Good heavens, Ros, why spend so much energy on those fan responses when you could be writing the next chapter of The Squib or reading 150 books? It was predictable that fans would react harshly to the article, and that a good number of them -- being young, not especially well-educated, or just very angry -- would do so inelegantly. Like shooting fish in a barrel, really.
As to the main article, I don't really see the author's point. Many works of art, literature or "popular culture" become symbols for more than they contemplated when they were made. HP is famous, so it's being used by a lot of people to refer to a lot of things; what's interesting about that is the very large number of things to which it can comfortably refer. As to the adult reactions she quoted, they didn't sound especially "infantalized" to me. I'm 46 47 and I got upset about Harry breaking up with Ginny; but then, I got upset about Raskalnikov's self-destruction in Crime and Punishment too. Is the only "adult" reaction to literature an unemotional one?
Harold Bloom's commentary was a perfectly sound criticism -- of the first book. I almost didn't read CoS. But the writing got steadily better with each novel (especially after PoA), the cliches were reduced, and the moral universe the characters inhabited became much more complex. The three possibilities that occurred to me were (1) JKR was learning as she wrote; (2) you write better when you don't have to do it on welfare, in a cafe, trying to avoid waking the baby in the pram; and (most interesting of all) (3) that the writing became more sophisticated because Harry is becoming more sophisticated as a character as he gets older.
As for "highbrow" vs. "middlebrow", pfui. No one knows what's classic until it's been around for a hundred years or so, and even then we're often surprised. I do think that Tolkien, for example, has a better chance of long-term resonance than HP, but that's because of his astonishing powers of description and exposition (only author who could make me cry by just describing a landscape). But I could be dead wrong about that.
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Date: 2007-02-10 05:05 am (UTC)As to the main article, I don't really see the author's point. Many works of art, literature or "popular culture" become symbols for more than they contemplated when they were made. HP is famous, so it's being used by a lot of people to refer to a lot of things; what's interesting about that is the very large number of things to which it can comfortably refer. As to the adult reactions she quoted, they didn't sound especially "infantalized" to me. I'm 46 47 and I got upset about Harry breaking up with Ginny; but then, I got upset about Raskalnikov's self-destruction in Crime and Punishment too. Is the only "adult" reaction to literature an unemotional one?
Harold Bloom's commentary was a perfectly sound criticism -- of the first book. I almost didn't read CoS. But the writing got steadily better with each novel (especially after PoA), the cliches were reduced, and the moral universe the characters inhabited became much more complex. The three possibilities that occurred to me were (1) JKR was learning as she wrote; (2) you write better when you don't have to do it on welfare, in a cafe, trying to avoid waking the baby in the pram; and (most interesting of all) (3) that the writing became more sophisticated because Harry is becoming more sophisticated as a character as he gets older.
As for "highbrow" vs. "middlebrow", pfui. No one knows what's classic until it's been around for a hundred years or so, and even then we're often surprised. I do think that Tolkien, for example, has a better chance of long-term resonance than HP, but that's because of his astonishing powers of description and exposition (only author who could make me cry by just describing a landscape). But I could be dead wrong about that.