July 20 2000, 803 words
W.H. Auden wrote, "There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children."
This is exactly the case with the Harry Potter books. The record sales around the world appear to be as much the result of adult interest as children's enthusiasm. I myself read the first book, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", last week and have put it on my second-best shelf. The second book took me one day to read, the third took two (this despite my best efforts to parcel out my sessions). The books' author, J.K. Rowling, has a story-telling ability surpassed, in my reading experience, only by Stephen King.
Critics, book reviewers and other literary people have given all sorts of reasons for the books' success and worth. They have talked about myth, classical genres, child psychology, moral messages and so on.
All of which, even when true, is really beside the point. A good book rests on three foundations: story-telling, characterization and integrity. Everything else is just icing on the cake, and anybody who tells you otherwise is just being pretentious (which is why most literary critics will, in fact, tell you otherwise).
Rowling has been lionized for getting children interested in reading once again. My own view is that children's interest in reading never really disappeared. The Harry Potter phenomenon implies that children just didn't have the right kind of books to like. And that is not the fault of TV or video games, but of untalented writers, snobbish critics, and blinkered publishers.
From what I have observed, small children are invariably fascinated by books (even if just to tear out the pages). It would, of course, be absurd to say that a love for books is innate, nor do I think a love for literature can be taught. But I do think it is a relatively easy task to translate the human instinct for acquiring language into an enthusiasm for reading.
Stephen King writes, "I see stories as a great thing, something which not only enhances lives but actually saves them...Good writing - good stories - are the imagination's firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter from life-passages which would otherwise prove unendurable."
This is why religious fanatics hate books. Novels encroach on their territory, and Harry Potter has already been banned by Christian fundamentalists. Their reaction is quite ironic, given the denouement of the first novel, where the evil wizard Voldemort, who had murdered Harry's parents when Harry was a baby, tries to kill Harry again through a disciple. Harry escapes being strangled because Voldemort's follower couldn't touch Harry without being burnt.
When Harry asks the magic school's principal, Dumbledore, why this was, he answers: "Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn't realize that love as powerful as your mother's leaves its own mark...to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever."
This is the central message of the New Testament, as well as being a psychological truth. But the fundamentalists' ostensible reason for banning Harry Potter is that the novels deal with witchcraft. I suspect, though, that Harry Potter is far more dangerous than they realize.
In "The Chamber of Secrets", after being possessed by a diary that writes back messages to its owner, a student witch is told by her mother, "Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain." This aphorism is open to several interpretations, but all of them boil down to questioning anything that seeks power over you.
In this same book, Dumbledore, says, "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." Choices, of course, require ethical consideration. Dogma doesn't. The third book mocks superstition by caricaturing the school's Divination teacher. "The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed," says Dumbledore. (Thinking required again.)
Worst of all, in every book Harry and his friends question adult authority and break rules. Clearly, if children internalized such attitudes, religion - and politicians - would not long survive. True, the world might then be a better, more reasonable place, but that's not religion's goal.
It is, however, the goal of good literature. The writers' faith is that what we write will, in some way, affect our readers. The power of the Potter books, and their popular and critical acceptance, may mean that literature has attained a new stage of development in the modern world.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh