Too Much To Dream

Potted Author follies

There is so much that is wrong with this criticism of the Harry Potter novels by A.S. Byatt that I don't know where to begin. Well actually, I do -- with the title: "Harry Potter and the Childish Adult." I do realize that most articles that appear in the pro news media have their titles chosen by someone other than the author, but this time the title at least reflects the central thesis of the piece, which is that tired, flabby notion that the reading of so-called "childrens' books" by those over the age of eighteen is supposedly indicative of some sort of immaturity of outlook, or merely an assuaging of some creature called the "child within."

I would like to state here and now that I do not believe that the onset of adulthood means that the child one was the day before one's eighteenth birthday (or whatever age one's society decides one becomes an adult) is somehow destroyed or subsumed. I believe that people keep their same personalities from birth to death, barring severe brain damage. As one grows older one accumulates more life experience and knowledge, and hopefully these things increase one's understanding as well. A certain level of mental, emotional, and physical maturity being necessary, however, before a human being can fully participate in society, human beings have therefore created an idea of there being a transition at some clearly demarcated point that is referred to as "becoming an adult." In olden days, when life was simpler, this time was chosen to more or less coincide with a person's sexual maturity, which happens around age thirteen. But as society became more complex, this solution became less satisfactory. (For one thing, the mental and emotional maturity of human beings lags far behind their physical maturity. In fact, few people -- some would say no people -- finish developing in those areas.) That is one reason why traditional religious ceremonies marking a child's becoming a full participant in their community's activities -- the bar mitzvah, first confirmation, and so on -- occurs either in preteen or early adolescent years, but secular society doesn't consider a person to be an adult until they reach at least the age of eighteen.

Anyway, I don't believe in this fencing off of "childish" literature. In fact, I believe that at least in Western society the idea of childrens' literature is a relatively recent development, and goes back no earlier than the Victorian Age. That was when there was finally a middle class large enough and prosperous enough to affect the market in a significant way. Before then children read the same things adults read, if they read at all. The stories known as "fairy tales," shunted off to the nursery, were merely the old stories and myths of the countryside, passed on to children by their nannies and therefore becoming "childrens' tales" by default. (If you want to read more about this idea in depth, read J.R.R. Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories." Currently it is to be found as an introduction to his story "Tree and Leaf," in The Tolkien Reader. He pretty much cuts to pieces the idea of childhood as a special state alien to adults, and thus the idea of special "childrens'" literature.)

Anyway, to get back to the Byatt piece. I have a problem with it the first sentence going in:

What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success of the Harry Potter books?

First of all, it is my personal opinion that the word "explosive" has become hackneyed, and a moratorium should be placed on its use in referring to anything other than describing the use of incendiary devices, or diarrhea. But let us move on, to the next sentence, which wonders at the "much harder question" of why so many adults read the Harry Potter books. Byatt comes to the conclusion that one reason adults read them is because they are "comforting" --

Childhood reading remains potent for most of us. In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 "best reads," more than a quarter were children's books. We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

Well, everyone reads Tolkien for their own reasons, I guess... though I can think of a lot of things I read that have no sex in them. Personally, I read H.P. Lovecraft's stories when I'm sick -- I find that restful, make of that what you will.

I have, incidentally, deliberately passed the extended Freudian approach to the reason why the Potter plot is so popular among children. I try to pass over Freudian cites without commenting as often as I can. My attitude towards Freud's theories, at least whenever they are used to back up someone's critique of a movie or a book, these days somewhat resembles that of Robert De Niro's character in Analyze This.

But see, see the stuff about "regression"? That's what I mean. My inner Paul Vitti (other people have "inner children" -- I have an inner gangster, go figure) wants to whack this kind of crap right now. Bada bing.

But that's not all. Next we get to the Today's Generation Sucks theme. See, in Byatt's day, grownups read proper stuff that made them feel all oogy and uncomfortable but in a squidgy, superior sort of way that they called "edgy" among their knowing, Culturally and PsychoSexually Aware friends. Oops. I meant, "literature" was once properly Dark and In Touch With Our Earlier Culture, and got us to know Good and Evil, and Everything Was Magical. But today, people are just a bunch of mundane sheep:

Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.

Good god, I haven't seen the phrase "urban jungle" in print since the seventies.

See, if you read something Byatt thinks is worthless, you are also worthless. It's a strange world Byatt inhabits. I would say that people who read pretentious "adult" literature are themselves pretentious twits who eat salads made with substances called "arugula" and have tasteful erotic art books on their coffee tables, but I actually know many people who read such literature and they are otherwise quite down to earth, have been known to buy and eat fast food, and don't think to themselves "I am getting in touch with my wild ancestors" when they go on hunting trips. I will refrain from wondering if Byatt is as snooty in person as she sounds here in print.

At the very least, though, she could have approached her subject with a little more care. Byatt seems to have barely skimmed the Potter books, because she gets several things wrong. The "magic" in the Potter books is by no means "confined to school grounds" (in the very first section of the fifth book evil magical creatures attack Harry and his cousin in their own neighborhood, far from Hogwarts), nor is it no less a "force" than the magic in Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books -- which also features a school for wizards, by the way -- since just as in LeGuin's stories magic is recognized as something that the persons endowed with these powers must be taught to control and focus. This isn't some tossed-off idea buried in a paragraph towards the back of, say, the fourth book -- it's only the entire premise of the main setting of the books, the Hogwarts School, not to mention one of the major underpinnings of the books as a whole. Harry must learn to control his powers lest they -- through the books' representation of a person's potential for evil, Voldemort -- control him, and he becomes evil like Voldemort. So there are no serious themes, no struggle between good and evil, in the Potter books? Fine, whatever.

I am not going to argue here that Rowlings is a writer on par with Thackeray (or Terry Pratchett, whose work if you ask me is only nominally fantasy; I think people like him for all the cute asides and in-jokes myself. Personally, I can only take Pratchett in small doses). She is no stylist -- she uses English the way most people use it, to describe what happened and what people thought and did and said about it. The prose is workmanlike, no better. If you are turned on by "amazing sentences" you won't care much for any of the Potter books, nor for a lot things. For my own part, I grow tired of "amazing sentences" and other such attention-getting tricks and sometimes would like to just sit down and read a story. If I feel "comforted" rather than depressed and drained -- as is my reaction to a lot of "real" literature -- I don't think that means that I am immature, unable to handle myself in the "real wild" (I'd like to know what the reaction of this flower of English letters would be if she were to end up somehow in the "real wild"), or "without the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing." I think I do pretty good in the telling apart of the ersatz from the authentic, especially when it comes to criticism of sort.

(Via Crooked Timber.)

Posted by Andrea Harris at July 8, 2003 03:01 PM