WHAT MAGIC REALLY DOES

Several years ago (I am not sure when) I read an article (although I am not sure where) in which someone (I forget who) was asked to explain why the Harry Potter books were so popular.  (I am a veritable goldmine of information, am I not?)  Whoever-it-was answered, more or less, that the popularity of Harry Potter was due to the appealing concept of wish fulfillment.  Harry, he said, can wave a wand and get whatever he wishes.  This, he said, is what draws the readers.

He was wrong, whoever he was.  He had obviously not read the books, or had not paid much attention; if he had, he’d have known that Harry Potter, despite being a wizard and able to perform magic, is not able to get everything he wishes for.  Magic, of course, just doesn’t work that way.  But aside from this fairly minor quibble, this person whose name I do not remember entirely missed the point.  What makes the imagined universe in which Harry Potter lives so interesting is not the idea that magic can get anyone anything they want.  The draw is the idea that magic can’t fix problems.  What makes the books readable is the premise that even wizards have problems.  Magic itself is a problem.  Even if you have a magic wand, you’re still going to encounter the same troubles that every other human being encounters, and that is the central notion that makes the Harry Potter books work.

We want solidarity.  We don’t even know that we want it, but the truth is that we crave it.  We don’t watch movies about superheroes and superhumans so that we can dream about being as amazing as they are.  Iron Man makes a good story because Tony Stark is a guy with problems; we don’t watch the movie to see him fly, but to be told that we’re not alone, that even a genius playboy billionaire with an incredible suit doesn’t have all the answers.  That’s comforting.  We watch to be reassured that humans are humans.  The X-Men are worth our time because even with their mutations, they still feel fear, love, and pain.  We watch to see normal people deal with life in spite of their superpowers, not to see how having a superpower makes your life easy.  If their powers made their lives easy, we wouldn’t care about them.  Not one bit.

I watch Downton Abbey.  For someone like me, with a profound weakness for all things old-fashioned and romantic, it’s a no-brainer of a show.  But people who usually don’t like that sort of thing watch Downton Abbey too.  Hundreds of them do.  It’s because Julian Fellowes, the mastermind behind the brilliantly written script, has showed us (or reminded us) that people are people.  The rich families of Downton Abbey have everything that money and social status can buy, but that doesn’t make their lives easy.  The servants downstairs don’t have much besides their jobs, but they have troubles, too.  And the troubles are pretty similar to those upstairs. 

Power, wealth, and social status don’t matter.  In a way they do, but they don’t change us in the ways that matter, so they’re still pretty inconsequential.  Whoever wrote the article about Harry Potter was dead wrong.  If Harry’s life became easy when he discovered magic, you’d never have heard about him.  No one would give a flying broomstick about those books.  I got enormously frustrated when I read the Harry Potter series, because I wanted Harry to keep his nose clean, but he didn’t, which is why I kept reading.  Magic didn’t make him a better person.  It didn’t instantly send him to a land of rainbows and sunshine.  It didn’t make school any easier or being bullied less frustrating.  The most important role of magic is to reveal how universal humanity really is. 

I’m a writer.  I consider it important to puzzle out how a series like Harry Potter could have become such a phenomenon.  The answer is fairly simple: Harry, like every good fictional character, turns out to be one of us after all.  Even if he is a wizard.