YOU CAN'T CANCEL A GOOD STORY
Potter is a literary masterpiece
During the first blossoming of Harry Potter mania in the late 1990s and early 2000s, some literary critics were distraught. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in July 2000, when the fourth book was published, Harold Bloom lamented that J.K. Rowling 's writing “makes no demands upon her readers ... Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better.”
In the Independent, in the same year, Philip Hensher derided the Harry Potter books as “written in a way which is designed to be seductively readable,” as if proper books should attempt to fend off readers with a big stick.
“The world of these books is thin and unsatisfactory,” he pronounced. “It does them no favours at all to talk about them in terms of literary classics.”
Weeks earlier, writing in the Observer, Anthony Holden had fretted that children were reading Harry Potter instead of Seamus Heaney's “far more exciting” new translation of Beowulf. He worried about the impact of Rowling 's books on “the literary taste of millions of potential young readers.”
Despite his detractors, Harry Potter has not gone away. Twenty-six years after the first book was published, Warner Bros., the studio behind the box-office-conquering Harry Potter films, has announced it's developing a major new television series for Max (formerly HBO Max) that will be “a faithful adaptation of the iconic books.”
J.K. Rowling is attached to the series as executive producer — a striking statement of support from the studio, given that the author has been subjected to repeated attempts to halt her career from those determined to paint her as the world's most notorious transphobe.
Why read Harry Potter, the traditional critical argument goes, when you could read The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dark Is Rising or A Wizard of Earthsea? Well, I've read those, too, and they're all wonderful. But Harry Potter is better. It's the funniest, the saddest, the most alive. Rowling 's writing is full of people who seem real, even as they're turning a teacup into a gerbil. She has Dickens's knack for character, Stephen King's feel for spookiness, P.G. Wodehouse's sense of the absurd, and Shakespeare's magpie eye for sparkling treasures gathered from elsewhere.
Is it ridiculous to compare Harry Potter with the best literature ever written in English? Not at all, because Rowling 's stories have become part of a global cultural consciousness.
So, yes, the time has come to talk about the Harry Potter books as literary classics.
Academics have, over the past 10 years, begun to pay closer attention. Beatrice Groves of the University of Oxford, among others, has provided a foundation of scholarship on Rowling's literary heritage and merit.
In her 2017 book, Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, Groves writes the series “trains its readers in an attentive, literary mode of reading that is nourishing in and of itself, but it also leads Harry Potter's readers out into some of the greatest works of the Western canon.” She points out that Rowling is fond of leaving a trail of subtle references to other novels, with character names lifted from The Mayor of Casterbridge (Dumbledore and Hagrid), Treasure Island (Professor Trelawney) and Mansfield Park (Filch's malevolent cat, Mrs. Norris).
One of the most profound sequences in the books is the backstory for Harry's nemesis, Lord Voldemort. In her youth, Voldemort's mother, an impoverished witch, falls in love with a handsome, arrogant, non-magical aristocrat. She tricks him with a love potion and then, pregnant with his child, and perhaps believing his love is now sincere, withdraws the potion. His eyes opened, he is disgusted, and rejects her. Heartbroken, she gives birth, then, seeking neither magical nor medical help, dies. There are traces here of Adam Bede, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Far from the Madding Crowd.
Rowling has said that her favourite novel is Jane Austen's Emma, a book she has read “at least 20 times.”
When I read Emma as a teenager, I was tickled to have spotted a stylistic antecedent for Rowling's blend of quick humour and nifty plotting, not to mention a thoroughly annoying, know-it-all yet lovable central female character. Emma Woodhouse and Hermione Granger must, surely, be long-lost cousins.
Rowling's magical world is a complex metaphor for real human abilities, particularly the power of words and stories, to change the world around us. She develops this thesis through a uniquely playful and distinctive British setting that, as in Shakespeare, weaves together allusion and influence so naturally that it feels as though it's grown organically out of the literature of these islands. Rowling takes what has come before her, and makes something new.
In her books, words are magic spells. The metaphor for reading is obvious, but Rowling adds her own shading and definition. Most of the spoken spells derive from Latin (Accio, Nox, Expecto Patronum), but the healing spells (Episkey, Anapneo) come from Greek, like so much of the Western medical tradition.
From the start, the books address difficult themes. Introduced in the first volume, the Mirror of Erised (read it backward), is a magical object that reflects the viewer not as he really is, but instead shows “the deepest, most desperate desire” of his heart. Faced with the image of what he wants more than anything, the viewer is in danger of becoming transfixed, unable to turn away from the mirror and face reality.
Rowling's writing develops and deepens through the series of seven books, published over 10 years, from the short and lively early volumes written in obscurity to the later, meatier tomes released at midnight to queues of breathless fans. As the child characters get older, the books become longer, the language and ideas growing more nuanced, death seeping ever more inevitably into everything. To read the series in order is to read a writer growing in confidence and power as she expands the borders of the fantasy world she has constructed.
The greatest of Rowling's achievements, however, is to follow her central group of characters right the way through from childhood to adulthood in a bildungsroman that engages closely with, at first, how it feels to be a child, and then, gradually, painfully, how to bear adult responsibilities. Rowling builds a literary bridge between youth and adulthood, Harry Potter marking a significant shift from the vintage children's literature.
This isn't to say the Harry Potter books are flawless. Even Rowling 's staunchest defenders acknowledge that she can be guilty of carelessness, particularly in her intention to cast a diverse world.
Beyond the legitimate literary criticism, Rowling has weathered several waves of unjustified attack, first from the harrumphing reviewers who somehow managed to read her books without reading them at all, and then a further wave of rage from those who disagree with her beyond the books, taking issue with her politics.
Harry Potter may be the face of a bankable franchise — but nobody ever loved a franchise. The story that started it all is what matters. The world of Harry Potter isn't just a commodity that sells, but a story that is loved because — admit it! — it's really good. And you can't cancel a good story. Merlin's beard, it'll outlive us all.