What children’s stories tell us about our values (3)

Harry Potter and believing that light is stronger than darkness.

Warning: contains spoilers

This is the third post in my occasional series about the deep seriousness of children’s stories. If you’re new, let me explain why paying attention to the tales we loved as kids is important. In the first post I said

I think a lot about my sacred values…. you can think of them as deep, orientating values, the things we want to define our lives. It isn’t always easy to know what is sacred to us…so I find it helps to pay attention to the stories that move me. The themes that draw us are a clue, because stories are such a key way we make and remake ourselves.

The philosopher Alastair Macintyre believed that it is only in becoming more aware of the narratives which shape us, and which we tell in our turn, that we can both understand ourselves and know how to act. We are, in his phrase, a “storied self”.

When I pick up a book now, there are layers to my motivation. I might be looking to improve myself, stay across the cultural zeitgeist, signal my status (by finding something smart I can quote on here to impress you, maybe), or to escape the bleakness of the world. When we read as children (if we were blessed enough to have had access to books and patient adults to help us into them) we read for joy. We loved the stories we loved because something in us called to something in it. The life of the characters seemed a life we wanted to live, if only for the duration of the pages. Therefore, these books can tell us about who we wanted to be before that wise intuition got buried under a landslide of “shoulds”.

And this pull, this joy, shows up for more children with one book series than any other. More adults too, I’d hazard. Harry Potter books take seven places in this list of the twenty bestselling children’s books of all time (though pipped to first place by Le Petit Prince, which is a good pub quiz fact).

I’m not going to address in any depth the controversy around J.K.Rowling. I have friends I respect who despite continuing to treat the books as sacred have felt a need to distance themselves strongly from her views, and others I respect equally who share them. Suffice to say, I am still reading the books, still trying to listen deeply to a range of views and treat the people in front of me with dignity, curiosity and compassion¹. I am, as on many of these most neuralgic issues, conflicted, mainly nauseated by the bile splattering around, acid-burning everything it touches. The list of things I am certain about gets shorter every day, and exactly what sex and gender are has never been on it. Reading Hilary Mantel on her failure to have strong opinions on most issues of the day helped me feel better about what I sometimes fear is my cowardly, fence-sitting tendency:

“Being a novelist has taught me, if I didn’t know before, that almost all human situations are complex, ambiguous and shifting. There is always more information, and more emerging information than you can process”

If you are someone who is certain on this, and I’ve just disappointed you by not signalling strongly enough that I’m on your team, I understand. If you feel you have to write me off now, go in peace. But we don’t have to agree in order to stay connected, even in conversation, I promise. It is possible the teams are bigger than we think.

The vast majority of people who read and love these books have no idea this is all going on, of course. They just want to spend time with Harry, Ron and Hermione. I have often wondered why they hold so many in their thrall.

I started them as a young teenager, was part of the generation drip fed releases, leaving us frantic with anticipation for years. I stayed up all night in a queue on Oxford Street in my early twenties for the final book and read it all the next day (including discreetly in the pews at a wedding). I am now drip feeding them to my kids, trying to space them out appropriately to match their developmental trajectory. Our whole micro-community-household loves them, and the day we all gathered at bedtime to take turns reading the very first chapter aloud to my daughter is one of my most precious memories².

Why though? Why do they capture wave after wave of children, and maintain a hold on adults like me too? Yes, they are cleverly written books, an intricate plot propelling delightful characters through a highly developed world. But so are many others. Stories about boarding schools, about magic, stories with friendship and adventure right at the heart. Thousands of them. I don’t think the particular confluence of characters x plot x world can explain it, nor the giant global marketing machine alone. Instead I think the series holds us because it bores down into our existential longings.

We all want to live lives that mean something, that locate us in something larger than ourselves. Marilynne Robinson (and I) find the old fashioned language of the soul irreplaceable because it is “a statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience.”

Late modernity in the west does not create much space for this hope, that our lives and choices have dignity and “unutterable gravity”. We have come to equate the good life (as I tweeted angrily at The Guardian recently) with some…less weighty things.

I have no objection to being “well” but I want my life to mean more than good skin and good sleep and a healthy gut microbiome. The Harry Potter series provides seven books of space to attend to our souls. It is, like most Great Myths, about the Good and whether we will orient ourselves towards it. Far more effectively than an ethics seminar, it asks the reader questions about their character. Will you offer care to others, even when it costs you? Will you take your (often very real) traumas and let them shape you towards compassion and wisdom, or bitterness and selfishness? Will you let others dictate who is pure and who is unclean? Will you, when it comes to it, fight against evil, or slink away and hide? Can you avoid, if you do summon the courage to join the fight, dehumanising others, becoming close to evil yourself³?

Harry Potter draws on potent magic. It makes the same claim as Christian theology⁴: that we are not imagining the suffering, the horror, the dislocation that runs right through this dark world, but that there is something stronger. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it. The darkness does not, will not, at the end of the story, prevail.

Writing these words any day feels risky, this hope too reckless and flammable. Given the current events in Israel and Gaza they can’t help but invite a hollow laugh.

And yet. Many of us are captured by a story in which self-sacrificial love is the deepest magic, capable of breaking any curse. Harry’s mother’s life-laying love runs in his blood like protective potion. It doesn’t make his path easy, doesn’t guard him from all darkness, but weaves a spell which means he can’t be swallowed up by it⁵.

The end of the series holds the most obvious echo of what C.S.Lewis called the True Myth. Harry lays down his life in order to save his friends. He dies as Aslan did. He goes (and this can’t be an accident, surely) to King’s Cross. The evil that is Will to Power, hungry for its own ends, sucking everything into its own twisted, corrosive logic does not know what to do with this, because Love is stronger than death.

The books echo many other myths, of course, other wisdom paths. I am not claiming them to be a direct Christain allegory. But “Love is stronger than death” is the incantation of these stories. The almost excruciatingly tender hope for that to be true holds us. I’d guess it always has.

I wish Rowling had not added the Happy Ever After epilogue at the end of the series. I wish she’d finished in the ruins of Hogwarts, where Percy bends distraught over Fred Weasley’s corpse and the Longbottoms are still in St Mungo’s, unable to recognise their son, because they joined the fight. Love can be stronger than death but it is still costly. We still live in the wreckage of the evil we create together. My tradition calls it the now and not yet. Living between the resurrection and the final trumpet. Those of us who believe this think we know how the story ends, that there is enough strength, enough love for us to endure, but we’re not there yet. We will need stories which nourish and prepare us for the journey. Whether you share my tradition or not, you may also have this hunch, or want to. It may not be Harry Potter for you, but it’s worth asking: what stories do you need to remind you of the gravity and dignity of your choices, and that light wins?

1. See episodes I’ve done on The Sacred with Jay Hulme, Suzanne Moore, Tea Uglow, Helen Lewis, Rachel Mann and Mary Harrington

2. I became aware, as I often am, of wanting to pick something obscure, a hidden gem to show you how discerning I am, how un-basic. This is one of the instincts I am learning to resist. The kind of person I want to be, with spiritual core-strength, sure of my own belovedness, would not need to perform my identity. I am trying not to care about coolness, or originality, and instead see our shared loves as beautiful. How many things have I taught myself to like because I should, as if I’m still a teenager dropping a band like a hot potato as soon as they hit the charts? As I slough of these layers of status-anxious formation, I find that I like a lot of things others like. Coldplay, and Netflix rom-coms and medium strength, milky coffee made with completely ordinary beans.

3. Part of the reason, I think, that there has been such a bitter backlash amongst some of Rowling’s readers is this. A generation alert to injustice, who longed for their choices to matter, found in the series a story in which to locate themselves, a shared language for protection of the vulnerable, and a common enemy (racism, facism, cruelty). To then discover that loving this world put them on the “wrong side” in a new good vs evil controversy must have triggered strong cognitive dissonance indeed. It is like discovering your mother is a monster (or Dumbledore is fallible).

4. And, probably, other theologies, which I would love to hear about in the comments.

5. I can’t help but stop and pray here: may we who parent or care weave this spell over our children. May you receive it, no matter how old you are, if you have not.