Harry Potter And The Literary Elitist

I'm late to the party, I know, having only in the past month taken up the Harry Potter books, compelled finally by the unprecedented publishing success of the series. I'm no fan of genre fiction generally, and near the very bottom of my list is fantasy fiction (I managed to slog through the first book of The Lord of the Rings trilogy many years ago, but just barely), edged out of last place only by science fiction, a genre I most heartily loathe largely because of its hey-look-at-me use of the weird and paradoxical in physical and astronomic theory, and because of its risible literary pretensions.

I've now read Books 1-4 of the Harry Potter series, and I'm somewhat chagrined to confess I found them all rather charming (which is, after all, only fit), even fairly engaging in a quick-read sort of way (it took me some five days to read all four books; all 1800 pages worth). J.K. Rowling is clearly a storyteller of considerable narrative gift who immediately calls to mind no-one so much as the Conan Doyle of the classic Sherlock Holmes tales, and a writer of a not inconsiderable fantastical imagination. The Harry Potter books are, for the most part, a clever and skillful patchwork of fairytale, saga, and mythological motifs and devices intelligently and imaginatively applied with a soupçon of Star Trek and Star Wars, and a fair bit more than a soupçon of Tolkien, and of English boarding school movies cum Nancy Drew and Andy Hardy.

And, surprisingly, it all somehow works.

One might be tempted to level the charge that the motifs and devices, as well as the various character types that act them out in the Potter books, are cliché or stereotypical, but one would be wrong. They're neither clichés nor stereotypes but archetypes, which is why, in the hands of someone with the requisite imaginative narrative gift, they all can be employed again and again, and still remain fresh, and psychologically resonant and affective.

As charming and engaging as the books are, however, there's about them something I find troubling. As A.S Byatt put it in her Op-Ed piece on the Potter books for the New York Times (not linked because available now only in pay-per-view form), which piece in large part, but not entirely, echoes many of my own thoughts: "Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous." I would go further and say that world evidences a seemingly dogged, even dogmatic, eschewal of the numinous. The reason for that is, I confess, a mystery to me; one for which I'll not even attempt to provide a solution. That the books are written for children (their surprising number of adult readers notwithstanding and beside the point) is no answer at all. Neither is it a justification or excuse for the apparent by-design avoidance of even so much as a suggestion of some deeper mystery behind the up-front magic.

The series' central schtick — its hook — is the portrayal of the magic world of wizards and witches — in Hogwarts and environs as well as in the Muggle world — mostly in matter-of-fact, often humorous, quotidian, even utilitarian terms, and that's a big part of the series' charm and appeal. But to lend the tales and the world they portray the necessary depth, always at work in the deep background at least must be sensed a numinous source of the magic in that world, good and evil, else that magic cannot help but be experienced as nothing more resonant than the flashy illusionist magic of the stage magician, or the cartoon magic of a TV-witch sitcom. Of this sense of the numinous, however, the Potter books are entirely bereft.

I don't at all mean to suggest that the Harry Potter books ought to be something their author never intended them to be. I'm saying merely that in each of the first four volumes I've read, there came a point in the narrative that pleaded, fairly cried out even, for a deft suggestion of some deeper mystery behind the outward magic — the chapter "The Forbidden Forest" in The Sorcerer's Stone; the chapter "The Heir of Slytherin" in The Chamber of Secrets; the chapter "The Servant of Lord Voldemort" in The Prisoner of Azkaban; and the chapter "Flesh, Blood, and Bone" in The Goblet of Fire — the heeding of which plea, even by something as tacky and as blazingly dumb as The Force of the Star Wars movies (although an imaginatively gifted storyteller such as Rowling could certainly come up with something a great deal better), would have given to the whole a resonance, depth, contextual believability, and sense of the special it could in no way otherwise achieve. But instead, in each case, the plea went unanswered — was not so much as even acknowledged — with the unhappy consequence that the books are experienced as a mere disposable diversion of the moment; quick-read charming and engaging, but neither different nor distinguishable in aesthetic and philosophic thrust and substance from any number of TV series targeted at the MTV crowd, or from big-screen bubblegum flicks.

And that's all rather a pity — for us adult readers, at any rate. It's not often a gifted storyteller like Ms. Rowling comes along, and when one does, we quite naturally want the maximum she's capable of providing. Ms. Rowling, we're convinced, is capable of more.