A nice piece on why Harry Potter is not The Lord of the Rings:
Posted by DeLong at July 22, 2003 01:12 AM | TrackBackkoimistress: For They Will Say Both Yes And No: Much has been said about A.S. Byatt's tirade ("Harry Potter and the Childish Adult," NY Times) against not only Harry Potter, but the readers of Potter. When it comes to the importance Byatt places on carefully demarcating the boundaries of childhood and adulthood, I could agree with penelope_z, who quotes CS Lewis's defense of Tolkien's "childish" books: "Critics who treat "adult" as a term of approval instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adults themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence...When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
But it's more interesting to me to focus on the demarcation she also insists on placing between "real" magic and "ersatz" magic. For Byatt is clearly a person who feels the need to separate categories out, lest the lesser infect the greater.... [S]he says... that the reality-TV-swilling masses are reading Harry Potter because they can't tell the difference between true, "numinous" magic, and the cheap K-Mart knockoff brand.... For some reason, Byatt (who ought to know better) completely ignores the "non-numinous tradition" (for lack of a better word) of magic books.
From Alice In Wonderland to James Thurber's delightful fairy tales The Wonderful O and The 13 Clocks, to The Phantom Tollbooth, there is a heady and wonderful ancestry of magical books that Harry Potter fits as easily as a missing puzzle piece.... These books don't make you fall to your knees -- you're having too much fun to do that. They may freak you out from time to time, and there will be monsters; but they will restore the world we know at the end. And the tradition of worldplay and clever games goes all through them. You can spot Harry Potter there as easily as you can tell a Weasley; the family resemblance is unmistakable. If anything, Rowling has deepened the tradition by allowing time to pass in each volume, adding the perils of growing up and the discoveries of moral ambiguity and loss to the mix....
It's not high-church magic, but it's good enough magic for everyday wear; not numinous, but full of high spirits, in every sense of the word. And therefore "ersatz" strikes me as a massively unfair word; it implies that something is passing for something else -- that the Potter books are trying to be numinous fantasy and failing. And I don't think they're trying at all. They're an entirely different species.
I've long been annoyed by those movie reviews where a film critic comes down hard on a film not because it was bad in itself, but because it wasn't what he expected. I still remember how naively surprised I was the first time I ever saw this phenomenon -- years ago, when the Frank Langella Dracula came out. I'd seen it on Broadway, where we were sent off to intermission after a scene so erotic, the matrons on line for the ladies' room had red faces and kept bursting into embarrassed, delighted giggles. The movie finally appeared, and one male reviewer, missing the mile-high point, gave it a thumbs-down -- not scary enough, he said, in a puzzled voice. "It's like an erotic version of Dracula." Not like, you idiot, I thought. Or Siskel and Ebert, talking about She-Devil (not the gorgeous -- and numinous -- British television version, unfortunately, but my point holds): "I thought it was going to be about a tug-of-war over this guy -- catfights -- something like 'The Women.'" "So did I!"
Similarly, blaming Potter for not being Tolkien strikes me as about as meaningful as crying, "This cat! It is not a cheesecake!" Indeed it's not, and perhaps you should sit down, Ms. Byatt, and have a nice glass of lemonade until you recover your senses.
Right to quote Lewis on the subject. He knew the risks of critics writing about a genre they didn't appreciate, and warned against it. One cannot tell potential readers of a particular sort of book anything they would want to know if one doesn't share their enthusiasm for the book. Lewis had a suggestion for all those who had no sympathy for a book they had chosen to review. Go review something else. There are enough good books in the world that can beneficially be recommended to readers that spending time on books one doesn't like is a waste. He was apparently of the wrong nature to appreciate the joys of tearing into something (or somebody) one disapproves of.
Posted by: K Harris on July 23, 2003 07:42 AMI enjoy the Potter books, and will no doubt keep reading them. But they overlook a central theme shared by better books, like LOTR or Jordan's Wheel of Time series: all magic has a cost, and is invoked at both mortal and moral peril.
I know that's a bit heavy for kids, even without understanding it as a reflection of this "real" world of might and wrong.
But after a few too many wands casually waved without fear or consequence in her pages, I begin to wonder if we should, quite so blithely, encourage such "magical thinking."
I disagree that there is no cost to magic. There is high cost and the body count in the Potter Books is increasing.
Part of the appeal of the books is that the characters behave in age appropriate ways. The social dynamic described in the books is very real and independent of the magical aspects. The magical aspects are fantasies about what could be done if there really were magic. Soccer on flying brooomsticks would be a real thrill, but highly dangerous and impractical. We readers know that. LIghten up.
Posted by: bakho on July 23, 2003 02:22 PM