Harry Potter and the Disappointed Devoted

Harry Potter and the Disappointed Devoted

I had a request to make my next entry not about myself, but about something cultural or pop-cultural. Unfortunately, the requester has not read Harry Potter. But that’s what I spent most of last week reading.
I took the opportunity of time off to re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. When I first read it in the summer of 2007, it disappointed me a lot. I did lose a night of sleep obsessing over it, but it just didn’t grip me the way all the others had. Did the book simply fail to live up to expectations, or were expectations so astronomically high as to ensure underwhelming? The second time around did nothing to assuage my initial disappointment. I could rant on and on about plot points and some characters not getting a proper death scene. But my disappointment comes from something deeper and indefineable—it simply did not make me weep. I sob through the last 200 pages of Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix. Likewise, vast portions of Return of the King give me shivers up the spine and bring tears to my eyes. But Deathly Hallows, which should be the ultimate emotional catharsis, left me strangely cold.
Deathly Hallows interests me, instead, only intellectually. I think I love Harry Potter so much because it satisfies me both emotionally and intellectually—it operates on several levels (if you can’t tell yet, I like things that operate on multiple levels). It spikes my intellectual and literary curiosity, yet it also appeals and touches on many emotional points. While Book 7 sent major signals flying across my intellectual radar, it didn’t spark any emotional fires. The big reveal, the big Harry-is-a-Horcrux moment, which should have surpassed “No, I am your father” on the earth-shattering scale, instead became simply a bemused, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense according to all the signs.”
I can identify two major problems with the 7th book, and one of them is that it plays a game called Spot the Allusion. “Allusion” is a literary term that describes when one literary work refers to another literary work. It doesn’t mention it by name, but simply “alludes” to it. Reading Hallows for the first time, I at one point went directly to my copy of The Canterbury Tales to look something up (J.K. Rowling confirmed that she had used this source). I also spotted references to the King Arthur legend (a sword in a pond/lake). But then it also made reference to more popular works, including Mary Poppins (the magically enlarged bag) and James Bond (the magic motorbike).
Playing Spot the Allusion will give Harry Potter some academic credit, but it does not really add to the emotional core of the story or morals or characterization. And it may leave readers without degrees in English scratching their heads about the relevance of some plot point. T.S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland plays the best game of Spot the Allusion ever, and while this has ensured its relevance in college classrooms, it has sapped the poem of any emotional relevance.
My other big problem with Deathly Hallows is that Rowling finally gave in to the urge for allegory. Allegory happens when characters, things, and events within a literary work correspond to characters, things, and events outside the story. The easiest example is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is an allegory of Christ. While Rowling had certainly added symbolism throughout the books, she had not yet made it so annoyingly obvious. But the mere presence of allegory didn’t alone do it for me. What did it was that Rowling unfortunately chose two of the most overplayed allegories: Jesus and Nazis.
Before Book 7, Harry had actually come off as refreshingly un-Christ-like. He didn’t have that insufferable attitude of moral perfection. Rowling had created a wonderfully three dimensional, flawed human. But then he had to go and get himself resurrected. Rowling had made such sensitive choices in her characterization of Harry himself and the moral world surrounding him for the six previous books, the sudden switch to contrived, overt symbolism disappointed me. C.S. Lewis set out to write the Chronicles of Narnia as Christian allegories for children. With my extremely limited religious experience, when I read those books at the age of 7, I had no idea—no idea—of the true identity of Aslan. Maybe my older-and-wiser status has simply moved me beyond allegory.
And after all this time, Voldemort is just your average Nazi? I say average because Rowling so clearly marked Grindelwald as Hitler (complete with ancient symbol stolen for nefarious purposes and a prison with a slogan over the gate). Voldemort himself contents himself with “registering” Muggle-borns and driving people on the run and into secret hiding places, prompting a response from an underground resistance who can never know for sure who is an enemy or a friend. I do have to admit that Rowling did a much better job at creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and secret terror than any WWII movie has ever done. And when done well, that is the power of allegory—it helps us to better understand the happenings in our world when we see them play out in another world.
But the glut of WWII movies and other media and George Lucas’s use of WWII allegory in Star Wars have hardened me to Nazi symbolism. Rowling always made interesting and responsible statements about government responsibility and corruption. She also made some deeply true observations about the nature of evil and created an absolutely engrossing figure in Tom Riddle/Voldemort. But then she has to go and choose the easy way out—because as Steven Spielberg knows, Nazis make incredibly convenient baddies.
And apparently I’m not the only with this lackluster reaction. The internet supports a huge network of Harry Potter fans and arm-chair literary analysts, scattered across several sites with surprisingly professional layouts. But the good people at Harry Potter Lexicon had not updated their page on Horcruxes since before Hallows came out, and it does not have the new information on the ultimate Horcrux. Mugglenet.com published essays on the books (including a particularly good one here), but the supply has dried up. Apparently the whole Harry Potter community was simply waiting for the seventh book to give all the answers, and now don’t want to ask any more questions. We all spent years asking Who? What? Where? When? But now we can start asking the harder, and ultimately more important and rewarding questions: How? and Why?