I kind of think the Harry Potter books are merely OK reading, not particularly great. And I do think they are ultimately right wing and crypto-Christian, as has been recently argued. The great contemporary children’s author is not J.K. Rowling, but the anti-religious humanist, Philip Pullman. But, that said, I have no sympathy for the current high-minded backlash of anti-Potterism…
In particular, I find A. S. Byatt’s attack against Rowling and Harry Potter in The New York Times to be thoroughly obnoxious. Byatt concedes Harry Potter to children, but froths at the mouth at the thoughts that adults might enjoy the books also. She writes that Harry Potter “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.” What is this besides class prejudice and snobbery? The better sort of people, I suppose, are those who read Byatt’s novels instead of Rowling’s, listen to NPR, and watch no TV aside from PBS–those whom my wife Jacalyn Harden sarcastically calls “Barnes and Noble Savages.”
Byatt also oddly characterizes adult Potter-lovers as ” inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don’t have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing…” This is rather an unfortunate metaphor, I think. I like visiting national parks as much as the next person; but, as somebody born and bred in New York City, I do not trust anybody who denounces urban life as somehow inauthentic and “ersatz” compared to “the real wild.” As Frank O’Hara wonderfully wrote, I fear that such anti-urban people “totally regret life.”
Byatt’s column also contains a gratuitous attack against “the leveling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don’t really believe exists.” Now, there are a lot of things to say in reply to this. For one thing, “cultural studies” is scarcely a unified field. Some of its practitioners are concerned with aesthetic questions, others with sociological ones (as well as a lot of other things in between). For another, the real question here is whether “literary merit” is the only thing that we can properly talk about when we talk about books. I have my own opinions about literary merit (for example, as I have already said, I think Philip Pullman is a writer of much greater literary merit than J K Rowling). But I am not enough of a snob–or to put it positively, I am too interested in, and fascinated by, literature–to think that giving such hall-of-fame rankings is where literary discussion begins and ends. Evidently Byatt is one of those people who prefers to venerate Great Books on bended knee, rather than experience writing and books as vital parts of people’s actual lives.
I was disappointed that Henry Farrell, in Crooked Timber, wrote in defense of Byatt’s column, going so far as to call it “splendidly caustic.” I guess it’s a question of what things put one’s pretentiousness detector on high alert…