November 07, 2005

I'm too old to fully understand the Harry Potter phenomena. I'd have to take the Wayback Machine to being 11 years old again to wholly comprehend it. Still, there is a part of me that is 11, so in some degree I do understand the appeal of the novels.

I did read the first one, and found there was some magic and wonder in it. Talking werecats slinking around at night, and a flying motorcycle ridden by a good-natured biker who couldn't quite make it as a wizard? Good stuff; in some ways great. Parts of the novel are a nearly perfect fantasy, especially the opening scenes. In other ways, though, there are a lot of problems with the book. And I do mean a lot.

Unfortunately, the second and third novels I found excruciating, and could not finish them. I'm not going to bother tackling the rest. Overall, I don't think the books are going to last, in the sense that J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis have lasted.

Even so, J.K. Rowling did hit a very big nerve with fans. Mostly, I think, because of the archetypes in her books, especially the first one. Harry is both an Outcast and a Scapegoat; he's also a Changeling. Harry fits Joseph Campbell's definition of a Hero on a Quest. He has no family; indeed what counts as "family" not only abuses him but appears to hate him. Later, when he enters wizard school he finds both true family and true community. Rowling also understands that both evil and power are opposite sides of the same coin, as exemplified by Voldemort.

Then we have the fact that the books are a subculture to differentiate kids from adults. Kids always do that. In some ways they're rites of passage. I've seen kids who treats the books like Dungeons and Dragons. They know every bit of trivia in them.

Those are the good parts of the book. The bad parts show that in real life the emotionally repressed Harry would have lost that British stiff upper lip of his, gone postal and axe-murdered his entire "family" because of their horrendous abuse of him. Making him live under the stairs with spiders? Starving him? Yet throughout all of it he remains cheerful and unaffected? No, I don't think so.

He'd be a seething caldron of hate, rage and probably envy, and like almost all people like that, his first defense would be to blame his problems on others, specifically his adoptive parents. Then -- pow, machete time. Yet Rowling pretty much writes as if this horrendous treatment has essentially had no effect on him at all. Just how unrealistic is that?

Although the books are fantasies, they're also horror stories, and like all horror stories make people feel the same thing: "I'm glad I don't have to live like that." Kids do learn to empathize with Harry, and wipe their brows and think, "Whew, I'm glad I'm not him."

I empathized with him, too. Partly. Otherwise, I wanted to shake him. How could I empathize and despise this kid at the same time, and think that he lived in a disturbed fantasy world? But I did. That's why I don't think the books are going to last: in some ways I despised Harry. "Damn it, kid, stand up for yourself! Show just a little bit of courage! Fight back, argue, don't let them roll over you like that!" I was terribly frustrated with him.

Let's put it this way: what would the overwhelmingly majority of parents think of some milquetoast kid like that? Would they really be surprised if the kid blew his stack someday and took a log splitter to the entire family as they slept? Probably not. I wouldn't.

There is something creepily narcissistic about the books. Harry's real parents are safely dead, so he doesn't have to deal with their imperfections and can instead idealize them. The "family" with which Harry lives are "all-bad"; the people at Hogwarts are "all-good." Harry has nothing in the Muggles' world, neither community or tradition or shared meaning. Not only does he have those things at Hogwarts, he's the most famous wizard ever. In some ways the book is incoherent and contradictory, and it appears that Rowling is working through some personal issues through her fiction.

And since when is middle-class existence so horrible the only out is a non-existent magic castle? Rowling is being subversive and insulting here. Since the bulwark of the Western nations are middle-class, she's bashing their values and trying to portray the members as being just like the Dudleys. She's essentially saying the middle-class, which was created by liberty and the free market, has nothing of value for anyone.

If I was 11, would I like the books? The first one, yes, for the most part. But even at that age I don't think any of the others would appeal to me. I was raised on Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Barsoom/Mars novels, books in which cowards and bullies were skewered with sabers and then had their carcasses kicked over cliffs (not only by the men, but by the women). Yet we get poor Harry swallowing abuse after abuse, not only from his adoptive family but from bullies and cowards like Draco Malfoy. It takes way too long for the bad guys to get their just deserts.

I can't imagine an American writing novels like Rowling's, just as I cannot imagine anyone but an American writing Burroughs' novels. Neither can I imagine a man writing Rowling's novels; to me they're clearly written by a woman. There's really no physical violence in the novel, in the sense of a bullied boy turning around and justifably smacking his tormentors right in the nose. That's one of the main problems right there: these books aren't really for boys.

When it comes right down to it, Harry comes across as Rowling's conception of a boy rather than what boys really are. Unfortunately, he acts more like a girl than a boy. Let's just say he's more than slightly...effeminate.

I wonder what the novels would have been like if a man had written them? Not just E.R. Burroughs, but say, Mickey Spillane? I guarantee you this, though: Harry would not, as he is in the movies, be a metrosexual with a Dorothy Hamil haircut.

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