More Potter Bashing^2

Potter bashers have historically been a rather scarce commodity, which gave them a certain market value. Antonia S. Byatt, who evidently is a writer of some reputation (not quite sufficient to come to my attention, however) is probably the second most prominent such death eater. She reviewed HP 5 in the New York Times Harry Potter And The Childish Adult in 2003.

Like other infidels, she can't quite figure out what the fuss is about:

What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success of the Harry Potter books? Why do they satisfy children and — a much harder question — why do so many adults read them? I think part of the answer to the first question is that they are written from inside a child's-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology. But then how do we answer the second question? Surely one precludes the other.

Her title announces both her diagnosis and her critical strategy. The last sentence is another clue. It's a thought that would never occur to me. Many of my main interests (science, sports, and games) are essentially childish, and haven't changed much since I was ten. I find that children are often more interesting to talk to than adults.

Byatt then proceeds to launch into Freud, a rather tedious exercise but not utterly without explanatory power.

The easy question first. Freud described what he called the "family romance," in which a young child, dissatisfied with its ordinary home and parents, invents a fairy tale in which it is secretly of noble origin, and may even be marked out as a hero who is destined to save the world. In J. K. Rowling's books, Harry is the orphaned child of wizards who were murdered trying to save his life. He lives, for unconvincingly explained reasons, with his aunt and uncle, the truly dreadful Dursleys, who represent, I believe, his real "real" family, and are depicted with a relentless, gleeful, overdone venom.

It's hard for me to get beyond the "Well, duh!" reaction. It's hardly a revelation that all children's stories (or all stories) are built on certain plot elements that tap into our deepest fantasies. Fortunately, there are only a few such paragraphs.

Next we get to hear some sour sniping:

Harry's first date with a female wizard is unbelievably limp, filled with an 8-year-old's conversational maneuvers...

Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child's own power of fantasizing...

Much of the real evil in the later books is caused by newspaper gossip columnists who make Harry into a dubious celebrity, which is the modern word for the chosen hero. . .

None of this strikes me as either true or interesting, but YMMV.

Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, "only personal." Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

The last sentence is absurd and the middle one is merely insulting, but what the heck is the "numinous?"

From Dictionary.com:

nu·mi·nous –adjective
1. of, pertaining to, or like a numen; spiritual or supernatural.
2. surpassing comprehension or understanding; mysterious: that element in artistic expression that remains numinous.
3. arousing one's elevated feelings of duty, honor, loyalty, etc.: a benevolent and numinous paternity.

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[Origin: 1640–50; < L nūmin

A "numen" it seems, is a divine power or spirit occupying an object or a place. There are no divine powers in Harry Potter, but there are plenty of spirits occupying places and objects from portraits to Horcruxes. Perhaps Byatt had in mind definition two.

Comfort, I think, is part of the reason[that adults like Rowling]. Childhood reading remains potent for most of us. In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 "best reads," more than a quarter were children's books. We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

Since she was 67 when she wrote this, I suspect she was boasting a bit.

She goes on to compare Rowling unfavorably with several fantasy authors that I haven't read: Susan Cooper, Alan Gardner, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Terry Pratchett.

For her finale, she wheels in some heavy artillery:

It's become respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called "consumable" books. There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's "magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

This merely points up that Rowling's readers have a different opinion, and that Byatt has explained nothing.