Rosen’s analysis of apocalyptic fiction focuses exclusively on the ways in which various secular, postmodern authors remove the apocalyptic narrative from its theological setting and still incorporate the five essential elements of apocalypse: divine authority, receiver of a prophecy, the end of the world, Judgment day, and transcendence; or, in her words, “the basic three themes of judgment, catastrophe, and renewal, but also the more specific motifs of deity and New Jerusalem” (Rosen xxi-xxii). In the next section, I examine how J.K. Rowling’s adaptation fits the narrative criteria of the genre Rosen presents as postmodern apocalyptic literature. When applied to the Harry Potter series, Rosen’s thesis proves fundamentally sound, in that the series both retains the traditional apocalyptic narrative structure and subverts the dualistic apocalyptic paradigm. Even so, including Harry Potter in the postmodern apocalyptic fiction genre requires first proposing an extension of Rosen’s argument beyond the purely secular texts she analyzes in Apocalyptic Transformation.
John Granger, a self-identified “traditional Christian” who home-schools his seven children “to keep them on course with biblical values and virtue,” wrote Looking for God in Harry Potter to explore how the story’s formulas, themes, and symbols reveal “a profoundly Christian meaning at the core of the series” (Granger, Looking 215, xix). While Granger’s is only one of many such analyses produced by Christian fans of the series, his work is thorough, meticulously researched, easily understood by readers without a Christian background, and covers each of the Harry Potter books extensively. If Granger goes too far in his claim that “The gospel has rarely, if ever, been smuggled into the heart and mind of readers so successfully and profoundly” (Looking 108), his evidence in Looking for God in Harry Potter and several other books is still persuasive enough to make a strong case that the series is “undeniably Christian, that is, loaded with specific Christian symbolism and meaning from the author’s faith and literary traditions” (Granger, Lectures 115). Minister John Killinger expresses a similar belief, that Harry Potter “is not only dependent on the Christian understanding of life and the universe, but actually grows out of that understanding and would have been unthinkable without it” [Killinger’s emphasis] (11).
Harry Potter, with its heavy Christian symbolism and obvious connections to the New Testament, can hardly be called a secular story; at the same time, without explicitly mentioning God or other theological elements, can it really be considered a religious story? Certainly, it’s far from a fundamentalist retelling of Revelation like that of the Left Behind series, sixteen best-selling novels written by Baptist pastor Tim LaHaye and writer Jerry Jenkins about the Second Coming of Christ. Nevertheless, fantasy series like the Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings have long been accepted as staples of Christian literature. (Abanes explains Harry Potter is different “most obviously because the fantasy tales of Tolkien and Lewis fall within the category of mythopoetic literature, meaning they take place in worlds disassociated from the real world in which we live,” whereas Rowling’s world is too close to reality for its portrayal of magic to be “safe” for Christian children (230). This argument falls somewhat flat when one remembers that the easiest way to get to Narnia is through the back of a very real, everyday wardrobe.) In my view, by virtue of the major plot elements Harry Potter shares with the Book of Revelation and the alternative moral lesson Rowling uses that plot to teach, the series not only fulfills the criteria Rosen sets for the postmodern apocalyptic fiction genre, but extends them beyond the religious/secular literature binary.
