CONTAINS NO SPOILERS.
After finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I wasn’t quite ready to separate myself from the subject yet, so I went to a number of websites reading reviews and the like. Among these I came upon the AV Club’s blogged-as-read report by Genevieve Koski and Tasha Robinson. It was replete with comments like “These books aren’t great literature, they’re just kind of fun, and I’m more interested in the whole phenomenon than in deifying Rowling as a great writer,” and “a lot of people, on this site and elsewhere, have complained that the Harry Potter books aren’t great literature and don’t deserve the kind of attention and devotion they’ve gotten.”
This is a common criticism – certainly among my New York friends – and I think it is absurd. Instead of conceding that someone isn’t a great writer and then cortorting our argument into all sorts of weird shapes to justify why we love it so much (because I can’t believe that there’s any reason for people to be fascinated by the Harry Potter phenomenon as opposed to, say, the Titanic or Pokemon phenomena), doesn’t it make more sense to admit that we do find someone a great writer, and then examine our definition of “great writer”? We can either find our emotions or our assumptions in error, but either way I think the examination is more honest as a result.
The conclusion I’ve drawn is that such backhanded complements to Harry Potter are first and foremost a product of academia and the sort of literature it has sought to produce and endorse: that which we euphemistically call “literary fiction,” and which is supposedly distinguished from genre writing by its lack of “conventions” and popular writing by its appeal to individual examination over universal sentiment. I don’t buy these distinctions. “Literary fiction” is embodied by oh-so-reliable tropes of political ennui, childhood remeniscences, extramarital affairs that are prompted by assorted personal vacancies, and obsessions over prosodic minutae. These are all as present as the conventions of genre fiction, and their most convincing effect could be (almost) agreed upon as in accordance with an organizing principle, if not universal sentiment. Literary fiction isn’t bad for that fact; it is simply conventional. It is literary by virtue of the fact that an academic community has named it so. It are not deprived of craft or novelty or relevance for this reason; it shares with popular and genre fiction the opportunity to extend relevance beyond a simple application of convention.
I’m not saying here either that I think that Rowling’s work is flawless. Each book has had its flaws. Books One and Two lacked the complexity and intrigue of all that followed. Sometimes they’ve suffered from too much exposition, perhaps, and who can forget the angry (and annoying) ALL-CAPS HARRY from Book Five. But even great writers have peccadilloes. Samuel Beckett is essentially a one-trick pony; his trick is good enough that we forgive him. Vladimir Nabokov has many tricks up his sleeve, but only one plot, and if you’ve read Lolita and Pale Fire you’ve gotten the gyst of it. Getrude Stine is startling and magnetic with the power and beauty and majesty of her voice, but not in her off-putting theories on personality and nationality.
Rowling is a master storyteller. She makes an economic use of narrative inflection and description to establish setting and characters as both subtle and rawly imaginative, and immediately kicks into plots with myriad intersecting arcs. Like Dantè’s terza rima the atoms of this device overlaps and stagger. This means that there is never a comfortable resolution until the end of the book, and maybe, ultimately, the series. It’s as effective as good noir for page-turning, and given the manipulation of information from earlier books, the abundance of both red herrings and legitimate clues, it’s authentically a masterful creation.
My problem with reviews such as the AV’s is that they make automatic provisions for and distinctions between good writing and good storytelling. And yet: between these two modes of writing – if the social and political situation of the text is just as interesting, if the prosodic and thematic vocabulary is just is sophisticated, if the modes of creation and the distribution of the work are essentially identical – is there any objective basis on which to prefer “good literature” over “good storytelling”?
I don’t think so, myself.
This week and next I will be writing three posts on this subject. In each I will choose an element, theme, or device that Rowling uses in the Hally Potter books generally and Deathly Hallows particularly. I will try to argue that these deployments are can be well-argued to be as nuanced and deliberate as those used by “master writers” of the last century. We have begun a process by which writing indigenous to the non-Western world – Ferdousi’s Shahnamah for example, or the stories of Rabindranath Tagore – is being critically explored as equal in nuance and deliberation to our Western canon. We ought to examine our assumptions within the field of Western literature itself.