Answers We Should Be Giving

To understand fantasy, one must firstly understand its enemy, and its enemy is not ‘reality’ whatever that may be, neither is fantasy someone’s laughably literal-minded idea of what constitutes 'magic'. In short, fantasy’s enemy is the kind of thinking that says ‘what I can see, what I can touch, that’s real’. One only has to think of the Dursleys in the Harry Potter books; there is no spiritual dimension for such people, there is no wonder in God’s creation because they will never accept or see what is not of their making, in their control, or in their direct understanding. And they can never understand the touch and the peace of the divine, or the heroic potential of the inner self. To represent such worlds, the world of the spirit and the psychology, fantasy uses magical worlds, the worlds of magic, of wonder. These are of course, in every way, ‘other’ worlds. We need faith to pass through, as we need faith to understand that there is more to reality than the seductive realm of the Possession; where the absence of the newest model of whatever coveted artifact (cars, food, phones) signifies absence of self in some way, (reducing of identity, of status). This is of course, exactly the world the Dursleys live in: the world of the mundane and material, of expensive cars and neat suburban homes.

Magic in these books, is of course a double edged sword; on the one hand it clearly signifies power and a certain kind of wisdom. Wizards are born, not made, that is clear. But to be a great wizard definitely signifies a mastery of the inner self, not of physical prowess. To produce a patronus, we need a happy memory, so we need to understand what happiness is to us, therefore we need to understand ourselves. Good readers of fantasy will be drawn into wondering what constitutes happiness for them, and about the power of positive thinking; they’ll start thinking about hope in a very sophisticated sense, and that will inevitably bring them to faith. Fantasy maps that journey with a metaphorical pen on a sort of paper called Destiny.
Poor readers of fantasy, on the other hand, will start wondering how cool they would look if they pointed a wooden stick at someone and shot out a silver animal at them.

Both Good and Evil can evil can master the inner self, which is why the Other world is always in peril, in some way a battlefield. Having faith is not the end of the journey; we need to know evil as it whispers in ourselves. I once read that in a fantasy novel, there is no character or place that does not symbolize something within a single human being. Elves and hobbits are two different faces of humankind…so are orcs. We are both Harry and Voldemorte. Stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia is only the first step, but if you can’t; if you get to that point and think “how stupid…how can a country exist inside a wardrobe?”, and toss the book over your shoulder in disgust…well, you haven’t even begun.