Chekhov’s Mistess

Much Ado about Harry

I begin with a Disclaimer: I have never read a Harry Potter book, nor do I intend to. They just don’t fit my taste in novels. My wife, who majored in English and is well read, is however, an avid fan of HP, as is my mother-in-choice, who also majored in English and was a librarian for 25 years. These are my biases.

That said, I have been following with amusement the energy spent on writing or talking about HP the book and HP the phenomenon. So it’s time to throw in a couple of pennies of my own. Harold Bloom, the famous literary critic/scholar, says that Rowling’s writing is “Goo” and that HP is bad because it will only lead to children that grow up to read only Stephen King novels. I think a lot of Mr. Bloom, so I’ll just say that this kind of snobbishness is to be expected from someone who was probably reading Blake and Dante at the age of three.

Then there are the righties and other moral commentators – but I’m not even going to touch that topic. That leaves the rest of us. Much of the commentary hovering about centers on the curious attraction that adults as well as children have to these books. In a recent NYT op-ed, A.S. Byatt, author of Possesion: A Romance, explores Freudian implications, escapism and the dumbing down of our culture, and then seems to benignly conclude that adults need to “regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for.” Whatever that means.

But in response to Byatt, Caleb Carr, author of the excellent book, The Alienist, says “Let children who love Harry read on. But let adults know that their obsessive devotion is feeding something far more frightening than the dark arts: a retreat from the complexities of adulthood in a dangerous world.” That is an absurd comment coming from an otherwise intelligent person and more so coming from an author (reminds me in a round-about way of the freedom fry phenomenon, but that’s another story).

All this commentary from authors smacks of envy – not of huge advance envy, but envy of writing something that, for whatever its literary merit, will have a place in literary, and in this case, cultural, history. William Safire says that HP is a “waste of adult time,” which leads me to the only real thing that I have to say about this whole thing: Out of the 100,000+ books published each year, of which some portion are novels, there are an awful lot of books that are a colosal waste of adult’s time – I’ve read Mr. Safire’s contribution to literature, Sleeper Spy, and that, unfortunately, could easily be considered “a waste of adult time” – so why pick on Harry?

Articles Quoted:

“Harry Potter and the Childish Adult” A.S. Byatt, New York Times, July 7th 2003, Op-eds, A13

“Harry Potter’s Magic, For Some” Caleb Carr, New York Times, July 9th, 2003, Letters, A20

“The Phenomenology of Harry, or the Critique of Pure Potter” New York Times, July 19th, 2003, B9

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: July 19, 2003
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:0
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