biological monsters, fantasy
characters, power, knowledge, magic and prosthetic extensions of self are not
categorical. Many
things that adults see as newfangled or that cause anxieties are accepted by
young people as inherent components of the “natural” world. Thus an adult fear
of dehumanization through technology might translate into a performance of
identity or a social connection for a child.
Obversely, a young person’s sense of danger may translate into a
technological task for an adult. For a
child, technology may be magic or science; power may be a fantasy or a
monstrous myth. For a number of the children I have spoken with in my research,
power can emerge out of a persistence in seeking knowledge; for others it may
be understood as a gift bestowed by biological luck. Knowledge for the children
I have spoken with may be conflated with power or magically lost. On the other
hand, technology may be a prize or a tool of adult power (Appelbaum, 1999).
Thus we find that chemistry sets are surprisingly popular, because children
want to pretend to be in a potions class at Hogwarts. Also popular are Animal
Planet’sÔ sound-enhanced animal toys, because Hagrid’s Care
of Magical Creatures class has tapped into children’s simultaneous fear of and
love for animals.
Technocentric
Utopianism for many children is really more aptly described as melancholic
acceptance of responsibility. Common
wisdom describes technocultural popular culture as a working through of adult
fears and fantasies (Waught, 1947; Wright, 2001). Early superhero technoculture
reenacted the cold-war conflicts of good guys and bad guys in a battle for
humanity and the universe. Historians
of popular culture (Waugh, 1947; Wright, 2001; Appelbaum, 1999; Napier, 2001)
suggest distinct evolution through several periods that characterize the nature
of the heroes and the narrative structure in particular ways. Following
good-guy versus bad guy constructs of the cold-war, subsequent cultural
commodities demonstrate a phase of inner psychological turmoil, splitting the
good-evil battle into a multiplicity of conflicting identities. For example, Batman and Spiderman, two heroes plagued with inner, psychological turmoil and
battling villains who suffer from countless psychological disorders, replaced Superman, a strong, almost invincible
boy from small town USA. The literature on popular culture (Napier, 2001;
Wright, 2001; Poitras, 2000; Levi, 1996; Rushkoff, 1996) suggests that this
psychological phase was subsumed more recently by the anime hero. This hero is a “gundam”[3]
child who inherits the aftermath of technological havoc wreaked by adults; the
hero dons prosthetic devices scavenged from an inherited wasteland in a
Romantic gesture of faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity. Gundam children
are present in television programs, animated films, videogames, role-playing
games, and other forms of entertainment.
Harry Potter, the young hero of the books that carry
his name, is characterized very much in the spirit of the gundam hero. He is
thrust into the most serious fights of good and evil, the ultimate outcome of
which will determine the fate of the world “as we know it.” This fight of good
and evil is one that he inherits from the previous generation, a generation in
which his own mother and father failed at the task he himself must now
undertake. Harry meets his challenges head-on, and with glorious enthusiasm,
using whatever latest trick of magic he has been able to obtain and control.
These magical artifacts, such as spells and potions, wands, invisibility
cloaks, a map that divines the locations of people unseen, and so on, play the
same role in these books that a prosthetic hand or mega-weapon body suit does
for the prototypical gundam hero. Magic, in this sense, becomes a technology.
Bruce McMillan, senior vice president and group studio general manager at
Electronic Arts (the makers of many successful video and computer games), was
recently quoted in describing the Harry Potter books in this way.
“J.K. Rowling wrote her fiction in a way that game
mechanics flow out of it,” […] The first book […] is packed with moments that
seem almost designed to appear in a game: the gauntlet of puzzles that Harry
faces to rescue the Sorcerer’s Stone, the character-building that takes
place as Harry learns to be a wizard, and much more. (Hendrix, 2001, pp. 37-38)
If we accept such historical interpretations of
superheros, we might ask, “What’s next?”
If humans have united within themselves extraordinary powers of
destruction and creation, will they or can they bring into being a new
evolutionary step? Those of us who work with young children should ask
ourselves what the implications are for the types of experiences these children
might be offered by adults, given that they are “schooled” in the popular
culture to savor the gundam role (Appelbaum, 1999). There are indeed ways that
gundam popular culture buttresses common sense attitudes about knowledge and
curriculum. For example, the common view of technology as prostheses that
amplify the potential powers of humans is consistent with the view that
knowledges gained in school are cultural capital. By this I mean that
prostheses for the body are part of a more global way of understanding our
world in which knowledge is recognized as bits of things that are collected and
later "spent" in the marketplace of college admissions and careers
(Appelbaum, 1995). Gundam heroes are also built upon techno-utopianism. Science
and technology are constructed in the school curriculum as well as popular
technoculture as techniques of progress. The gundam hero accepts the premise
that science and technology are their own antidotes, and thus reconstructs
technology as self-perpetuating and necessary. But should or can we seriously
respond to gundam desires with and through the school curriculum? Can such
desires be interrogated and challenged?
Teachers
tend to feign disinterest in childhood experiences of cyberculture. They see as part of their job the need to further
separate popular and high-status culture. School knowledge is part of that
high-status culture. Popular and mass media raise the status of school
knowledge when teachers keep them outside of school. But children are
intimately caught up in popular media, and they use mass media resources in
play, social relationships, and in imagining possibilities. When teachers
preserve the in-school versus outside-of-school boundaries, they cut themselves
off from relationships with children directly connected with the most pressing
issues of self, identity, morality, power, and knowledge. Sometimes a teacher relies on seemingly
positive goals when effecting these boundaries. For a teacher who sees his or
her job in terms of demystification or enculturation, it is gravely difficult
to construct educational practice as migration into a new culture. This kind of teacher wants instead to teach
the children about the traditions and cultural legacy of the old culture out of
which they are entering the new cultures of anime. And, for a teacher
who sees her or his job as bestowing the gifts of civilization, it is difficult
to do so in terms of a cultural practice that celebrates the Romantic hope of
childhood as the savior of humanity.
They would more likely understand their role as saving humanity from the
strange, challenging actions of the anime hero. Furthermore, it is absurd for a
teacher to imagine a curriculum that dehumanizes even her or himself as a tool
for anime heroism or post-anime evolution: In the obsessively
survivalist mode of teacher practice spawned by Standards-based accountability
bureaucracies, what possible technologies of self could or would we even think
credible? Indeed, what is the role of a
teacher other than the conserving one of passing on the wisdom of the past? I
suggest that our new technoculture requires teaching practices that
facilitate an interrogation of this culture, and the facilitation of
self-understanding necessary to unravel the intricacies of self-identity in a
post-modern world. The "new curriculum" should consider alternative
visions of technology that move it away from the metaphor of prosthesis.
Consider, for example, Sadie Plant's notion that technology is not just an add-on
to the human body that amplifies its powers, but instead serves to re-engineer
the body itself, creating a new and different cyborg body (Plant, 1997). The
Potter books speak to the re-engineering of the body through technology in
their examples of magic used as a tool to regrow human limbs, occasionally (or
accidentally) remove someone’s bones from a part of their body leaving it
temporarily rubbery and deformed, to cosmetically enhance someone’s teeth, and,
most directly, in the role of the animagi, those who change into animal form.
Curriculum, then, must speak fully to issues of identity and questions of what
it means to be human in the face of re-engineering and cultural change.
This challenge to teachers is consistent with the cultural
view that the gundam hero must save the world even as the clueless adults sit
idly by, paralyzed by the threats that they themselves have unleashed. What the
Harry Potter books provide, however, is a reassurance that some
adults really do know what is happening, and indeed that these adults can be
trusted to come through with support when the going gets rough. Albus
Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall, Sirius Black, and Rubeus Hagrid, for example,
often turn out to be fully aware of what is happening, or at least adequately
conscious of what Harry and his friends are up to, so that they can offer
assistance at just the right moments. And Harry and his friends always seem to
have recently mastered just enough new spells and tricks to accomplish what is necessary.
In the end, as with the gundam hero, it is the child who must save the world.
Nevertheless, in these books, the bleakness is tempered. It is almost as if the
adults know that the “real” curriculum is outside of the classes, and is just
enticing enough to interest these children in their preparation for leadership.
Real-world challenges provide the problem-solving context so necessary for
meaningful learning. As a treatise on education, the Harry Potter books
make an intriguing statement on the boundaries across the school and popular
curricula.[4]
If we only knew the story of every other child at Hogwarts, could it be that
they, too, are having adventures? Maybe the school is set up to trick people
into coming together for real-life problem solving outside of school under the
careful guidance of Dumbledore and his friends?
Power and violence are not always what they seem to
be. There is a way in which a child who spends three hours a day playing Smackdown,
WWF WarZone, Timesplitters, and other violent videogames, and
then watches a WWF video for another hour and a half, will recoil in
horror and fright at scenes from popular films such as Rules of Engagement,
or even the final scene in The Secret of Roan Inish. Smackdown and
the World-Wide Wrestling Federation WarZone are arcade-style fighting
games in which characters use gratuitous violence alone or in groups to render
their competitors unconscious or devoid of any life energy; and, while the fanatic
interest in World-Wide Wrestling’s violent wrestling soap operas have
waned in the last few years, many boys and young men still rent the videos for
their nostalgic entertainment value. Yet most players and viewers will quickly
insist they can tell that the violence is “fake,” and that their interest in
the entertainment has more to do with the complex strategies involved, or in
the intricacies of the soap-opera style plots. Rules of Engagement, a
2000 film starring Tommy Lee Jones, Mark Feuerstein, and Samuel L. Jackson, and
directed by William Friedkin, which involves a team of Marines responding to a
fictional attack on a U.S. embassy in Yemen, is rated R for graphic violence.
However, much of the violence is implicit and artistically developed through
techniques of suspense. The Secret of Roan Inish, director John Sayles’
1995 rendering of an Irish folktale, is steeped in magic and tradition. While
supposedly suitable for family viewing, at least according to many film critics
and its PG rating, the final dramatic scene involves a child’s mother returning
to the sea to live as a seal, leaving many children horrified at the child’s
loss of its mother.
Similarly, a young girl might try out seemingly
sadistic or masochistic choices in a Purple Moon Rockett computer game,
yet refuse to view Rugrats on television because she finds the character
Angelica so horrific. The Rockett computer games incorporate a narrative
about a pre-teen’s life choices; the player makes decisions about what the
young girl, Rockett, should do in various social situations. While an adult
observer might expect the player’s choice’s to be an indication of what they
player might choose in a similar situation, many girls playing the game in fact
choose a less socially sanctioned option just to see how it affects the plot.
In the Rugrats television program, the oldest child, Angelica is not
only extremely bossy, but often puts the younger children into terribly awkward
or potentially dangerous situations. Even though viewing Rugrats could
entertain by allowing viewers the chance to see how children might make poor
social choices, or reconcile them, many children actually find the character so
reprehensible that they choose another form of entertainment. (Nevertheless,
this should be understood in the light of the program’s continued popularity.)
Visibility of gore, as opposed to realism of violence, can be distinguished by
many children as they discuss moral issues and scenarios.[5]
There has been much written in the popular press about
the violence of the Harry Potter books. It is suggested that the books
might be unhealthy because of this. However the violent scenes are not what
entice people to the books and are not what the books are about, per se. A Harry
Potter reader can handle the notion of being scarred for life on the
forehead by an evil sorcerer, or a child in the school being killed by this
same sorcerer a few books later. What readers of these books have suggested in
their discussions with me is that they can easily separate these violent events
from the moral contexts in which they take place. It is the morality to which
they turn in applying "lessons learned" to their own interactions
with "real people" in their lives. I admit to adult incredulity when it
comes to this violence, and as educators we are seriously concerned about the
violence or threats of violence through mass culture narratives that effect our
daily lives in schools. But
reader-response theory remains: some children read the “dark themes” in Harry Potter books as a backdrop to the
details, and contend with the dark themes on another plane of existence,
independent of their reading of these books.
Similarly, some children are so caught up in the strategic details of videogames,
Pokemon, or the Magic card game,
that they do not see the violence that adults see readily; they contend with
issues of violence and control in thoroughly different ways when it appears to
them as part of a life outside of the game.
In particular, invisible but possible violence is far more frightening
to these children than larger-than-life cartoonish violence, even when the
cartoonish violence is extremely graphic.
(For example, Independence Day, or The Matrix, would be consumed as enjoyable entertainment; but Contact is unbearable because the suspenseful unknown is carried for so long in
the film. Independence Day would initially seem to be terribly
frightening as it graphically depicts aliens coming very close to violently
taking over the Earth; The Matrix depicts the horrific scenario of a future
Earth being nothing more than an illusion for people who have been reduced to
energy resources for intelligent machines. Contact, which describes
the tensions between science and religion when contact with aliens becomes
possible, depicts no violence but keeps the suspense about the aliens hidden
throughout the majority of the film.) I suppose the question comes down
to whether or not children can tell the difference between the games and the
“real world.” We seem to have some
evidence to the contrary. Eugene
Provenzo (1991) and others have amassed a collection of research that suggests
reasons to worry about the culture of violence so prevalent. In the end, as I talk with and work with
children, my own evidence is that they are genuinely living an independent
trajectory. The enacted violence could in some ways be said to be consistent
with the dark imagery of Harry Potter
books, and the game-like realism of current high-graphics fighting and shooting
games; but I find the causation to be in the other direction. If anything these images and choices of
entertainment are a semantic sign of something in our culture rather than an
origin of cultural meaning. That is, the images that children play with tell us
more about the fears and fantasies of the adults who provide the images, and
the resources for making meaning that are available in our culture, than about
what children are becoming or doing to themselves or our culture. This does not
mean that violent and sexist images would never be an origin of meaning for any
particular child: it certainly is possible that they could be. It just is not such an origin in my
research. And I do not see it as the
common experience of most children.
Another popular concern that has lead to the books
being banned in some communities is the attention to the dark arts and magic in
general. It may be feared that young people would become interested in pursuing
cultish practices. The use of these features makes the books no different from
numerous popular television series and video games (see, for example, the
television programs Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, the Final Fantasy video game series, and
the computer game Black and White).[6]
Magic is strongly associated with
experiences of wonder.
There is little distinction between the Harry Potter books and the Magic:
The Gathering card game, or a cyberhero
like Inspector Gadget and a round of laser-tag. Paintball, for a child, can be a variation on Pokemon,
or a dramatic fantasy based on the Power Rangers, or - if “I”
played paintball last weekend and “you” never have - a real-life “play” of
power against another child in the acquisitive culture of childhood. In tapping into magic, many forms of youth
technoculture reach into the realm of wonder in ways that establish these
cultural commodities as educative experiences in the Deweyan sense that they
promote growth. (Maybe not growth in
the school-culture sense, however.) When adults set up school as distinct from
the world of wonder (even to compete with popular culture for “coolness” or
“cleverness” but in the act clarifying the impossibility of this attempt) they
fail children, and abdicate their responsibility to participate in mass culture
and peer interactions. In denying the potential of wonder through magic,
educators are also denying students an environment that is educative. Three
questions arise: should we try to create educational encounters that directly
mirror the linking of magic, technology and wonder, as in, for example, Botball
tournaments (KISS Institute, 2001)? Should teachers hype science into a
parallel form of edutainment, as in television science programs? Or should
educators establish science/technology/wonder as a critical examination of the
popular (Appelbaum & Clark, in press; Gough, 1993)? I suggest, in contrast,
that children gravitate to the wonder where it is. When wonder is not in the
curriculum, they will find it elsewhere, outside of school.
An
interesting case study is afforded by Hasbro’s marketing of the new toy, PoxÔ (Tierney, 2001). The new toy was introduced by
identifying who the coolest of the cool children are: roaming playgrounds and
neighborhoods, marketers asked, “Who’s the coolest kid you know?” When they
landed a kid who said, “Me,” they invited the “alpha pup” to get paid to learn
a new video game. Fighting monsters are created by collecting body parts and
powers. Warriors are put together from the collected parts; then you program a
battle sequence by strategically balancing the strengths and weaknesses of the
various body parts. The coolest kids can boast about what level they have
attained, what potential body parts they have collected; the ones who lose are
not humiliated publicly since the game is played stealthily. Pox depends not on
reflexes, as with other video games, but on “the collection of arcana.” Asked
why they like the game, boys say, “because it’s, like, battling and fighting,”
and “we like violence!” Tierney writes that they sound bloodthirsty without a
sign of menace. He cites research that suggests that violent entertainment is
actually associated with a decrease in violence among young people. The seeming
connection between violent entertainment and violence, he suggests, might be
better explained by a strong increase in violence in society begun long before
the advent of video games.
Things
dominate the life of children. For
young people in the early century, commodification as the final arbiter of
identity and acquisition is intimately entwined with self. If knowledge is the sort of knowledge truly
conflated with power, then children voraciously grab for it. But if it is ambiguous in its relation to
power, then it is ignored in the interest of efficiency. Thus, a young boy will exert whatever it
takes to acquire the new Sims (Electronic Arts, 2000) game before
others get it, to learn a trick from GamePro
magazine before his friend does; yet the same child could care less about the
financial mathematics of purchasing the game unless the money actually makes a
difference in his life. In the latter
case, if school artificially makes this into a world-problem type experience,
the conflicting identity politics is a crucial element in self and
community. Similarly, the importance of
Pokemon Gameboy will fluctuate for
many girls depending on its competition for importance with current MTV star
details, varying make-up items and body gels, and other technologies of the
body. For both boys and girls,
technology is a fashion; but this
fashion is played out in gendered and other ways. In the Harry Potter culture, material products include wizard trading
cards, Quidditch brooms, the best
owl, a magic pet, and magic treats sold on wizard trains. And these commodities
serve parallel functions. For Harry
Potter readers, consumer culture makes early possession of the books and a
child’s recall of details into an acquired need that works as cultural capital
in analogous ways. Indeed the child who possesses full command of detail, like
the player of the new PoxÔ game immersed in the collection of arcana, is the one
most likely to win. In one sense, this consistency in and out of the books
serves to make the stories more “believable” for readers. Students at Hogwarts
collect trading cards of great wizards and quidditch heroes much like young
people outside the books obsess over sports cards, and this common consumerism
makes the children in the books more “realistic.” And Harry quickly learns to
covet the latest, most expensive gadgets, like a typical child outside the
books.
In another sense, acquisitive consumer
culture dominates popular and Potter culture in ways that make the books
emblematic of the culture in which they appear as commodities themselves. Early
in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, for example, the competing
Slytherin team demoralize the Gryffindors by showing off their new “Nimbus Two
Thousand and One” broomsticks. “Very latest model. Only came out last month … I
believe it outstrips the old Two Thousand series by a considerable amount.”
(Rowling, 1999a, p. 111). Harry’s friends are left holding their out-moded
“Cleansweep Fives,” no longer competitive with the newer Nimbus models. In Harry Potter and the Prizoner of
Azkaban (Rowling, 1999b) Harry is mesmerized by an advertisement for an
even newer model, the “Firebolt.” So hyped that it is priced upon request,
Harry “didn’t like to think how much gold the Firebolt would cost. He had never
wanted anything as much in his whole life” (Rowling, 1999b, pp. 51-52). He
tries to console himself by noting that he has never lost a Quidditch match on
his Nimbus Two Thousand, yet “he returned, almost every day after that, just to
look at the Firebolt” (Rowling, 1999b, p. 52). In this way Potter and
popular consumer culture intertwine consumerism and technoculture by turning
new technologies into coveted consumer products.
It was James MacDonald (1995) who wrote:
It is my personal myth that today's technology is
yesterday's magic. Further, it is
intuitive feeling that technology is in effect externalization of the hidden
consciousness of human potential.
Technology, in other words, is a necessary development for human beings
in that it is the means of externalizing the potential that lies within. (p.75)
The Harry Potter
books portray MacDonald’s wisdom in, for example, their juxtaposition of the
flying car and the use of tea leaves to divine fortune, but even more directly
in the all-important fixation on the best and latest Quidditch broom. Why would
a school full of apprentice wizards need to buy the latest innovation in design
and technology? To reemphasize class
and justice themes? To satisfy a “real
boy’s” need for toys and desire? It is
the same audience finding this believable that runs out to purchase the newest Magic deck, or searches the internet for
rare and expensive no-longer-in-print cards; the same audience that shells out
$30.00 for a quarter-inch of plastic that can be painted and used in a WarhammerÔ game. And, it is the same audience that knows all
the lyrics to Brittany Spears’ latest video, the dance moves to Christina Aguileira’s
new video, the place to buy the coolest body gel.
This chapter is an interrogation of the world that
embraces the Harry Potter phenomenon; it is not an extensive analysis of
the books themselves. I claim that the main thrust of Harry Potter’s attraction
has mostly to do with its treatment of magic as a commodified technology, just
as videogames, television cyborgs, and fantasy role-playing games in “our
world” treat technology as magic. In as
far as morality is constructed in any of these terrains, it has very little to
do with specific plot or imagery, and more to do with the “kids’ culture”
Rushkoff (1996) described as “a delightful mixed-up common ground for all of
these digital, magical, and biological sorts of development.” (p. 109) This is
not to say that young readers are more likely to be interested in the magic
than the moral lessons of the books; rather, we can find a technology of
morality that constructs identity as multiple and fluid. Because
"technology" and "humanity" are overlapping and
transgressive as categories in "our world," we can no longer talk
about technology as a tool that is wielded in accordance with morality.
Instead, we must understand morality and technology as mutually constitutive.
In Harry Potter’s
World surprises might be lurking in any place or thing. The trick is to ride it through and never
give up the chance to have fun. This is the fate of the gundam child. Similarly, kids playing videogames do not
dwell on the plot, the characters, or what things might seem to be if one were
to take a particular event or character as a “message” in some adult way. Take race, gender, or nationality, for
example: “Kids routinely choose any and all … options and don’t think twice
about it,” writes J.C. Herz (1997), “because the only factor in their decision
is a given character’s repertoire of kick-ass fighting moves. Ironically, all considerations of race, sex,
and nationality are shunted aside in the videogame arena, where the only goal
is to clobber everyone indiscriminately” (p. 166). Yet, as Herz points out,
kids understand on a deeper level that they are “operating in a disembodied
environment where your virtual skin doesn’t have to match your physical one,
and that you can be an Okinawan karate expert, a female Thai kick-boxer, a
black street-fighter from the Bronx, or a six-armed alien from outer space, all
within the span of a single game” (p.166).
Herz notes that adults do not generally approach things
this way: they might be disturbed by the idea of a cutesy Japanese school-girl
committing gruesome, bloody maneuvers, or at least be aware that they are
choosing this character in some semi-conscious way. For children, however, write Herz, “shuffling videogame bodies
and faces is like playing with a remote control” (p.167). Adults also tend to see the videogames as
preprogrammed and predetermined, so that the limited selection of identity
combinations and options suggest a particular story about identity to these
adults. Recent videogames, however, employ the “create a character” feature, in
which it really does seem like any and all combinations are the goal. “The game
starts, cycles through a bunch of avatars, and you punch the fire button when you
see one you like. It’s channel
surfing.” (p. 167) When children are imitating the moves of these characters,
trying out the “cool” moves and identities, some adults become concerned that
there is not a clear separation between the fantasy of the game or television
program and the dreams of particular children. This is indeed the case for some
children; it is also part of working through our cultural ideas about what
“identity” is, and so may be a necessary experience for children.
Harry Potter books reconstruct in analogous detail the pecking
order of school-ground one-upmanship.
You cannot just know the spell in Harry’s World; you have to study it,
practice it, and perfect it. And if you
can learn a spell that others do not yet know, you are the coolest. What the
Potter books do is destablize the tension between acquisitive coolness and
nerdiness, because they take magic and turn it into the techniques that can be
learned. Thus Hermione is not all that cool in the books even though she
studies the most and learns the most spells, because within the context of the
books she is just a studious nerd in school. Yet other kids in the books who do
not take on the characteristics of nerds but know more tricks than the others
earn recognition and status. It can be cool to know more magic than
other kids. It is pretty much the same
outside the books: you must show you have incredibly detailed and specific
knowledge that others do not yet have to stay ahead. It is not enough to be the first kid to own the SimsÔ,
a computer game in which one creates a whole simulated world of people and then
manipulate how they interact. You have to
know how to download the Sim guinea
pig off the net and use it to help two Sim
families come together and start a new household. Herz (1997) emphasizes the importance of both the arcane knowledge and
hand-eye coordination. And it is
the same for Harry: he is always at the center of the fun because he is always
looking for a new, esoteric detail. Harry Potter books are an education for
the information economy, where everyone pays premium rates for narrow expertise
and short-lived skills. Just as Harry
will grab at the chance to use a secret map, so too will a first-grader
voraciously read Nintendo magazine, a
fourth-grader search out the chat room where one can learn the most arcane code
for Tony Hawke’s SkatePro (a skateboarding videogame). To the other characters in the books, Harry
is cool not because he can talk to snakes - that is something he was born with;
he is cool because he has an invisibility cloak and a really good broomstick.
(It is the case in these books that Harry Potter is famous: everyone knows the
story of how the most powerful evil Voldemort was unable to kill Harry, and
that trying to kill the young lad caused Voldemort to lose much of his power
and disappear. But in general we see that most kids in the books find him
peculiar and do not treat him as special in any particular way. A more subtle
reading registers his fluctuating status: he is sometimes a hero, sometimes a
suspect, but in either case always “special.” Outside of the books is another
story; most readers identify with Harry in particular.)
Technology, in this sense, is nothing more than a
trick, spell, or code: it lets you do things other people do not know about
yet. And this is pretty much what
MacDonald was referring to as the externalization of potential. As Rushkoff (1996) writes:
When we look carefully at the reaction of younger cyber-denizens to their Sega-environs, we find that they make no distinction between information and matter, mechanics and thought, work and play, or even religion and commerce. In fact, kids on the frontier of the digital terrain have adopted some extraordinarily magical notions about the world we live in. Far from yielding a society of coldhearted rationalists, the ethereal, out-of-body experience of mediating technologies appears to have spawned a generation of pagan spiritualists whose dedication to technology is only matched by their enthusiasm for elemental truth and a neoprimitive, magical worldview. To a screenager, these are not opposing strategies but coordinated agents of change. (p.109)
This harkens back to the Enlightenment epistemology
that created a kind of confidence about a human being’s place in the world even
as they were decentered in that world, because one could know all, and
understand all, and harness it to human advantage. In this view, humans even
have the role of controlling the world: if we could only realize this, we could
fit into the natural world that is scientifically knowable. The irony is that this is the postmodern
era, in which we are no longer supposed to be believing this. Supposedly we no longer believe in the idea
of eternal progress, and with the loss of this rudder we have presumed the
destruction of all of the accompanying beliefs, such as human “rationality,”
unlimited potential for control, and the ability to create a society in which
both individual and collective will can be met. At the same time, there seem to
be so many reasons to accept that these possibilities can be met, through for example, e-mail, and other, post-modern
notions of web technology. The practice
of control is almost always
destructive; the anime/gundam heroes
are a direct response. Yet this post-modern era is in many ways what
Enlightenment people could only have imagined!
But life is not just a party of enlightenment
fulfillment. Kids find themselves in
the midst of adult conflicts and power games, even as they search out the next
form of magic. They have to deal with
the stupidity of the previous generation and its disturbing legacy of
destructive forces. In this respect,
the coordinated agents of change Rushkoff mentions must be employed to specific
ends. If Harry can use his new
invisibility cloak in fending off evil, he is no different from an anime heroine wearing her new suit, or a
WWF character wielding her
extra-super-finishing move. “And this
is what it’s about,” writes Herz,
…as the cultural stream of East and West swirl into the Tastee-Freez of global entertainment. Mythic figures resonate, all the more if they’re engaged in some kind of combat or action adventure, real or simulated, the most popular forms being basketball and videogames. They resonate for the same reasons mythic figures have always resonated. Only now, the audience numbers in the millions, and the object is not to celebrate ancestors or teach lessons or curry favor with the spirits. It’s commerce. And the people transmitting their stories to the next generation aren’t priests or poets or medicine women. They’re multinational corporations. And they are not trying to appease the gods. They are trying to appease the shareholders. (Herz, p. 170)
It is not just videogames, it is everything in our
mass culture. We can just see it more
clearly in videogames. And we are just
a little edgy about the attraction of this series of Harry Potter books. Violent
entertainment is the most blatant form of popular culture, but it is all about
taming mythic monsters. The difference
with the videogames is that the monsters are inside the games, and we can try
them on ourselves. Such gods and
monsters used to scare people. Now
people manipulate the gods and monsters (see, especially, Black and White). So we see
once again why Harry Potter is the
literature of the moment: he, too, trains and controls monsters and goblins,
just like a player of Magic, a player
of the Pokemon card game, or a
videogame master.
In her writing, Herz seems to be claiming an
evolution, a new breed of freaks that adults need to study and live with. Perhaps she agrees with Bruce Mazlish (1993)
that, “In making machines, humans have become themselves Creators who endow
their creations with movement.”
Automata … express this form of creation dramatically. An automobile, a locomotor, an airplane,
these also move under human inspiration.
Until the Renaissance, it appears … that Western Man [sic] built
automata and other machines not so much to dominate nature, but to copy it; not
to rival God, but to imitate him [sic].
Increasingly, however, in the West, humans came to smudge the image of
God as the Creator and to substitute their own, first turning God into a
Newtonian machine, and then merging him with nature as an evolutionary
process. In doing so, humans united
within themselves extraordinary powers of destruction … and of creation. Whether in taking on creative powers humans
are also able, in the form of their machines, to bring into being a new
evolutionary step remains our next question.
If Man [sic] succeeds in taking this step, he would certainly be doing
something admittedly unique. (pp. 213-14)
Throughout, my main curriculum argument is that educators
need to learn from children what it is they are experiencing -- that ol'
Margaret Mead adage that our contemporary situation is one of migration into a
new culture: children are the translators while adults are keepers of
tradition. Adults need to learn from
children in order to survive, yet children gain valuable narratives through
which to interpret action by listening to stories of the old country from the
elders. The "answer" for
curriculum is not to try to compete with technoculture, because we will always
fail at the imitation; instead we need to develop organized experiences that
respond to life in and with technoculture.
More proactive would be for educators to work toward a biculturalism,
and finally for a diversity that embraces both traditions and the
multiplicities of what Herz calls “superhero sushi.” This includes adult
cultures and technocultures, mass and consumer cultures and youth subcultures,
and cross-over memberships and participations in multiples cultures at once. At
the same time, we must be wary of constructing teachers themselves as the anime heroines, themselves progenitors
of technohyperbolic change. If teachers read the Potter books and then
fashion themselves as the wizards with the children as the magical beasts to be
tamed, then teachers become the technochildren themselves. Indeed, teachers are
often urged to try on new prototypes of technology in order to experience a new
sense of their powers of perception, production and destruction (e.g., new
technologies of assessment, instruction, surveillance). At other times they experience the
melancholia of the gundam; they conceive themselves as capable of harnessing
the sometimes terrifying applications of scientistic pedagogical techniques in
order to lead the student-monsters in an effort to save society from invasion
or technological disasters (Appelbaum 1999)
Even as the narratives reproduce themselves and their
hegemonic themes, there is the parallel story, in which we enter a new phase of
cyborg technoculture. Even in this
context, magic and technology are not distinct categories for children. They are attracted to technology for its
ability to perform magic, and they are attracted to magic for its potential to
be used as a tool.[7] In working
with children, I find that magic is not special despite its amazing surprise or
apparent impossibility: for a child, anything is possible. The intriguing thing is the secret of how it
is done. It is no wonder to me that Harry Potter books coincide with the
unprecedented popularity of television specials in which magicians reveal their
secrets, despite being exiled forever from the community of magicians. It is no longer the “magic” of magic, but
the cleverness of the technique that matters.
Whereas the technical ingenuity of a particular tool is no longer of
interest; the technological possibility is replaced by the cleverness of the
magic it can perform. Regardless of how
incredible the actual task is, it is ordinary unless it is relatively unique,
arcane, or unexpected.
O’Har (2000) turned to Jacques Ellul (1967) in working
through the popularity of Harry Potter.
If we imagine that magic and science were once “one,” then we can create a
narrative of their split: one path went the way of technique, into technology;
material technique leads to a multiplication of discoveries, each based on the
other, and thus writes in itself a myth of progress. Magic, the other path,
promotes only endless beginnings; it also answers all questions by preserving
spirituality. The part of magic that was lost to our world in the dominance of
science and technology was that aspect of magic that functioned in this
spiritual realm. The fundamental message of Harry
Potter, according to O’Har, is that magic saves Harry from turning into a
Dursely; instead it provides a whole new set of endless Beginnings.
Oddly, though, these beginnings carry the trappings of
everything we already know about how people live and work together. Here is the
“literary beauty” of the school in the Harry
Potter books: it is no better than any other school we know of, simply by
virtue of being school. Once magic is
the subject matter, it is nothing special; in its commodification, it has
become another technology, another collection of technical skills to be
mastered. Everything exciting, all of
the real magic the children acquire, comes from the technological tricks they
need to perform outside of school.
Outside the books, however, the magic (when read about) serves a
different function. For us, reading along, it is the magic that captivates us
because of its presentation as technology. This new technology, the magic, is
ironically a technique for solving all of the problems that technology and
science have always failed to solve. For us, too, the magic provides a set of beginnings.
The difference between school for Harry and his friends and the schools that
readers experience outside the books, however, is that everyone at Hogwarts
School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is learning stuff that they know they will
use (Block 2001). Students at Hogwarts are training to be wizards, and they
know that what they are learning will be useful to them in their lives.[8]
Outside the books, the uses of school learning are remote at best, good for a
promised future; inside the books, kids use what they have learned immediately
to solve life-threatening puzzles and to save the fate of the world as we know
it.
A particularly powerful element of the Harry Potter books is the unification of
Harry’s self-knowledge with his self-care.
Who is this Harry, where does he come from, why is he so important, and
why is he at the center of so much good-evil carnage so many times in his life? Only by strapping on the technoculture of
magic can he seek the self-knowledge he, we and everybody else crave. For
example, Harry looks into the magic mirror and sees his family; indeed he
initially learns that he is a wizard through a message sent to him from
Hogwarts. In this process of strapping on the magic, a process of externalizing
and realizing his self-potential, he wields the tools that lead to
self-understanding. Harry is a
personified conflation of self-knowledge and self-care. His self-knowledge leads to care of the
self, indeed saves his life; and, in taking care of himself and his potential,
he is able to achieve self-knowledge. The books thus present what Michel
Foucault (Martin et al.1988) named a “technology of morality:” the
transformation of self by one’s own means or with the help of others - that is,
in the operations upon one’s body, soul, thoughts, conduct, and way of
being. Foucault postulated that this
technology of morality enunciates a hierarchy between knowing oneself and
taking care of oneself. Harry doesn’t
yet enunciate a hierarchy, and he therefore lives a more nuanced notion of
morality that Foucault initially suggested. Harry’s life project does not place
knowing oneself above caring for oneself, nor does it value care of the self
over knowing who he is. Either he has not been transformed yet (J.K. Rowling
plans to write several more books for each of Harry’s years at Hogwarts, so as
this chapter is composed there is no clear conclusion), or he is a symbol of a
shift away from Foucault’s binary, toward an independent coexistence with the technology
of morality. This is parallel to
videogamers channel-surfing through the strategies of what in adult terms are
violent images but in young peoples’ terms are mere strategy games devoid of
the realistic violence these young people say they would condemn. For Harry
Potter fans, the convention of good-evil contestation is a context for the
real cleverness and intrigue of the story, the details about how Harry and his
friends collect more trinkets of magic in their quest to be “cool.” Similarly, a fifth-grader can buy status at
recess by recounting details of last night’s WWF show, and claim he is not in the least interested in the “fake”
violence, but instead in the intricacies of the particular combinations of
moves that the fighters made. In any of these examples, the cultural shift has
moved the focus away from the binary and the potential hierarchy to the
placement of the binary in an independent context.
When magic is treated as technologies and technology
is treated as magic, what can we say about the morality of magic, and about the
magic of morality? Self-development is
an enlightenment project, and self-development leading to self-knowledge is,
again, an enlightenment project. We can
see this clearly in Pokemon: The main
characters, Ash and his friends, and the other Pokemon trainers, are traveling
around looking to understand themselves, using different Pokemon to understand and strengthen
themselves. The Pokemon that children train and fight with are externalizations of their inner drives and desires. Only in striving to become a true Pokemon trainer does an aspirant
achieve, eventually, self-knowledge and the ability to care for oneself. So we
are again up against this idea that post-modern technoculture is spawning a
fulfillment of enlightenment fantasy.
If we think about the degree of bourgeois optimism that was so prevalent
in the nineteenth century -- that by knowing things you could enrich yourself,
make yourself happier and be a better person, and in the process implicitly
help society - and if we think about the role of this technology of morality in
supporting the accomplishment of cultural forms of optimism like capitalism and
industrialization, it is possible to understand why and how this new scientific
optimism and notions of new possibilities through technologies can blind us to
terrible things that are going on in the world, such as genocides, slave labor
in factories, or environmental racism.
People are smugly not thinking about horrible famines in Ethiopia and
instead are celebrating their technological power, a wealth plus knowledge
equation that enables one to do what one wants when one wants in the world
through technology -- which is magic!
In the end, the morality of magic is an Enlightenment ideology of
post-modern technoculture. And this is Harry Potter’s World. In the books,
there are really serious concerns about the impending triumph of the dark arts
to contend with; outside the books, we can turn our local concerns into major
focal points for self-development and ignore the major ethical concerns that
plague our post-modern world.
Children growing up in a state of enlightenment
technoculture may indeed experience the technologies of morality as both a
blinding scientific optimism and a more immediate celebration of individual
prosthetic enhancement. As consumers of books, children are represented in our
culture as a “hostile audience,” since they are depicted as choosing other
forms of entertainment over reading a new book. As science fiction and fantasy
increasingly permeate the entertainment of children, adolescents, and young
adults, members of contemporary society are effectively growing up in a
fantasyland. It becomes imperative to analyze examples of these popular forms
of entertainment (no matter how inconsequential or artless they may at first
appear); we should understand what we are learning from these stories, and what
sorts of adults we are becoming as a result (Westfahl 2000). Yet I believe that
the most important use of the popular is an interrogation of the culture
through the popular. One significant feature of the Harry Potter
phenomenon is the presence of continued items in a series, and the need to
continually market to an audience of consumers who will “need” to buy the next
product, whether this product is a new book in the series, a home design
product, a videogame or film based on the books, or fanware. Advertising and
promotion of products have become the dominant element of the Harry Potter
culture since the first book. One might posit children as social change agents
in turning the books into major marketing products through word-of-mouth
advertising. Yet the overriding nature of consumer culture is that one is
trying to sell something to a cynical audience. As adults purchase a Harry
Potter T-shirt because of its connection to reading a book, children want
the T-shirt for its value as a commodity. However, for both, the T-shirt serves
as a symbol of membership in a cultural subgroup.
Reading Harry Potter with children requires
more than reading the books. Reading includes participation in and reflexive
analysis of all forms of cultural text. Indeed, reading especially means
interpreting the uses of fanware. This chapter has focused mainly on the
introduction of the Harry Potter phenomenon through the books themselves
because the fanware hype occurred mostly after the success of the books
themselves. Nevertheless, as we look forward to understanding what Harry
Potter can teach us about ourselves we will need to address more carefully
these multiple sites of meaning beyond the books. The multiple “texts” of Harry
Potter can only be popular if they are open enough to admit a range of
negotiated readings, through which various social groups can find meaningful
articulations of their own relationship to the dominant ideology (Fiske 1987).
The “dominant reader” identifies with Harry, the hero, and can believe that
everyone might just have magic in them. If we play down the fact that many
muggles do not get an invitation to Hogwarts, while some Wizard folk, squibs,
are unfortunately lacking, we might just hope that hard work and careful
practice can help us get ahead. The dominant reading maintains a common-sense
belief in meritocracy. Negotiated readings emerge when people make use of the
images presented to interpret their own lives, as when a reader thinks of the
ways they are like and unlike Hermione, or why they would never be able to
become a teacher like Snape. Issues of class and race, underplayed by the
dominant reader, may be foregrounded in negotiated readings. If the negotiation
is more “against” than “with” the text, then a reader might use the texts as
blatantly sexist or racist, or perhaps anti-religious.
In any reading of the texts of Harry Potter,
however, we will find magic and technology confused, or thrown into disarray,
to be unraveled and comprehended in ways that are consistent with the reading
that emerges. Arthur Weasley, who works for the Ministry of Magic,
eccentrically collects electric plugs and batteries, and secretly keeps a
flying car until it ends up in a magic forest in a later book. The Dursleys
want nothing to do with magic, and fill their home with all of the latest
technological gadgets and toys one could ever want.[9]
It is Vernon Dursely who points out the peculiar place of technology in the
arts of magic: in the end, it is technology that is the symbol of one’s path to
wizardry, as everyone takes the Hogwarts Express train to get to this school of
witchcraft and wizardry. He asks why wizards need to take a train. He never
gets his answer. Harry’s story provides the larger context: in the end,
technology/magic has to do with who one is and what one does. And because who
one is and what one does is so intertwined with the technologies of magic and
the magic of technology in the service of self-knowledge and self-care, who one
is and what one does is a technology of morality and an essential node of the
construction of ethics.
Hogwarts confronts the ethics of magic and science directly. Its purpose is to help its students harness and focus their powers. These powers might be called magic or they might be called technology; but in this case they are called magic. The problem for the educators in the books is that they can not be certain that people (wizards) will use these powers for the common good. It boils down to a choice between the common good and the dark arts. And so we are confronted with the evil of Voldemort and the always-present danger of evil triumphing over good. Hogwarts was founded by four wizards, one of whom, Salazar Slytherin, at least dabbled and perhaps reveled in the Dark Arts. He used his powers for questionable if not specifically evil purposes. (For centuries many of the young wizards who reside in Slytherin House have exhibited the same tendency.) Albus Dumbledore, who heads the school, needs to figure out how to train students not just in the "technology" of magic but also in the moral discernment necessary to avoid the continual reproduction of the few great Dark Lords like Voldemort and their multitudinous followers. The problem is exacerbated by the presence of faculty members who are not wholly unsympathetic with Voldemort’s aims.
Good
and evil are not just cartoonized in the books. As Alan Jacobs writes, Harry Potter is unquestionably good; yet a
key component of his virtue arises from his recognition that he is not inevitably
good. When first–year students arrive at Hogwarts, they come to an assembly of
the entire school, students and faculty. Each of them sits on a stool in the midst
of the assembly and puts on a large, battered, old hat—the Sorting Hat, which
decides which of the four houses the student will enter. After unusually long
reflection, the Sorting Hat, to Harry’s great relief, puts him in Gryffindor,
but not before telling him that he could achieve real greatness in Slytherin.
This comment haunts Harry: he often wonders if Slytherin is where he truly
belongs, among the pragmatists, the careerists, the manipulators and deceivers,
the power–hungry, and the just plain nasty. Near the end of the second book,
after his third terrifying encounter with Voldemort, he confesses his doubts to
Dumbledore.
"So
I should be in Slytherin," Harry said, looking desperately into
Dumbledore’s face. "The Sorting Hat could see Slytherin’s power in me, and
it--"
"Put
you in Gryffindor," said Dumbledore calmly. "Listen to me, Harry. You
happen to have many qualities Salazar Slytherin prized in his hand–picked
students. Resourcefulness . . . determination . . . a certain disregard for
rules," he added, his moustache quivering again. "Yet the Sorting Hat
placed you in Gryffindor. You know why that was. Think."
"It
only put me in Gryffindor," said Harry in a defeated voice, "Because
I asked not to go in Slytherin. . . ."
"Exactly,"
said Dumbledore, beaming once more. "Which makes you very different from
[Voldemort]. It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more
than our abilities." Harry sat motionless in his chair, stunned.
Harry
is stunned because he realizes for the first time that his confusion has been
wrongheaded from the start: he has been asking the question "Who am I at
heart?" when he needed to be asking the question "What must I do in
order to become what I should be?" His character is not a fixed,
preexistent thing, but something that he has the responsibility for making. “In
this sense,” writes Jacbos, “the strong, [enlightenment] tendency of magic to
become a dream of power makes it a wonderful means by which to focus the
choices that gradually but inexorably shape us into certain distinct kinds of
persons.”
In
the Harry Potter books, magic is often fun, often surprising and
exciting, but also always potentially dangerous -- much like the technology
outside the books that has resulted from the “victory” of experimental science.
The technocrats of this world hold in their hands powers almost infinitely
greater than those of Albus Dumbledore and Voldemort: how worried are we about
them, and their influence over our children? If we could only measure technique
by other criteria than those of technique itself. Harry Potter is more helpful than most children’s
literature in prompting such ethical and cultural reflection.
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[1] After weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller list, Harry Potter books found themselves on the newly created list of “Children’s Best Sellers.” Thus Harry ushered in a new awareness of the field of children’s literature and the need to pay attention to the field as a major market niche. But more importantly, Harry books found themselves as markers of a new boundary, effectively denying it “real” status even as it was celebrated as a cultural phenomenon. No longer a book for adults, it continued to be read by many “older” readers. See Kathy Malu’s chapter elsewhere in this volume.
[2] Filk are new words to well known songs, sung together by fans at gatherings.
[3] Gundam is a term from Japanese animation for the hero who dons technology in order to fight the unleashed threats resulting from pervious human efforts with technology and science.
[4] See Charles Esler’s chapter in this volume.
[5] See Heather Sevarty and Deborah Taub’s chapter, this volume.
[6] How do you cope with the aggravation from strongly religious people against witchcraft? J.K. Rowling: “Well, mostly I laugh about it I ignore it... and very occasionally I get annoyed, because they have missed the point so spectacularly. I think the Harry books are very moral but some people just object to witchcraft being mentioned in a children's book unfortunately, that means we'll have to lose a lot of classic children's fiction.” (Comic Relief 2001)
Q: What
are your feelings towards the people who say your books are to do with cults
and telling people to become witches ? (reader's question, didn't give name)
A: Alfie.
Over to you. Do you feel a burning desire to become a witch ?
Alfie: No.
A: I thought not. I think this is a case of people grossly underestimating children. Again. (Southwest News 2000)
[7] "Any smoothly functioning technology gives the appearance of magic." Quote attributed to Arthur C. Clarke (Jacobs 2000)
[8] Hogwarts School Song: Hogwarts, Hogwarts, Hoggy Warty
Hogwarts/Teach us something, please/Whether we be old and bald/Or young with scabby knees/Our heads could do with filling/With some interesting stuff/For now they're bare and full of
air/Dead flies and bits of fluff/So teach us things worth knowing/Bring back
what we've forgot/Just do your best, we'll do the rest/And learn until our
brains all rot.("And now, before we go to bed, let
us sing the school song! Everyone pick their favorite tune and off we
go!")
[9] Toys in Dudley Dursley’s spare bedroom: computer, PlayStation, two televisions, racing bike, video camera, remote control airplane, large numbers of computer games (including MegaMutilation Three), VCR, gold wristwatch, working model tank, bird in a cage, air rifle, tortoise, sports bag, books (unused), computerized robot.