Despite the wit of cynics the Harry Potter narrative is coming to its final cinematic conclusion in July, with the movie release of the second part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
With the immense popularity of the Potter saga, millions of young adults have grown up literarily as readers of the books and imaginatively immersed in the world of Hogwarts.
A recent Sydney Morning Herald article records their reflections on what it has meant to journey towards adulthood in parallel with the fictional young wizard:
“I don’t think I can imagine my life without Harry… It’s about finding yourself, about discovering that you are needed. It’s so hard to explain.” – Adam Shelley (20)
“It answered a lot of questions I had in my mind, which I didn’t know I had.”
“It does have huge effects on the decisions I make in life. I’ll base a decision I make on what happens in the book… He has been with me since I was nine and I can’t really remember much of life before.” – Erica Crombie (20)
The power of the characters and stories of Harry Potter belie the idea that fantasy as a genre is about mere entertainment. Rather, fantasy can tell us as much about human life and how we should live as “factual” writing.
J.R.R. Tolkien, perhaps the most influential fantasy writer, wrote an important reflection on the subject in,”On Fairy Stories“. He describes the art of fantasy as “subcreation”:
“[The author] makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.”
According to Tolkien, “fairy stories” attract the attention of the reader by “an arresting strangeness”. They pull them in, a process which Tolkien named “Enchantment”. The fantasy world has its own internal consistency and logic, “derived from Reality, or … flowing into it.” The joy of being part of the imagined world (even temporarily) is, “a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth… a far-off gleam or echo of …the real world.”
It is this echoing of the world of young adults that has made the Harry Potter books so extraordinarily popular. By writing of a young wizard growing to adulthood, J.K. Rowling has been able to frame, in ways far more ‘real’ than a scientific account of adolescence, the adolescent years of her younger readers.
But, according to Tolkien, fantasy has an even greater power than ‘echoing’. It is its ability to make us long for the “secondary world” to be the primary world, to desire for our lives to be part of the story:
Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded.
The Harry Potter saga achieves this identification for many, with one fan reflecting, “I longed for what Harry wanted,” and another who started the series at age six saying, “I would have loved to have gone to Hogwarts… I thought that when I was 12 my letter of invitation would arrive by owl, too.”
This is the potency of artful story: the reshaping of human expectation and desire.
What shape life will have for Potter-fans remains to be seen, but for many, their imaginations will be forever influenced by the power of the narratives.
