As I said, that's all the automatic business, but aside from the sheer mechanics of tying up the plot, what does this all mean? Over the last few weeks, journalists have been pouring over the last decade of Pottermania, deciding that it really didn't permanently change adolescent reading habits as much as many had hoped. They have also discovered, most tellingly, that much interest among younger readers dropped off after the first three books--which are, after all, the shortest, least grim, and most self-contained stories in the series.
Even allowing for all this hedging, though, the books do seem to have created a sizable cult. In my own lifetime, I think only the world of Star Trek has achieved this level of widespread aesthetic communion, but unlike the Star Trek universe, which stretches across centuries and lightyears, the world of Harry Potter remains within very distinct boundaries of time and space. If Star Trek in all its incarnations captured for its adherents a particular vision of the perfect society, the Potter novels, even with all their shadow governmental agencies and extended backstories, ultimately trace the transit of a single life. Somehow, the books that relate that life have resonated with readers, particularly with the generation of readers who have grown up with them since the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997. The depth of that resonance should make us wonder where it comes from.In that regard, the most useful comparison to Harry Potter may not be any of the members of the United Federation of Planets, but Buffy Anne Summers, more popularly known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from the film (1992) and television series (1997-2003) that bore that name. I'm not sure if anyone has ever noted it before, but Harry and Buffy are almost the same age. Based on information given in J. K. Rowling's books and the Joss Whedon-supervised television series, Harry was born 31 July 1980, and Buffy was born less than six months later, on 19 January 1981. Although Buffy is younger than Harry, she seems older, in part because her story was told earlier, and in part because the key events in her life happen at later ages than those in Harry's. As every loyal reader knows, Rowling's novels tell the story of Harry's development from age 11 to age 17. By contrast, the core of Buffy's story covers an almost exactly later period, from age 16 to age 22.
In other words, Rowling's last two Potter novels cover the same period as the first two seasons of Whedon's television series, both in terms of historical chronology and in terms of their protagonists' ages. Yes, I know both protagonists are fictional, but somehow I find it oddly fitting that in the spring of 1997, just about a month before Harry Potter witnessed Dumbledore's tragic death at Hogwarts, Buffy Summers herself died (for the first of three recorded times) in the caves under the Hellmouth-ridden town of Sunnydale.The similarities between the two heroes are fascinating--both created by authors writing across gender lines, both seconded by clever witches who made it cool for girls to be bookworms, etc.--but it's that age difference that I think is probably most telling. In a sense, Buffy's story begins when Harry's ends. Harry Potter's story is a story of adolescence. It almost functions as the English equivalent of many of the early Marvel comics (Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men), asking the question: what would you do with powers if you had them? The strongest attraction of such fantasies always lies in their underlying emotional reality. This is what adolescence feels like to the vast middle of teenagers, neither under- nor over-privileged, in a relatively affluent society. If fairy tales offer younger children fantasies of alternative households and parents, superhero stories offer adolescents fantasies of alternative talents and fates: this is what I'm really like, the consumer thinks, I'm just killing time while I wait to fulfill my destiny. Rowling is obviously keenly aware of this and has made her characters' choices of eventual vocations within the magical world a minor but compelling subplot in her series. In the early books, the characters are just having fun with the discovery that they can do magic. As they advance though their education, however, the magic moves beyond mere play, and they begin asking: What do I want to do with this ability?
If Harry's story details a process of adolescent discovery, Buffy's traces her slow acceptance of adult responsibility. One of the most reiterated situations in Buffy's story is her refusal to take on the duties that come with her unique position as Slayer.
From her initial awareness of her powers and move to a second high school at age 16, through her running away from home at age 17, to the aftermath of her unwilling resurrection from the dead at age 20, right down to her eventual comfort with her role as counselor, leader, and teacher at age 22. Buffy's path to full adulthood is persistently stymied by a longing to be "normal." She regularly dreams of what it would be like not to be special, not to have powers, not to have a unique destiny. She longs for the sense of play that Harry left behind around the time of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, just as he longs for the clear sense of purpose that she gained around the time that she graduated from high school.Yet even though these two stories focus on different parts of growing up, they share a common historical grounding. There have been repeated attempts to determine the historical referents for the major events in Rowling's world--from 1930s homegrown fascism, to the rise of Thatcherism, to Tony Blair's role in the war on terror--but the genius of Rowling's creation is that this world is not merely a one-for-one allegory for ours but rather comprises its own internally consistent alternate reality. To my knowledge, there have been no analogous attempts to find historical referents for Buffy's Sunnydale, but even without a specific historical peg on which to hang a sociopolitical analogy, there is always the most accidental thing that the two heroes have in common: their birthdates. Both grew up in the world of the 1980s and 1990s, and their careers and separate paths through adolescence and young adulthood suggest that they are shaped by a shared generational psychology that is apparently transatlantic rather than national in origin.
As generational heroes, Harry and Buffy most clearly stand apart from the analogous characters who preceded them in popular culture by how they regard authority. In Buffy's case, this attitude is perhaps not so striking. In western society, we expect stories of the late high school and college years to entail a certain amount of vague "rebellion." But as parents who have read Harry's adventures to pre-teen children will tell you, it is striking how many rules Hogwarts students break in Rowling's books. When Dorothy Gale broke rules, there was always a consequence. Tom Swift, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys would never even have dreamt of breaking a rule to reach their goals. From their very first adventure, however, Harry, Ron, and Hermione have to break rules, to undermine the authority of nearly every adult around them (up to and including Albus Dumbledore) in order to achieve a satisfactory conclusion. This is not to say that they don't get in trouble for breaking some rules. It would be more accurate to say that one of the most important skills that Harry and his friends acquire over the series is learning which rules you should break and which rules you shouldn't. Unlike earlier adolescent heroes, the students of Hogwarts are not being taught to conform by their adventures.
They are not being taught to rebel either, though, and neither are Buffy and her friends. Rebellion and isolation inevitably lead to bad results, as nearly all of Whedon's characters realize during their first year of college.
The appropriate response to oppressive, blind, even destructive conformity for both sets of heroes is not pure independence but the building of new societies: the creation of the armed resistance group Dumbledore's Army in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; the student-led counterattack at Sunnydale High's 1999 graduation ceremony, which ends up being a dry-run for the slayer army that Buffy trains in the last season of the television series and after. The rules cannot be trusted, and neither can the adults who made or enforce them. You can listen to these adults, you can learn from them, but ultimately you have to make your own world from the pieces that they leave you.This ambivalence toward adults and what they might have to offer adolescents by way of example is the most compelling aspect of the two series' shared emotional world. Barring anything we might learn Saturday morning from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, with the exception of saintly Albus Dumbledore, no adult in either series can be fully trusted. Politicians and parents prove consistently unreliable, but even the characters' most valued mentors lose their tempers, drink to excess, and can practice unthinking cruelty unless prevented from doing so by the stories' more responsible adolescents.
One episode from the third season of Buffy, entitled "Band Candy," showed this perhaps better than any other, when enchanted chocolate made the teachers and parents of Sunnydale revert to their own high school years. If anything, they acted worse than the members of Buffy's generation, with Buffy's usually buttoned-down mentor Rupert Giles being the worst offender of the lot. He slacked off on his Watcher duties, smoked marijuana and had sex with Buffy's mother, stripped down to his tshirt, and began inflicting casual violence and vandalism any chance he could get. The voice of order had reverted to his secret origin: a sneering punk who was only interested in the quickest kicks.Sirius Black serves as a similarly ambivalent mentor for Harry Potter. In emphasizing that Black was wrongfully imprisoned is Azkaban for over a decade, many readers ignore the hints that he was something of a juvenile delinquent before he got in there: a darkly born, flying motorcycle-riding, unregistered Animagus who played a prank on Severus Snape during their own time at Hogwarts that almost got his classmate killed.
Along with his friends (including Harry's father James), he felt that the rules did not apply to him, and that the magical world was made for his amusement. At least once, he seriously considers killing Peter Pettigrew, the man responsible for his imprisonment, in cold blood, and it is only the more responsible Harry who can talk him out of it. Both Giles and Black have a great deal to offer as mentors, but part of their mentees' maturation requires that they learn to do as they say and not always as they do.Around the time that both Harry and Buffy were born, there was a considerable vogue for wearing tiny buttons with ironic messages. Like many other subcultural tics of the late 1970s and early 1980s, these buttons were both an inheritance from and a refutation of the counterculture of the 1960s. To be precise, the buttons were a continuation of the proudly declared politics of that earlier era, but their ironic messages were clear signs of the more alienated, less forthright era close at hand. My favorite button from this period you can still see around, although I sometimes wonder how many people got the joke. It bore only two words: QUESTION AUTHORITY. When I wore it, I was always surprised how many people read it as if it was a straightahead hippie message. Yeah, man, they thought it meant, don't let the establishment get away with anything, man. When I bought it, though, I had assumed that the first thing people were supposed to notice about the button was that it bore a direct order. Who's telling me to question authority, I thought it meant, and why should I do what they say?
I can't know for sure, but my sense is that if you were born after 1980, you don't need to have the irony of that button explained to you. The most lasting children's fantasies of the 1960s, stories like the film version of Mary Poppins and Roald Dahl's original novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, suggest that all a displaced child needs is to be taken under the wing of nice countercultural types and everything will turn out fine. Even their families will eventually get turned on. But the story changes once the countercultural types become the parents: then rebellion itself can become authority and even a form of legacy. Once you buy your five-year-old a tshirt with an anarchy symbol on it, cultural radicalism is now coexisting side by side with psychological conformity. That kind of unresolvable contradiction is exactly the sort of condition that is ripe for the creation of new pop myths, not just the ones I've traced in Harry's and Buffy's stories but those in a number of other post-1980 books, films, and TV series too, perhaps most arrestingly in Wes Craven's original Nightmare on Elm Street and Richard Kelly's film Donnie Darko.
Joss Whedon and others are currently writing a series for Dark House Comics that is frankly labelled Buffy: Season 8, but for me, the final episode of the TV series four years ago was the only ending I needed. J. K. Rowling has built up enough good will with me that I trust that her seventh book will round out her protagonist's story just as well, even if I'm wrong and he doesn't definitively die. As time goes on, it will be interesting to see if the stories of these characters prove powerful for new readers or simply remain touchstones for the generation that grew up with them. From all reports, the currently rising generation is less worried about having an embarrassing ex-hippie or ex-punk for a parent than they are about the rise of a form of blank conformism that is very different from the kind that ruled during the 1950s. Somewhere right now, someone is glimpsing precisely how different the conformity of our own time is from that of the earlier era. If we're very lucky, they'll use that sense of difference as the cornerstone of a brand new, fully imaginary world, one that finally helps us to clearly see what's going on in our own.
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