Potter mania SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
| What is truly disturbing about J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is not that it happens to appeal so much to children but that it happens to appeal so much to adults. |
This is perhaps J.K. Rowling's biggest achievement: to write a series that has unashamedly and exclusively targeted children, and to then watch it explode, partly by word of mouth, into a phenomenon that has consumed adults as well.
Photos: AP and Royal Mail via Bloomberg News
Over-estimation: Is Harry Potter a marketing marvel? The curious thing about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is that, despite its status as arguably the most awaited book in history, it will do next to nothing to determine the place of the Harry Potter series in literary repute. That debate has, over 10 years of Potterphilia, already burned itself down to the ground, scorching a strip of No Man's Land through the reading public and dividing it into two staunchly opposing camps. The merits of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are unlikely to send loyalists of either side scurrying into the other.
Entertaining debate That the debate itself has been as, and frequently more, entertaining than the books is an acknowledgement of the age in which we live. These are times when writers of children's fiction do not necessarily write just for children. They must write also for the adult reviewers of literature, and for the adult readers of those reviews, since it is those adult readers who can then set down an adult credit card to buy the book in the first place. The children figure only as inevitable recipients, and sometimes not even then.
So the permanent wryness of Terry Pratchett, the various allegories of Philip Pullman, and the mordant darkness of Lemony Snicket are hardly kid magnets of the first water. They're strategic elements that will induce reviewers to marvel at the realism or the subtlety of the fiction, and to conclude that these books are just as fascinating for grown-ups as for children. This is perhaps J.K. Rowling's biggest achievement — to write a series that has unashamedly and exclusively targeted children, and to then watch it explode, partly by word of mouth, into a phenomenon that has consumed adults as well.
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I read the first three Harry Potter books standing up, in snatches of stolen reading, hidden away behind a pillar when I should have been helping re-stock the shelves in a bookstore. It was the slow winter of 1999, and Harry Potter and t he Prisoner of Azkaban had released just a few months earlier. The franchise hadn't quite reached its apogee of manic frenzy, although it was methodically, assuredly working its way up there. At the time, I remember thinking that they were pleasant enough reads but little more; in my mind, I equated them with the Clive Cussler novel I had just finished, and I moved behind the next pillar to begin Michael Crichton's Timeline.
Less than a year later, the debate went on Full Heat. Rowling's supporters argued that the books had electrified children into reading, and that anybody who managed that stupendous feat deserved the encouragement of every right-thinking individual. That theory has been somewhat bruised by a 2007 study, which found that rather than reading more of everything, children were simply reading more of Harry Potter — not quite the universal electrification the literati were looking for.
But even earlier, there were more thundering criticisms. A.S. Byatt called Rowling's universe "a secondary secondary world," tiresomely derivative, and charged that our modern tendency to substitute "celebrity for heroism" fed the Potter phenomenon. Harold Bloom, Yale's ever-caustic literary academic, called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone severely clich-ridden and compared it — very unfavourably — to the literatu re of Stephen King.
Even more dramatically, Bloom dismissed the trumpets of the Potter-inspired reading revolution. "Why read, if what you read will not enrich mind or spirit or personality?" he wrote, in a column in The Wall Street Journal in July 2000. Later in the same column, he concluded: "Can more than 35 million book buyers, and their offspring, be wrong? Yes, they have been, and will continue to be for as long as they persevere with Potter."
Anthony Holden, The Observer's literary critic, joined the proponents of another commonly held view — that Harry Potter did so well simply because he was marketed to within an inch of his life, with "advance hype w orthy of a Wonderbra." Serving on the jury of the Whitbread Awards for children's fiction, Holden dismissively ignored two fellow judges who insisted that their children enjoyed Potter. "Were their children, I snorted, to be allowed to choose the Book of the Year?" he wrote. "'You should be reading them Beowulf,' I snapped testily. 'It's much the same sort of stuff, heroes taking on dragons and all that, but the language is far mor e exciting'." It was shortly after this, not surprisingly, that he was labelled a "pompous prat" on television.
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Holden's views — and they are not exclusively his — on children's literature seem to tell of a titanic shift, from a golden pre-Rowling age of merry Beowulf-reading into the bleak present of hyper-marketed Po tterness. But any of us who aren't quite that out of touch with reality could tell Holden otherwise. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was reading the Hardy Boys, Archie comics, and far more Enid Blyton than is considered healthy for a growing child — all closer to Harry Potter than Beowulf.
Children's books Indeed, when were children ever reading Beowulf at that age, short of encountering it in a school curriculum or being Seamus Heaney's grandchildren? Blyton wrote her stories for children midway through the 20th century, and pe nny shockers like the Hardy Boys mysteries appeared even earlier. Roald Dahl's fiction was more sophisticated, but it is hardly Beowulf. Where, then, is Holden's golden age, if children have been reading simplistic, heavily entertaining, lowbrow fiction for many decades now?
Even if some of us were aberrations, and if most of our peers were really crouching under their sheets at night with a flashlight and a dog-eared copy of Beowulf, it doesn't seem to have precluded an escalation to more mature literature. Holden would possibly argue that those were different times, and that distractions like cable television and Facebook will mire today's children at the Potter level of literary thought forever. But Rowling and her publishers invented neither cable television nor Facebook; those are symptoms of a larger social rearrangement that Potter can scarcely be held responsible for.
What is truly disturbing about the Harry Potter series is not that it happens to appeal so much to children but that it happens to appeal so much to adults. As bluntly as ever, Holden advised these adults to "get a life". "Getting in touch with your inner child is all very well," he wrote, "but reluctance to put away childish things is, as another bestseller long ago suggested, rather more worrisome."
Holden's view — that the Harry Potter books hold desperately little of value to engage mature thinking — is becoming increasingly difficult to share without being accused of joyless literary snobbery. I plead the opposite: That as an adult, it is in fact joyless to read a book that talks down to you, a book where you can lazily read every fourth sentence and sufficiently keep up, a book written in English that is uninspired at its best and awful at its worst, a book that contains no thought or meaning beyond what is iterated at tiresome length on the page. These are conceivably requisite elements for successful children's fiction, and it is unreasonable to grudge their presence in the Harry Potter canon, but that is all that can be said for them.
Adult fascination It isn't immediately obvious what to make of this adult fascination with Potter. Should we be far more worried now about the standards of adult fiction? Should we surmise that our leading novelists are struggling to make any sort of real connection with their readers? Should we shrug this too away and ascribe it, as we do so much else, to the side effects of the modern world, its incessant stresses that make people want an undemanding, thoughtless experience whenever they do find the energy to pick up a book? Or are we as guilty as Holden of fondly imagining a previous golden age where none existed, and is Harry Potter just the newest instance in a long history of populist reading?
There is, finally, the danger that we over-estimate Harry Potter entirely too much, for he is more a mercantile phenomenon than a literary phenomenon. His legacy, years from now, will be stated in terms of the number of books sold, each copy a tiny Horcrux that contains a multi-millionth part of his soul; it will be stated in terms of how Bloomsbury's stock went up, how much richer Rowling became, how many billions of dollars the movies made. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will certainly stack those numbers higher, like a teetering pile of poker chips. But numbers come and go, and faster today than ever before; literary longevity, much more lasting and correspondingly elusive, may require a completely different sort of magic altogether.
https://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/07/22/stories/2007072250010100 .htm
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