What would C. S. Lewis Say about Harry Potter? (#10)

C. S. Lewis maintained that one of the prime achievements in every good fiction has nothing to do with truth or philosophy or a Weltanschauung (worldview) at all. And this is especially true of Lewis’s favorite kind of fiction: fantasy.

The primary value he saw in reading fantasy was not that he could learn truths about life but that through it he could be more than himself. He wanted to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with his own. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, was not enough. He wanted to see what others had invented.

He would therefore have delighted to enter into the beliefs of Philip Pullman or J. K. Rowling, even though he would have thought certain aspects of them untrue. His defense for doing this, for occupying his heart with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which he tried to avoid having in his own person, was that in reading them he became a thousand men and yet remained himself.

Like thousands of stars looking upon the earth, he saw with a myriad eyes, but it was still he who saw. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, he transcended himself; and was never more himself than when he did. “The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison,” he wrote.

This, however, does not mean that C. S. Lewis thought that imaginative literature could have no positive or negative effects on the reader beyond this experience of self-transcendence. But more about that in my next entry…

What would C. S. Lewis Say about Harry Potter? (#9)

Many people who read Harry Potter, particularly certain Christians, have what C. S. Lewis calls a “problem of belief.” It may not be as violent as described in my last entry, but perhaps they disagree with certain ethical implications or are worried that the books incite dangerous magical practices. Or they point out that God seems to be left out of the picture.

To this, C. S. Lewis would reply that in good reading there ought to be no “problem of belief.” A true lover of literature should be in one way like an honest examiner, who is prepared to give the highest marks to the telling, felicitous and well-documented exposition of views he dissents from or even abominates.

Writes Lewis: “I read Lucretius and Dante at a time when (by and large) I agreed with Lucretius. I have read them since I came (by and large) to agree with Dante. I cannot find that this has much altered my experience, or at all altered my evaluation of, of either.”

C. S. Lewis even warned against what he termed the “Vigilant School of Criticism.” To them (and I am afraid a number of Christians are among them) criticism is a form of social and ethical hygiene. They see all clear thinking, all sense of reality, and all fineness of living, threatened on every side by propaganda, by advertisements, by film and television. The hosts of Midian “prowl and prowl around,” and they prowl very dangerously in the printed word.

Against this the Vigilant School are our watchdogs or detectives. Vigilants, finding in every turn of expression the symptom of attitudes which it is a matter of life and death to accept or resist, do not allow themselves the liberty of “free play.” Nothing is for them a matter of taste. They admit no such realm of experience as the aesthetic. There is for them no specifically literary good. A work, or a single passage, cannot for them be good in any sense unless it is good simply, unless it reveals attitudes which are essential elements in the good life.

C. S. Lewis, even though he was a committed and outspoken Christian, most definitely did not belong to this Vigilant School of Criticism.

What would C. S. Lewis Say about Harry Potter? (#8)

In my last entry in this series I said that C. S. Lewis did not limit his appreciation of books to those with which he agreed. He knew that if he did limit it, he would then only stare at his own reflection on every page instead of getting to know the unique perspective of the author.

Another effect of limiting our literary appreciation to authors we agree with is this. If we meet an author who seems to attack our beliefs, we understandably feel a passionate dislike of his work. What we think thoroughly bad, we hate. If, besides being bad, it enjoys great popularity such as Harry Potter and thereby helps to exclude works that we approve from their “place in the sun,” as Lewis put it, hatred of a somewhat less disinterested sort will creep in. Lower and still lower levels of hatred may open; we may dislike the author personally and launch attacks on her. We may warn friends about Harry Potter or even post passionate warnings on the internet.

The problem with this is that people who hear or read our “reviews” will learn precious little about the books we attack. They will not be able to even think about the books under discussion. We rivet their attention on ourselves, Lewis said. The spectacle of us thus writhing in the mixed hurt and thrill of a fully indulged resentment is, in its way, too big a thing to leave them free for any literary considerations. They are in the presence of tragic-comedy from real life. When they get to the end of our attack they find that we have told them everything about ourselves and nothing about the books.

Lewis’s advice?—“Write your slashing review now and drop it into the wastepaper basket a day or so later. A few re-readings in cold blood will often make this quite easy.”

What would C. S. Lewis Say about Harry Potter? (#7)

Some people are (whether rightly or not) worried about possible negative effects of Harry Potter. What would C. S. Lewis say about that?

Perhaps he would suggest that many of those people might really be worried about the effects of fantasy literature in general. One of the first questions we need to settle is therefore, “Can there be value in reading fantasy? Does good fantasy exist or is all fantasy bad simply because it is fantasy?”

The term “good” can of course have many meanings. To the Christian parent it means probably something completely different than to a professional literary critic. But whatever our standard is, we first have to decide whether fantasy can meet that standard, and then—and only then—see whether Harry Potter passes or fails the test.

What, then, constitutes good literature? Its didactic value? According to C. S. Lewis, no. As he made clear in his book “An Experiment in Criticism,” he rejected the view that imaginative literature should mainly be valued for telling us truths about life. He criticized those who foisted upon every book a serious “philosophy.”

Literature, he believed, is primarily a collection of works of art. Lighter works should therefore not be misrepresented as being really far more serious than they look; and when it comes to weightier literature, there should be some free play, some willingness to suspend disbelief (or belief) or even repugnance while we read the good expression of what, in general, we might think bad.

We should not limit our appreciation of authors to those who confirm our own views. Such limitation closes the way to one of the principal effects that good reading has on us: to admit us to experiences other than our own. If we only read imaginative works to tell us truths about life, we will necessarily attribute to our chosen author what we believe to be wisdom; and the sort of thing that seems wise to us will of course be determined by our own caliber.

If we are fools we will find and admire foolishness; if we are mediocrities, we’ll find and admire dullness. At best we are profound thinkers ourselves, and what we acclaim as our author’s philosophy might in itself be good, but in reality be merely our own. In that case we are like the long succession of preachers who have based edifying and eloquent sermons on some straining of their texts. The sermons, though bad exegesis, were often good teachings in their own right.

What would C. S. Lewis Say about Harry Potter? (#6)

C. S. Lewis didn’t like the distinction between children’s literature and adult literature, because there is no specific “juvenile” taste. And he was positively annoyed at condescending adults who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term.

People who do that, Lewis pointed out, cannot really be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development.

When C. S. Lewis was ten, he read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if he had been found doing so. When he had grown up, he read them openly. When he became a man, he, as the Apostle Paul says, put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

But if Harry Potter should not primarily be regarded as a children’s book series, what else can it be? The most general answer would be to say that it is fantasy literature. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines fantasy as “imaginative fiction dependent for effect on strangeness of setting (such as other worlds or times) and of characters (such as supernatural or unnatural beings).” C. S. Lewis put it more concisely: “Fantasy means any narrative that deals with impossibilities and preternaturals.”

Such a definition is broad enough to include a great variety of books and literary genres. Science-fiction, fairy-tales, animal stories, fantastical satires, allegories, myths, legends, and what is commonly known as Fantasy all fit under the general umbrella of fantasy literature. Of course they are very varied in spirit and purpose. The only thing common to them is the fantastic. But it is exactly this fantastical element which some people cannot stand.

Once Lewis asked a lady who had recently felt a certain dreariness creeping over her life, “Have you any taste for fantasies and fairy tales?” Her muscles tightened, her hands clenched, her eyes started as if with horror, and her voice changed, as she hissed out, “I loathe them.” Certainly not everyone who dislikes fantasy has such a violent reaction against it, but the fantastical element does form a demarcation line of opinion. If some seem to go to fantasy in almost compulsive need, others seem to be in terror of what they might meet there.

When we apply this observation to Harry Potter, it becomes clear that many people (not all) who dislike Harry Potter do so because they reject fantasy per se. But more about that in my next entry of this series …

What would C. S. Lewis Say about Harry Potter? (#5)

If you’ve come upon this series of blog entries for the first time, you might want to read the previous four first, as this is a continuation of them.

In them, you will see that C. S. Lewis was against creating a special genre of “children’s literature.” Instead of inventing a separate class of a specifically juvenile taste, he wrote, it would be more accurate to say that the peculiarity of child readers is that they are not peculiar. It is we who are peculiar. Fashions in literary taste come and go among adults, and every period has its own shibboleths. These, when good, do not improve the taste of children, and when bad, do not corrupt it; for children read only to enjoy.

Of course their limited vocabulary and general ignorance make some books unintelligible to them. But apart from that, juvenile taste is simply human taste, going on from age to age, silly with the universal silliness or wise with the universal wisdom, regardless of modes, movements, and literary revolutions.

C. S. Lewis strongly opposed the condescending notion that one could (or even should) “grow out of” those juvenile tastes. He thought it silly if someone spoke in a playfully apologetic tone about his adult enjoyment of “children’s books.” No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty, he said—except, of course, books of information.

The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would probably have been better not to have read at all. A mature palate will probably not care much for cheap liquor: but it ought still to enjoy bread and butter and honey.

What would C. S. Lewis Say about Harry Potter? (#4)

In my last entry, I said that C. S. Lewis would probably not have classified the Harry Potter books primarily as “children’s literature.” He thought that such a classification was born more out of an economic necessity than a true distinction of genre. Children, he said, are not a distinct literary species with a taste alien to adults

For one thing, there is no literary taste common to all children. We find among them all the same types as among ourselves. Many of them, like many of us, never read when they can find any other type of entertainment. Some of them choose quiet, realistic, “slice-of-life” books, as some of us do. Some like fantasies and marvels, as some of us like “The Lord of the Rings” or Homer. Some care for little except books of information, and so do some adults. Some of them, like some of us, are omnivorous. Silly children prefer success stories about school life as silly adults like success stories about grown-up life.

It may be argued against this that in general children do like mostly adventurous and marvelous stories—more than adults do. But if this is our view it implies that we are regarding as specifically childish a taste which in many, perhaps in most, times and places has been that of the whole human race. Those stories from Greek or Norse mythology, from Homer, from Spenser, or from folklore which children (by no means all children) enjoy were once the enjoyment of everyone. Even the fairy tale was not originally intended for children; it was told and enjoyed in (of all places) the court of Louis XIV.

When discussing this topic, C. S. Lewis repeatedly made mention of J.R.R. Tolkien, who pointed out that the fairy tale gravitated to the nursery when it went out of fashion among the grown-ups, just as old-fashioned furniture gravitated to the nursery.

What would C. S. Lewis Say about Harry Potter? (#2)

In my last entry I noted that C. S. Lewis criticized the critics more than he criticized books. His maxim was “Do not criticize what you have no taste for without great caution,” which could be called the Golden Rule of criticism. Someone who violates it is like a teetotaler who is dubbing a particular wine as being of poor quality. Of course any wine is poor to his taste, even if it happens to be the finest burgundy in the world!

This is a universally applicable principle. No one wants to hear a particular woman being abused by a confirmed misogynist. No one wants to have a deaf man criticizing music or a blind one evaluating paintings. Only someone who loves good music will recognize bad music and only someone who has seen many great paintings will detect a meager one.

So with literature: people who do not have a taste for a certain genre had better hold their tongues about any particular book of that genre—because they might not be criticizing it at all but the genre in general. They might indeed have good reasons for disliking the genre; but they should not masquerade their aversion as criticism of individual works. Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer’s dislike of the kind to which it belongs.

Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, C. S. Lewis said, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Otherwise we shall find epics being blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, and Harry Potter for not being “realistic” enough. C. S. Lewis said about his own dislikes: “I don’t like detective stories and therefore all detective stories look much alike to me: if I wrote about them I should therefore infallibly write drivel.”

So what kind of a genre is Harry Potter? More about that tomorrow …

What would C. S. Lewis Say about Harry Potter? (#1)

“What would C. S. Lewis, the author of Narnia, say about Harry Potter?” This I find a most intriguing question. I wish that C. S. Lewis had lived long enough to answer it himself. Unfortunately this was not to be. It is also a dangerous question because, whatever answer I choose, C. S. Lewis is not here to contradict it. I can easily pen my own opinion on him and misuse his great name to promulgate whatever idea I happen to like.

Nevertheless, I will spend several entries attempting an answer, although (to avoid the above pitfall) I will let C. S. Lewis speak for himself as much as possible. To do that, I shall draw mostly on Lewis’ works of literary criticism. Among them are “An Experiment in Criticism,” “Studies in Words,” “The Allegory of Love,” “A Preface to Paradise Lost,” “The Discarded Image,” “Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century,” and various essays on literature. I shall freely steal from these works, often only slightly rewording what Lewis wrote. Note, therefore, that many phrases might be directly from C. S. Lewis even when I don’t indicate them as such.

Let’s start.

In many of his writings, C. S. Lewis criticizes the critics more than he criticizes books. If asked what he thought about Harry Potter, he might therefore first of all turn to Harry’s antagonists. “Do not criticize what you have no taste for without great caution,” he would advise. “And, above all, do not ever criticize what you simply can’t stand.” If a critic has a violent and actually resentful reaction to any story in the vein of Harry Potter, it is a danger signal. For good adverse criticism is the most difficult thing a critic has to do.

It is far easier to correctly criticize a book that belongs to a genre in which one thoroughly knows and really likes the thing the author is trying to do, and has enjoyed many books where it was done well. Then a critic will have some chance of really showing that perhaps the author has failed. But if a critics’ real reaction to the Harry Potter books is “Ugh! I just can’t stand this kind of stuff,” then we shall not be able to diagnose whatever real faults they might have.

This principle—“Do not criticize what you have no taste for without great caution”—could be called the Golden Rule of criticism. But more about that in my next entry.

(For my own small contribution to juvenile Fantasy literature, see The Crack Beneath the Worlds.)

Harry Potter: First and Second Readings

Revisiting the First Harry Potter Book

Writing a review on the first Harry Potter book seems superfluous, as it must surely be one of the most reviewed books in the history of literature. 

I will therefore refrain (more or less) from summarizing the story, and instead compare my first reading to my recent re-reading of the book. 

In my first reading, I met a boy called Harry, who was the quintessential “uncool kid.” He grew up at his aunt and uncle’s because his parents were supposedly killed in a car crash when he was a baby. That was at least what Aunt and Uncle Dursley told him. Harry was the uncool kid both at home and at school, hence constantly jumping from the frying pan into the fire. At home, “the Dursleys often spoke about Harry (…) as though he wasn’t there–or rather, as though he was something very nasty that couldn’t understand them, like a slug.” Their spoiled son, Dudley, also did his best to bully Harry around. And at school, “Harry had no one. Everybody knew that Dudley’s gang hated that odd Harry Potter in his baggy old clothes and broken glasses, and nobody liked to disagree with Dudley’s gang.” 

Hence, when Hogwarts’ half-giant gamekeeper told Harry that he was a wizard, he could hardly believe it. And when Harry stepped through the Leaky Cauldron onto Diagon Alley, everything was new and exciting. He had not had the slightest clue that such a world existed; accordingly he saw everything through the eyes of an amazed and hungry learner. 

And since I as the reader always walked by Harry’s side, I, too, had this “sense of awe.” Together with Harry, I marveled at Gringotts Bank and its goblins, the power of the magic wands, the magic broomsticks, Platform 9 ¾ and the steaming Hogwarts Express, the gigantic school castle, the meeting hall with its enchanted ceiling, the moving staircases, the “living” paintings, the ghosts, the owl post, and numerous other things. 

Harry became like a two-year old toddler again who is excited about discovering the world, and as the reader I was a toddler with him. This is Fantasy at its best. The fact that J.K. Rowling made Harry an “outsider” to the world of magic is of great importance to the experience of the reader. Otherwise I would not have been nearly as astonished about the details of Mrs Rowling’s world as I was. It also prevented the technological aspects of the Harry-Potter magic from totally disenchanting her world. 

Now to my re-reading of the “Philosopher’s Stone” (I still like the original British title better than the “Sorcerer’s Stone”). 

I read the story again shortly after I finished the seventh book. Knowing where the story and characters are headed, many scenes now took on new significance. It was fascinating to read a particular passage and think: “Ah! Now I know why she put that in there.” I have to complement J.K. Rowling on having planned the seven books so well. 

Furthermore, reading the first book from the retrospective view of the whole series also makes a difference for the moral custodians among us. If you only read the first book, you might come away thinking that Harry Potter tries to justify the means by the end a little too much. Harry’s magic is at first set into motion when he is “upset and angry”, the toffee-nosed know-it-all Hermione turns likable by lying on Harry’s behalf, and one of Harry’s chief character traits is that of a rule breaker. 

Aside from the point that novels–including juvenile ones–don’t have to portray their main characters as saints, the series has, in fact, turned out to be of great moral depth. Given Harry’s final moral choices at the end of Book VII, Book I can now be seen as the beginning of a “Bildungsroman.” That is, a Coming Of Age Story in which Harry goes through all the stages of childhood and adolescence, to finally arrive at moral, social, and psychological maturity. 

If that is not an ideal way of making teenagers aware of their own journey to maturity, I don’t know what is. 

(By the way, a few years ago I wrote the rough draft of a book on Harry Potter. It’ll probably see the light of publication toward the end of next year under the title Seven Years at Hogwarts: A Christian’s Conversion to Harry Potter.)