Dammit, I Like Harry Potter

Sadpunk posts rant about Harry Potter.

Well, sort of.

Anyway, I disagree.

Though this sort of feels like an AA meeting, I must admit that I like Harry Potter. Despite the fact that I'm an adult. Despite the fact that Sadpunk is right — or at least arguably so — about most everything he says in his post.

I was at the local bookstore at midnight with some friends (yeah, I know, drink the Kool-Aid), all of whom are adults and most of whom were a little tipsy when we arrived. They all bought the book, too. Though they're smart, so we mostly avoided the lines and went to Kroger, which sells them cheaper than the bookstores do, anyway.

I was, as were most adults, a latecomer to the Potter phenomenon. A friend gave me the first three books at the time of the publication of the fourth. And I started reading, cautiously.

Now, it's worth mentioning that I'm a book collector. I was already aware of the tremendous popularity of these books and the exorbitant prices they were fetching. And I read about three pages of the first book and thought, "I wish I'd read this when it was new." Because you can tell, sometimes, immediately, when a writer has it. And you may not even know why. Well, J.K. Rowling has it.

Sadpunk asserts:

. But I’ve glanced through some Harry Potter books, and glanced at some of the movies, and it seems to me that they offer nothing novel, nothing challenging, nothing that we haven’t seen a million times before; Rowling’s achievement in writing them is not in creating something new, but in concisely distilling all these things we’ve encountered uncountable times already.

Hmm. Isn't that kind of the point of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces? That much of our myth, legend, religion, etc., relies upon stories told and retold? That Star Wars is a lot like The Searchers, which is a lot like any number of other books/movies/plays/etc.

I think Campbell would argue that there's a way heroes act in Western literature. And that's the way Harry Potter acts. If he didn't act that way, he wouldn't be a hero.

Rowling's particular genius seems to be to be taking the myths we all know, or have heard bits and snatches of, and creating with them an amalgamated magic world that, simply because its constituent elements are based on stories we all know almost subconsciously, seems real and believable. Sadpunk seems critical of this approach; I think it lends her story credibility and grounds it.

And then she's smart enough to make Harry Potter, for all that, a real, genuine, adolescent boy. He turns into a real louse later in the series; he's sometimes haughty and arrogant, just as boys sometimes are. And he's not pure as the wind-driven snow, either.

The same is true of the other characters; they're like real people, not cardboard cutouts of them. The story is essentially human, wrapped up in wizardry and dreams and nightmares. And isn't that what art, for the most part, ought to be in some sense?

And the boarding-school for English magicians — I wish I'd thought of that.

Rowling's a storyteller of the first rate. And that's a big part of it.

Or maybe Sadpunk's just cynical. I dunno.