I saw the fifth Harry Potter movie on Thursday (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). Quite fun. By now, the Harry Potter series has, I suppose, surpassed the fantasy classics that I read as a kid-- C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings-- in terms of both length and readership. Having read very little of Harry Potter-- I read the first chapter and a half of Order of the Phoenix-- I suppose I can't really compare. Certainly Rowling is a very talented writer. But I don't sense in her the same greatness as in Tolkien or Lewis.
Lewis, whose greatness is specifically Christian, is a topic for another essay. Tolkien seems to me the inventor of modern fantasy; the inventor because, unlike, say, The Wizard of Oz, he serves as a bridge between the ancient fantasist tradition-- paganism-- and a myth-starved modernity which hungers for a literature that inculcates the belief, proscribed in our times by scientific-materialist dogma, that there are mysterious worlds other than our own, a belief that man needs to have at some level even he is no longer permitted to openly confess it, or else, as William Blake said, "the same dull round, even of the universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels." One must give special credit to a founder. Rowling steps into a tradition of fantasy literature which is already thriving; her originality lies in the extraordinary humor and creativity with which she appropriates a huge amount of magical folklore, and at the same time in her evocation of the experience of growing up.
What impresses me about Tolkien is the strange presentism of Lord of the Rings. I've heard that Tolkien denied that his books were representing contemporary events. (He was writing between 1937 and 1949, and was published in 1954-5.) And an attempt to map the characters, places, and events of his novels onto the geopolitics of the 1930s and 1940s doesn't quite work. And yet there are nonetheless so many parallels and echoes. The Ring evokes the atom bomb: it means destruction if the Enemy gets it; yet the good guys, who have it, must not use it or it will irrevocably corrupt them. The rising power of Sauron evokes the rising power of Hitler: a force of perfect malevolence, of terrific strength, but capable also of subtlety, cunning, deceit. Saruman and King Theoden, under the influence of Grima Wormtongue, evoke the appeasers, seduced by lies and fear into collaboration or non-resistance. The opposition of East and West is also evocative: the East (read: Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany), a source of vast menace and darkness; the West-beyond-the-seas (read: America), a place of bliss and peace, to which the people of Middle-Earth could once sail (the open borders of the 19th century) but to which access was now debarred (the rising immigration restrictions of the 1920s, a national disgrace for which we have never felt anything like adequate shame: they make us, in effect, complicit in the genocide of the Jews). Tolkien's Middle-Earth is a world in an immediate crisis but also in long-term decline, a world full of the echoes of old glories, full of ruined cities and depopulated countries, a world where the best things are ancient. In this respect it makes a weird contrast with our world, where we taken for granted the superiority of the present over the past. But it fits the 1930s and 1940s: Europe's glorious past standing in grim contrast to the darkness and menace and horror of its present. And again, victory over Sauron brings a reprieve but not a restoration: the decline of Middle-Earth is inexorable, just as Europe could never again be restored to its 19th-century glory.
Too mechanical a presentism can be a fault: it may prevent a story from following its own logic, its telos. Tolkien's presentism is incomplete. The Ring is destroyed and the good side wins; the atomic parallel breaks down. America came to Europe's rescue; Tolkien's blessed West-beyond-the-seas remains aloof from the affairs of fallen Middle-Earth. Presentism is not Tolkien's purpose: he is not trying to describe contemporary affairs in metaphoric garb. Yet the moods, the fears, the lessons of those times infuse The Lord of the Rings, and they can help a contemporary reader to imaginatively penetrate the consciousness of the world-saving Britons of the 1940s. That is what myths for. William Blake wrote that "eternity is in love with the productions of time." Myths capture that intersection of time and eternity, weaving into stories that will reverberate forever the deepest heart of man-as-he-lives-now. Tolkien's presentism is his strength.
Is there a similar presentism in Rowling? Of course, whereas Tolkien created his world apparently out of whole cloth (although one never quite understands what the relationship of "Middle-Earth" to our own world is), Rowling's books are set in our own world and our own times, with the fascinatingly implausible revision that there is an entire magical world parallel to and secretly embedded in it. A certain trivial presentism is inherent in the fact that Rowling's stories are, in fact, set in the present. But does Rowling's mythology bear any meaningful relationship to the great issues of our times? Is there a high presentism in it similar to that of Tolkien? If so, I don't see it. Rowling's fiction seems to me merely escapist.
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