Column: Intelligently reading 'Harry Potter'
Published Oct. 5, 2007
The saga is over. Voldemort's gone moldy. What else is there to talk about?
Plenty, really. The most fascinating thing about the Harry Potter series is its extremely wide appeal, from the hordes of young children to well-known academics and even people who tried, somewhat successfully, to rip off J.K. Rowling's work in both Chinese and Russian. (Hint: Change some names and plot details, then translate into Cyrillic or Mandarin.)
Not to mention the glut of Rowling-sanctioned fan fiction that's available on the Internet, and some of it isn't bad, but some of it is bizarre (I seem to recall hearing about one "fanfic" piece where Harry and Draco fall in love and engage in magically assisted bondage play.) Of course, there are those the series didn't appeal to: people who are found lurking in the dark corners of every religious movement and fundamentalists who have tried to ban Potter from libraries or towns on the grounds that the books promoted witchcraft.
I hold that part of Potter's wide appeal is due to the fact that Rowling managed to cast a number of thematic structures and ideas in a profoundly accessible style that is fluid, cogent, humorous, personal and does not fall into clichŽ.
The books are redolent with references steeped in Christian mythology and history, death and resurrection being the most obvious - although there are, to the careful reader, echoes of C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. And, of course, there's the overarching questions about post-modernity, the limits of human understanding, the universality of oppression and the distrust of power vested in sadistic organizations.
I would be remiss to not mention the medieval, even Arthurian, intertwining of plot and symbol, from the very nature of the quests to the idea of hallows. (Hint: Google "Hallows of Britain" and see how many parallels to items in the Potter series you can find.)
Of course, there aren't many pieces of fan fiction that come close to being as joyously readable, although there are certainly those who find great pleasure in re-imaging Harry Potter as they see fit. And I promise that if you're one of those people, there is something out there for you, from renditions of the Order of the Phoenix in The Sims game engine to angsty renditions of Luna Lovegood's unrequited love for Ginny, although no one's rendered that using the Sims, at least to my knowledge.
Oh, and let's not forget the newly emergent, almost Pitchfork-worthy musical movement known as wizard rock. Starting with Massachusetts-based Harry and the Potters, there are now more than 200 catalogued bands that are based in some facet of the Potter mythology, including the Wyrd Sisters, the Leaky Cauldrons, Ministry of Magic, The Parselmouths, The Remus Lupins and even rap act Sirius Black. This movement has even spawned an in-production documentary, Wizard Rockumentary. Presumably the good folks at Ragtag CinemacafŽ already have that in its lineup.
Interesting bit of trivia: The New York Times eventually classified Harry Potter as children's literature after numerous complaints from publishers that "serious" literature was being kept off the list (I believe that at one time, there were three Potter titles in the top 15.)
I would personally like to think of the Potter era as something that I'll miss. Not that I'm a big fan of rabid children or the more adult obsessions that one can find scattered around the tubes on the Internet, but Rowling can take a great deal of credit for promoting literacy around the world, which is something that I haven't managed to do yet.