In Defense of Harry

Book critics may not admit it, but the Harry Potter series has plenty to offer adults.

By Kriston Capps

Overheard at the water cooler:

“And my kid just can’t wait! She’s re-reading Dæmonomania before the midnight party tonight.”

“Yeah, kids just eat up that intertexuality. If it weren’t for these Ægypt books, mine would never be reading Góngora.”

“You know, you can tell them all you want that they’d really love the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, but if they don’t come to it on their own, they’ll just think it’s a lame-o dad text.”

“Hey, whatever it takes to get them to turn off Apotheosis of the Earth and read. You know? How much Karel Husa can one kid listen to?”

Okay—that’s a conversation that exceedingly few people had this morning. But it’s the sort of high-brow intellectual exchange that Ron Charles wishes adults were having. Not necessarily about John Crowley’s sophisticated Ægypt books, but maybe something along those lines—anything, really, other than Harry Potter. If Charles’s recent column about the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows craze is any indication, The Washington Post Book World’s senior editor would rather that the adults left the children’s books well enough alone.

Charles admits to reading up to book four (The Goblet of Fire) before both he and his daughter lost interest and gave up. He seems to have picked up on the superficial draw, peppering his essay with quirky names and details pulled straight from the text. He doesn’t discuss the classic British prep school setting, though—the charming, essentially English backdrop that’s surely a draw for lads and lasses across the pond. But never mind all that. What Charles fails to appreciate isn’t in the details—it’s in how the texts work.

No, the Harry Potter novels aren’t unique, sandwiched as they are between the crowded (and co-mingled) fantasy and children’s lit shelves. Nevertheless, their closest narrative cousins aren’t, in fact, fantastical novels like Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy—both written by wonderful authors who Charles name-checks as Potter alternatives. Instead, the Potter books belong to a different category altogether: pulp soap opera.

As even Charles knows, every episode finds our hero, Potter, traveling the arc from ignominy at 4 Privet Drive to victory at the Hogwarts campus. The stories follow a simple template. What happens therein never has much bearing on Potter himself: The characters who populate this universe are flat. This is an asset, actually. Readers recognize Severus Snape not because he’s extraordinarily developed, but because he’s an archetype; readers recall that skinny, sullen Goth kid who ate lunch under the stairs and got picked on by kids who were more attractive, more charismatic, and more mean.

What readers wonder is where Snape’s loyalties lie—with Dumbledore or with He Who Must Not Be Named? And to suss out the Potions professor’s motivations, readers must unravel J.K. Rowling’s rich puzzle. Whatever else she doesn’t accomplish with dialogue and characterization, she gets this part right. Seemingly contradictory bits of evidence are stashed throughout all six novels, and to make sense of them readers must do the selective editing that young Potter is unable to do (lacking in maturity and, of course, the privileged perspective of the reader).

It’s this puzzle that brings the adults to the table. Deciding on Snape, the crucial character on whom seemingly everything rides, requires a reader to build a case from Rowling’s clues. Moreover, with the turn of events that concludes Half-Blood Prince, readers must come to an opinion on Dumbledore’s competence before they can arrive at an answer on Snape. (And this intrigue doesn’t even touch upon the potential parallel hero, underdog Neville Longbottom, who might turn out to have been the Chosen One all along.)

Ultimately, whether Snape turns out to have been a devious double-agent planted by a plotting, Cheney-esque Voldemort, a hero who hid in the open, or something in between, the solution won’t be nearly as satisfying as the puzzle. I, for example, will distrust you automatically if you say that you’ve read the same books as I have and yet believe, in all honesty, that Snape is an actively enrolled Death Eater; even if I’m proven wrong, I’ll still cast a wary eye your way. This is what makes the communal reading spirit that Rowling has summoned so marvelous: Everyone is rooting rather for his own interpretation than for the hero we know will win in the end.

On the millions of copies that will be purchased at midnight by readers seeking the final say, Charles observes: “There’s something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private.” Too true. Slicing an apple affords none of the benefits of peeling an orange.

But his argument has a tinge of disingenuousness to it. After all, he asks, “How could the ever-expanding popularity of Harry Potter take place during such an unprecedented decline in the number of Americans reading fiction?” Why should he care? Charles privileges a private, reader/author relationship—but then laments that it isn’t shared by all. He strenuously objects to the thing that’s popular, but not to popularity on principle.

It does sound a lot like a high-school narrative—the sort you shouldn’t want to read.

Kriston Capps is a Washington, D.C.-based arts writer. He blogs at Grammar Police.

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