Via Kevin Drum, here's what I consider the definitive riposte to the literary critics who bemoan the Harry Potter phenomenon. The headline says it all: The masses aren't asses
And that's why those who ascribe the popularity of the Potter books to nothing more than the bad taste of the masses are so off the mark. The most prominent of those naysayers, that drooping defender of the canon, Harold Bloom, has, in his attacks on Rowling, provided us with fine examples of another reason for the Potter books' popularity: the insularity of a literary culture that willfully ignores what it is that makes people readers in the first place.In a July 2000 article in the Wall Street Journal, and in comments made in these pages three years later when the National Book Foundation announced it was awarding a prize to Stephen King, Bloom revealed a vision of literary culture in which only some people belong, where class is destiny and where the idiot rabble needs guidance by those elites who are better suited to making the decisions that will affect that rabble.
[snip]
In Bloom's world, it's his way or nothing. He claims to have the divine foresight to know that no child who ever reads Harry Potter will ever go on to "The Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll. Just as, he insists, no one who ever enjoys a Stephen King book will ever go on to read Edgar Allan Poe. (This, by the way, seems to be the new anti-Potter tack; a Page 1 story in the New York Times last week revealed breathlessly that not every Potter reader will go on to other books — as if the series had billed itself as a cure-all for falling readership.)
The author of this piece is himself a literary critic, published at such tony addresses as the NYT and Newsday.
Rowling, of course, is laughing her way to the bank multiple times over. I wonder how much of Bloom's antipathy can be traced to jealousy. When I look at his bibliography I see a lot of books with value limited primarily to literary students and professors. I'm sure that studies of the poetry of Shelley, Blake and Yeats are worthwhile endeavors, but nobody I know is waiting breathlessly at midnight for their release.
Give it a rest, critics; Harry Potter's adventures are good fun. I won't be at Borders at midnight Friday, but I'll be there Saturday to pick up my reserved copy.
Posted by Linkmeister at July 18, 2007 09:19 AM | TrackBackNot that I want to defend Bloom or anything, but you have to keep in mind that the notion of a "canon" at all smacks of elitism cum fascism cum monolithism. That being said, I can only imagine that this is exactly how the various detractors of the Brontës and Wilkie Collins felt. I hardly think it passes without notice that there really are various "tiers" of literature out there. There's Rowling and King, who are both wildly popular but fairly lowbrow. There's Brown and his ilk, who are lowbrow while making their readers feel a little middlebrow. And then there's writers like John Banville, Graham Swift, Kiran Desai, Kazuo Ishiguro, JM Coetzee, David Mitchell, and on and on—who will almost assuredly never see the kind of fame and fortune that King and Rowling will.
I don't want to make claims about superiority (I enjoy Rowling's and King's stories), and I certainly don't think that popularity is anathema to "art," but it is a bit disconcerting that no one goes batshit crazy over the Booker shortlist coming out every year, but people will stand in line for days for the new Harry Potter.
But then, thousands waited on the docks to find out what happened to Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop.
Here's what makes it worse, to me: what was the last book of poetry you read?
Posted by: Scott at July 18, 2007 09:59 AMI, er, don't remember. Poe? Frost? I can lay my hands on my copies within two minutes, I know that.
As I recall, though, the Potter phenomenon took off slowly by word of mouth. There weren't the big release parties at bookstores until the third or fourth book. As I recall, Scholastic's first print run for Book 1 in the US was all of 12,000 copies.
I don't pay as much attention to the various prize shortlists as I should, but I do notice.
Posted by: Linkmeister at July 18, 2007 10:09 AMI read a lot, all sorts of things, but I detest reading poetry. I do like to hear it recited though. For me poetry, like plays, are dull as ditchwater when read on a page; they only work for me when voices bring them to life.
On the other hand my daughter, who loves Harry Potter, also loves poetry. In addition she did go on to read Lewis Carrol after she started reading Harry Potter. Funny old world, innit? :D
Posted by: Shelagh at July 18, 2007 08:53 PM