Jewish Narnia?

Here's an interesting review essay by Michael Weingrad. In the course of his piece Weingrad asserts that fantasy as a genre has attracted few Jewish writers, and ponders why that might be. Of course a number of people beg to differ about his premise (ie, Robert Silverberg's Majipoor series might be a counter-example, though I guess it's technically science fiction.) Over at his New York Times blog, Ross Douthat provides some thought-provoking commentary. He quotes Abigail Nussbaum at length; her equally thought-provoking post on Weingrad's essay is here. I'd recommend reading all four of the above posts/articles; I think they all make good points.

Turning to a more specific topic, one of the books Weingrad reviews is Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Grossman, if I remember correctly, is the journalist who wrote an article in Time asserting that the total absence of religion in Harry Potter (as opposed to Narnia) illustrated the triumph of secularism in the modern world. Of course, that was before the final Potter book was released... which had all that stuff in it about Harry, the saviour of wizards and witches, sacrificing himself for his friends and being resurrected. It was 'round about the chapter entitled "King's Cross," if you've forgotten.

Anyways, apparently Grossman has since written his own fantasy story, satirizing both Narnia and Harry Potter. Weingrad writes of the novel:

...its goal is to ask the question of whether fantasy and adulthood are mutually exclusive, as the process of becoming an adult means accepting the reality principle rather than “looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life,” as one character puts it. Of course, such an either/or does not do justice to fantasy literature, which, at its best, confronts loss, pain, and frustration. Grossman does not, for instance, turn his satirical sights on Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which after all is a world saturated with failure and loss, and his send-up of Narnia’s divinely incarnated lion Aslan falls short of grappling seriously with Lewis’s actual theology. Moreover, his overeducated, young, single protagonists—like Whit Stillman characters thrown into a Harry Potter novel—can offer only a thin slice of what it means to be an adult. Nevertheless, Grossman’s experiment of placing real, urban, early twenty-somethings in a Hogwarts-and-Narnia-like environment is often dazzling. What he shows is the extent to which medieval magic cannot make our human unhappiness disappear.

PS: In passing, Nussbaum's post points out this blog post from Martin Lewis about Arthur C. Clarke's story The Star. In the comments a bunch of people, including Lewis, John Kessel, Adam Roberts and Paul Kincaid (all, I think, identifying themselves as atheists) engage in a spirited discussion about the theological meaning of the story and of SF's roots more generally. Meanwhile, over at this post some of the same players discuss The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Gene Wolfe more generally. Kessel seems to be a fan of Wolfe's.)

Harry Potter to be investigated?

Yes, another overly literal person has become mighty suspicious of that no-good Harry Potter and similiar characters. He hasn't actually read any of the books, but he thinks they may very well have a "pernicious" and "insidious" effect, because they may teach children to believe in magic. He is a bit better than most other fundamentalists in that he admits that he doesn't know for sure... yet. But like a good evangelist, he intends to write his own book for children to instruct them in the orthodox way.

I'm not sure what he'll think of the magic if he does get around to reading the Potter books. He'll probably approve of the magisterial British academics portrayed therein, but he'll likely be unhappy with the fact that the children spend much of their time disobeying said academics. And if he makes it to the final book he'll probably get very angry when he comes across the Christian symbolism it contains. (My thoughts on The Deathly Hallows are here.)

Alan Jacobs comments snarkily here.

Rowling on religion

J.K. Rowling comments more extensively about Christian imagery in Harry Potter.

Some of this she's said before but some of it's new. In particular she comments about the tombstone quotes and the books' epigraphs. Also:

"The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It's something I struggle with a lot," she revealed. "On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes — that I do believe in life after death. [But] it's something that I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that's very obvious within the books."

And:

For her part, Rowling said she's proud to be on numerous banned-book lists. As for the protests of some believers? Well, she doesn't take them as gospel.

"I go to church myself," she declared. "I don't take any responsibility for the lunatic fringes of my own religion."

[via Get Religion]

(I just can't help chuckling when I recall all the dire fundamentalist warnings about the Satanism of Harry Potter. Or the gleeful secularist claims about Harry Potter's implicit atheism. And now MTV, corrupter of America's youth, is setting the record straight. Ah, sweet, sweet irony.)