by Smasha on Sat Jan 15, 2011 3:59 am
This is all off the top of my head.
The biggest problem is in the message repeated several times to the protagonist. If you try to follow your dream, the whole world will help you reach it, even when it doesn't seem like it. This message is very much not true. It isn't true that nature or the world has some agency that will help you out, and nor is it true that the actual agents - people and their societies - will necessarily help you. Worse, the message is insulting, and obscures a much more valuable insight. For a moment, think of all the people who had their lives cut short because they were following their dreams. Think of all those dreamers who, for decades, were oppressed through violence and stigma by people who were aware of the dream and who were directly trying to sabotage it. Think of all those people who try hard to achieve their dreams only to fail due to dumb chance. People and nature will not necessarily reach out to help you. A much more useful spiritual message about dreams is that you should try to reach your dream no matter what, even though you probably won't actually reach it. But this message is obscured by The Alchemist. People get fixated on the bold cosmological claims - nature has an agency and wants to see success from the people who are brave enough to follow their dreams.
Maybe the message about nature helping dreamers is itself an allegory for some other message. The message pointed at by the allegory is that you should pursue your dreams as if the world will help you out. This might obscure less the better message, the message that you should pursue your dreams even though you probably won't achieve them. But still, this allegorical approach cannot be taken. The new message remains insulting to all those people who couldn't realize their dream despite much hope and effort. Worse, it makes the story of The Alchemist irrelevant. What reason do we have for thinking that actual dreamers are anything like the characters in the story, if we reject any cosmic agents willing to help us? What reason do we have for believing we should try to reach our dreams as much as we would if there really was cosmic help for us? There is a good answer to this question, but it isn't found anywhere in The Alchemist.
The second biggest problem is all the superstition. The superstitious characters in the story are always the wise ones, who offer the best advice to the protagonist. Their wisdom and their superstition are presented as being tightly related, as maybe even the same thing. This is far from what the real world is like. While there are lots of wise people who are superstitious, and the relationship between superstition and wisdom might even be causal in an important sense, the average superstitious person is not wise, and looking at the superstitiousness of a person does not provide you with a good way of predicting how wise the person is. The novel glamorizes superstition in a way that is difficult to justify, not even in terms of the need to draw in readers or the need for sensationalism. That is, the glamorization of superstition is hard to justify the same way we do the glamorization of depravity and violence in many books. The superstition isn't just colour to keep us interested in the story; it is part and parcel of what the book is trying to say to us.
The protagonist is on a quest for treasure he thinks is at the pyramids. Despite what he thought for most of the story, the treasure isn't there. At the pyramids, the protagonist gets robbed by some guys. One of the robbers reveals he had a dream about a treasure buried in a specific place in a faraway land, which the protagonist recognizes as the very place he used to tend sheep. The implication is that if the robber followed his dream, he would have got the treasure, but since he did not, the dream and treasure was made available to the protagonist instead. This suggests one or more startlingly immoral beliefs and values. First, dream-following is a zero-sum game, or is at least competitive. You only win your dream because someone else lost his or hers; if you win a dream, there is one less available for other people to win. Second, people who don't follow their dreams are violent and immoral - in this case resorting to robbing.
The protagonist seeks a treasure of gold, strangely materialistic for a text that is supposed to offer spiritual insight. The gold is perhaps meant allegorically. The use of valuable metals as a stand-in for spiritual insight goes way back; it is in Plato's Phaedo and Republic, for instance. But it isn't really clear what spiritual insight the gold stands in place for, or why gold is the best stand-in for it. Keep in mind that the gold remains the dream of the protagonist even after he learns how to call on nature to help him, and how to magically communicate with his love over huge distances. Many readers will be left with an incomplete message, or an incorrect message: "whatever it is you desire, be it materialistic or shallow, this book will help you get it." But spiritual insight needs to go deeper than that. It cannot bottom out on a way of achieving riches or fame or whatever. In spiritual insight, you are supposed to transcend your old desires. You are supposed to scrutinize them, not take them for granted. What you desire matters, not just what spiritual tools you have gained in order to reach what you desire.
A big, though maybe idiosyncratic, reason I have for discouraging people from reading The Alchemist is that its suggestion that meaning is found everywhere and that seeming-coincidences are actually fated encourages people to think in a way that, on a whole, our society does to excess. We need to learn to accept coincidence, or we will be prone to exploitation by people who provide false but convenient answers. Some people seek so hard for meaning they get hung up on questions with no answers or ruminate excessively, and this sort of thing can lead to psychopathology. Some people reject natural science since they don't want to part with all their friends in nature, the anima. Many problems are only solved by going to the small-picture, by forsaking questions of how the world as a whole works or how things are connected, and instead by focusing on context-less details.
