A.S. Byatt and the goblet of bile

The author's recent New York Times Op-Ed shows that she doesn't understand why so many of us love Harry Potter. Maybe it's just too much fun.

By Charles Taylor

Jul 8, 2003 | When a book sells 5 million hardcover copies in its first day, it's inevitable that there's going to be someone who slams it and tells us that what we're seeing is merely a pop phenomenon that bears no relation to literature. That esteemed gasbag Harold Bloom, in his guise as self-appointed keeper of the canon, did the honors after the fourth Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," telling us that reading should enrich us (without ever getting around to declaring whether it should entertain us) and shortly thereafter launching his own compendium of children's lit that, in his view, did just that. Right on schedule, just a mere two weeks after the new Harry Potter release, it's A.S. Byatt, apparently having made peace with Martin Amis' dental work, who steps into the ring against J.K. Rowling's books in a New York Times Op-Ed.

Byatt's argument is just what you'd expect from someone shouldering the mantle of high culture. To show that she's not a total killjoy, Byatt allows that Rowling's books are entertaining and reveal "a sure instinct for childish psychology." To answer the bigger question of what explains the series' huge success with adults as well as children (uh, because J.K. Rowling is a master of narrative?), Byatt decides that the books represent "comfort" for their readers, embodying Freud's notion of "family romance" (finding the surrogate family where we are appreciated for ourselves) and the chance to regress to a safe world where good and evil are readily identifiable and we feel that we are given control over the unpredictable.

Byatt may have a valid cultural point -- a teeny one -- about the impulses that drive us to reassuring pop trash and away from the troubling complexities of art. The problem is that her argument has nothing to do with the experience that anyone I know has had reading the Harry Potter books. Perhaps operating from the assumption that anything positive written about J.K. Rowling's work is little more than publicity or evidence of lowered cultural standards, Byatt wastes nary a syllable on the subject that has been widely written about and discussed with both "The Goblet of Fire" and the new "The Order of the Phoenix": the increasing darkness of the books. Rowling has conceived of the seven-book cycle as tracing Harry's growth from childhood to late adolescence. And as the books have gone on, the dangers he faces have not only increased but, as happens with age, become less easy to shrug off, inflicting physical and psychological wounds that are not so quick to heal. In the climax of "Goblet of Fire," Harry witnesses the murder of a classmate, an event that is still giving him nightmares in the new book. Having witnessed death, he is now prone to seeing things, not at all reassuring sights, that his classmates who have been spared experiencing death can not. And increasingly, he finds that the power that allowed him to survive the attempt Voldemort made on his life as an infant links his brain with that of the dark lord, making him feel that his goodness is forever imperiled by this access to the dark side.

In "The Order of the Phoenix," Harry experiences the death of another character, someone very close to him, and increasing alienation from his best friends, Ron and Hermione, who don't bear the burdens he does. Young readers who were the same age as Harry when the series began may be growing with him. But a younger group of readers who are just now beginning the series may find that the later books are too upsetting for them (in the same way that some teenage viewers of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" abandoned the show when it began dealing with the complications of young adulthood). But even if, at this point, they only read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" they will find themselves confronted with loss. Remember, this is a character whose parents are murdered when he is an infant, and who himself is under the continual threat of death from his parents' killer. That first book features 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?

Of course there's something comforting in the Harry Potter books. I defy Byatt not to find the same qualities in all great children's literature. She has confused comfort with escaping reality. Not only do all great fantasies relate back to the real world, any reassurance they offer always comes at a price. 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" and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' "The Yearling" as it is of Harry Potter.

From the question of comfort and reassurance, Byatt moves on to even shakier ground, complaining that Rowling's form of magic is ersatz. "Ursula K. Le Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force," Byatt writes. "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." Excuse me? Anything exists in any novel only because the author says it does. That does not excuse the author from making it dramatically plausible, and if what Byatt intends to say is that for her Le Guin's worlds are magical and Rowling's are not, then that is an honest admission of taste. But to imply that there's some objective standard dividing books where "magic really does act as a force" from ones where magic is a gimcrack concoction is bunk, and Byatt knows it.

Next Page: What should keep Byatt and the other keepers of the cultural flame up nights

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