[Fwd: Harry Potter and the Childish Adult]
Sophia
Harry Potter and the Childish Adult
By A.S. BYATT
LONDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/07/opinion/07BYAT.html
What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success of the Harry
Potter books? Why do they satisfy children and ? a much harder
question ? why do so many adults read them? I think part of the answer
to the first question is that they are written from inside a
child's-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology. But
then how do we answer the second question? Surely one precludes the
other.
The easy question first. Freud described what he called the "family
romance," in which a young child, dissatisfied with its ordinary home
and parents, invents a fairy tale in which it is secretly of noble
origin, and may even be marked out as a hero who is destined to save
the world. In J. K. Rowling's books, Harry is the orphaned child of
wizards who were murdered trying to save his life. He lives, for
unconvincingly explained reasons, with his aunt and uncle, the truly
dreadful Dursleys, who represent, I believe, his real "real" family,
and are depicted with a relentless, gleeful, overdone venom. The
Dursleys are his true enemy. When he arrives at wizarding school, he
moves into a world where everyone, good and evil, recognizes his
importance, and tries either to protect or destroy him.
The family romance is a latency-period fantasy, belonging to the
drowsy years between 7 and adolescence. In "Order of the Phoenix,"
Harry, now 15, is meant to be adolescent. He spends a lot of the book
becoming excessively angry with his protectors and tormentors alike.
He discovers that his late (and "real") father was not a perfect
magical role model, but someone who went in for fits of nasty
playground bullying. He also discovers that his mind is linked to the
evil Lord Voldemort, thereby making him responsible in some measure
for acts of violence his nemesis commits.
In psychoanalytic terms, having projected his childish rage onto the
caricature Dursleys, and retained his innocent goodness, Harry now
experiences that rage as capable of spilling outward, imperiling his
friends. But does this mean Harry is growing up? Not really. The
perspective is still child's-eye. There are no insights that reflect
someone on the verge of adulthood. Harry's first date with a female
wizard is unbelievably limp, filled with an 8-year-old's
conversational maneuvers.
Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing "secondary
worlds." Ms. Rowling's world is a secondary secondary world, made up
of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of
children's literature ? from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to
Roald Dahl, from "Star Wars" to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper.
Toni Morrison pointed out that clichés endure because they represent
truths. Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they
are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child's
own power of fantasizing.
The important thing about this particular secondary world is that it
is symbiotic with the real modern world. Magic, in myth and fairy
tales, is about contacts with the inhuman ? trees and creatures,
unseen forces. Most fairy story writers hate and fear machines. Ms.
Rowling's wizards shun them and use magic instead, but their world is
a caricature of the real world and has trains, hospitals, newspapers
and competitive sport. Much of the real evil in the later books is
caused by newspaper gossip columnists who make Harry into a dubious
celebrity, which is the modern word for the chosen hero. Most of the
rest of the evil (apart from Voldemort) is caused by bureaucratic
interference in educational affairs.
Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written
for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and
the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of
soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in
it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out
of his dream, "only personal." Nobody is trying to save or destroy
anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.
So, yes, the attraction for children can be explained by the powerful
working of the fantasy of escape and empowerment, combined with the
fact that the stories are comfortable, funny, just frightening enough.
They comfort against childhood fears as Georgette Heyer once comforted
us against the truths of the relations between men and women, her
detective stories domesticating and blanket-wrapping death. These are
good books of their kind. But why would grown-up men and women become
obsessed by jokey latency fantasies?
Comfort, I think, is part of the reason. Childhood reading remains
potent for most of us. In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 "best
reads," more than a quarter were children's books. We like to regress.
I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that
there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is
restful.
But in the case of the great children's writers of the recent past,
there was a compensating seriousness. There was ? and is ? a real
sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark
forests. Susan Cooper's teenage wizard discovers his magic powers and
discovers simultaneously that he is in a cosmic battle between good
and evil forces. Every bush and cloud glitters with secret
significance. Alan Garner peoples real landscapes with malign, inhuman
elvish beings that hunt humans.
Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put back in touch
with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman
creatures ? from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil
? inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled. If we regress, we
regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for. Ursula K. Le
Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic
really does act as a force. Ms. Rowling's magic wood has nothing in
common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds,
and dangerous only because she says it is.
In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks
to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about,
mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild.
They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing,
for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination
they had.
Similarly, some of Ms. Rowling's adult readers are simply reverting to
the child they were when they read the Billy Bunter books, or invested
Enid Blyton's pasteboard kids with their own childish desires and
hopes. A surprising number of people ? including many students of
literature ? will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since
they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the
life of the books. But in the days before dumbing down and cultural
studies no one reviewed Enid Blyton or Georgette Heyer ? as they do
not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical,
who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a
multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative
manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling
originality. Who writes amazing sentences.
It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this
phenomenon. And it is the leveling effect of cultural studies, which
are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary
merit, which they don't really believe exists. It's fine to compare
the Brontės with bodice-rippers. It's become respectable to read and
discuss what Roland Barthes called "consumable" books. There is
nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of
awe we feel looking through Keats's "magic casements, opening on the
foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."
A.S. Byatt is author, most recently, of the novel "A Whistling Woman."
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AS Byatt: The dame who dared to criticise the world of Harry Potter
By Hermione Eyre
12 July 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?story=423841
AS Byatt composed her most recent book review with the calm, searching
exactitude that characterises her essays. But, because the subject of
her criticism was none other than the sacred Harry Potter series, Byatt
provoked a torrent of aggressively pro-Potter outrage, some of it
phrased as a personal attack.
"We're dealing here with an acolyte at the temple of high culture
barring the doors," spluttered Charles Taylor, the leading critic of the
San Francisco-based literary website Salon. "Success on the scale of JK
Rowling clearly gets under her skin."
Does any of this muck stick to the stately, eminent figure of Dame
Antonia Susan Byatt? Surely it's outrageous to suggest that the
66-year-old Booker-winning polymath could be riled by the wildfire
success of Harry Potter? Would the literary website also like to surmise
that Byatt is fuming because Rowling has appropriated the family name of
the star of her tetralogy, heroine, Frederica Potter?
Instead, it seems far more likely that AS Byatt has come up against
critics who can't quite rise to meet her. They respond hysterically to
her careful, dextrously-made point that Hogwarts is not "an
anthropologically coherent world... it is small and on the school
grounds and only dangerous because she says it is."
True to form, Byatt proves herself passionate yet cerebral in her Potter
review in The New York Times. Her style recalls William Hazlitt's ideal
of the "disinterested" critic - one who is full of feeling, yet removed
from partisan proclivities. And now that this review has lead to her
being reported as having dropped "a gobbet of bile" on JK Rowling, it
seems like she has been flagrantly misread. But this would not be the
first time.
It has been mooted by Byatt loyalists that her work is often
misunderstood critically. "She is so innovative that early reviews of
her novel often wildly miss the point," says fellow novelist and critic
Philip Hensher. It is as if it takes a good 15 years for Byatt's work to
"sink into" the public consciousness, he says. The dense quality to her
work, and its steady, unhurried metabolism, is mirrored by the long,
slow arc of Byatt's career.
Born in 1936, in Sheffield, she spent much of her childhood in bed due
to asthma, where she read voraciously - "kept alive by fictions" as she
later said. Her father, a judge, was often absent; her mother, Kathleen,
who had studied under FR Leavis at Cambridge, provided a model of an
intellectual woman - although one perhaps frustrated by domesticity and
often difficult. As Margaret Drabble, Byatt's younger sister, has said
"She displaced a competitiveness on to us."
Their mother, seems to continue to be a source of altercation between
the sisters. When Margaret Drabble published A Peppered Moth in 2000, AS
Byatt's usually measured tones segued into the weirdly proprietorial: "I
would rather people didn't read someone else's version of my mother".
This recalls the idea that she has described as the kernel for
Possession - the idea being to do with "being taken over, or taking
somebody over, depending on whether you're a sympathiser or a hunter."
The sisters' relationship has been the source of reams of writing - much
of it penned by the sisters themselves. It seems that the conflict began
early. Byatt's 1967 novel The Game describes childishly vicious sisters
fighting with "nails, teeth, shoes, silently intent on real damage".
They both went to Cambridge; Byatt went to Newnham, won a first, and
went on to plough through academic research at Bryn Mawr and Somerville,
while also coping with a young family.
Drabble gained a starred first and became, at 21, a best-selling
novelist, lightly leaping into the Sixties literary scene. The critic
Jan Dalley has acutely noted that a moment in the BBC Bookmark programme
"said it all. Shot one, Byatt at work in the British Library, in
shapeless clothing and bottle-glass specs; shot two: Margaret Drabble
sleek and glowing, prancing in miniskirt for the cameras in some hip
Sixties room." The disparity between them is perhaps also present in the
line in Drabble's first novel, A Summer Bird Cage: "As tags go, she is
grand dame while I am jeune fille."
This contrast translates into their careers. Drabble's "taut
lightly-spun style" has been contrasted with Byatt's thick, ambitious
tomes, crammed with many voices, times and genres. Antonia took a
ponderous path to literary greatness, accruing five novels and several
critical studies (including Degrees of Freedom: the Novels of Iris
Murdoch and a historicist reading of Wordsworth and Coleridge) before
she achieved anything like her sister's popular success.
It took 10 years of teaching Victorian literature and long work in the
Coleridge archives before she was ready to write the Victorian
post-modern romance, Possession. But when she did, it won her the 1990
Booker prize and its attendant rewards, including a ninefold increase in
sales. Her magnum opus, although far less popular than Possession, is
the tetralogy of novels known as the Frederica Quartet: The Virgin in
the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and, most recently, A Whistling
Woman. The work took over 40 years from conception to completion.
The sustained power of this work is extraordinary, and contributes to
the impression that Byatt is something of an anachronism. She herself
has said: "I was baffled by the Sixties. It was very exciting and very
pointless." She retains instead, the seriousness of her war-time
generation. "I think there is a huge gulf between people for whom the
war was the formative experience, and those who came after.
She's the eldest of four, and there's something of the serious big
sister about her: Byatt often seems like a lone adult writer among
squabbling brats. She finds the "sugar-coating of Beano infantile
humour" of Lucky Jim distasteful. Alienated from the post-war Movement
authors (such as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn), she has
complained of "puerile jokes about funny foreigners". Famously, she once
accused Martin Amis of "male turkeycocking".
Her great good sense, and deep learning often conspire to put her in the
"ultra-serious, forbidding, donnish" category (Polly Toynbee). Perhaps
it was this reputation that resulted in the venomous accusations of High
Art élitism from the Potter-supporting Charles Taylor. But erudition
seems to come as simply and naturally to Byatt as breathing. For
example, she just can't help "finding [herself] reciting over and over
in her head a line from Wallace Stevens" while sitting for Patrick Heron.
There is nothing snobbish or pretentious about her in a literary sense -
she is an ardent and vocal supporter of Terry Pratchett and Georgette
Heyer. Her lengthy analysis of Prachett's work leaves us convinced she
believes in it as echt magic as opposed to Rowling's ersatz. Byatt also
wears her learning lightly. Her popular mythology embraces the fact that
she spent her Booker bounty on swimming pools for her homes in the South
of France and Putney. And it enjoys the thought of her painstaking
research into the sex life of snails.
At a talk at Tate Britain after the publication of Byatt's book The
Matisse Stories, Jan Dalley noted that the author responded to a "fairly
solemn art-historical question about the artist's influence by talking
about the colours of the cushion covers she'd just bought for her house
in France. No one with lesser academic credentials would have dared such
a cosy answer."
However, Byatt is not afraid of being élitist, in its most positive
sense. Unlike fashionable post-structuralists, she isn't reluctant to
say staunchly that some things are of more value than others, or to
support the idea of a list of masterworks. Most recently, in her Potter
review, she openly rejected the drab "levelling" of cultural studies.
Byatt also has to contend with allegations of personal severity and
harshness. Michčle Roberts, author and critic and a friend of Byatt,
defends her, describing her personal warmth: "She is an amazing
conversationalist." Her short stories, Roberts adds, are also full of
joie de vivre "There's a lot of humour and sensual relish in them."
Brought up as a Quaker, and often described as "earnest... with high
moral seriousness", Byatt is sometimes taken for a hair-shirt kind of
Puritan. Only yesterday Fay Weldon called her "a bit of a party pooper"
for her critique of Harry Potter. But Byatt actually forms part of a
non-conformist tradition that is hard-working and meticulous, but also
full of sensuality and pleasure. It's a tradition that includes George
Eliot, capable of combining sentences like "I am in love with pleasure"
with full moral discipline.
"I'm constantly being castigated for saying that I know George Eliot
much better than I know my own daughters," says Byatt. Another small
line of self-analysis is very telling - referring to Lucy Snowe in
Charlotte Brontė's novel Villette, Byatt says, "She is what I am afraid
of becoming. Solitary, clever, and trapped."
It is easy to imagine Byatt saying this in her grave, gentle voice, her
eyes watchful and unwavering. For anyone who has seen her video diaries
in Scribbling, the intimate television portrait filmed over a period of
three years by Leanne Klein, it is hard to forget her serious,
charismatic personal style. The programme showed someone totally
committed to her craft. Byatt needs total solitude to write; in the
middle of writing A Whistling Woman, she persuaded her husband to cancel
his planned visit so that she could live more fully in the novel.
When the novel came to its crux, and Byatt was writing with total
intensity, she was dramatically hospitalised with a twisted gut. She was
diagnosed as four hours from death. Her main reaction to this was the
worry that she had "so little time left, and so many books to write".
Life story
Born
Antonia Susan Drabble, 24 August 1936, in Sheffield. Daughter of John
Drabble, QC and Kathleen Marie Bloor
Family
Sister of novelist Margaret Drabble. First husband, Ian Charles Rayner
Byatt, one daughter, one son (dec'd; second husband, Peter John Duffy,
two daughters
Education
Sheffield High School; Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge
Career
Lecturer in literature at Oxford, London and Cambridge universities
1962-83; member of Kingman Committee on English Language, 1987-88;
Management Committee, Society of Authors, 1984-88; Board of British
Council, 1993-1998.
Non-fiction
Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time (1970); Iris Murdoch (1976)
Fiction
The Frederica Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life
(1985, Pen/Macmillan Silver Pen), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling
Woman (2002). Other novels: Possession: a Romance (1990, Booker prize),
Angels & Insects (1993), The Biographer's Tale (2000)
Honours
Honorary Fellow, Newnham College, Cambridge; Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature; Honorary Doctor of Literature, Bradford, Durham,
Nottingham, Liverpool Portsmouth London and Cambridge universities
She says
"Given the choice, I prefer silence to music."
They say
"Fans of AS Byatt's fiction can be divided into two groups: those who
cannot understand her novels and those who lie." - Ron Charles,
Christian Science Monitor
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