Down with Harry Potter
May 29th, 2008 Posted in Of InterestSince I’ve pissed off several friends already by forwarding this critique of Harry Potter, it’s time to troll it up on the blog. I hereby admit that I feel nothing but revulsion for Harry Potter and everything he stands for. I wanted to articulate why one day, and then I came across A.S. Byatt’s fantastic review.
Some highlights:
Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child’s own power of fantasizing.
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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.
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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.
That children like it I understand. That adults can’t see through its complete lack of imagination and craft I find depressing.
I realize that these sorts of critiques these days automatically make you a snob. You’re only allowed to say “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” While the idea that food might taste good yet be bad for the body is widely accepted. The idea that culture can be good or bad for you is not, because it evokes the uncomfortable and seemingly elitist concept of bad taste. The same people who work out and eat salads obsessively would never dream of making artistic distinctions that transcend the expression of their personal taste; and they would never dream of modifying their leisure habits.
In case none of this offends you, the same thing goes for “The Kite Runner.”
Fire away.
2 Responses to “Down with Harry Potter”
By Harry Potter lover on May 30, 2008
I guess all the millions of adults all over the world who have enjoyed HP are all idiots who are neither cultured not mature enough for ‘Babel Tower’ etc.
So, why don’t you tell me this? How many of your friends have read Harry Potter and enjoyed it and how many of them are asstards? You’re an intelligent fellow so I doubt it very much that you associate with the type of numskulls that Byatt professes HP readers to be.
I do agree with you…this kind of generalization does make you a snob. I still like you but if you and Byatt think that you’re above a story of a child and the eternal fight between good and evil, thats fine too. More ’smut’ for the rest of us!
By Wes on May 30, 2008
But let me modify my point: I like lots of crap. Bad books, TV, movies, you name it. But like bad food, I recognize that taken in excess, they’re bad for me. That a unimaginative and badly written children’s book would dominate the cultural landscape in the way it has is a shame.
I love a story about a child and the eternal fight between good and evil — and that’s why I hate Harry Potter. He is Evil. If I could get to Harryland, or whatever it’s called, I would hunt him to the ends of his preparatory school and drown him in a toilet and all the books with him. In the name of Good.
Actually, there really is no drama of good and evil in these books, and that’s Byatt’s point. There is nothing larger at stake — the fate of the world, for instance. It’s really all just about Harry’s personal safety.
It’s not everyone who likes Harry Potter is an idiot — readers’ ability to imbue such meager offerings with their own fantasies is in some ways an advantage, as Byatt points out. But we shouldn’t be unwilling to face the fact that just because we like something doesn’t mean it’s any good.