The essay below was originally part of an introduction to The Seeker's Guide to Harry Potter. You'll find a few snippets of overlap with my book here. However, since the book is focussed on the layers of mythic and spiritual meaning we find in Harry Potter and the lessons we may draw from them for our own lives, the publisher and I ended up feeling that it was an 'off message' beginning. We thought of making it an appendix, but had no room, so here it is.

It's also a lot more academic in tone than my book. It covers a lot of intellectual ground to put the Harry Potter novels in their literary and cultural contexts and counter their critics. Therefore, its effects on the uninitiated may be like the Draught of Living Death potion. You have been warned!

Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Critics

There are a couple of points to bear in mind when we look at Harry Potter as literature. First, some critics, and even some fans, have said that there's little in the books beyond surface entertainment. If that was true, there'd be no point going further.

Second, the whole idea of our shared cultural, spiritual and mythological heritage is central to the Harry Potter phenomenon. Many of us have lost familiarity with the 'canon,' the body of great works that some critics defend. Has Harry stepped in to fill some of the gaps in our cultural heritage? Should he? Are the novels a collage of genres and ideas with no real depth? Do they say anything about myth and magic, or just mechanically use the forms? Can Harry draw us back to older works of enduring value? Will his stories endure? Read on.

A Pottered History of Criticism

Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun. For those of other nationalities, it's a British thing. JK Rowling, like Dickens before her, has a very British kind of fun with language, words and names.

In some of what follows, it may seem that I'm ranging a bit far from Harry. I'm doing so to give you a deeper perspective of the ideas and debates behind what the critics say about the books, which will pay off when we look at their critiques in detail.

Let's start with a brief review of the basic issue of what is or isn't art. This exciting brawl has raged around every form of art, from painting to sculpture to literature to film to music. We certainly won't resolve this debate, but an outline should show how the arguments relate to Harry Potter.

The term 'art' used to stand for the whole range of arts and sciences, including the magical arts. Nowadays, what we call art and 'not-art' exist on a continuum. At one side there's what most of us would agree is art, at the other, what most of us would agree isn't.

Part of the distinction is intent. Shakespeare's works are generally agreed to be great examples of the writer's art: literature. My shopping list isn't, but it isn't meant to be. What if I published it in a book as a poem? Does a change of context change it nature? Do my apples and milk attain greater psychological or even spiritual resonance if I draw attention to them this way?

Some of the most furious art debates have raged around this sort of question. For example, a controversial 1996 London art exhibit, Sensation, featured a pickled lamb in a tank by Damien Hirst, entitled "Far from the Flock," and Tracy Emin's bed.¹

Criticism, encompassing reviews and scholarship, is intended to help us separate the wheat from the chaff. Over 116,000 books are published each year in the UK alone.² No one can read them all. Ideally, critics draw our attention to the 'best,' but as we all know, my best isn't necessarily your best, and critical ideas of what is 'best' change over time.

In the late 1800s, the critic and poet Matthew Arnold said that 'critical reading' was about cultivating an appreciation for "the best that had been thought and said in the world." Works were measured against a kind of literary hall of fame, the 'Great Tradition.' Works that fall into this category became known as 'canon.'³ Well-funded libraries were favorite ports of call for readers to embark on their literary voyages through the great works, meaning that books weren't seen simply as consumer goods, but existed on a higher plane.

There has been justifiable criticism of the whole idea of canon. Genre fiction like children's stories or fantasy was dismissed out of hand, and dead white men dominate the list of literature as art, yet critics are also right to defend aspects of it.

Dead white men's good work, like anybody's good work, can enrich and inform us. Kipling's poem, If, has been a support to my family since it was written. My great-grandfather always joked that if you could do all it said you wouldn't "be a man, my son,' you'd be a god, but he still always quoted it when the going was tough.

Two hundred years ago my ancestors would have included the Bible, classical myths and Shakespeare on their list of literature, as well as a lot of traditional oral Gaelic and Hungarian and Transylvanian tales and prayers and folklore. They wouldn't have included the ancient Sumerian epic Gilgamesh or the luminous poems of the Sufi mystic Rumi. They wouldn't have known the Indian Upanisads or Aborigine myths.

Obviously, they also wouldn't have known today's great works. Canon can be written now, we just seldom know for sure that it's canon until we see if it 'sticks'. Shakespeare, Conan Doyle and Jane Austen were all pop culture in their day. They still are, to some extent — witness the endless Austen retreads on film, and the fact that Shakespeare's plays have never gone out of production.

JK Rowling sounded like she had found a sense of peace regarding this process, in an interview after Hallows. She said, "If the books deserve to survive, they will survive, and if they don't deserve to survive, they won't. That's it. History will judge. That, ultimately, is what matters, and it really helps you put everything else in perspective."⁴

Our canon should expand, yet we lose something if we lose all shared cultural familiarity with works that have stood the test of time, in the texture of our lives and in our ability to communicate more deeply with each other. The desire for shared emotional experience stands at the heart of our urge to create and enjoy art and stories.⁵ Harry has given us shared emotional experience on a grand scale, and he hearkens back to earlier shared myths and heroes.

Cultural inclusion shouldn't be about making a theoretical 'them' more like a theoretical 'us,' but about creating enough of a common cultural vocabulary to allow all of us to express what we actually are to each other. Sharing some cultural touchstones is less about indoctrination than communication.

Interestingly, Harry Potter formally became just such a touchstone in 2003, when the British Home Secretary of the time, David Blunkett said that people applying for British citizenship would need to pass tests in English, politics, history and culture. Among other things, they would need to know the name and birthplace of Britain's most famous playwright (William Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon) and the name of the main character created by British author JK Rowling.⁶

Harry Potter has certainly become a part of many cultures, particularly British and American. Two references to the books appear in a 2007 episode of the British science fiction series Doctor Who, which has been on the air intermittently since 1963, and so is a cultural institution itself. The Doctor, a time-travelling alien, teasingly speaks of how he cried after reading book seven. (This was a safe bet for the story line, even though it hadn't come out yet). In another episode of the time-travelling series, Shakespeare used "expelliarmus" to expel a horde of evil aliens from the world. So, Rowling's word has been put into Shakespeare's mouth in Doctor Who, the term 'Muggle' has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, Rowling has received a golden badge on the iconic children's television program Blue Peter, and she's met the Queen. That's about as integrated into British culture as an author can get.

Harry Potter has sense of tradition but represents forward looking, multi-racial Britain. Hogwarts has room for people of any race and any (or few) talents. Harry is a retrolutionary: "a symbolic figure of the past-in-future England which is in desperate need of such symbols."⁷

Evidently Harry Potter, while uniquely British, appeals worldwide, from the American music student who uses expecto patronum before recitals, to the Chinese translators who heartily enjoyed the change of pace and the connection with traditional Chinese folk tales that the stories brought them as they prepared Chinese editions.

Harry hearkens back to the shared archetypal heroes of all cultures, as I discuss much more fully in The Seeker's Guide to Harry Potter. The loss of common cultural heroes, myths and traditions leads to mythic and spiritual impoverishment, and shallow, facile communication.

People often used to say things like, "Blake said it better than I can..." and follow with a quote from the great poet. Now we're lucky to hear a catch phrase. Rote learning of the Great Tradition didn't rob people of personal expression, if anything it seemed to give people better access to inspiration that our current popular culture does.

When I first saw Ken Burns' documentary series on the American Civil War, what most struck me was the beautifully written letters. These weren't just officer's letters. They were the letters of ordinary people, writing extraordinary prose.

This is partly what's behind academics' and critics' attempts to defend the canon, and what leads some to try and bash Harry Potter. A broad and deep cultural education can enrich people's lives. The critic's and academic's role is dual. One part is to watch and analyze what is. Another is to act as a guide for future growth based on our 'historical bests' as a species.

The study of culture should to some extent be a study of the culture we've got, including what we dislike. An anthropologist doesn't go to study headhunters and refuse to look at headhunting because it's too popular amongst the natives or because he doesn't much like it. Yet the bias remains that popular cultures is bad culture.

The critic, Harold Bloom, who also had a go at Harry Potter, attacked the best-selling author Stephen King, both for his own popular horror novels and for his praise of Rowling's books.

King responded when he won a National Book Award for "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters." He asked his critics, (including Bloom) if they thought that they earned "social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch" with their own culture.⁸

Academics shouldn't be ruled by popular culture, however. Critics and academics should try to protect our ancestral legacy, to make sure that works that have been consistently valuable to generations aren't washed away by books that prove to have a more ephemeral value, leaving us with nothing. That's the role literary novelist AS Byatt and others quoted below are trying to take when they attack Harry Potter. Let's see if they're justified.

I'll offer you a few words of encouragement here, which you may particularly need if your first encounter with literary criticism was (or will be) someone bashing the books of our much-loved hero.

I had impassioned quarrels about what is and isn't art and literature as a teenager in art school. Critical snobbishness dictated that I couldn't judge art until I was 'educated.' My art history teacher said she'd gotten so educated that, in opposition to the old saying, she knew what was good, but didn't know what she liked. I'm one of many proofs that professional critics are wrong about the idea that only the 'ignorant' dislike many works they deem 'great.' I'm excessively educated in many fields now, yet much work that critics deem 'important' still leaves me cold.

Getting educated didn't change my tastes much. In painting, I still love the surrealists. I still rate much figurative work over much abstract work, though I can describe why either might be considered good or bad. I can understand why one would call a painting art, even great art, while simultaneously honoring my inner delinquent by wondering aloud how it can possibly suck and blow at the same time. As Ollivander said, Voldemort did great things, "terrible, but great."

The critics' big lie is that 'untrained' individuals aren't entitled to their personal aesthetic response to a work. This really comes up in relation to the Harry Potter books. In Harold Bloom's words "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes."⁹ Of course, people, en masse, can be wrong about any number of things. There are an awful lot of Dursleys out there, Muggles with little social, environmental or personal awareness beyond what they might like to consume.

There's no problem with a critic saying that a popular idea or craze is wrong. What does seem wrong is the idea that we must all agree, and only enjoy what the thought police approve of. It runs counter to the whole modern Western idea of art as individual self-expression. If individuals are entitled to express themselves, then individuals are surely entitled to their unique experience viewing that self-expression.

To understand a work doesn't mean you have to like it. What's more, not theoretically understanding a work doesn't mean you have no right of response. We are all entitled to our opinions and aesthetic experiences. What I've found 'half-baked' about many critiques of Harry Potter is that the critics tend to deny this, and too often work from an apparently cursory glance at the novels. For example, Harold Bloom wrote a scathing attack on the series in 2000 after the fourth book came out, having only read the first one.¹⁰

No novel, let alone series, is flawless. Some critics raise points about the books that are well worth examining. However, others rely on circular arguments or bald statements. The books are badly written because they're not written well, and grown-up Harry fans must be 'dolts' because, you guessed it, we're grown up Harry fans!

Don't be intimidated by experts.

Thus fortified, let's have a look at some 'expert' assessments of Harry Potter.

Answering the Case against Harry Potter as Literature

Standing before us in the Wizengamot, the wizard's court, we have three individuals, the critic, William Safire, prize-winning novelist AS Byatt and critic Harold Bloom. They give us a representative sample of negative critiques of the books. (These are literary objections. I discuss the well-publicized religious objections to the novels in my book.) I'll give a rough outline of their perspectives, and respond after each.

I owe some of the points that follow to Taylor's amusingly named essay A.S. Byatt and the goblet of bile.¹¹ Here's the reason for his title.

In 2003, Byatt, who won the Booker prize for Possession, turned her guns on Harry Potter. She said that many grown-up Harry Potter lovers seek a comforting regression to childhood from the books and that Phoenix was written "for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the...mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip." These readers inhabit "urban jungles" not "the real wild." They also "don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thingŠ" She goes on to say that JK Rowling "speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery.

She asserted that fantasy novels by authors such as Ursula K Le Guin contained "a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark forests." By contrast, The Forbidden Forest at Hogwarts "is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is." The books are "comfortable, funny, just frightening enough," offering a chance to regress to a safe world of identifiable good and evil where we feel that we're given control over the unpredictable.

Byatt concludes her review by saying that there's "nothing wrong" with Harry Potter. "But it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats' "magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.'"

There's certainly comfort to be found in Harry Potter. Comfort of some kind is a necessary element in children's literature. There's comfort in Harry's relationships, in a world where magic is tangible and flashy, in a semi-closed protected world of special people where you'd be safe from Muggle violence. Harry's textbook in Azkaban describes witch burning as a bit of a joke. Real witches could perform a simple charm and enjoy "a gentle tickling sensation." Although this begs the question of why Hogwarts was founded, if not to enclose and protect as well as educate wizards.

There's quite a bit of comfort in the way that Harry can study his textbooks outside Fortescue's ice cream parlor eating half-hourly ice creams without getting fat. Only Fleur expresses concern over the Hogwarts food fattening her. No one else does, though there are chubby witches and wizards. Magic must burn up a lot of calories. (Now there's a book to write. Magical weight loss — though of course most weight-loss books promise something similar. Everyone with me: thinguardium porkilossa!)

Byatt is also right that it's comforting to be able to identify evil. It's certainly better than having it sneak up behind you! A clear fight is an easier fight to choose and to win. This is one reason that both America and Britain get nostalgic for World War II. A clearly defined evil was out there invading. Rowling even brings the war into Harry's universe by linking its end to Dumbledore's defeat of Grindelwald in 1945.

One of our greatest fears is unidentifiable evil; what that quiet, normal fellow gets up to in his spare time. However, Voldemort's influence, and even Voldemort himself, isn't always identifiable. That's one of the things that Hagrid cites as most terrifying in Stone. Even as Harry hears this from Hagrid, he has already encountered Voldemort's agent, and later, vehicle, Quirrell.

The books get darker, and evil inflicts deeper physical and psychological damage on Harry and others. This was evident when Byatt was writing, though there was worse to come. Hallows is a bit of a bloodbath. Rowling doesn't flinch from showing some of evil's real effects, and this isn't comforting.

Nor are other emotional realities of the tale. As Taylor notes, even Stone viscerally confronts us with loss in "the devastating scene where Harry encounters a mirror that reveals the heart's truest desire and, looking into it, sees himself happy and smiling with the parents he never knew, a vision that lasts only as long as he looks into the glass, and a metaphor for how fleeting our moments of real happiness are. This is Byatt's idea of reassurance?"¹²

Byatt does have a point when she talks about magic, for example, about control. Giving people a sense of power and control is a very real psychological benefit of magic in indigenous and other cultures. As the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski said, "Magic ritualizes man's optimism." Harry certainly feels better with his wand.

I discuss how magic seems a bit more mechanical and less mystical in Rowling's universe than LeGuin's in the first few novels in my book. LeGuin's Earthsea novels, the story of a young wizard's training, focus on internal states from the start. Rowling takes her time getting there. It's only in Azkaban that internal states seem to become crucial to the magic, for the patronus charm.

However, to say that Rowling's Forbidden Forest is "dangerous only because she says it is" is facetious. Anything exists in any novel only because the author says it does. Authors have to make their worlds plausible, and if LeGuin's world works better for Byatt, fair enough. However, there's no objective standard of 'realistic' magical depiction in books, however much the Ministry of Magic might like there to be.

At its heart, Rowling's depiction of magic isn't ersatz. I've trained and taught in the fields of anthropology and shamanism, and have had lifelong personal experience of magic. I could have filled my entire University of Edinburgh Open Studies course by taking off from the magical and mystical themes in Harry Potter, and the real principles behind them, which I couldn't do if it was all ersatz. Of course, the presence of those themes doesn't necessarily mean that Rowling has a deep anthropological or personal understanding of magic. Everything can be read magically and symbolically.

Let's allow Harold Bloom to take the chair now. Writing after the fourth book, he says he's just completed the first book in the series, "purportedly the best of the lot."¹³ On the basis of this one book, he goes on to say that the books aren't well written and don't possess "an authentic imaginative vision."

He says that many reading Harry Potter "simply will not read superior fare, such as Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows or the Alice books of Lewis Carroll. Is it better that they read Rowling than not read at all? Will they advance from Rowling to more difficult pleasures?" He goes on to rhetorically ask if there are any redeeming, educational qualities to Rowling or to Stephen King.

"Why read, if what you read will not enrich mind or spirit or personality?" He speaks of the ordinariness of the characters. "The young future sorcerers are just like any other budding Britons, only more so, sports and food being primary preoccupations. (Sex barely enters into Rowling's cosmos, at least in the first volume.)" Objection to the interrogator! I should hope sex doesn't come into the stories in volume one, our heroes are 11!

I think you probably agree with me that the books possess an authentic imaginative vision or you wouldn't be reading this. While The Wind in the Willows and Alice in Wonderland are great, I wouldn't class them as more "difficult pleasures" than Harry Potter. My eldest (four, at the time of writing) enjoys parts of Wind in the Willows as comfort reading, but I wouldn't try her on Harry Potter at bedtime yet. Similarly, Alice doesn't have anything like the traumas and distressing imagery of even the first novel.

I also wouldn't agree with him that Stone is the best of the series. Ms. Rowling is always good, but only improves throughout the series. Compare her handling of the 'info-dumps' at the starts of Stone and Prince. An info-dump is how writers refer to a big chunk of information that the reader or viewer needs to know and the writer needs to convey. They can be a problem, because there's nothing worse than having two characters talking about things they already know for the audience's benefit. This is what happens at the beginning of Stone between McGonagall and Dumbledore.

By the start of Prince, a more assured JK Rowling gets the information we need across in a dialog between the Muggle Prime Minister and outgoing Minister of Magic. She also gets in some humor and one of her usual digs at self-absorbed politicians. The Prime Minister isn't horrified that the Dementors are spreading misery amongst his people, but his 'voters'. Rowling conveys what's necessary while nicely widening her narrative's scope.

Stephen King summed up some of Rowling's virtues in a 2007 review after Hallows.

"She never loses sight of her main theme — the power of love to turn bewildered, often frightened, children into decent and responsible adults — but her writing is all about story. She's lucid rather than luminous, but that's okay; when she does express strong feelings, she remains their mistress without denying their truth or power. The sweetest example in Deathly Hallows comes early, with Harry remembering his childhood years in the Dursley house. "It gave him an odd, empty feeling to remember those times,'" Rowling writes, "it was like remembering a younger brother whom he had lost." Honest; nostalgic; not sloppy. It's a small example of the style that enabled Jo Rowling to bridge the generation gap without breaking a sweat or losing the cheerful dignity that is one of the series' great charms. Her characters are lively and well-drawn, her pace is impeccable, and although there are occasional continuity drops, the story as a whole hangs together almost perfectly over its 4000-plus page length."¹⁴

No mean achievement. The passage he quotes is also my favorite in the series. She captures the strange, bittersweet quality of remembering ourselves as children in minimum words with a maximum impact.

To come to our final witness, William Safire, writing in 2000, argued that adults who liked Harry Potter were basically dolts. He supported the idea with an essentially circular argument. Children's fiction is without deeper levels, except for the books he likes, such as Huckleberry Finn and Alice in Wonderland, which aren't really children's books because they have deeper levels! Safire basically counters himself with his reasoning.

He frames his critique by cheering the fact that Seamus Heaney's fine translation of Beowulf, a 1200-year-old Anglo-Saxon poem, won the prestigious Whitbread prize in 2000. That's because Azkaban was short-listed for the same prize. In fact, the Whitbread rules were changed to allow children's books to be entered for the main prize because of Harry Potter's success with adults.

The judge, Anthony Holden later justified his decision by writing that the Harry Potter books are "one dimensional children's books...a tedious, clunkily written version of Billy Bunter on broomsticks."¹⁵ (Billy Bunter was the chubby, lazy schoolboy protagonist of a long-lived nostalgic British book series.)

Nobel laureate Heaney accepted the large cash prize with a line from Beowulf: "Fate go ever, as fate must." Heaney is a great writer, and he would certainly have noticed the money more than JK Rowling, but his win raised a couple of issues. First, can translation ever be ranked higher than invention? Then, Azkaban won best children's book instead, which brings up the whole question of whether children's literature can be taken as seriously as adults' especially when it draws an adult audience. Philip Pullman's Amber Spyglass was the first children's book to win the main prize in 2002.

There was also a very large British academic issue that wasn't known to many Harry fans. This was the year that Beowulf was withdrawn as a compulsory part of Oxford's English syllabus. Refer here back to our entire preceding discussion on critics as guardians of the canon and the importance of shared cultural symbols.¹⁶

What's ironic here is that critics are defending the canon against a 'retrolutionary' who brings us back (and simultaneously forward) to the mythic spirit of Beowulf. Andrew Blake wrote an excellent book called The Irresistable Rise of Harry Potter, focussing on social, literary and political aspects of the phenomenon. He said something here that's worth quoting at length.

"Each offers an exploration of the powers of heroic individual endurance, bravery and self-belief in defence of ideas of community, and against forces of evil and greed. Each features the exploits of a male hero who defeats unspeakable monsters. But, even in Heaney's translation, Beowulf belongs completely to the past, whereas Prisoner of Azkaban is resolutely contemporary — and there's much more to this than the mere detail of jeans and trainers under witches' robes, or the occasional use of 'wicked' and 'cool' in the pupils' dialog. Beowulf's monsters stalk the swamps and caves of Northern European legend, but while Harry saves another legendary creature, the...Hippogriff, Buckbeak, he is also hunted by the terrifyingly contemporary Dementors, and in order to save himself from them he invokes a patronus or guardian which takes the form his father used to adopt. Those monsters of depression, the Dementors, and the ghostly presence of protective fatherhood in an age of anxiety about its disappearance, take us away from legend, away from Hogwarts and its semi-parallel world, and right back to the contemporary world, its personal and political issues. Even when, wizard-cloaked and wand in hand, he is defeating monsters, Harry Potter is a contemporary boy."¹⁷

But is he contemporary literature?

The teacher John Ciardi once said, fiction is meant to be "character under stress." Another writer called it "interesting people in difficulties."¹⁸ We're on safe ground there with Harry!

The bestseller list isn't heavily laden with critically approved 'literature' because a lot of modern literary fiction has moved away from the 'interesting people' and their 'difficulties.' These engaging characters and great stories brought many of us to reading in the first place and kept us reading over the years.¹⁹

What other elements go into writing great fiction? The writer and magician Alan Moore has said that writers deal in fiction, not lies. Even fantasy must have a core of real human experience and truth or it doesn't work.²⁰ I'd argue that we're on safe ground here, too. Even Byatt acknowledged that the books showed "a sure instinct for childish psychology."

So far, so good. Now let's move on from fiction to see how we define literature.

The Oxford Concise Dictionary defines literature as the "writings of a country or period," or "writings whose value lies in beauty of form or emotional effect." Webster's dictionary gives us "writings in prose or verse; especially: writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest."

Emotional effect: check. Beauty of form and excellence of expression: to be discussed, along with ideas of permanent or universal interest. Harry Potter's literary merit sparked a lot of discussion in my class, as it has online and in the media, amongst fans and critics alike.

Someone (just posted as 'a reader'), commenting online about Scholastic's Literature Guide to Chamber for nine to thirteen year olds says: "I love the Harry Potter books... But I never for a moment mistook them for great literature. All of the Harry Potter literature guides are mistaken attempts to teach Harry Potter (Impossible! It is simply a fun book, and fun books cannot be taught!)"²¹

Some educators and psychologists might say you can't teach anything well, including books, without an element of fun. As another reviewer, a librarian, said, "There are hundreds of books out there that are termed 'classics' that will (and should be) taught to youth. Unfortunately, many of these are boring and make children think of reading as a chore for years to come... Johnny Tremain and The Moon is Down almost lost me as a reader forever. They were dry and horrible and full of educational value. It was the seldom taught, but much loved, book Rebecca that showed me what reading has to offer. Remember, no book is a classic until looked at in hindsight, and has stood the test of time, but I would put money on Harry Potter still being around in 20 years."²²

Most of us have a tedious assigned book memory. Mine is Steinbeck's The Pearl. Coyotito, the tragic baby...urgh! For me The Pearl was full of irritatingly afflicted characters who came to pathetically distressing and often implausible ends. Steinbeck's characters reminded me of the dachsunds my father bred in his youth. His were sickly animals and he said that each dachsund found a more heart-rending way to die than the last one. That said, I still remember The Pearl where I'm sure I've forgotten many other books, so it had an impact.

Despite their dark elements, the Harry Potter books are certainly cheerier and more engaging than some classics. That's why they've been so successful getting in children and adults to read.

You only have to look at the letters printed in Chamber to see some anecdotal evidence for Harry Potter's impact on children reading. It's not hard to find other examples, particularly in relation to encouraging boys to read. It's well known that Joanne Rowling became JK because her publisher didn't think boys would read a book by a woman author. At a National Press Club conference she joked, "I'd have let them call me Enid Snodgrass if they published the book."²³ Right or wrong, boys have certainly taken to the novels now, and they've enticed this hard to reach group of young readers into the library.

Adam Pritchard, 12, was a nominee for 'reader of the year' in the 1999 Year of Reading competition. Partly sighted, he had to go between reading large print and braille, which was physically difficult. He had always loved being read to or reading, and his favorites were Harry Potter and Pullman's Northern Lights. He said that reading is fun because "it puts you in a different world and cheers you up when you're sad." He encouraged other boys to read by telling them "some exciting things about books like Harry Potter."²⁴

Girls are equally attached to the books. For one thing, they offer a brainy, brave girl as a central character. After Hallows, many young people posted reader reviews on the Telegraph newspaper website. 17 year-old Mimi Newman said, "I sit here in my bedroom not sure what to feel, clicking endlessly through reviews of the final installment of the Harry Potter books which have taken me through my childhood, taught me to read and shown me how fictional characters can dwell in your heart even though you know their stories are nothing more than a series of thoughts that came from the imagination of one woman. So I search, hoping that someone will have summed up my feelings, shown me what I should feel, but of course no one can because the beauty of a story is that no two people can read it the same way. As a result, I am unsure how I feel about this end to something that has been a part of my life for 10 years." Like many others, she said she'd never been as excited to buy any other book.²⁵

The books don't just encourage reading, they're very much about reading and acquiring knowledge. Harry and his friends are always off to the library to solve a mystery. It's not just Hermione. Harry's first use of his father's invisibility cloak in Stone is to go to the library to have a sight of the restricted books section.

As Mimi Newman, the reviewer above, said, Harry Potter has also drawn some adults back to reading for pleasure, for reasons that bear directly on the question of their literary merit.

The New York Times created their children's bestseller list in 2000 partly to clear Rowling's books off the regular bestseller list. At that point, Azkaban had been on it for six months, Chamber for one and a half years and Stone for two and a half years.²⁶ With Goblet about to come out, Rowling would have taken four of the fifteen slots.

Agents and others put forward fairness arguments, yet, as Taylor said in his Goblet of Bile essay, "When the Beatles occupied five slots in the top 10 they weren't relegated to a British list to make room for the Beach Boys." He went on to say that, regardless of book industry promotional desires, either a bestseller list "is going to report the best selling books in the country or it is not. And when a children's novel sells five million copies in its first 24 hours on sale, clearly it's not just children who are reading it, and it's a bald-faced lie to pretend that any other book is the number one bestseller."²⁷

Of course, popular literature isn't necessarily great literature, but the two aren't mutually exclusive, either. I hope that the discussion above has at least made it clear that the books merit study on literary grounds, and that it's reasonable to look to them for deeper layers of meaning. Harry is a literary, cultural and spiritual phenomenon as much as a commercial one.

The final reason that Harry Potter isn't all about the money or the hype is that JK Rowling wrote what she wanted. The books weren't pitched to make money in the way that, say, a boy band may be cynically purpose-built for income. Whatever anyone says, JK Rowling's vision has integrity. It is her own, though like all authors, others have influenced her.

Harry's Literary Relatives

Earlier, I said that some 'literary' fiction has moved away from narrative and character, and that these two are the major reasons why many of us read books. Other kinds of fiction, commonly referred to as 'genres' of writing, have stuck to the story, and aimed their stories at specific kinds of readers. Romance novels are often aimed at middle-aged women, for example. Other genres include fantasy, horror, science fiction and of course, children's stories. We have genres within genres, for example, children's school stories, horror stories, teen romances or coming-of-age stories.²⁸

Genre fiction and children's fiction have been described by philosophical author and critic Umberto Eco as 'closed texts,' that is, texts that tend to be aimed at specific readers to elicit specific responses. While he said that you can interpret a Superman comic in loads of ways, each meaning is distinct and independent of the others. By contrast, each interpretation of an 'open text' relates to the others. They don't cancel each other out. He gives James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake as an example.²⁹ The open text has a "halo of indefiniteness," and is "pregnant with infinite suggestive possibilities," lending itself to multiple interpretations.³⁰

You can easily get the idea here that the closed text is the lesser work, and this is often true. However, indefiniteness isn't always a virtue, any more than clear meaning is always a vice. There are lots of great authors, some of whose work might be considered 'closed,' Dickens, for example, or Shakespeare.

There are also other avenues to creating meaning. Much of the greatness of Finnegan's Wake comes through its mythological and archetypal levels of meaning, Finn MacCool being one of the great shamanic figures of Irish myth. As the magus and writer Alan Moore discovered, comics gave him a mythos to read, and later write, that could tell him something new about the ancient archetypal figures. He didn't have to just reread the old myths.³¹

Umberto Eco might well describe Harry Potter as a closed text, yet its mythic levels resonate in the psyche long after the books have been put down. Harry certainly fits into a variety of genres, and combines them in inventive ways that haven't always pleased the critics.

Harry Potter is most often discussed in terms of the school story, fantasy, and of course, children's literature genres. We'll start with the classic English boarding school story.³²

The most famous of these is probably Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes, published in 1857. The book takes place at the Rugby School. Its headmaster was then Thomas Arnold. He was the father of the Matthew Arnold mentioned above who advocated cultivating an appreciation for the Great Tradition of literature.

We can make a point by point comparison between another school story, Rudyard Kipling's Stalky and Co., and Harry Potter.³³ Stalky and his friends are bound for British army careers, Harry and his friends for wizarding careers.

Some of these also have an imperial feel, for example the eldest Weasley brothers' careers in treasure hunting for a Goblin bank in Egypt and studying dragons in Romania. Rowling, like some other English writers, echoes themes of the 'lost' British Empire in her work.³⁴ It's as big a subtext of British consciousness as WWII.

Boarding schools prepared boys for imperial futures in part by separating them from their families at a young age. They equipped children for the disorientation and hardship of foreign climes by, you guessed it, disorienting them and putting them through physical hardship. The beds were far from as comfortable as the Hogwarts four posters, there were few delectable feasts, and beatings were on the curriculum. (Hogwarts' caretaker Filch would have liked that.)

However, as they train for the future, Stalky and his friends, like Harry, Ron and Hermione, engage in similar dormitory rivalries, and forbidden nocturnal excursions. They must evade the school Seargent, who, like Hogwarts caretaker Filch, delights in apprehending rule breakers. A dead cat features in Stalky and Co.'s revenge on a bullying teacher, which reminds me a bit of how Filch's cat, Mrs Norris, is petrified in Chamber.

Harry and Stalky both have 'outcast' phases and break rules. Their rebellion, however, proves their mettle, and the wise headmasters that chastise them are "secretly grooming them for a future success that they do not expect of other pupils."³⁵

This is a key to a crucial point about the Harry Potter books. Some have attacked them as undermining all social and parental authority because Harry gets away with breaking rules. They don't address why. Harry generally breaks rules for some kind of larger purpose, not just for fun. Harry adheres to a moral code we find in Plato and the Indian epic, the Mahabharata as well as in Christian scripture. It's part of the perennial spiritual wisdom.

Literature is one of the best ways to convey wisdom and meaning to children and adults alike. Bruno Bettelheim, a therapist who worked with severely disturbed children, said that restoring meaning to their lives was the most important task he performed.

In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim said that "if children were reared so that life was meaningful to them, they would not need special help." What could help children find meaning? First and most obviously, their parents and others who care for them; second, our cultural heritage, as we've been discussing, above. Yet this heritage must be transmitted in the right manner. "When children are young, it is literature that carries such information best."³⁶

Writing in 1976, he found himself very dissatisfied with what most children's literature had to offer. What a child needs is "access to deeper meaning, and that which is meaningful to him at his stage of development." It must arouse curiosity, entertain, stimulate his imagination and intellect, recognize his difficulties and suggest solutions to his problems. It must engage with his whole being.

Folk fairy tales do all this quite well. They were created well before modern society, and so, they don't teach about coping with specifics of today's world. Yet, they can teach us more "about the inner problems of human beings, and of the right solutions to their predicaments in any society, than from any other type of story within a child's comprehension." The child will learn to apply these principles to the specifics of his life "provided his inner resources permit him to do so."³⁷

Harry Potter updates the fairy tale and fantasy, anchoring it to the real world and ordinary concerns in ways that some critics have disliked, claiming the novels are neither fish nor fowl, neither realistic or fairy tale.

Why should adults be interested anyway? Simply put, because finding meaning is a process that goes on throughout our lives. Meeting all life's challenges depends upon our inner reservoirs of courage and love whether we're seven or seventy.

Life Divined from the Inside: The Truth in Children's Fantasy

Rowling gives a clear nod to the importance of fairy tales in Dumbledore's final gift to Hermione. The volume of the fairy tales of Beedle the Bard includes the one about the very 'Deathly Hallows' that feature in the final resolution of the seven volume series.

While Hermione is skeptical of the story's value in Hallows, years before, in Chamber, she asks Professor Binns, "Don't legends always have a basis in fact?" Myths and fairy tales can reveal facts, and more than facts. The German poet Schiller wrote, "Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.³⁸

While, as we've seen, children's literature can be looked down on as 'lesser' by critics, meaning is one reason why adults are turning more frequently than ever to children's books, as readers and as writers.

The novelist Philip Pullman, (the Whitbread winning author of The Amber Spyglass, mentioned above) has said, "I have always been interested in questions that fall under the general heading of what we call religion, questions of reality and meaning and purpose and what are we here for and where do we come from and all that stuff."³⁹ Children's fiction is still dealing with the big questions of meaning that much adult fiction has moved away from.

Children aren't stupid. Le Guin begins a description of how to write children's fiction sarcastically, saying you should take out the sex, use short words and "little dumb ideas" and end happily. "If you do all that, you might even write Jonathan Livingston Seagull and make twenty billion dollars and have every adult in America reading your book. But you won't have every kid in America reading your book. They will look at it, and they will see straight through it with their clear, cold, beady little eyes, and they will put it down, and they will go away."⁴⁰

In America, Dr Seuss's, Oh, The Places You'll Go is one of the most popular high school and college graduation gifts. That's because children's tales and the themes still resonate years on. There are bits in Winnie the Pooh that still bring a tear to my eye in ways that precious little adult literature ever has. Don't even mention The Velveteen Rabbit. That story, like Harry Potter, deals with love, loss, death and rebirth. Fairy tales and children's stories use fanciful themes to explore real issues.

A Sunday Times headline said, "JK Rowling's books seem like fantasy, but she is tackling the dark heart of a real world."⁴¹ While trying to pay her a compliment they missed the point. Tackling the dark heart of things is precisely what fantasy is meant to do.

In response to Byatt's critique of Harry Potter, Taylor notes that comfort we find in children's stories isn't the comfort of total escape from reality. Great fantasies relate back to the real world, and reassurance comes at a cost. "Kids suffer loss in the great works of children's literature and then find that they have the strength to cope. They don't forget their losses, but they learn to live with them. And that's as true of the young heroines in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, or the boys in Walter Farley's The Black Stallion...as it is of Harry Potter."⁴²

Jack Zipes says that fantasy and fairy tales play "upon the imagination not to open it up to escape into a never-never land but to make greater contact with reality."⁴³ GK Chesterton and CS Lewis said that fairy tales are "spiritual explorations" and hence, "the most life-like" since they reveal "human life as seen, or felt, or divined from the inside."⁴⁴ Fantasy in Harry Potter, as in fairy tales, allows children to enjoy and engage with a story that would otherwise be unacceptably horrific.

Actor Ralph Feinnes mentioned this when he was interviewed after playing Voldemort in the film of Goblet. Speaking of the scene of Voldemort's rebirth, he noted, "It's a very disturbing scene. I mean, if you strip away the fairy tale, fantasy package, what you get is a little boy tied up while an older man humiliates him, and that, translated to the real world, is not children's fare at all."⁴⁵

Never mind children. As a mother, I would find the story of a serial killer pursuing and torturing a child he orphaned impossible to read if it was told in a more realistic way. In the cave scene towards the end of Prince we see that Voldemort has murdered vast numbers of men, women and children. Without the buffering effect of the fantasy we're approaching Silence of the Lambs meets A Boy Called It. From the extraordinary threat of Voldemort to the 'ordinary' abuse Harry suffers at the Dursleys' hands, Harry's tale can be quite grim.

Which returns us to the fairy tale. The old ones, like those collected by the brothers Grimm, take place in far darker woods than those of their Disney descendants. Many adults find themselves shocked when they read them.

Take Ashputtel, the Grimm brothers' version of Cinderella.⁴⁶ Ashputtel's sisters don't just try to cram their feet into the identifying slipper. They chop bits off, and are betrayed by the trail of blood they leave behind the Prince's carriage. The sisters receive more punishment at the end. Birds fly from the magical, wish fulfilling, hazel tree that Ashputtel planted on her mother's grave and rip their eyes out.⁴⁷

You'll notice quite a few similarities with Harry Potter here beyond the simple presence of darker elements. An article entitled Cinderfella notes that both Harry and Ashputtel have dead mothers whose love magically protects them.⁴⁸ Ashputtel's hazel tree provides gold and silver clothes for Ashputtel to attend the ball in when she casts the spell, "Shake, shake, hazel tree, gold and silver over me."⁴⁹ This calls Harry's inherited vault of silver and gold to mind.

A bird from Ashputtel's magic tree warns of the sister's deceit, as Harry's scar warns of danger. The scar and the tree each have a relationship to their mothers' protective love. Harry and Ashputtel both work magic. This sets Ashputtel apart from most fairy tale heroines. Understandably many old European tales use magical 'stand-ins,' like a fairy godmother or animal, to relieve the protagonist of the suspect practices of witchcraft.

Ashputtel calls magical birds to perform the impossible task of rapidly sorting dried peas from ash for her stepmother, just as Harry performs all sorts of impossible tasks by magic.

Both tales have a cyclic aspect. Ashputtel and Harry each repeatedly return to drudgery and misery at home after their magical excursions to attend balls or Hogwarts. Ashputtel returns home on three successive nights after the balls. This cyclic reversion also relates to alchemical transformations. The hardships and lessons of the 'real world' are compared and contrasted with the magical. Each realm of experience supports spiritual, moral and psychological learning on different levels.

Fairy tales take place at a safe remove in time and space, allowing children to examine real issues like child abuse, poverty, evil and abandonment without being overwhelmed by them. Fairy tales evolved over the ages to reach "the uneducated mind of the child as well as that of the sophisticated adult." They carry important messages "to the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious mind, on whatever level each is functioning at the time."⁵⁰

The way that authors like Tolkien and Rowling create instinctively and get surprised by their own creation, points to the spiritual and subconscious origins of their work. It's not surprising that such stories would work on these levels for the reader as well.

This is one reason why ancient Irish tradition attributes healing and protective powers to certain stories. Traditional Hindu physicians may even prescribe meditation on a particular fairy tale to a troubled patient. The story may not have anything to do with the person's outer circumstances, which may seem insoluble, but it has a lot to do with their inner problems.⁵¹

But the belief is that the stories are therapeutic, and meditation on such a tale can get at the problem sideways rather than head on.

The way that many of us find ourselves repeatedly drawn back to the novels may be part of a similar internal process of meditation and resolution. Where religion and myth tend to give us rules for behavior, Harry Potter, like all good fairy tales, encourages us to work things out for ourselves.

Harry Potter has stepped in to fill our need for shared references in more ways than one, mythically as well as culturally. We need him, and other shared myths and symbols, but Harry doesn't simply stand alone as a symbol we can hold in common. As he does at the end of Hallows, he raises the beneficent ghosts of ancestors and teachers in his wake, he revives ancient symbols to live anew.

The snitch is the easiest example. The winged disk has a wealth of narrative associations from Harry. Yet the associations don't stop with him, but re-invoke older symbols and ideas.

I sculpted the snitch on the cover of my book over fifteen years ago. It has Egyptian symbolism, and other traditions saw it as the symbol of a perfected soul, or of the choice to live a righteous life. Some trace its origin to the phenomenon of the solar eclipse, when 'wings' of light appear around the darkened sun. The golden, winged, orb can represent the very process of renewal and resurrection. To experience symbols like the snitch on archetypal and mythic levels, so that their meanings can truly become part of us, we need to look in a different way than our day to day awareness. We need to go betwixt and between 'reality' and dream.

There are many 'liminal' or boundary realms and states of being in Harry Potter, from Platform 9 3/4 on...but that's covered in the book!

1. * Check year of "Sensation" 1996 — Emin's bed and Hirst's lamb, entitled, Far from the Flock
2. Blake, 2002, p. 72
3. Blake, 2002, pp. 55-6, quoting from Arnold, Matthew, 1965, Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold's Prose Works, vol. 5, edited by R.H. Super, (Michigan: Michigan University Press), p. 113, 1st edition 1867
4. Vieira interview with J. K. Rowling, http://video.the-leaky-cauldron.org/video/827 accessed 30th July 2007
5. Dissanyake, 1988
6. 5th September 2003 at 12:56 PM Posted by GRAE, Source: The Straits Times via The Leaky Cauldron , get access date and web address*
7. Blake, 2003. pp. 15-16
8. http://slate.msn.com/id/2093333/ Original speech at: http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_sking.html accessed 30th July 2007
9. Bloom, 2000
10. Bloom, 2000
11. Byatt, 2003, Taylor, 2003
12. Taylor, 2003
13. Bloom, 2000
14. King, 2007
15. Blake, 2002, p. 70, quoting Holden, 2001, pp. 1-2
16. Blake, 2003, pp. 69-70
17. Blake, 2003, pp. 70-71
18. Quoted in Gunn, 2005, p. 145
19. Taylor, 2003
20. Alan Moore interviewed in Vylenz, 2006
21. Online comments on Amazon relating to Scholastic's (Harry's US publisher) Literature Guide: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Grades 4-8) (for 9-13 year olds). From: http://www.amazon.com/Literature-Guide-Potter-Chamber-Secrets/dp/043921114X, accessed 15th May 2007
22. Aries 1978, 2001
23. Nel, 2001, p. 274. This was in a reading and press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. She picked Kathleen as a second name after her favorite Grandmother.
24. Blake, 2002, pp. 35-36
25. Newman, 2007 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/exclusions/potter/nosplit/bo-harry-potter-review.xml, accessed 26th July 2007
26. Whited, 2002a, p. 3
27. Taylor, 2003
28. Scholars sometimes call coming of age stories bildungsroman. I offer this just in case you ever come across the term in further Harry related reading. I didn't know what on earth it meant either!
29. *Eco, year*, The Role of the Reader, pp. 8-9
30. Eco, 1989, p. 9
31. Vylenz interview with Moore, 2006
32. Articles including discussion about Harry Potter's relationship to the school story include Cockrell, Pinsent and Steege, all in Whited, 2002, and Gunn, 2005. Blake also discusses it.
33. Cockrell, 2002, pp. 18-19
34. See Anatol, 2003b
35. Cockrell, 2002, p. 19
36. Bettelheim, 1991, p. 4
37. Bettelheim, 1991, p. 5
38. Schiller, from the The Piccolomini, III, 4, quoted in Bettelheim, 1991, p. 5
39. Mitchison, 2003
40. Le Guin, 1989, p. 49, quoted in Cockrell, 2002, pp.17-18
41. Langford, 2006, p. 9, referring to The Sunday Times, 24th June 2005
42. Taylor, 2003
43. Zipes, 1979, p. 141, quoted in Ostry, 2003, p. 89
44. Bettelheim, 1991, p. 24, quoting from, G.K. Chesterton, 1909, Orthodoxy, (London: John Lane) and C.S. Lewis, 1936, The Allegory of Love, (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
45. Ralph Feinnes interviewed in the documentary He Who Must Not Be Named on Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire DVD, Disk 2
46. There are over 700 versions of Cinderella. Gallardo-C. and Smith, 2003 refer here to: Jim Trelease, 1995, The Read-Aloud Handbook, (New York: Penguin) p. 77. For this discussion I refer to the version in their article and that in Grimm, 1975, pp.164-171. For Harry and fairy tales, also see Grimes, 2002.
47. Gallardo-C. and Smith, 2003, p. 195, referring to "Aschenputtel," in Crane, 1963
48. Gallardo-C. and Smith, 2003, p. 195
49. Grimm, 1975, p. 167
50. Bettelheim, 1991, p. 6
51. Bettelheim, 1991, p. 25

Bibliography

Anatol, Giselle Liza
2003, Reading Harry Potter, Critical Essays, Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture, number 78, (Westport, Connecticut, London: Praeger)
2003a, "Introduction," in Anatol, 2003, pp. ix-xxv
2003b, "The Fallen Empire: Exploring Ethnic Otherness in the World of Harry Potter," in Anatol, 2003, pp. 163-178

Bettelheim, Bruno
1991, The Uses of Enchantment, (London: Penguin)

Blake, Andrew
2002, The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter, (London: Verso)

Bloom, Harold
2000, 11th July, "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes." In The Wall Street Journal, online at http://wrt-brooke.syr.edu/courses/205.03/bloom.html, accessed 23rd April 2007

Byatt, A.S.
2003, 7thJuly, "Harry Potter and the Childish Adult," in The New York Times, Section A, p. 13

Cockrell, Amanda
2002, "Harry Potter and the Secret Password, Finding Our Way in the Magical Genre," in Whited, 2002, pp. 15-26

Heyman, David
2005, producer, directed by Mike Newell, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, (Warner Brothers) UK DVD double disk edition 2006

King, Stephen
2007, August 20th, "J.K. Rowling's Ministry of Magic," from Entertainment Weekly, at http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20044270_20044274_20050689,00.html, accessed 25th August 2007

Langford, David
2006, The End of Harry Potter? (London: Gollancz)

Le Guin, Ursula K.
1989, *quoted in Cockrell
1993, The Earthsea Quartet, (London: Puffin)
1976, The Wizard of Earthsea, (London: Puffin)

Mitchison, Amanda
2003, 3rd November, "The Art of Darkness," interview with Philip Pullman, at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/11/04/bopull04.xml&page=1, accessed 11th January 2008

Nel, Philip
2001, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Novels, a Reader's Guide, (New York, London: Continuum)
2002, "You say 'Jelly,' I Say 'Jell-O?' Harry Potter and the Transfiguration of Language," in Whited, 2002, pp. 261-284

Newman, Mimi
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Ostry, Elaine
2003, "Accepting Mudbloods: The Ambivalent Social Vision of J.K. Rowling's Fairy Tales," in Anatol, 2003, pp. 89-102

Taylor, Charles
2003, 8th July, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Bile," in Salon, online at http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2003/07/08/byatt_rowling/index.html, accessed 18th April 2007

Vieira, Meredith
2007, 29th July, "Harry Potter: The Final Chapter," Dateline, NBC, transcript at http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2007/0729-dateline-vieira.html, accessed 11th January 2008

Vylenz, DeZ
2006, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, DVD, Shadowsnake Films, www.shadowsnake.com

Whited, Lana A.
2002, editor, The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter, Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon, (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press)
2002a, "Introduction," in Whited, 2002, pp. 1-14
2002b, "What would Harry Do? J.K. Rowling and Lawrence Kohlberg's Theories of Moral Development," in Whited, 2002, pp. 182-210