There’s an interesting article up on Touchstone by a chap named John Granger, the author of several books on Harry Potter who’s a graduate of the University of Chicago, analyzing Rowling’s books as “the ‘shared text’ of the twenty-first century.” This is a more significant statement than it might seem, coming from a former student of Allan Bloom, who argued “that ‘shared books’ are the foundation of culture, politics, and individual thinking; as such, Granger is arguing—quoting Chuck Klosterman in Esquire—that
Over time, these novels (and whatever ideas lie within them) will come to represent the mainstream ethos of our future popular culture.
Klosterman thinks that’s a bad thing, but Granger strongly disagrees:
Before meeting Allan Bloom and, through him, the Western canon, my friends and I were a sarcastic and self-absorbed, if good-hearted lot, nourished on stories that were only diversion and dissipation. I have to think my children are better prepared and more willing to embrace that tradition than I was because of their years of instruction at Hogwarts castle. . . .I struggle to think of any fictional work of the last two or three centuries that had the potential to shape the cultural and political agendas of its time as this one does. Dickens’s crusading social novels? Uncle Tom’s Cabin? The Jungle? Harry Potter differs from these in that the others ignited a latent Christian conscience. The Potter novels help foster one into existence. . . .From this text, we can build a conversation about virtue and vice, and about what reading does to the right-side-up soul. From it, too, we can take an invitation to go on to even better books—ones that our grandparents’ great-grandparents had in common, and others that our children may one day write. Hasten the day!
It’s an interesting argument, and I think he may be on to something. It’s certainly worth considering seriously.