In Defense of Harry
Book critics may not admit it, but the Harry Potter series has plenty to offer adults.By Kriston Capps
July 20, 2007
Book critics may not admit it, but the Harry Potter series has plenty to offer adults.
By Kriston Capps
Friday July 20, 2007
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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Comments
As I read your argument, you’re saying that we should be indifferent to whether adults are all reading J.K. Rowling or John Crowley or whatever else. I’m not sure you really make the case, however.
What you mostly justify is a way of reading in which we all read a single text that is open to multiple interpretations, and then “root for our own interpretation” of that text. If we are all able to do this with a single text, then maybe this will facilitate communication through a common culture and give us a pleasant sense of community, or maybe it has some sort of ethico-political significance.
I’ll buy that. But this isn’t contrary to the position of “objecting to the thing that’s popular, but not to popularity on principle.” That is, I can grant you that having one book be really popular may have some inherent benefits because it produces a “communal reading spirit”. But I can still argue that those benefits would be enhanced if we were all reading a different, better book.
— Chiasmus - Jul 21, 02:13 PM - #TAPPED (The American Prospect) blog is a cowardly excuse for a blog. Those twats have apparantly banned my comments because they can’t disprove them. If anyone here values freedom of expression, post comments on TAPPED and tell them what twats they are for banning someone they can’t disprove. I have heard the “blog is like someone’s house” analogy in that you can ban anyone you want as you can tell anyone in your house to leave, but there is a difference between banning someone for being a dick and banning someone for consistently saying things that they don’t want to hear yet can’t disprove because they’re the facts, like them or not. I’ve said the truth about 9/11 being a false flag operation many times on many blogs and have yet to be banned by anyone but TAPPED. I know a lot of people like to pretend that 9/11 happened the way the official myth has it, but nevertheless they haven’t banned me. And a big blog like TAPPED? That even has its own magazine in print? Utterly gutless. Those cowards are either willingly or unknowingly part of the cover-up, helping out the mass murderers who have the blood of 3,000 Americans on their hands. No wonder their blog’s motto is “Liberal Intelligence”. They must be the liberal wing of the intelligence community. They’re accessories-after-the-fact to mass murder. Cowardly pieces of shit who ban people instead of trying to debate because they can’t defend the indefensible. To hell with TAPPED.
— Realist - Jul 21, 04:11 PM - #Dear “Realist”,
As TAP’s web intern, I want to thank you for giving the blog a new byline: “TAPPED: Liberal Intelligence and Accessories-After-The-Fact to Mass Murder.”
As to the fact that comments were disabled for Friday’s post, that was a technical problem: No one was able to make comments, not even people in the TAP office.
What this has to do with Harry Potter, I’m not entirely sure.
— Steven - Jul 21, 10:45 PM - #“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.”
Resemble that remark much, bunky?
— Morty - Jul 22, 08:16 PM - #Nice argument. One correction, though, from this HP nerd: Neville could never have been the chosen one after that fateful night when Voldemort tried to kill Harry, because as Dumbledore reveals, Voldemort chose Harry, and that’s essentially the only thing that made him the chosen one after all.
— Bradley - Jul 26, 02:06 PM - #Having just read John Charles’ column, one has to wonder, what he did to get his 10 year old to want to stop listening to Harry Potter? Did he forget that reading to a child is a shared performance, between author & reader? Did he start to read with an academic snideness?
I think that Charles forgets that in contemplating the Wester Canon, he’s looking back on hundreds of years of literature built up year by year by best-sellers. Our great books are, after all, the ones that won, the ones that history remembered. Pulp/tripe/trash has always been part of the literary equation, and has generally been as equally forgotten. If Charles would stop to think of who it is who could afford to read such classics in the past, one would think of someone with a great deal of idle time and a great deal of money.
I’ve read more than my share of classics, and continue to read voraciously. But I will always argue that reading is a habit, and that developing the habit, from your parent’s knee, or from Harry Potter, is the key element.
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