Grappling with ‘Harry Potter’ on 20th anniversary
copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and stayed up all night to read it. Cultural consumption is increasingly a public process, and now that I’m a professional critic, it’s my job.
The act of caring about the books and finding meaning in them has become an indicator of a certain set of ideas.
As much as I love Harry Potter, and as much as I look forward to sharing Rowling’s novels with another generation of readers, I do feel ambivalent about the way the series has been turned into a political touchstone.
I recognise that this use of the novels is probably inevitable: In an increasingly fragmented media environment, Harry Potter is the increasingly rare cultural language that we can assume everyone will speak.
Unlike, say, the unfolding Marvel Cinematic Universe, which use political issues as a gloss, Rowling’s books are genuinely concer ned with political and civic concerns. Fans of the franchise have successfully pushed to make sure that products associated with it live up to Rowling’s stated values.
But even as a progressive Harry Potter fan, I’ve felt a certain queasiness over the political revisions and uses of the series in recent years.
My objection isn’t that the series is childish, which is an argument Rowling herself anticipated. Instead, it’s that Harry Potter is an imperfect metaphor for our given moment. And trying to make it a mere instrument of politics has a way of reducing its power as literature.
The process of tur ning Harry Potter into a political instrument is one that Rowling herself has played a hand in. Among the many world-building tidbits she has revealed since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published, Rowling has said that she thought of Albus Dumbledore as gay and Hermione Granger could be black.
Saying these things after the fact, rather than making them part of her novels, is a way for Rowling to accrue credit for choices she didn’t actually have the courage to make a part of her story.
More specifically, the use of Harry Potter as a metaphor for the Trump administration in the US seems to spring from the same impulse that branded a resurgence of civic engagement “the Resistance”.
Maybe I’m being a little sour. But beyond the aptness of this particular literary metaphor to this specific set of political circumstances, there’s something grating about our present tendency to take Harry Potter, and many other works of fiction, and contort them to match our present circumstances as precisely as possible. I believe that art is political but that its greatest political power comes not in the moments when it’s subordinated to an existing movement, candidate or agenda, but when it flies above the moment and helps us see things differently.
The relevant questions we can draw from Harry Potter in this moment aren’t whether Trump has horcruxes hidden in his hotels or whether British Prime Minister Theresa May is Dolores Umbridge.
Instead, we should ask how brave we really are, how much we’re doing to support the people who are with us in the struggle, what value we place on a free and independent press, and whether we’re sacrificing the most vulnerable to protect ourselves.
The best respect we can show for Harry Potter on the series’ 20th anniversary is to let the novels transcend the times, rather than shackling them to the present. – Washington Post