I have the good fortune of being one of the original readers of Harry Potter. As a science fiction and fantasy fan, I was on the look out for new authors, new works, and Potter fit in nicely. I don't remember how long the book spent on my shelf, but I remember picking it up when I first saw it at the Baylor Bookstore.
My reaction to the first book was that I wanted more. But before I go on, let me recall that her audience hasn't exactly been bereft of material to read in this genre. There have been plenty of predecessor series. There's the Prydain Series by Lloyd Alexander, featuring our favorite Assistant Pig Keeper. There's The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper, which featured a fine cast of characters, including Will Stanton, young man, yet one of the Old ones, and Bran, the strange Welsh kid with the surprising family connections. There's The Chronicles of Narnia, which recently got its own cinematic treatment. There are likely quite a few more, but my recollection escapes me, and I don't want to belabor the point too much. Others might undoubtedly recall others, and I'd be happy to hear about them.
And lets not forget Grimm's Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson's work, and a multitude of others. Children's fantasy is a rich literary tradition.
Which may be part of the problem. Many works scorned in their day are grandfathered into later canons of literary greatness by readers with fond memories and nobody still alive to drop it in the waste basket as trash. Harry Potter has the problem that its, well...
New. Test of time, and what have you.
Maybe Potter will end up as a curiosity of our times, remembered mainly by enthusiasts and lovers of esoterica. But lets not forget, that a lot of people wrote in the old days for the same purpose they write today: Money, and because they love doing it.
Rowlingly obviously loves doing this. Her exquisite sense of detail would allow no other conclusion. She gave the cinematic translators of her work a magnificent headstart. Her plots are well organized, the dialogue fairly good. She takes care with how she reveals information, and the mysteries that form the heart of her novels are well organized. As for money, well she's getting a sh... well, a lot of it.
Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and many others wrote not for the future idolization of their art, but for the love and the profit of it. I know that's kind of a generalization, but if you look into the history of many of the authors of what we call canon, you'll find more than a few commercial works, more than few overripe works of popular fiction.
I will not say that Harry Potter Books will necessarily become literature in the years to come. That truly is beyond my ability to say. But I will say this: It's popular enough to have some staying power, on the basis of having soaked into to enough homes and libraries, and it's of good enough quality to ensure that folks who pick it up, whether it remains out and about or gathering dust on some distant shelf, will pick it up and read it. So it could join works like Robinson Crusoe, The Three Musketeers, Great Expectations and others on the lists.
But what's the deal with the lists anyways? I'm going to tell you a little secret here: The lists are an accident! There are plenty of works we could speak of that would not have gotten on them had the folks who determine canonicity now been in charge. I look at a lot of what people read as literature, and some of the work is genuinely good, some of it not. Today's literary elites focus so much on pushing a certain world view, a certain view of realism, surrealism, postmodernism, or whatever camp they lump themselves into, that they're missing the new canon of literature as it rolls by them. They'll pick up on something that resembles their world view, like Pullman's His Dark Materials, but they'll miss a great deal of the other stuff, because it doesn't fit their idea of what is worthy.
Now my brother's much further into the modern works that I am, or care to be, but I notice that often enough he picks works that have a sense of humor, rather than loading himself up with only depressing material. I can imagine that there's no accounting for taste, which is why all kinds of books enjoy success, but still, there are some observations I'd like to make.
Genre work, meaning the stuff that doesn't stick to absolute reality, has a bad rap. That said, There's artistry in creating new worlds, or at least in doing some refit to this one. We can see in the works of Salman Rushdie and others this kind of approach. Whether you call it magical realism, fabulism or whatever, popular authors of the literary canon often drop in for a visit to fantasy and sci-fi land. And why not?
People right stories to figure out what you could call the human condition. But just consider all the things that go into that- our civilization, our culture, our sensibilities. There's a lot of space in there for examination of things like our relationship to technology, to religion, to all kinds of things. Fantasy and sci-fi, world-building works in particular, have their own territory to explore, their own intuitive truth to uncover.
While the genres can be escapist, they can also act as kind of a strange loop, as Douglas Hofstadter would call it, whereby readers can escape to the other worlds and parallel dimensions, and nevertheless come back deepened for their frivolity, because they come back to know the place they are in for the first time. That's perhaps one of the things cultural elitists hate- that they lose the control of those minds, that these works so entrance readers as to take them away from what's real.
But what is real? As a political writer on Watchblog, I've noticed what can only be called a strong divergence between what different parties consider real. Its noticeable elsewhere. Now I am not a big fan of philosophies that say that there is no objective reality, only what is brought into existence by consensus of belief. I believe there is an objective reality, but that we all have subjective, incomplete understandings and perceptions of it. Reality as it exists may be objective, but reality as we perceive it is a different story. With all that in mind, though, it's still important to seek the best possible understanding of that objective reality, to go beyond the shell of our perceptions, the necessary illusions that they are.
Fantasy and Science fiction allow us to look at the way people think and deal with cultures without necessarily having to glance directly at our own.
There are magnificent reflections of human truths in Harry Potter, and I believe that this is part of its lasting appeal. The relationship between Dumbledore and Potter, Potter's development into adolescence, the petty rivalries and lifelong grudges of personal and professional life, carry into her books.
They, among other aspects of a narrative work, literary or otherwise, contribute to what could be called the experiential value of the work.
The processes of the human mind are complex, multifacet, and represent the difference between what one is told, what one is shown, and what one experiences. Art is about taking advantage of the methods by which we seek to understand the world as reality, and using it to communicate wisdom and knowledge about the world too complex or beyond the person's normal experience to understand. It is also about how we train our minds to deal with the world around us.
Harry Potter's world is complex enough to believe in, with characters that are complicated enough to play around believeably in this world as human beings, and not just ciphers for the author's feelings. In all our self-indulgence, we writers have a tendency sometimes to put our own feelings as greater than our readers, but the truth is, no matter what we do, the success of our work depends on how we engage our readers, and how well we do it. Some would like to fantasize about how they will draw in an audience, or how they should be drawing in the audience instead of some author who just got lucky (from their point of view), but the fact is, by entering the profession they have, they've put the fate of their stories from the get-go, and have to do that to make art or to make money.
So my advice to those who hate what Potter has done to literature is this: compete. Be dazzling storytellers. Be original. Don't be a cliche, regardless of whether you're literary or commercial in your inclinations. Have some fun, while you take the work seriously. Understand that without the audience, without the bridge you build to them in your words, your work, your imaginings are incomplete. Only when somebody puts down a book satisfied, having had a worthy experience, can the art and the commerce of your work be complete.
