Harry Potter: Classic Or Dud?

i. i thought it wz tightly written and effectively conjured up its own world
ii. i do not much share jkr's sense of humour as evidenced in book one
iii. this may not be a fair judgment — the world is fat with HP spoilers — but i wzn't much convinced by the attempts to set up suspense: HP himself has WAY too much deus-ex-machina on tap for you ever to be nervous on his behalf, beginning middle or end
iv. hogwarts is a failure so far, i think: upthread edna welthorpe mrs's says "faux nostalgia for blytonesque midnight dormie feasts" — i think this is on the nose... the realm of magic (so far) shares a distinct cosiness with the suburban blandness HP is portrayed as being in flight from (room obviously in later books for this to expand into a more interesting, subtle dialectic between the TALENTED and the ORDINARY => by the end of book one all we have established is the ultra-niceness of meritocracy which is pro forma as geeky compensation but weak when you push it at all) (exception: snape, but we don't go there, yet...)
v. what is magic FOR? evil it's RULING THE WORLD AND LIVING FOREVER BWAHAHA, good it's like kid's birthday-party stuff, so weak-tea lame that surely the more easily bored wizards/witches wd end up on the dark side (just to keep themselves interested) (or give up magic altogether, like the Dogme 95 of Necromancy)
vi. once inside her sphere of approval, characters are rounding a bit slowly but nicely enough
vii. WHAT IS AT STAKE? i don't get it yet (bcz actually i think rowling changed her mind during the book: it WAS going to be a knock-about cartoon slapstick revenge on potter's unconvincingly horrible relatives but jkr made this too easy to be fun and switched in a new quest and a new evil late in the book)
viii: potentially REALLY interesting nub of a topic for the future, contained in an aside of hermione's: "many of the greatest wizards have been complete strangers to logic"

the great children's books abt the teaching of magic as a school subject are A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA and THE SWORD AND THE STONE: hogwarts isn't even slightly a match here in its treatment of what it is potter is supposed to be good at (there's also a puffin book, illustrated by quentin blake, called "the ________ mr ________" [haha sorry = i forget what it's called] which i recall as being good on the gap between actual magic and party conjuring w/o being serious especially....)

I was going to change my mind on the phenomenon and actually give it a chance when... we were visiting Laycock House (she said Lay Cock, hunh hunh hunh < /Beavis & Butthead > and were followed through by these extremely loud Americans who made me cringe as they loudly decried "You'd think they have MORE HARRY POTTER STUFF here, wouldn't ya?"

Excuse me, this is LAYCOCK ABBEY - this is the BIRTHPLACE OF MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY, not to mention an extremely interesting study in Tudor History, what with the dissolution of the monastaries, and the ways in which Tudor aristocracy utilised former Abbeys for their own ill-gotten ends, and 13th Century archicture and oh so interesting and whatnot, and all they can do is rabbit on about HARRY BLOODY POTTER?!?!?!?

Christ.

I hate hearing Americans in public these days, it makes me so self conscious, wondering "Do I sound that loud and annoying to other people?"

But I suppose if Harry Potter makes fat American tourists visit country houses they otherwise would ignore, at least their entrace fees keep the National Trust going so that I can enjoy the houses. Or something. Grrrrrr. I am turning into a curmudgeon, lord help me.

why oh why cd the movies not have been filmed in POUNDBURY?

yeah, The Sword and the Stone is a fantastic book, I've been meaning to read that one again. also very funny (which JKR def isn't).

My three year old daughter insists that I am Hagrid. This has been going on for three weeks. My throat is beginning to hurt.

Sarah-Jane: "Hagwid, are we going to Hogwart's now?

Daddy (gruffly): "That's right, Harry, better bring your owl, what's her name again?"

My three year old daughter insists that I am Hagrid. This has been going on for three weeks. My throat is beginning to hurt.

Sarah-Jane: "Hagwid, are we going to Hogwart's now?

Daddy (gruffly): "That's right, Harry, better bring your owl, what's her name again?"

(I also think yr. way overreading this meritocracy thang tho that may only be apparent in the next few books. A recent article in some alt-weekly actually had a somewhat dubious "queer" reading of potter.)

i think rowling's attitude to harry's adoptive relatives (in this book) IS a bit momusoid though: talentocracy maybe a clearer word than meritocracy? there are hints that things could be developed differently BUT they're really not in book one

Harry Potter and the Childish Adult

July 7, 2003
By A.S. BYATT

What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success
of the Harry Potter books? Why do they satisfy children and
- a much harder question - why do so many adults read them?
I think part of the answer to the first question is that
they are written from inside a child's-eye view, with a
sure instinct for childish psychology. But then how do we
answer the second question? Surely one precludes the other.

The easy question first. Freud described what he called the
"family romance," in which a young child, dissatisfied with
its ordinary home and parents, invents a fairy tale in
which it is secretly of noble origin, and may even be
marked out as a hero who is destined to save the world. In
J. K. Rowling's books, Harry is the orphaned child of
wizards who were murdered trying to save his life. He
lives, for unconvincingly explained reasons, with his aunt
and uncle, the truly dreadful Dursleys, who represent, I
believe, his real "real" family, and are depicted with a
relentless, gleeful, overdone venom. The Dursleys are his
true enemy. When he arrives at wizarding school, he moves
into a world where everyone, good and evil, recognizes his
importance, and tries either to protect or destroy him.

The family romance is a latency-period fantasy, belonging
to the drowsy years between 7 and adolescence. In "Order of
the Phoenix," Harry, now 15, is meant to be adolescent. He
spends a lot of the book becoming excessively angry with
his protectors and tormentors alike. He discovers that his
late (and "real") father was not a perfect magical role
model, but someone who went in for fits of nasty playground
bullying. He also discovers that his mind is linked to the
evil Lord Voldemort, thereby making him responsible in some
measure for acts of violence his nemesis commits.

In psychoanalytic terms, having projected his childish rage
onto the caricature Dursleys, and retained his innocent
goodness, Harry now experiences that rage as capable of
spilling outward, imperiling his friends. But does this
mean Harry is growing up? Not really. The perspective is
still child's-eye. There are no insights that reflect
someone on the verge of adulthood. Harry's first date with
a female wizard is unbelievably limp, filled with an
8-year-old's conversational maneuvers.

Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing
"secondary worlds." Ms. Rowling's world is a secondary
secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked
derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature -
from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl,
from value="46636">"Star Wars" to Diana Wynne
Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that
clichs endure because they represent truths. Derivative
narrative clichs work with children because they are
comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the
child's own power of fantasizing.

The important thing about this particular secondary world
is that it is symbiotic with the real modern world. Magic,
in myth and fairy tales, is about contacts with the inhuman
- trees and creatures, unseen forces. Most fairy story
writers hate and fear machines. Ms. Rowling's wizards shun
them and use magic instead, but their world is a caricature
of the real world and has trains, hospitals, newspapers and
competitive sport. Much of the real evil in the later books
is caused by newspaper gossip columnists who make Harry
into a dubious celebrity, which is the modern word for the
chosen hero. Most of the rest of the evil (apart from
Voldemort) is caused by bureaucratic interference in
educational affairs.

Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It
is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined
to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not
threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and
celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as
Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of
his dream, "only personal." Nobody is trying to save or
destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and
family.

So, yes, the attraction for children can be explained by
the powerful working of the fantasy of escape and
empowerment, combined with the fact that the stories are
comfortable, funny, just frightening enough.

They comfort against childhood fears as Georgette Heyer
once comforted us against the truths of the relations
between men and women, her detective stories domesticating
and blanket-wrapping death. These are good books of their
kind. But why would grown-up men and women become obsessed
by jokey latency fantasies?

Comfort, I think, is part of the reason. 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.

But in the case of the great children's writers of the
recent past, there was a compensating seriousness. There
was - and is - a real sense of mystery, powerful forces,
dangerous creatures in dark forests. Susan Cooper's teenage
wizard discovers his magic powers and discovers
simultaneously that he is in a cosmic battle between good
and evil forces. Every bush and cloud glitters with secret
significance. Alan Garner peoples real landscapes with
malign, inhuman elvish beings that hunt humans.

Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put back
in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when
supernatural and inhuman creatures - from whom we thought
we learned our sense of good and evil - inhabited a world
we did not feel we controlled. If we regress, we regress to
a lost sense of significance we mourn for. Ursula K. Le
Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world
where magic really does act as a force. Ms. Rowling's magic
wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is
small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only
because she says it is.

In this regard, it is magic for our time. 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.

Similarly, some of Ms. Rowling's adult readers are simply
reverting to the child they were when they read the Billy
Bunter books, or invested Enid Blyton's pasteboard kids
with their own childish desires and hopes. A surprising
number of people - including many students of literature -
will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since
they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often
destroys the life of the books. But in the days before
dumbing down and cultural studies no one reviewed Enid
Blyton or Georgette Heyer - as they do not now review the
great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who
creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a
multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to
derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with
death with startling originality. Who writes amazing
sentences.

It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has
fed this phenomenon. And it is the leveling effect of
cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and
popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don't
really believe exists. It's fine to compare the Bronts
with bodice-rippers. It's become respectable to read and
discuss what Roland Barthes called "consumable" books.
There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do
with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's
"magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in
faery lands forlorn."

A.S. Byatt is author, most recently, of the novel "A
Whistling Woman."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/07/opinion/07BYAT.html?ex=1058586460&ei=1&en=2630c074ae8b4120

(also i watched the alt.tv documentary abt that poor japanese girl who turned up in fargo frozen in the snow, and the world thought she wz a mentalist fan looking for unreal treasure and actually — says this doc — the real story was not that at ALL... anyway the doc wz done as an hommage to la jetee, all in colour stills w.an actress playing the girl, and wz very tremendously sad in its a.m.homes-ish way...)

Basically - to hell with them! H.P. is getting more and more peopel to read, it's beautiful escapism, it addresses some (well, few) difficult issues, R*wling is amazingly talented with her imagination, and I love the darn things. All of them. Did I mention how many more people are reading these days as a result of having picked-up H.P. and then gone seeking more books in similar veins?

GRRR. Maybe Byatt is just jealous.

This is a debatable point. In the UK at least the size of the market for kids lit is at the same level it was pre Pottermania. No more books are being bought, which sort of suggests there's no more reading going on. Of course, this doesn't take into account public library lending which might well have gone through the roof. Still, I'd expect *some* increase in book buying if that many more people were reading,

i decided more of a l. george.

I assume they meant 'commented,' but you never know.

"And now, 'Little Girl with the Blue Eyes.'"

Seriously brilliant. Where did Chris Morris get his ideas from, eh?

If Scott, Dan and Nicole have been talking about how much they love Left Behind on that thread, sanity has finally departed This Sad World.

The Hogwarts/Poudlard one has me stumped the most, I don't see why it wasn't kept the same.