In the biggest dung-flinging crossfire of literary criticism in recent memory, Booker-winning author A.S. Byatt wrote this article in the New York Times claiming J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series to be “written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons and the exaggerated – more exciting, less threatening – mirror world of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip,” among other things. This has since led to rebuttals and counter-rebuttals across the vast expanse of the Internet, such as Charles Taylor’s response at Salon.com, an eloquently written variation on the standard snobbery-jealousy defence. Both sides are surprisingly well-represented in readers’ letters here and here, and there is a wealth of responses from the general Potter readership at The Leaky Cauldron. There is also a fierce debate going on at Crooked Timber that is worth a look.
I will gloss over my redundant agreements with what has already been said. Some have already pointed out the irony of Rowling prognosticating exactly this line of criticism by demonizing the regulation of curricula in The Order of the Phoenix. Few would neglect to mention how especially interesting it is that Byatt cites Tolkien as an exemplar of what she would rather see as representative of the fantastic realm, considering that her criticism of Rowling bears uncanny resemblance to the anti-Tolkien material Tom Shippey spent an entire chapter tearing to pieces in Author of the Century.
One wonders how she would respond if she actually came across the real trash on fantasy shelves today. Byatt compares Potter’s appeal to “soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip,” but she is picking on about as wrong a target as possible; one wonders if she would drown in her tears should she come across the endless fluff and drivel to which Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time has sunk, those hundreds of pages detailing the dress senses of never-before-introduced characters with indistinguishible names and no perceptible relevance to the story other than to flesh things out a little. As far as soapiness goes, the suds are bubbling around the mass-produced franchise trash of brand-name fiction such as the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, which largely concern themselves with self-contradictory plot convolutions and make thematically negligent attempts at filling in all of the ambiguity that made the movies such tightly-paced tales of wonder.
Harry Potter has insofar possessed none of these traits. The saga shows an irrefutable curve of exposition and development, and a conclusion is in sight; structurally, it is hardly the model of an overly marketable infinite series. Rowling spends remarkably little time dealing with the baser complications of meaningless trivia and who’s dating whom, reserving such tangents to the briefest of passing mentions or cooping them within separate volumes entirely, as in the case of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through The Ages (I still await Charm Your Own Cheese).
I refuse to advocate the accusations of snobbery, as elitism is a practice I relish myself over caviar and herbal tea, and on a regular basis at that. In many cases, professional criticism is necessary to keep the forces of marketing from polluting Barnes & Noble warehouses with wastepaper. Byatt’s problem is more of a critical misfire more than anything, an ill-advised stab at what is erroneously purported to be children’s-only literature based solely on said erroneous assumption.
But now on to the far more serious claim that lies at the core of this entire debate: the notion of Harry Potter being a derivative, juvenile, and – most atrociously – “cartoonish” series.
The standard counter-argument is that adults read Potter because it’s fun. I would go as far as to say that they – or we, rather – read Potter because, whether or not we realize it, it’s funny.
Ersatz magic, thou sayest? Derivative of the traditional archetypes of witchcraft and wizardry? Why, certainly – that is precisely the point! J.K. Rowling is doing to the traditional stereotypical bastions of fantasy precisely what The Avengers did to the James Bond spy image: spoofing them conceptually, yet wrapping a serious story around it all. One becomes so absorbed in the books that it is easy to forget the inherent absurdity with which she treats bureaucracy in true Pythonian fashion, with the convoluted machinations of the Ministry of Magic; or alternatively, the deft satire of fanatical football culture in the ridiculous game of Quidditch. The apparent aura of childishness is a direct result of this reliance on archetype, something that Rowling mocks relentlessly in her comical dissection of the traditional expectations of numinous literature.
The claim that Harry Potter is a cartoon is correct in the sense that it is written in cartoonish prose, but that is more of a descriptor than a fault. Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is essentially a comic book, yet that does not preclude it from treating anti-Semitism and the Second World War with respect and decorum. The argument that the accessibility of Rowling’s prose makes it somehow improper for anyone old enough to have a driver’s license is along the same line of consciousness that animation is an inherently childish medium of film, or that caricature is an immature and illegitimate form of illustration. One would sooner fault Hemingway for being the pioneer of discarding grandiloquence, or Douglas Adams for his cliché-ridden portrayal of Vogons as green, blobby space aliens bent on destroying the Earth.
With every reference to a purportedly superior author, Byatt digs her hole a little deeper. She cites Susan Cooper, whose The Dark is Rising cycle is a revisionary update of Arthurian legend, and Terry Pratchett, whose works are conceptually traditional but written with hilarious levity. Yet Rowling’s work is a marriage of modernization and humour that produces a distinctly original product, one that naturally seems derivative on the outside precisely as intended by the author.
The completely predictable misunderstandings of Rowling’s critics serve only to highlight her greatest triumph. The Harry Potter novels are so clearly intended to take established fantasy paradigms and precepts and spin them out of control, they are literary mousetraps of intricate design, litmus tests of whether or not adults still know how to read.
