Satire is pretty much when you take some flaw in human beings, possibly as a society, and expose it through wit and ridicule; for example, one could say that in Harry Potter, the Ministry of Magic is a satrical representation of the governments and bureaucracies of today’s big world powers, in that it is an exaggeration of how our governments deal with issues such as genocide, war, social injustice – all that jazz. Of course, the way Rowling attacks the Ministry isn’t usually as humorous or lighthearted as most satire, but it is still a comically hopeless representation of it.
And the thing is, ignoring creative intent, one could see everything as satire – TV shows, books, poems, maybe even religions! Like, is Twilight satire? It shows these terrible values and ghastly characteristics of people, and seems to advocate them. It shows these shallow, two-dimensional people, and terrible choices and decisions, and yet all of it leads to a supposedly happy ending. BUT if you look at it as satire, you could say that it’s just saying that people are shallow and pathetic like that, and eventually get the kind of ending they expect – one that is empty and worthless in the long run.
But it’s not.
One problem with satire is that often, especially with more complex issues, is that satire can be hard to identify. Who knows if something (like Twilight) is poking fun, or serious? Admittedly in most professional (not Twilight) books you can usually tell what the author is supporting, but it can still get confusing. And worse, if it’s given straightforward that something is satire, it takes away from the expereince somewhat. It’s like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: if you know something is satire, you don’t get that doubt about society and all (like when I was reading 1984 and Brave New World I could not tell how much of it was actually bad things about society until I did some research); you need to judge something without knowing its intent to be able to truly appreciate satire, in my opinion. That was a confusing sentence…
Overall, satire = good. I’d give it 5/5
“What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.” Those words, written by Plutarch and quoted by J.K. Rowling in her 2008 Harvard commencement speech, sum up both the Harry Potter series and Travis Prinzi’s analysis of the best-selling books in Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds. Great imaginative literature places readers between two worlds – the magical world on the page and the world of daily life – and challenges readers to imagine and to act for a better world. Starting with Harry Potter’s great themes, Harry Potter & Imagination< takes readers on a journey through the transformative power of those themes for both the individual and for culture by placing Rowling’s series in its literary, historical, and cultural contexts. Prinzi explores how fairy stories in general, and Harry Potter in specific, are not merely tales that are read to “escape from the real world,” but stories with the power to transform by teaching us to imagine better.
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