How to Read and Why

... is the title of a book by Harold Bloom. By most accounts, it is a good book. I might even read it sometime, perhaps after I get through reading How to have Sex and Why. By which I mean that I've never had any doubts about why, and have acquired enough understanding of how that I feel no particular need for coaching from a 70 year old (his age when he wrote it) Yale professor of literature.

So what do I care about this self-styled "master critic" and his opinions? About seven years ago, on his seventieth birthday, the Wall Street Journal published his pompous and dismissive review of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone entitled Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes.

Popular literature that they don't get is common target for aging critics. Edmund Wilson set off against J R R Tolkien in similar fashion forty or so years earlier. Of course, I shouldn't dismiss his critique out of hand. So what does he have to say? He opens with:

Taking arms against Harry Potter, at this moment, is to emulate Hamlet taking arms against a sea of troubles. By opposing the sea, you won't end it.

The famous critic about to upbraid Rowling for cliches doesn't seem to miss many himself.

Though the book is not well written, that is not in itself a crucial liability. It is much better to see the movie, "The Wizard of Oz," than to read the book upon which it was based, but even the book possessed an authentic imaginative vision. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" does not, so that one needs to look elsewhere for the book's (and its sequels') remarkable success. Such speculation should follow an account of how and why Harry Potter asks to be read.

The ultimate model for Harry Potter is "Tom Brown's School Days" by Thomas Hughes, published in 1857. The book depicts the Rugby School presided over by the formidable Thomas Arnold, remembered now primarily as the father of Matthew Arnold, the Victorian critic-poet. But Hughes' book, still quite readable, was realism, not fantasy. Rowling has taken "Tom Brown's School Days" and re-seen it in the magical mirror of Tolkein. The resultant blend of a schoolboy ethos with a liberation from the constraints of reality-testing may read oddly to me, but is exactly what millions of children and their parents desire and welcome at this time.

In what follows, I may at times indicate some of the inadequacies of "Harry Potter." But I will keep in mind that a host are reading it who simply will not read superior fare, such as Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows" or the "Alice" books of Lewis Carroll. Is it better that they read Rowling than not read at all? Will they advance from Rowling to more difficult pleasures?

I detect an acrid putrescence to the disdain dripping down his page, but where is the substance?

One can reasonably doubt that "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" is going to prove a classic of children's literature, but Rowling, whatever the aesthetic weaknesses of her work, is at least a millennial index to our popular culture. So huge an audience gives her importance akin to rock stars, movie idols, TV anchors, and successful politicians. Her prose style, heavy on cliche, makes no demands upon her readers. In an arbitrarily chosen single page--page 4--of the first Harry Potter book, I count seven cliches, all of the "stretch his legs" variety.

The "stretch his legs" cliche indeed occurs on pg. 4, but is ironically appropriate - it portrays the thought and intention of a character whose life is a total cliche.

Bloom can't resist any chance to demean Rowling's readers, nor can he resist the impulse to express himself in the most pretentious and supercilious way.

How to read"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do. is there any redeeming education use to Rowling? Is there any to Stephen King? Why read, if what you read will not enrich mind or spirit or personality? For all I know, the actual wizards and witches of Britain, or America, may provide an alternative culture for more people than is commonly realized.

The tilter against windmills must express a vain hope:

And yet I feel a discomfort with the Harry Potter mania, and I hope that my discontent is not merely a highbrow snobbery, or a nostalgia for a more literate fantasy to beguile (shall we say) intelligent children of all ages.

Whatever the height of his brow, I think his discontent is mainly snobbery.

The core weakness of the review is his utter inability to guess the nature of Harry Potter's appeal. He doesn't comprehend it, so he can only blame the readers:

Perhaps Rowling appeals to millions of reader non-readers because they sense her wistful sincerity, and want to join her world, imaginary or not. She feeds a vast hunger for unreality; can that be bad? At least her fans are momentarily emancipated from their screens, and so may not forget wholly the sensation of turning the pages of a book, any book.

There is fear in that paragraph and incomprehension, and I feel a momentary pathos. These are the words of one who thinks the world has passed him by, and rages against it. His fear, though, is mainly misplaced. If he were slightly more attuned to the world that is, he would have realized that those legions of Potter maniacs he fears are mainly people who have read and admired Shakespear, Austin, Shelley, and Lewis Carroll.

He has one line that speaks to me:

Why read, if what you read will not enrich mind or spirit or personality?

Vladamir Nabakov told the story of teaching college literature and asking his students why they studied it. There were many answers he didn't like, but one that he did:

I like stories.