The moral and political philosophy of Harry Potter

I'm busy writing a piece for Vogue today, so I leave you with some thoughts about Harry Potter - a piece I wrote as a guest post for Normblog in the summer:

Finishing the seventh and final volume of the Harry Potter series over the weekend, I was struck by the fact that a generation of children has grown up immersed in a morally complex world in which the traditional epic battle between good and evil is clouded by questions. The discussions on the many Harry Potter fan sites bear out this view that J.K. Rowling has exposed her readers to some of the most important and difficult dilemmas of our own age. That these discussions are often awkward and sometimes illiterate does not detract from the real passion and sense of enquiry with which they are entered into.

. . .

In the final volume, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, released on Friday, the Ministry of Magic has fallen to Voldemort's forces and the totalitarian state is emerging. The plan is that the magic world will take over the Muggle world which is to be a vast slave labour camp. Muggles (ourselves) are the lesser breeds - the Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, blacks. Those drawn to Voldemort's cause are obsessed with ideas of racial purity, they pride themselves on being 'pure-blood' (entirely magic) and despise those 'half-bloods', the products of mixed-marriages (though ironically Voldemort himself is a half-blood) or worse, the 'mudbloods', those wizards and witches who are Muggle-born.

In one of the most horrifying sections of the book, Voldemort introduces Nuremberg Laws. Families are investigated for potential half-blood ancestry and the 'mudbloods' are accused of having stolen their magic powers from real magic people. Deprived of their magic wands, the source of their power, they are reduced to pitiful beggars in Diagon Alley, in scenes reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto.

But what of the 'good' wizards, those who have heroically fought the takeover? They are not without the taint of evil themselves, for they are slave-owners - of the degraded house-elves who are under an oath of loyalty to the family who owns them, whatever the orders. One scene, towards the end of the book, shows the burial of a house-elf given his freedom, and the simple inscription on his grave: 'Here lies Dobby, a free elf.' In order to defeat evil, dubious alliances must be made: for example, with the goblins, the makers of swords and the guarders of gold, who regard all property as owned by the maker of it, and only 'leased' to others for their own lifetime; at the point of the leaser's death, it must revert to its maker. The wizards' cheating of these rules is, says one character, something on which they should reflect. Many species will not ally with the wizards because of bad relations, old grudges and grievances.

. . .

In America, the Christian right has condemned the Harry Potter books. They regard them as leading their children to Satan. Perhaps they should be more worried that the real danger in these works lies in their sophisticated and empathetic account of the grey areas that exist within both good and evil, and the hard choices we all have to make to find a path through the darkness.
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Dressing

From Dressing by George Szirtes

.. For whose sake
Do you become who you are? Are you alone
In the dark? Is it for yourself you ache

In the morning? Even if you were stone,
Like this goddess, you would desire beyond
Your fixity something already half-known

Yet negotiable. As a child you respond
To the adult’s gravity with a blank stare
Of instinctive hunger. You touch your blonde

Hair and bunch it in your fist. You prepare
Your flirtatious look. You play at control,
Then lost, start crying at the small despair

You’re stuck with. But this is the soul
Prepared for you, these garments that glow
In the dark and burn as fierce as coal...

RIP Norman Mailer 1923-2007

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation. Norman Mailer

Lady Macbeth in the reading group

It is a perennial complaint of readers of literary fiction that they ‘don’t like’, or ‘can’t relate to’ the characters. It’s my impression that ‘liking the characters,’ or even ‘loving the characters’ forms one of the chief discussion topics in reading groups. However, it is not the role of the novelist to provide complete strangers with sets of imaginary friends. It is not up to me to second-guess the type of individual whose company someone I have never met, nor will ever meet, enjoys.

The creation of characters in fiction is one means, amongst several, of producing work of the literary imagination. At the baseline of fiction, the foundation that hold it up, is the telling of a story – the fulfilment of a human drive to tell and hear stories has its earliest manifestation in European culture in Homer. The story orders experience and makes sense of it; it contains within it wonder while feeding, at its most crude, our curiosity, but there really is nothing wrong with wanting to find out what happens ‘in the end’ even though in life the only endings are death.

An additional purpose of fiction is to point out that not only likeable individuals have stories, but also monsters. The murderer Rashkolnikov, in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, has a story. Another murderer, Macbeth, has one, too.

Wanting to ‘like’ characters, is to miss what the author is trying to tell us. That humanity comes in many manifestations, and even those who are evil are aspects of our selves. Indeed, one of the advantages of literature is that you can enjoy the company of individuals whom normally you would run a mile from, particularly their smells and grunts and bad breath. Every year or so I re-read Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater to spend time with the appalling Mickey Sabbath, the repulsive puppeteer who turned down the opportunity to join Jim Henson and make muppets. He’s a lech, a hater, a thug, but at least he reminds you what it is to be alive. He is all passion, unspent.

And it is not only the demons who deserve to have their stories told. I am currently re-reading Anita Brookner, whose work I avidly devoured for several years after she won the Booker in 1984. An encrustation of scorn later grew up around her; her characters, it was said, were all the same – wet young woman, doormats, in an era which was producing a new fictional female type, the ‘feisty heroine.’ Brookner remained coolly admired, but fell from fashion. Re-reading three of her novels in the past couple of weeks, I have been astounded by the quality of her prose and the delicate, compassionate forensic quality of her mind. It is true that many of her characters are passive (both female and male) but their passivity conceals longings which they can neither express nor fulfil.

If you are looking for people to like, turn to the people in your book group. Literature is not escapism, it is a reckoning with reality. My friend, the poet George Szirtes, more or less exactly explains what literature is, in this series of posts about Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, on his own site:

‘The novel's contract with reality is different from the poem's contract with reality, but reality itself - the out-thereness of it, the strange semi-documentary concreteness of it - is the same for both, exerting the same pressure. And this is true not just of novelists and poets but of humanity at large, or rather of that aspect of humanity that comprehends – however inarticulately - what the project of novels and poetry, indeed of all art is about, art being the place where experience, imagination and language flow into each other.’

Indeed. It is not life, it’s more.

Hollywood Writers' Strike

I support. There's an old joke about the starlet who was so stupid that she slept with the scriptwriter. American tv is in its golden age at the moment, and that's because of the phenomenal quality of the writing. So pay for it.

Comrades, the massed ranks of the Society of Authors are behind you all the way.

Meanwhile, aspiring writers who think there's a living to be made from literature, should check this out.

A small but important addition

To my very small blog roll I have added the site of my friend Lisa Goldman. The Thoughtful Dresser is not a political blog but from time to time it does reflect some of my wider interests. Lisa is a Vancouver-born Canadian-Israeli journalist, now based in Tel Aviv. Building up to the summer of 2006 she worked to make contact with bloggers on the other side of the sealed border with Lebanon. When the war started and the bombs fell she insisted on doing everything she could to maintain contact with the ordinary individuals, bloggers and journalists like herself, who were supposed to be her enemies. She insisted on not accepting the demonisation and dehumanisation which is a characteristic of this conflict. She embodies for me the quote from Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate, on the sidebar (a book which at some point I will write more of): 'The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and his right to these peculiarities.'

Prohibited from entering Lebanon because she holds, in addition to her Canadian passport, an Israeli one, she nevertheless went there this summer. The discovery, after she left, prompted a scathing editorial in the Beirut Daily Star accusing her of being a spy. The hundreds of emails and comments she received from Lebanese civilians thanking her for her visit, proves Grossman's maxim.

There are evil people in the world, but most of us merely struggle from day to day to find joy in whatever interests us, in love in friendship, in clothes or football. Flawed and often failing, we must nevertheless do what we can to live our lives in the circumstances, societies and political systems in which we find ourselves and sometimes we must struggle to change what is intolerable about those societies and systems. But mostly, we just live. And being alive is a unique wonder of its own.

If you can't go shopping then read about shopping

In The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping which has arrived in the post today from my publisher. It contains, amongst many literary treats, an extract from my family memoir, Remind Me Who I Am Again, about a shopping trip with my mother when she was unable to remember who I was or how we were related but still managed to pick out a Ralph Lauren suit for herself.

Reader, she married him, in Vera Wang

I have always been interested in clothes, but only in the past few years have I actually begun to think about them, in a serious way. It all started with this piece in UK Vogue, which I wrote in 2004. Vogue doesn't put any of its features online so I've been waiting since this blog began for my webmeister to turn the text that's stored on my computer into a PDF and then a link. And here it is.

It's about how clothes have been treated by literature, though the ages, from Chaucer (enthusiastically) through Jane Austen (with disdain) to Proust (love and reverence) to Judith Krantz (max out your cards). I'm looking at how an author uses clothes to delineate character:

What did Hamlet wear? Black. And the Wife of Bath, riding to Canterbury? Red stockings and new shoes. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa? A pale primrose morning gown, with a recurring silver and gold pattern of violets, accessorised with diamond earrings, blue satin buckled shoes and black velvet gloves. Proust’s Duchess? The first Fortuny dresses. Jane Eyre? Black and pearl grey silk, despite Mr Rochester’s insistence that should take the pink satin, which made her feel like a houri in a Turk’s seraglio.

Read on

Liverpool

George Szirtes has written a lengthy interview with me in a new book just out, Writing Liverpool: Essays and Interviews.

Liverpool, my home town and a significant influence on my ideas as a writer, is 2008's European Capital of Culture. You can find more of my views on it here

Today Linda is

Writing about Lanvin


Reading: Anita Brookner's The Latecomers