J.K. Rowling’s fictional story about dualism and prejudice in the wizarding world is clearly based on the apocalyptic myth of the Book of Revelation. Rowling’s use of a third-person limited narrative voice produces an effect similar to the experience of reading the Book of Revelation. Restricting the audience’s knowledge to Harry’s experiences conveys the same feeling of tunnel vision evoked by John of Patmos’s first-person account in the Book of Revelation. In the traditional story, the prophet never questions the authenticity of his vision, because he receives it from God, the omnipotent divine authority. Furthermore, since the story is told in first person, readers have no reason to doubt John of Patmos when he insists he “received and passed on the Truth as total, complete and forever the same” (Quinby, Millennial Seduction 28). Yet Harry is an often-clueless teenage boy. Rowling limits her narration to Harry’s point of view, but also intentionally and repeatedly demonstrates to the reader that Harry is an unreliable narrator. Using an unreliable narrator undermines the traditional biblical dualism between the prophet of Christ and the false witness of the Anti-Christ.
In addition, by preventing the audience from trusting the narrator and/or prophet, postmodern apocalyptic authors challenge two elements of the traditional apocalyptic narrative: divine authority and receiver of the revelation. If the audience has reason to mistrust the prophet’s reliability or knowledge, is the prophet himself is defective? Or is the divine figure issuing the revelation not really omnipotent after all? In Harry Potter, the answer is a little bit of both. At the end of every book, a conversation takes place between Harry and Dumbledore, the headmaster of Harry’s school. Without fail, Dumbledore divulges vital information that finally reveals the bigger picture behind Harry’s personal experiences throughout the school year. After the first few books, the annual repetition of this scene is laughably predictable. The reasonable assumption, therefore, that Harry never knows all of the facts requires readers to doubt the validity, or at least the scope, of any “truth” Harry presents as certain and complete. That Rowling effectively demands this skepticism from the reader stands in stark contrast to the apocalyptic ideal of a single Truth revealed to John at Patmos and set down in the Book of Revelation.
According to Quinby, “Apocalypse presents itself as the revelation of absolute Truth” (Anti-Apocalypse 66). By asserting that there is only one Truth and only one legitimate moral hierarchy, the Book of Revelation established “the paradigm of so much aesthetic theory that privileges monological originality over dialogical richness” (Quinby, Millennial Seduction 26). Bauckham reinforces this conclusion in a section titled “Revelation’s Relevance Today:” “Revelation is overwhelmingly concerned with the truth of God [emphasis Bauckham]. So we should not construe the notion of different imaginative ways of perceiving the world in the vulgar postmodern way that reduces all significant truth to matters of personal preference and ends in nihilism” (160).
Between absolute Truth and vulgar nihilism are Harry’s annual conversations with Dumbledore, which demonstrate the anti-apocalyptic argument that “truth itself is dialogical…attained and revealed through communication with the thoughts of others” (Quinby, Millennial Seduction 26). Such an understanding of truth is antithetical to “apocalyptic knowledge claims privileging certainty, abstraction, and reductive generalization” (Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse 67). Absolute, apocalyptic Truth even claims the power of life and death: “it is the truth of God, to which the Lamb and the martyrs have witnessed, which here [19:20] finally prevails over those who would not be won to it, condemning them to perish with their lies” (Bauckham 106).
To challenge this apocalyptic view of absolute Truth and omnipotent deity, authors of postmodern apocalyptic fiction translate the traditional deity figure into secular terms by humanizing the deity (Rosen xxiii). Some writers create more than one deity, splitting the traits of the traditional Judeo-Christian God among different characters (Rosen xxiii). Rowling, in contrast, uses the same technique Rosen describes in her analysis of Alan Moore’s work, that is, she “conflates the God/Devil binary structure of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm in order to represent a far more shaded morality than Revelation allows” (Rosen 8). In the first four books of the series, Dumbledore is portrayed as powerful, infallible, and all-knowing. Harry (and therefore the audience) knows Dumbledore as the greatest sorcerer in the world, whose awesome “powers rival those of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named [Voldemort] at the height of his strength” (Chamber of Secrets 17). When Voldemort returns at the end of the fourth book, Harry fully expects Dumbledore to be the savior of the wizarding world, the only one who possesses the incredible strength and skill necessary to defeat Voldemort.
Throughout the fifth, six, and seventh books, this vision of Dumbledore is systematically destroyed. Harry gradually loses faith in Dumbledore as he learns about the more unsavory details of his past. In their annual chat at the end of the fifth book, Harry blames Dumbledore for Sirius’s death, and Dumbledore admits to making “an old man’s mistakes…I had fallen into the trap I had foreseen, that I had told myself I could avoid, that I must avoid” (OotP 838). In this scene, not only must Harry accept the fact that the great Dumbledore’s plans were deeply flawed, but he also realizes that it is his task to defeat Voldemort. For the first time, Dumbledore is neither all-knowing nor all-powerful. In the sixth book, Harry watches Dumbledore die, leaving no doubt about his mentor’s mortality (Half-Blood Prince 595-596). The illusion of Dumbledore’s god-like invincibility is shattered.
In the seventh book, Dumbledore takes on the qualities of a Devil or Antichrist figure. It is revealed that in his youth, Dumbledore was ambitious, power hungry, single-minded, and above all, committed to “cleansing” the world of Muggles and Muggle-borns – the very traits Voldemort is famous for (Deathly Hallows ch. 18). At first, Harry refuses to believe Dumbledore could ever be anything but “the embodiment of goodness and wisdom,” he had known, but eventually the evidence against Dumbledore is overwhelming (DH 360). Harry, seeing the world in terms of moral absolutes, reacts by starting to hate Dumbledore. Dumbledore’s fall from grace, his transformation from God to Devil, is complete; Harry’s feelings about him could not be more different than the respect and adoration he felt in the first four books.
Harry admits to himself, “He had thought he knew Dumbledore quite well, but ever since reading [Dumbledore’s] obituary he had been forced to recognize that he had barely known him at all” (Deathly Hallows 21). As the deity figure, Dumbledore’s resistance to classification within a binary moral paradigm is an example of “instability in the religious roles in general [that] suggests the kind of uncertainty about identity which is part of the postmodern variation of the apocalyptic myth” (Rosen 129). When an author creates characters who are not easily divided by “the partition between the chosen and the doomed” he or she takes an important step towards undermining the totalistic “binary structure” and “normative morality” contained in the traditional myth of the saved vs. the damned (Quinby, Millennial Seduction 3, 37).
In the Book of Revelation, there’s nothing ambiguous about the end of the world (except, perhaps, when it will come to pass), which is the third narrative element of apocalypse. No detail, from the grotesque punishments that will befall the damned, to the heavenly reward waiting for those who are saved, is spared. The water turns to blood, most of humanity perishes, and there’s an epic battle at Armageddon. In postmodern apocalyptic fiction, in contrast, “the apocalyptic ‘world’ which is destroyed can also be flexibly interpreted” (Rosen xxii). Figurative worlds include specific communities, individuals, or even an individual mind (Rosen xxii). Again, Rowling’s apocalypse is somewhat of a combination of the two; there are elements of both individual and communal destruction in the last book of the Harry Potter series.
Hogwarts, Harry’s school and the center of the wizarding community (second only to its government, the Ministry of Magic), is attacked, and just before Harry learns that he will have to sacrifice himself, he sees that “the situation within the castle had deteriorated severely: The walls and ceiling were shaking worse than ever; dust filled the air, and through the nearest window Harry saw bursts of red and green light so close to the foot of the castle that he knew the Death Eaters [the attacking army] must be very near to entering the place” (DH 626). The communal starts to become more personal when Harry witnesses Ron’s brother being killed. Harry thinks to himself, “The world had ended, so why had the battle not ceased, the castle fallen silent in horror, and every combatant laid down their arms? [emphasis added]” (DH 638). The Death Eaters do breach the walls of the castle, the death toll mounts, and it becomes clear the students and teachers defending the school have no hope of victory.
Finally, in the midst of this communal destruction is one of the most moving passages of the series, when Harry realizes he must sacrifice himself to save the rest of the wizarding world. “Terror washed over him as he lay on the floor, with that funeral drum pounding inside him… It was over, he knew it, and all that was left was the thing itself: dying” (DH 692). Following the apocalyptic narrative, the end of the world is necessary before Harry and the rest of the wizarding world can achieve transcendence and reach New Jerusalem. The combination of Harry’s personal demise and the communal destruction of Hogwarts foreshadows Harry’s personal evolution beyond a binary worldview and the wizarding world’s transcendence beyond the Gryffindor-Slytherin dichotomy.
The fourth element of the apocalypse is judgment, a particularly difficult element for postmodern writers to adapt, due to “postmodernism’s refusal to privilege one culture or point of view over another” (Rosen xxiv). Rosen emphasizes that “what we lose when the apocalyptic paradigm is removed as a sense-making structure is a clear sense of good and evil, as well as the corresponding sense of ourselves as a member of one of those groups. In such a universe, the fundamental apocalyptic notion of judgment cannot exist” (163). In Harry Potter, like the Book of Revelation, one side wins, and one side loses. Is Rowling merely perpetuating traditional apocalypticism by celebrating the superiority of good, tolerant people, and condemning bad, prejudiced people? According to Derrida, “to demystify or, if you prefer, to deconstruct apocalyptic discourse itself,” the following are essential: “the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil, for elucidation, for critique and truth, but for a truth that at the same time keeps within itself some apocalyptic desire, this time as desire for clarity and revelation” (Derrida 51).
J.K. Rowling admits that in her story, “undeniably, morals are drawn” (Grossman 2). But she avoids the dualism of the original myth by creating morally ambiguous characters on both sides of the war between Harry and Voldemort. She creates a spectrum of good and evil, instead of two separate and opposing groups, and does not claim to offer any kind of permanent truth about the nature of good and evil. Her judgments are not cross-cultural or universal, unlike in the Book of Revelation, where there is no escape from a final judgment by an all-knowing God. In short, Rowling offers a combination of the five traditional essential elements of apocalypse and a postmodern rejection of metanarratives of prejudice to create an alternative moral system that is not bound by dualistic extremes, but, rather, transcendence of apocalyptic morality. The next section provides examples of the limits of dualism in Harry’s world, and his eventual transcendence to accepting an alternative worldview and arrival in New Jerusalem.
