ha! ha!
Allan Bloom 
(Wrote The Closing of the American Mind)
Harold Bloom 
(Harry Potter hating old fart)
Orlando Bloom 
(left-wimg guiser)
Posted on 07/18/2005 9:57:30 PM PDT by Eurotwit
What accounts for the success of the Harry Potter series, as well as the "Star Wars" films whence they derive? The answer, I think, is their appeal to complacency and narcissism. "Use the Force," Obi-Wan tells the young Luke Skywalker, while the master wizard Dumbledore instructs Harry to draw from his inner well of familial emotions. No one likes to imagine that he is Frodo Baggins, an ordinary fellow who has quite a rough time of it in Tolkien's story. But everyone likes to imagine that he possesses inborn powers that make him a master of magic as well as a hero at games. Harry Potter merely needs to tap his inner feelings to conjure up the needful spell.
"Tonstant Weader fwowed up," Dorothy Parker reviewed A A Milne's "Pooh" stories in the New Yorker, and I am sad to report that reverse peristalsis cut short my own efforts to read J K Rowling's latest effort, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. In any event I am less interested in reviewing the book than in reviewing the reader.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but complacency is the secret attraction of J K Rowling’s magical world. It lets the reader imagine that he is something different, while remaining just what he is. Harry (like young Skywalker) draws his superhuman powers out of the well of his "inner feelings". In this respect Rowling has much in common with the legion of self-help writers who advise the anxious denizens of the West. She also has much in common with writers of pop spirituality, who promise the reader the secret of inner discovery in a few easy lessons.
The spiritual tradition of the West, which begins with classic tragedy and continues through St Augustine's Confessions, tells us just the contrary, namely, that one's inner feelings are the problem, not the solution. The West is a construct, the result of a millennium of war against the inner feelings of the barbarian invaders whom Christianity turned into Europeans. Paganism exults in its unchanging, autochthonous character, and glorifies the native impulses of its people; Christianity despises these impulses and attempts to root them out. Western tradition demands that the individual must draw upon something better than one's inner feelings. Narcissism where one's innermost feelings are concerned therefore is the supreme hallmark of decadence.
A culture may be called decadent when its members exult in what they are, rather than strive to become what they should be. As God tells Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, Man all too easily grows lax and mellow, He soon elects repose at any price; And so I like to pair him with a fellow To play the deuce, to stir, and to entice. [1] What characterizes the protagonists of great fiction in an ascendant culture? It is that they are not yet what they should be. The characters of Western literature in its time of flowering either must overcome defining flaws, or come to grief. Austen's Elizabeth Bennet must give up her pride; Dickens' Pip must look past the will-o'-the-wisp of his expectations; Mann's Hans Castorp must confront mortality; Tolstoy's Pierre must learn to love; Cervantes' Don Quixote must learn to help ordinary people rather than the personages of romance; Goethe's Wilhelm Meister must act in the real world rather than the stage. Goethe's Faust I have long considered the definitive masterwork of Western literature, first of all because its explicit subject is the transformation of character. As Faust tells Mephisto, Should ever I take ease upon a bed of leisure, May that same moment mark my end! When first by flattery you lull me Into a smug complacency, When with indulgence you can gull me, Let that day be the last for me! That is my wager! [2] Failure to correct defining flaws, of course, leads to a tragic outcome, as in Dostoyevsky or Flaubert. More consideration is required to portray characters who change rather than fail, to be sure; that is why the late Leo Strauss thought Jane Austen a better novelist than Dostoyevesky. Finding the right partner in marriage, after all, is the most important decision most of us will make in our lives. Whatever good we otherwise might do has little meaning unless another generation draws its benefit, and that character of the next generation depends on the character of the families we might form. If we take inventory of all the married couples we know, how many of them can be said to have done this with due consideration? Courtship is a high drama that should keep our teeth on edge. Instead, we relegate the subject to the genre of romantic comedy, and to the consoling familiarity of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.
The more one wallows in one's inner feelings, of course, the more anxious one becomes. Permit me to state without equivocation that your innermost feelings, whoever you might be, are commonplace, dull, and tawdry. Thrown back upon one's feelings, one does not become a Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker, but a petulant, self-indulgent bore with an aversion to mirrors. To compensate for this ennui one demands stimulus. That is the other ingredient in J K Rowlings' success formula. Magical devices distract us from the boredom inherent in the characters, and one cannot gainsay the fecundity of the author's imaginative powers. She manufactures new enchantments as fast as Industrial Light and Magic churns out new computer-generated graphics for the "Star Wars" films, or amusement parks erect faster roller coasters.
Pointy hats, it should be remembered, were made to fit on pointy heads. Rowling's fiction stands in relation to real literature the way that a roller coaster stands in relation to a real adventure. The thrills are cheap precisely because they could not possibly be real. The "boy's own" sort of adventure writing popular in Victorian England had a good deal more merit.
When we put ourselves in the hands of a masterful writer, we undertake a perilous journey that puts our soul at risk. Empathy with the protagonist exposes us to all the spiritual dangers that beset the personages of fiction. In emulation of the ancient tale in which a seven days' sojourn among the fairies turns out to be an absence of seven years, Thomas Mann sends Hans Castorp to the magic mountain of a tuberculosis sanitarium - but it is the reader is captured and transformed.
We are too complacent to wish upon ourselves such a transformation, and too lazy to attempt it. We find tiresome the old religions of the West that preach repentance and redemption, and instead wish to hear reassurance that God loves us and that everything is all right. We have lost the burning thirst for truth - for inner change - that drives men to learn ancient languages, pore over mathematical proofs, master musical instruments, or disappear into the wild. We want our thrills pre-packaged and micro-waveable. Above all we want our political leaders, our pastors, our artists and our partners in life to validate our innermost feelings, loathsome as they may be. I do not know you, dear reader; the only thing I know about you with certainty is that your innermost feelings would bore me.
Western literature, along with all great Western art, is Christian in character, including the product of a putative heathen like Goethe, whom Franz Rosenzweig correctly called the prototype of a modern Christian.[3] It is Christian precisely because it deals with overcoming one's "inner self". A jejune Manichaeanism pervades the Potter books as well as the “Star Wars” films, and I suppose a case could be made that such a crude apposition of Good and Evil corresponds in some fashion to the emotional narcissism of the protagonists.
In that sense, Christian leaders who disapprove of the whole Potter business simply are doing their job. According to some news reports, Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, disparaged Rowling's books in a private letter written two years ago. But according to NZ City on July 18, "New Zealand Catholic Church spokeswoman Lyndsay Freer says there is some question over the validity of the letter. She says more importantly, Vatican cultural advisors feel the book is not a theological work and is just plain children's literature. Ms Freer says it's wonderful children are being encouraged to read, and the Potter books are no different from the likes of Grimms' Fairy Tales and Star Wars." How reassuring it is that the ecclesiastical authorities of Auckland have taken the initiative to correct the pope on this matter.
She made a lot of great movies, but sadly had a short career and yes, her later life was one of hardship and decline.
Get ahold of a non-Bowdlerized version of the Grimm Fairy Tales. Rolling a naked woman in a barrel studded with nails was just one of the lovely fates in that book.
Beautiful woman!
I loved, as a tiny child, the fact that Cinderella's stepsisters cut of a heel for one and the toes for the other, to make the glass slipper fit their feet and that the drops of blood, which fell from the shoe, as the Prince was taking each back to the palaces, spoke, as they fell to the ground and alerted him that he had the wrong girl. Also, I enjoyed the ending, with the blackbirds pecking out their eyes, as they stood on the castle ramparts, watching the wedding procession of Cinderella and the Prince.
And then there's the rape of SLEEPING BEAUTY, by the Prince who finds her, his wife's ( yes, he was married, when he had almost necrophiliac sex with SB ) boiling one or both ( depends which version is read )of his bastard children with SB and serving him/her/them to him for dinner.
I could go on and on, but I guess you know about all of these juicy tidbits. LOL
Yes, she was and she also had a very lovely, distinctive voice.
Of course, someone will eventually point out that the witch in Hansel and Gretel cooked and ate kids.
And then there's Baba Yaga...
Indeed she did. "Elegance."
There doesn't seem to be a religious element to Christmas in HP. I do not recall a reference to God at all in HP, though I'm certainly no avid reader, having read only half of them (to my daughter, before she starte to read them herself).
Lessons in fairy tales ? Not in all of them by any means.
The witch, in Hansel and Gretel BAKED children in an oven...a for-shadowing of the Nazis?
And yes, Babba Yaga ate children and adults. She was really a bogey, rather than a witch, though.
King Lycaon fed Zeus a meal of human flesh. Zeus changed him into a wolf, for punishment. ( Origin of werewolves ?)
Cronos swallowed all of his children ( the Olympian gods and goddesses ), but Zeus killed him and they were save.
Zeus swalloed Athena's mother, when she was preggers, but later, Athena sprung full grown and dressed in armor, from his head.
There are lots of Greek and Roman and Norse myths, about cannibalism.
And "SULLIVAN'S TRAVELLS", as well as many others.
Thanks for the Draco information.
From Dumbing down American readers By Harold Bloom, 9/24/2003: What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times.As has since been noted use use of the phrase "stretched his legs." to refer to going for a walk does not occur "several dozen times" in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone , but just one (1) time (on page 4 - which is probably as far as thst old fraud Bloom actually read).
Harold Bloom doesn't only look like a decayed Michael Moore.
Those people have severe self-esteem issues. When one accepts oneself for the person one is, there is no need to try to bring down others.
ha! ha!
Allan Bloom (Wrote The Closing of the American Mind)
Harold Bloom (Harry Potter hating old fart)
Orlando Bloom (left-wimg guiser)
Exactly.
Allen Bloom, isn't that? Same cat wrote The Closing of the American Mind?
I have both those books on shelves somewhere or other. Haven't read them since soon after they came out, but both stuck in my mind; at least the theses did.
I have young friends who are as wilfully ignorant as your co-workers; and yet I know other young people that seek and read the great works of Western Civilisation. I suspect that the latter are a minority, and that they have always been a minority.
Yes, the officers of the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1917 could all chart out Latin cases and knew their way around the classics, as could the women of their class. But the great bulk of the soldiery could not, and yet the British Empire was at its historic peak.
No doubt, some prissy academic wannabee of the day could have looked at the music-hall entertainments of the troops and pronounced the collapse of the English language then, at the very time some of the finest and most moving poetry in this tongue was being written.
d.o.l.
criminal number 18f
Actually I suspect there has been a greater decline in the standards of imntellectuals than the commoners.
Prissy academics back then were too busy to sneer at the mass culture.
Actually, the British officers of 1917 were mostly middle and upper middle class folks and not the aristocrats of three years earlier. The latter had pretty much ceased to exist between the fighting retreat of 1914 and the disasterous Somme offensive of 1916.
Who tended to have a pretty decent education by today's measures. (My favourite of the poets was from an upper-class, although not ennobled, family: Siegfried Sassoon. They of course were never ennobled because they were not C of E. Siegfried spent much of 1917 in Craiglockhart nuthouse).
English schools were pretty decent until the 1960s and 1970s, when a campaign of levelling eliminated the separate tracks for knowledge workers (Grammar Schools) and labourers (Secondary Moderns), and consolidated all secondary education at the lower level (Secondary Comprehensives). It created a business opportunity for a lot of new private schools, though.
I've encountered many graduates (and even dropouts) of the grammar schools that have a cultural knowledge level higher than today's college graduates.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.