J.K. Rowling's Harvard Speech
The Harry Potter Author on the Power of Failure and Imagination
Failure and Imagination: Those were the two key themes of J.K. Rowling's speech to Harvard's 2008 graduates. It seems an odd combination; one might think she would address success and imagination instead. But these two themes are powerful life lessons, and they are also prevalent in the Harry Potter stories. This speech demonstrated how her own life lessons serve as a foundation for her wildly popular novels
The Power of Failure
Why did Ms. Rowling choose the theme of failure?
"Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me." (2008 Harvard Commencement Speech)
This was true for Rowling, and it was true for her hero Harry Potter. For almost four straight books, Harry was becoming entirely the wrong kind of hero: the standard, middle-class, popular male hero. But in the fifth book, Order of the Phoenix, Harry fails miserably. His hero-complex is shattered when it motivates him to act on faulty information and results in the death of his own godfather. For the next two books, he'd learn to be exactly who he was: a young man with a tremendous capacity to love.
The Power of Imagination
Of imagination, Ms. Rowling said:
"We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better." (2008 Harvard Commencement Speech)
It takes creative heroes to change the world. There is nothing creative about changing the world through brute force. In fact, doing so will ensure that one will become like one's own enemy in the end. Creative heroes are self-sacrificial heroes, not heroes with bigger and better weapons. Harry does not defeat Voldemort with a killing curse; he does so by willingly sacrificing himself. The same can be said of other great imaginative tales: Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Gandalf and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings.
The Power of the Fairy Tale
Ms. Rowling is correct that we do not need "magic" to change the world. But entering the magic realm of the fairy tale, even as adults, reminds readers that there is power in love, that "the world is wild" (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter 4), and that there is room for creative action for the good.
Ms. Rowling gave stirring and challenging words to the Harvard grads, but she also reminded us all, in subtle fashion, of why we love tales like Harry Potter. They contain transformative power for the individual reader; and transformed individuals can creatively change the world.
