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Why Byatt is Wrong (But Kinda Right)

I wasn't gonna get into it, but.... Kip teases Sara for her endorsement of A.S. Byatt's rejection of the Harry Potter series. Before the previous incarnation of this blog was destroyed by silicon valley gremlins, frequent visitors of this site will recall I had posted my eager anticipation of the new book and the out-of-nowhere barrage of comments from juveniles who somehow managed to sniff down my humble site out of the millions of "harry potter" and "jk rowling" hits one can google. So ya might think I'd join in on the teasing. And, as Sara knows personally (and poor, poor Kip), I am not one to refrain from needling a pal without a great deal of self control.

Erngh. Mmf. Nkkk. Here goes.... I'm actually caught in the middle of Kip and Sara on this one. Okay, yes, I think A.S. Byatt is off the mark. If she hadn't cited some important plot points from Order of the Phoenix, I would have thought she had stopped reading at book two. Byatt faults Rowling for creating a paper-thin magical world that relies too heavily on a light parody of our own, for not building a self-contained organic total system of magical rules and origins as might be found in Tolkein or Le Guin:

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.

Damning stuff. And Byatt has a point. The hyped-up commercialization that afflicts any popular work aimed at the young begets an overwhelming spawn of merchandise, video games and the disappointing-so-far movies. And no, Rowling's world is no Middle Earth. But Byatt overlooks a few key themes of Rowling's work. The evil Voldemort poses is not "dangerous only because she says it is", but dangerous because it is racist, classist and fascist. Voldemort threatens not merely Harry and those close to him, for Harry is the one truly difficult obstacle Voldemort faces in his drive for world conquest, the enslavement if not elimination of "muggles" (you and me, bub), and the genocide of "mudbloods", them miscengenized wizards of muggle parentage. His plans find sympathy among the old "pure-blood" ruling families of the wizard elite, who dress up like Klansmen, torture hapless muggles and call themselves Deatheaters like a bunch of snobby sophomores who mixed too much Schnappes with their Neitzche. You know...Nazis.

In breaking down Rowling's sociology of evil into snobs, Klansmen and Nazis, I am being a little flippant (cuz it's just my way) and risk doing harm to a more complex point, or several points she is making about the relations between systems of class, race and power. (Sexism gets a few subtle nods, too, but so far remains a bit underdeveloped in my view.) Byatt might object to my use of American Studies lingo to shorthand these issues—she seems a tad prickly about "culture studies"—yet such easy cynicism risks underestimating the importance of bringing such a social critique before young readers. Or the demographic that vexes Byatt, older readers.

Speaking as an older reader, I can say that my devotion to the Potter series has nothing to do with the psychoanalysis Byatt proffers. Despite some stylistic problems, Rowling's storytelling is sharp and compelling. She has a taste for the nasty that reminds me of Roald Dahl, a comparison from which I don't think Rowling suffers. And she creates some really wonderful characters (Snape is fascinating mangle of conflicting loyalties; Umbridge is pure delightful evil). Yet what also draws me are the elements of realism that Byatt cites as compromising Rowling's magical world. Harry and his friends act like real teenagers. They have volatile, conflicting emotions; they are stupid and awkward about dating; they obsess over celebrities and sports heroes; they consume gawdily-named-and-colored candies and play juvenile practical jokes. They also divide into snotty little cliques that have a strange way of reflecting and reenforcing divisions of culture and class in the adult world. The pack mentality that results can become a violent, angry, censorous mob, so that the celebrity attending to Harry's heroism is rarely ever a good thing. Rather it becomes yet one more element that estranges him from everyone else, complicating, sometimes undermining his best efforts to fight Voldemort.

Where I think Byatt gets it right, however, is in her assessment of an average grown up Potter fan's critical reading skills:

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.

Kip tells a pretty funny tale of a modern father ordering a year's subscription to a Spider-Man title for his eight-year-old son, naively assuming that the comic book's content has undergone little change since he was that age. I sympathize with the man's shock at finding Peter Parker getting it on with some naked woman at some point in every issue. Yet it says something about his cultural literacy that in looking for something to get his kid to read, he turns to a Spider-Man comic book. (Note: This is not a slam on comics; it's a slam on a certain genre of comics that I just can't stand.) He didn't go for C.S. Lewis or Madeleine L'Engle or even JK Rowling. Such a father is the kind of adult reader Byatt means, the sort who regress a little too easily to a childhood of little curiousity and shallow literacy.

What worries me are the movies and the merchandise. They make the Potter series of books seem—via guilt-by-association—as trite, as hyped and as awful as Byatt seems to suggest they are.

Posted by kevinmoore at July 9, 2003 06:27 PM | TrackBack