It's an interesting essay, and thank you for summarising the views of Bloom and Byant.
I have a critique, though, or rather what I hope is a theme to build on. I think that a key strength of the series -- and a key reason of its longevity, like Tolkien's series -- is that it provides a complex moral guide in the form of a mythos. Complex, because Harry and his friends do not have all the answers, and actually are forced to evolve and abandon simplistic positions as time goes on; Snape and Dudley are two key examples.
In this sense it's perfectly normal to be fascinated and start to love the series as an adult rather than a child; I know more than one person who did. And it's perfectly normal to then use the series to signal allegiance to a specific moral outlook; as we can see with protesters naming themselves "Dumbledore's army".
And in this light the preoccupation of Bloom and Byatt on the lack of the sexual dimension (which, incidentally, is not that true--see the sixth book for example and the numerous dalliance subplots) seems honestly to widely miss the mark.
I appreciate the thoughtful response, and like you I’m not sure we are at a disagreement. I do think that at least partly a myth (or at least a good myth) teaches complex moral lessons (which I think I indicated in the piece).
My point of contention remains the adult story. I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I’m sure there are many adults who were introduced to the books and enjoyed them. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have been such an adult myself. However the primary appeal seems to me still to be for teenagers - and the adults who enjoy it usually have a higher ‘tolerance’ for such things than the rest of the adult world. It is almost in virtue of their childness that they enjoy it.
A school administrator told me to read J.K. Rowling's books because my students were doing so. I never taught Y-A "literature" because I think it's garbage, but I obediently read the Harry Potter books.
And loved them. Oh, they all go saggy in the middle, but the syntax and vocabulary are good, plot details come together, and some real British arcana and a healthy moral element get worked in.
Look, if young people won't read A.J. Cronin and Sholem Asch and Fitzgerald, or J.M. Barrie or Shaw, then Rowling will have to do, and she'll do nicely.
Excellent piece! This is something I've been thinking about lately -- why some books grab us and hold on even though they are kind of terrible by most measures of literary quality. The series that brought this to mind for me was "Dungeon Crawler Carl," which is likewise totally implausible and clumsily written and generally a mess, and yet I blasted through seven gigantic books at much cost to my sleep, and am impatiently awaiting the eighth.
You've just reminded me that Harry Potter was the same way. They're quite different series, but three common elements stand out for me:
1. Breakneck pace. Both are written with an almost frantic energy, racing on to the next thing without a pause or slowdown. The one place in the Harry Potter books I really struggled with was the final book where there's a long sequence of Harry, Hermione, and Ron just kind of wandering around aimlessly; and that's the one time the pace flags.
2. Vivid, memorable characters. I don't say *deep* characters, they're not particularly, but they have very well-defined personalities that drive their actions and their dialogue.
3. Enthusiastic worldbuilding. Again, I don't say it's *good* or consistent worldbuilding. Tolkien would turn up his nose at it, and he'd be absolutely right. But both writers are brimming with wacky ideas and they throw them out rapid-fire, inviting us to laugh at the silliness even as they tell a serious story.
Iv'e been thinking going into Dungeon Crawler Carl, but it seems that my fantasy list is rather long these days. Good to know it has some similar characteristics. Your comment bumped Carl up the list :-)
For what it is worth, I had a nearly identical reaction to the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, although I also wound up with a burning desire to explain to my long-suffering friends (who read it at around the same time) everything that was wrong with it.
Great analysis, very enjoyable to read. As a member of that generation (I am now 35) that read Harry Potter, I have always found it peculiar that it became such a 'cult object' in society in a way that none of its competitors ever did. I read it as a kid, of course, and watched the films, but never became obsessed with it. I may be wrong, but it seems like the HP obsession is especially strong in America, because it taps into two fantasies: that of a magical world, and that of 'Olde England' to which many Americans are so drawn. It is also a 'school mythology', and I notice that Harry Potter fans tend to be women, perhaps because (at least in my experience) women tend to enjoy school more, or have fonder memories of it.
Malinowski distinguished 'science, magic, and religion'; for him, magic was basically primitive technology ( Tolkien would have agreed). This is part of the problem with Potter for me- it rarely moves beyond magic/technology. Everything in the secondary world is just modern, middle-class English life transposed into another dimension, where magic wands (what would Freud say...) replace tools. With Dumbledore and a few others being an exception, a glimpse into something higher... perhaps?
And yet, I am struck by how many people treat it with an attitude approaching the religious. It reminds me a bit how 60's rock bands became part of the 'Boomer' mythology....
One of the unique things about this obsession is precisely that it is not an American phenomenon. Even stranger, it is a mass cultural phenomenon unrelated to the U.S., which is rare these days. This is an interesting point :-) As you say, the books contain many fantasies, but I'm not sure the fantasy element alone is sufficient to explain their mass attraction, which is arguably unprecedented.
As for the Malinowski connection, this scheme ('science, magic and religion') is not uniquely his. Perhaps the most interesting predecessor is Auguste Comte, but arguably even more mandane anthropologists like Frazer solidified it. Either way, Tolkien is definitely not one to view magic and technology as two sides of the same coin; in fact, he's done a good job in characterising magic in On Fairy Stories. Be that as it may, you're right that the 'true magic' or the 'non-middle-class-day-to-day' magic in the books is hidden to some extent, but I tried to do something to bring it out, because it is there.
As for the religion part - well, this is an explicit analogy in what I've written :-) You've hit the nail on the head: people treat it as if it were a religion, almost as if they grew up on a certain mythology.
As someone who encountered these books as an adult (mid thirties) I find essays like this (and Bloom’s critique) incomprehensible. Rowling books are derivative, of the canon of western esotericism. We encounter a TS Eliot reference in the first few pages (Dumbledore’s scar) and proceed to meet Ibsen’s Hedwig, Goethe’s Green Snake and Beautiful Lily and learn that Harry is a “seeker” whose unique power stems from his powerful yearning to reunite with the World Soul almost literally reproduced in the Mirror of Erised. Rowling has made no secret of her use of alchemy as the framework of the books. Yet none of these criticisms, including yours, consider the books as Christian NeoPlatonic allegory, dismissing them as poorly written and non literary. It’s a bit like reading a criticism of Ulysses which dismisses the book as obscene and poorly written without once mentioning its relationship to Homer. Is it too obvious or too dense?
The Corpus Hermeticum is generally dated to the first two centuries CE, so contemporary with Plotinus, though there are arguments for earlier dating still in Hellenistic Egypt. There are plausible but not well supported by documentary evidence arguments that the traditions date back several hundred years earlier ( for example in Jewish Kabbalah, although the evolved traditions date to late medieval Europe.) The Western Renaissance Christian strain of NeoPlatonism is a synthesis of the Corpus Hermeticum, Plato from the newly rediscovered (by the west) dialogues and Republic and Alexandrian and early Christian Neoplatonism mostly due to Pico and Ficino who translated materials which escaped the fall of Constantinople. It interprets the fall or original sin as the individuation of the bit of world soul enmeshed in a material body and resulting forgetting of its divine origins and direct connection to the divine mind. Spiritual alchemy is the process of breaking down the material connections (which correlate to or give rise to the deadly sins) to free the soul to remember its divinity and reclaim divine powers and insight. Alchemy provides a practical (stuff you can do in the lab) and symbolic path for accomplishing this process - the stages of the lesser and great work, Nigredo, Albedo, Rubedo etc. Esotericism embraces this story as ontologically correct. Our consciousness is a bit of the divine world soul which can reacquire access to the divine mind through a process of purification and integration. You may view that as credulous or naive, Rowling has some success to show for trusting the process. You have likely never heard of Elizabeth Goudge, who was at one time (mid 1900s) an enormously successful writer of children’s stories and historical fiction following the same structure. Rowling cites Goudge’s Little White Horse as her favorite children’s book and a seminal influence on her work.
The Corpus Hermeticum by itself doesn't contain much of the tradition you've been gesturing at (in terms of operative symbols, not metaphysics). My personal impression is that ספרות ההיכלות and the Hermeticum share more common ancestry than a relation of influence. As for the Jewish Kabbalah, the earliest relevant text for the specific Neoplatonist genealogy you're thinking about is much, much later, ספר יצירה (the earliest attribution I know of is the 6th century). As for the overall arch you're describing from Ficcinio and Pico (and Bruno, etc.), neatpicking aside, is good - but irrelevant.
The true symbolic matrix you've been gesturing at earlier is the post-Renaissance alchemical tradition. This is fine, but its connection to the neo-Platonic metaphysics is like a father to a son, rather than one of identity. :-) It also happens to be much more obscure and, as I said, elitist. Now you seem to be saying that, regardless of that, this symbolic structure imbued in this metaphysics has a genuine magical quality that is beyond the standard mythic quality. I'd sooner believe that this matrix has latent mythic potency that, given the right configuration, could have a wider appeal, but no, I will not 'trust' any occult 'process' in the sense you're suggesting, at least not as an explanation. As a spiritual practice - to each his own.
I think you are arguing semantics at this point. I suppose you can argue for a biologically or sociologically determined “matrix with latent mythological potency” within a completely realist ontology, but I am not sure how that is functionally distinguished from Neoplatonic idealism. I personally find realist solutions to Hume’s problem of induction unsatisfying, so I prefer an idealist ontology but, as you say, to each their own. I am very skeptical of claims that anyone has ever exercised divine powers after achieving enlightenment through the alchemical process, and regardless of one’s metaphysics it is hard to argue against suppressing id and ego to open one self to deeper truths, so functionally it is not hard to reconcile psychological and metaphysical conceptions of “accessing the divine mind”.
I don't think this is a semantic discussion or that your digression into the metaphysical discussion is warranted simply by me rejecting alchemic practice as a form of explanation to a mass culture phenomenon, nor that if it were warranted the relevant philosophical-spiritual positions to discuss are even close to being enclosed by the positions suggested in your comment. Let's agree that this is a different discussion to have someday.
Be that as it may I learned from this exchange with you some interesting things so thank you for taking the time to discuss.
Thank you for sharing your thought process. About the books being poorly written - this is simply a declaration of a point I never saw a good reason to doubt. You may like her writing style, but it is repetitive, thin, grammatically shallow, and suffers from a real issue of adverb inflation, regardless of context. This is only the tip of the iceberg. I'm not claiming that I'm a good writer, nor is Bloom. I'm also not arguing it in this piece. Consider it a declaration.
As for the esoteric connection, I think you need to distinguish intentional thought and unintentional luck or impressionistic tendency that hit the right notes. Bloom, as you might know, is no stranger to Western "esotericism". But throwing around names and images doesn't qualify the author as an esoteric genius. Sure, in retrospective analysis, one might recognise the deeper coherence of the piece - as I did here, and you gestured in your comment - but this is a very far cry from proving it was also there at the inception. From proving that Rowling, for instance, is some sort of closeted Jung.
I'm not even going to start arguing about "Christian neo-Platonic allegory" (a field I happen to know well). I could just as easily read the books through Hegelian dialectics. It's there only in the sense that it is co-present with these themes out in the world. The Ulysses analogy is slightly ironic: We have ample evidence - besides names and imagery and prose coincidences - to support that Joyce worked very hard to fit the narrative to the Odyssey, both internal evidence (weaker) and external to the Ulysses. Aside from a few cryptic comments by Rowling, we have nothing equivalent of the sort.
Ok, that answers my question in a way. The entire structure of Harry Potter is built around the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, the three protagonists are Harry Potter (salt, the seeker), Ron Bilious Weasley (Sulphur) and Hermione Granger ((Hg, Hermione are both mercury). The sixth book is a comedy of humours which follows Ripley’s Compound of Alchemy nearly line for line. That you can dismiss the connections as “a few cryptic comments by Rowling” indicates you are claiming expertise where you are completely ignorant. I am not sure what constitutes “an esoteric genius”, but I am sure that Rowling weaves the ideas, symbols and works of Western spiritual alchemy through every level, and nearly every word of the texts.
As for her use of language, somehow she managed to turn an absurdly dense (if you had criticized it for being overworked I would have accepted that) alchemical allegory into the most popular work of fiction ever, inspiring tens of millions of young readers. I am a Shakespeare-Sidney scholar, so my sense of what constitutes “good writing” is colored by having to slog through the euphuism of Lyly and Harvey. Rowling’s writing is lively, respects decorum and manages emotional range all within a convincing frame of boarding school genre writing, which strikes me as an accomplishment of some sort.
Sounds like - truly - fascinating essay for you to write and for me to enjoy. Nevertheless, until you (or someone else who already did?) will, I shall remain sceptical that the structural similarities you gesture at are anything more than the typical structural similarities found in western myths, symbols and narratives (Hero's Journey in pop culture, superheroes as demi-gods prefigurations, The Dark Knight - Orestia, etc).
A fellow named John Granger has made a mini career out of writing about this. He bills himself as Hogwarts Professor. He is a Lutheran clergyman who leans a little too hard into the Christian reading for my taste, but has been at it for a couple decades so he has a sizable amount of material out at this point. The correspondence to Ripley is not subtle. At one point where Ripley instructs to feed the stone with moisture and warmth after a solution stage Mrs Weasley hands Harry a bowl of onion soup. The chapter is titled “An Excess of Phlegm”. Have you actually read the series?
I just read up a bit about Granger following your first comment. Sounds interesting, but since you already read his interpretation, you may answer my question: Leaving internal coherence or correspondence to other texts aside, do we have external evidence for assuming Rowling modelled her books in this way to begin with, in the same way we have it with Joyce, an analogy I remind you that you brought up? Aside from scattered, vague, interview remarks?
(As for the 'excess of phlegm', I'm perhaps less impressed by such things from overfamiliarity with ancient Galenic theory, but I do genuinely appreciate such 'easter eggs'. Personally, I'm very fond of the trellony-cassandra parallel, which is neatly executed.)
When the “witchcraft” controversy and resultant banning of her books by fundamentalist Christians was hot, she did talk with some specificity about how she had notebooks full of renaissance alchemy which informed the books. She has been circumspect to the point of simply lying about sources for names and plot, and never to my knowledge provided clear guidance about where various bits come from. The first book is named the Philosopher’s Stone, which ties it pretty specifically to Alchemy. I was once part of a group of academics who made a sport of identifying her sources - for example when the potions class brews a love potion the description of the scent is verbatim from Cochran’s description of the Aqua Viva. When Ron and Hermione are quarreling, a point where the principles have been isolated alchemically, Ron gets a clingy girlfriend improbably named Lavender Brown, a term which was used to describe the Regulus of Venus which bound the fugitive Sulphur until it could be reunited with the cleansed Mercury. It has been many years since I have paid much attention, I vaguely understand she has released considerable material on her fan site, so more may have come out since.
The announcement of the new series prompted me to reread the Harry Potter books (which I was absolutely obsessed with as a child, to the point of writing my own fanfiction) a couple of weeks ago, and I was pleasantly surprised at just how much I enjoyed and was even moved by the experience. And yet, as an adult—after years of reading and studying the classics—I have to agree with Bloom and Byatt (and you!) that the books are not well-written in terms of prose quality and are indeed derivative.
I've been working on a newsletter post to try to grapple with these tensions and try to make sense of why the book is so personally meaningful to me, and I absolutely agree with you that one of the things that makes Harry Potter so compelling is that it taps into the power of myth really effectively. One aspect of the series that really stood out to me this time around, after having lost my father, is its interest in death and grief and mortality—to me that elevates it, whatever the flaws in its worldbuilding or prose.
I have to admit that the theme of death and the way it is treated was part of the appeal for me as well growing up. I’d be curious to read your piece on the matter - will you be writing it? have you written it already?
My daughter asked for the first two HP books for her ninth birthday because everyone at school was talking about them; Chamber of Secrets had just been published in paperback. Not because of Bloomsbury hype, not the later adulation, but on the recommendation of her peers who had enjoyed them. Reading them for herself taught her to read novels for herself, for which I am ever thankful. Adult opinion was and remains irrelevant.
I was struck by Byatt's claim that the New York Times did not review Terry Pratchett books. It seems she was almost right - they had reviewed the previous Pratchett novel a few months prior, but then seems to have been the first time, barring a highly negative far-earlier review of his co-authored Good Omens.
I wouldn't call it a correction. As I said, she was almost right. If Pratchett (when we was alive) and others like him are reviewed by the critics now, it probably is because HP paved the way.
This was a lot of fun to read! Good points. Good analysis. Love your prose style. One piece of entirely constructive feedback (since I really like your writing): section titles would really help the pacing of your work; in a long piece like this, everyone needs a break once in a while, and finishing a section comes with a nice little feeling of reward. Just a thought!
Thank you for reading this. Thank you also for the compliments, not sure I deserve all of them, but it is nice to be appreciated from time to time. I know I have a bit of trouble with accessible pieces, and the tip about the sub-headers helps. I'll try to incorporate it in future writing :-)
This is exhausting tbh. It was a fun story. It gripped us. It’s not highbrow literature, because it is a children’s book. But she is, at heart, good at telling mystery/whodunnit stories in very basic accessible prose with a dry humour that appeals to kids because it feels honest. She’s still a bad person.
She is a bad person, and the books walked a generation of child readers through a politically complicated era with an explicitly political message that was rare in children’s literature at the time.
I'm not sure I understand why it is important that she is a "bad person" - because of some Twitter quarrels? - or why is it so important to mention twice, but your point about her character being irrelevant here rather holds. One of the things I've tried to show here is why, even though it is not 'highbrow literature', it might still be of some importance, and also why, specifically, *her* character doesn't have anything to do with the success of the books.
The only pushback I'd offer is that her books were by no means 'unique' even in the aspect of offering a political message in a children's book.
I think in the landscape of children’s literature at that time that they were quite unique in that regard. The books were, like you said too, highly unoriginal in many ways. The worst witch series has a tremendous amount of overlap, and it’s clear she was drawing (overtly) on plenty of existing works. There’s one whose title I can’t remember, but it’s about a boy whose parents disappear on vacation and leave him notes. Even there were parallels! But politically speaking, they were explicit in ways almost no children’s books were without being didactic, and especially for the era (I’m coming at this from a US perspective, but 9/11 and the London tube bombings and the subsequent wars impacted the entire anglophone world).
I put in the qualifiers on her character because people are often quick online to make accusations of latent biases if you have a nuanced point of view on anything lol.
I appreciated the second half of your essay; I am just exhausted by the constant evaluation of Harry Potter’s quality by adult metrics.
Thank you :-) I think you're spot on on several issues here. About the politics in children's books: post-1968, there were probably quite a few children's books that addressed politics. I'm not even talking about Orwell's Animal Farm or other older children's books. But you're also right that I'm not as familiar with the American landscape of that time, so you probably know better what was and wasn't original back then.
Very enjoyable. As a 90’s kid who grew up adoring the books and so locked into Byatt’s 8 year old perspective, I cannot analyse them seriously from an adult point of view, so appreciate this overview. As an adult, I can read and enjoy them still, but have lost the simple childish love.
I definitely identify with the living vicariously through Harry thematic, even though my childhood wasn’t ‘bad’.
I wonder about how to qualify the cultural effect, more than just counting how many books sold. To me, the world treated it as miracle, the book series that took kids off of screens and into the library. Perhaps it was related to a specific moment in time, when gameboys were still black and white, and Nokia played 8-bit snake, that allowed for the cultural phenomenon to take off. Hard to believe the same would happen in a Tiktok world.
It’s also fascinating how it’s a certain type of millennial that still loves the book as an adult - they tend progressive female. I find it ironic that the censorious schoolmarm Umbridge and the guns rights libertarians culture of Dumbledore’s Army don’t necessarily coincide with their politics.
I find the claims of a lack of depth to be slightly spurious. In particular, Sirius’ death beyond the Veil is quite sophisticated - in my youthful mind it evoked the same hopeful grief that Frodo’s departure at the Grey Havens did.
On sex - I recall Rowling once saying she hated Lewis’ treatment of sex, especially when he described one of the Narnia girls as growing up and getting too interested in clothes and vanity. Rowling specifically tried to counteract that (seems clear that Lewis was religiously motivated and Rowling in turn motivated by rebellion against that religious impulse), but the result was chaotic, the young romance in the novels seems manufactured.
One of my students read Haroun and the Sea of Stories (published in 1990) and thought Rushdie had plagiarized Harry Potter (first book published in 1997).
It's an interesting essay, and thank you for summarising the views of Bloom and Byant.
I have a critique, though, or rather what I hope is a theme to build on. I think that a key strength of the series -- and a key reason of its longevity, like Tolkien's series -- is that it provides a complex moral guide in the form of a mythos. Complex, because Harry and his friends do not have all the answers, and actually are forced to evolve and abandon simplistic positions as time goes on; Snape and Dudley are two key examples.
In this sense it's perfectly normal to be fascinated and start to love the series as an adult rather than a child; I know more than one person who did. And it's perfectly normal to then use the series to signal allegiance to a specific moral outlook; as we can see with protesters naming themselves "Dumbledore's army".
And in this light the preoccupation of Bloom and Byatt on the lack of the sexual dimension (which, incidentally, is not that true--see the sixth book for example and the numerous dalliance subplots) seems honestly to widely miss the mark.
I appreciate the thoughtful response, and like you I’m not sure we are at a disagreement. I do think that at least partly a myth (or at least a good myth) teaches complex moral lessons (which I think I indicated in the piece).
My point of contention remains the adult story. I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I’m sure there are many adults who were introduced to the books and enjoyed them. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have been such an adult myself. However the primary appeal seems to me still to be for teenagers - and the adults who enjoy it usually have a higher ‘tolerance’ for such things than the rest of the adult world. It is almost in virtue of their childness that they enjoy it.
A school administrator told me to read J.K. Rowling's books because my students were doing so. I never taught Y-A "literature" because I think it's garbage, but I obediently read the Harry Potter books.
And loved them. Oh, they all go saggy in the middle, but the syntax and vocabulary are good, plot details come together, and some real British arcana and a healthy moral element get worked in.
Look, if young people won't read A.J. Cronin and Sholem Asch and Fitzgerald, or J.M. Barrie or Shaw, then Rowling will have to do, and she'll do nicely.
Excellent piece! This is something I've been thinking about lately -- why some books grab us and hold on even though they are kind of terrible by most measures of literary quality. The series that brought this to mind for me was "Dungeon Crawler Carl," which is likewise totally implausible and clumsily written and generally a mess, and yet I blasted through seven gigantic books at much cost to my sleep, and am impatiently awaiting the eighth.
You've just reminded me that Harry Potter was the same way. They're quite different series, but three common elements stand out for me:
1. Breakneck pace. Both are written with an almost frantic energy, racing on to the next thing without a pause or slowdown. The one place in the Harry Potter books I really struggled with was the final book where there's a long sequence of Harry, Hermione, and Ron just kind of wandering around aimlessly; and that's the one time the pace flags.
2. Vivid, memorable characters. I don't say *deep* characters, they're not particularly, but they have very well-defined personalities that drive their actions and their dialogue.
3. Enthusiastic worldbuilding. Again, I don't say it's *good* or consistent worldbuilding. Tolkien would turn up his nose at it, and he'd be absolutely right. But both writers are brimming with wacky ideas and they throw them out rapid-fire, inviting us to laugh at the silliness even as they tell a serious story.
Iv'e been thinking going into Dungeon Crawler Carl, but it seems that my fantasy list is rather long these days. Good to know it has some similar characteristics. Your comment bumped Carl up the list :-)
For what it is worth, I had a nearly identical reaction to the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, although I also wound up with a burning desire to explain to my long-suffering friends (who read it at around the same time) everything that was wrong with it.
Great analysis, very enjoyable to read. As a member of that generation (I am now 35) that read Harry Potter, I have always found it peculiar that it became such a 'cult object' in society in a way that none of its competitors ever did. I read it as a kid, of course, and watched the films, but never became obsessed with it. I may be wrong, but it seems like the HP obsession is especially strong in America, because it taps into two fantasies: that of a magical world, and that of 'Olde England' to which many Americans are so drawn. It is also a 'school mythology', and I notice that Harry Potter fans tend to be women, perhaps because (at least in my experience) women tend to enjoy school more, or have fonder memories of it.
Malinowski distinguished 'science, magic, and religion'; for him, magic was basically primitive technology ( Tolkien would have agreed). This is part of the problem with Potter for me- it rarely moves beyond magic/technology. Everything in the secondary world is just modern, middle-class English life transposed into another dimension, where magic wands (what would Freud say...) replace tools. With Dumbledore and a few others being an exception, a glimpse into something higher... perhaps?
And yet, I am struck by how many people treat it with an attitude approaching the religious. It reminds me a bit how 60's rock bands became part of the 'Boomer' mythology....
One of the unique things about this obsession is precisely that it is not an American phenomenon. Even stranger, it is a mass cultural phenomenon unrelated to the U.S., which is rare these days. This is an interesting point :-) As you say, the books contain many fantasies, but I'm not sure the fantasy element alone is sufficient to explain their mass attraction, which is arguably unprecedented.
As for the Malinowski connection, this scheme ('science, magic and religion') is not uniquely his. Perhaps the most interesting predecessor is Auguste Comte, but arguably even more mandane anthropologists like Frazer solidified it. Either way, Tolkien is definitely not one to view magic and technology as two sides of the same coin; in fact, he's done a good job in characterising magic in On Fairy Stories. Be that as it may, you're right that the 'true magic' or the 'non-middle-class-day-to-day' magic in the books is hidden to some extent, but I tried to do something to bring it out, because it is there.
As for the religion part - well, this is an explicit analogy in what I've written :-) You've hit the nail on the head: people treat it as if it were a religion, almost as if they grew up on a certain mythology.
As someone who encountered these books as an adult (mid thirties) I find essays like this (and Bloom’s critique) incomprehensible. Rowling books are derivative, of the canon of western esotericism. We encounter a TS Eliot reference in the first few pages (Dumbledore’s scar) and proceed to meet Ibsen’s Hedwig, Goethe’s Green Snake and Beautiful Lily and learn that Harry is a “seeker” whose unique power stems from his powerful yearning to reunite with the World Soul almost literally reproduced in the Mirror of Erised. Rowling has made no secret of her use of alchemy as the framework of the books. Yet none of these criticisms, including yours, consider the books as Christian NeoPlatonic allegory, dismissing them as poorly written and non literary. It’s a bit like reading a criticism of Ulysses which dismisses the book as obscene and poorly written without once mentioning its relationship to Homer. Is it too obvious or too dense?
The Corpus Hermeticum is generally dated to the first two centuries CE, so contemporary with Plotinus, though there are arguments for earlier dating still in Hellenistic Egypt. There are plausible but not well supported by documentary evidence arguments that the traditions date back several hundred years earlier ( for example in Jewish Kabbalah, although the evolved traditions date to late medieval Europe.) The Western Renaissance Christian strain of NeoPlatonism is a synthesis of the Corpus Hermeticum, Plato from the newly rediscovered (by the west) dialogues and Republic and Alexandrian and early Christian Neoplatonism mostly due to Pico and Ficino who translated materials which escaped the fall of Constantinople. It interprets the fall or original sin as the individuation of the bit of world soul enmeshed in a material body and resulting forgetting of its divine origins and direct connection to the divine mind. Spiritual alchemy is the process of breaking down the material connections (which correlate to or give rise to the deadly sins) to free the soul to remember its divinity and reclaim divine powers and insight. Alchemy provides a practical (stuff you can do in the lab) and symbolic path for accomplishing this process - the stages of the lesser and great work, Nigredo, Albedo, Rubedo etc. Esotericism embraces this story as ontologically correct. Our consciousness is a bit of the divine world soul which can reacquire access to the divine mind through a process of purification and integration. You may view that as credulous or naive, Rowling has some success to show for trusting the process. You have likely never heard of Elizabeth Goudge, who was at one time (mid 1900s) an enormously successful writer of children’s stories and historical fiction following the same structure. Rowling cites Goudge’s Little White Horse as her favorite children’s book and a seminal influence on her work.
The Corpus Hermeticum by itself doesn't contain much of the tradition you've been gesturing at (in terms of operative symbols, not metaphysics). My personal impression is that ספרות ההיכלות and the Hermeticum share more common ancestry than a relation of influence. As for the Jewish Kabbalah, the earliest relevant text for the specific Neoplatonist genealogy you're thinking about is much, much later, ספר יצירה (the earliest attribution I know of is the 6th century). As for the overall arch you're describing from Ficcinio and Pico (and Bruno, etc.), neatpicking aside, is good - but irrelevant.
The true symbolic matrix you've been gesturing at earlier is the post-Renaissance alchemical tradition. This is fine, but its connection to the neo-Platonic metaphysics is like a father to a son, rather than one of identity. :-) It also happens to be much more obscure and, as I said, elitist. Now you seem to be saying that, regardless of that, this symbolic structure imbued in this metaphysics has a genuine magical quality that is beyond the standard mythic quality. I'd sooner believe that this matrix has latent mythic potency that, given the right configuration, could have a wider appeal, but no, I will not 'trust' any occult 'process' in the sense you're suggesting, at least not as an explanation. As a spiritual practice - to each his own.
I think you are arguing semantics at this point. I suppose you can argue for a biologically or sociologically determined “matrix with latent mythological potency” within a completely realist ontology, but I am not sure how that is functionally distinguished from Neoplatonic idealism. I personally find realist solutions to Hume’s problem of induction unsatisfying, so I prefer an idealist ontology but, as you say, to each their own. I am very skeptical of claims that anyone has ever exercised divine powers after achieving enlightenment through the alchemical process, and regardless of one’s metaphysics it is hard to argue against suppressing id and ego to open one self to deeper truths, so functionally it is not hard to reconcile psychological and metaphysical conceptions of “accessing the divine mind”.
I don't think this is a semantic discussion or that your digression into the metaphysical discussion is warranted simply by me rejecting alchemic practice as a form of explanation to a mass culture phenomenon, nor that if it were warranted the relevant philosophical-spiritual positions to discuss are even close to being enclosed by the positions suggested in your comment. Let's agree that this is a different discussion to have someday.
Be that as it may I learned from this exchange with you some interesting things so thank you for taking the time to discuss.
Cheers,
Thank you for sharing your thought process. About the books being poorly written - this is simply a declaration of a point I never saw a good reason to doubt. You may like her writing style, but it is repetitive, thin, grammatically shallow, and suffers from a real issue of adverb inflation, regardless of context. This is only the tip of the iceberg. I'm not claiming that I'm a good writer, nor is Bloom. I'm also not arguing it in this piece. Consider it a declaration.
As for the esoteric connection, I think you need to distinguish intentional thought and unintentional luck or impressionistic tendency that hit the right notes. Bloom, as you might know, is no stranger to Western "esotericism". But throwing around names and images doesn't qualify the author as an esoteric genius. Sure, in retrospective analysis, one might recognise the deeper coherence of the piece - as I did here, and you gestured in your comment - but this is a very far cry from proving it was also there at the inception. From proving that Rowling, for instance, is some sort of closeted Jung.
I'm not even going to start arguing about "Christian neo-Platonic allegory" (a field I happen to know well). I could just as easily read the books through Hegelian dialectics. It's there only in the sense that it is co-present with these themes out in the world. The Ulysses analogy is slightly ironic: We have ample evidence - besides names and imagery and prose coincidences - to support that Joyce worked very hard to fit the narrative to the Odyssey, both internal evidence (weaker) and external to the Ulysses. Aside from a few cryptic comments by Rowling, we have nothing equivalent of the sort.
Ok, that answers my question in a way. The entire structure of Harry Potter is built around the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, the three protagonists are Harry Potter (salt, the seeker), Ron Bilious Weasley (Sulphur) and Hermione Granger ((Hg, Hermione are both mercury). The sixth book is a comedy of humours which follows Ripley’s Compound of Alchemy nearly line for line. That you can dismiss the connections as “a few cryptic comments by Rowling” indicates you are claiming expertise where you are completely ignorant. I am not sure what constitutes “an esoteric genius”, but I am sure that Rowling weaves the ideas, symbols and works of Western spiritual alchemy through every level, and nearly every word of the texts.
As for her use of language, somehow she managed to turn an absurdly dense (if you had criticized it for being overworked I would have accepted that) alchemical allegory into the most popular work of fiction ever, inspiring tens of millions of young readers. I am a Shakespeare-Sidney scholar, so my sense of what constitutes “good writing” is colored by having to slog through the euphuism of Lyly and Harvey. Rowling’s writing is lively, respects decorum and manages emotional range all within a convincing frame of boarding school genre writing, which strikes me as an accomplishment of some sort.
Sounds like - truly - fascinating essay for you to write and for me to enjoy. Nevertheless, until you (or someone else who already did?) will, I shall remain sceptical that the structural similarities you gesture at are anything more than the typical structural similarities found in western myths, symbols and narratives (Hero's Journey in pop culture, superheroes as demi-gods prefigurations, The Dark Knight - Orestia, etc).
A fellow named John Granger has made a mini career out of writing about this. He bills himself as Hogwarts Professor. He is a Lutheran clergyman who leans a little too hard into the Christian reading for my taste, but has been at it for a couple decades so he has a sizable amount of material out at this point. The correspondence to Ripley is not subtle. At one point where Ripley instructs to feed the stone with moisture and warmth after a solution stage Mrs Weasley hands Harry a bowl of onion soup. The chapter is titled “An Excess of Phlegm”. Have you actually read the series?
I just read up a bit about Granger following your first comment. Sounds interesting, but since you already read his interpretation, you may answer my question: Leaving internal coherence or correspondence to other texts aside, do we have external evidence for assuming Rowling modelled her books in this way to begin with, in the same way we have it with Joyce, an analogy I remind you that you brought up? Aside from scattered, vague, interview remarks?
(As for the 'excess of phlegm', I'm perhaps less impressed by such things from overfamiliarity with ancient Galenic theory, but I do genuinely appreciate such 'easter eggs'. Personally, I'm very fond of the trellony-cassandra parallel, which is neatly executed.)
When the “witchcraft” controversy and resultant banning of her books by fundamentalist Christians was hot, she did talk with some specificity about how she had notebooks full of renaissance alchemy which informed the books. She has been circumspect to the point of simply lying about sources for names and plot, and never to my knowledge provided clear guidance about where various bits come from. The first book is named the Philosopher’s Stone, which ties it pretty specifically to Alchemy. I was once part of a group of academics who made a sport of identifying her sources - for example when the potions class brews a love potion the description of the scent is verbatim from Cochran’s description of the Aqua Viva. When Ron and Hermione are quarreling, a point where the principles have been isolated alchemically, Ron gets a clingy girlfriend improbably named Lavender Brown, a term which was used to describe the Regulus of Venus which bound the fugitive Sulphur until it could be reunited with the cleansed Mercury. It has been many years since I have paid much attention, I vaguely understand she has released considerable material on her fan site, so more may have come out since.
The announcement of the new series prompted me to reread the Harry Potter books (which I was absolutely obsessed with as a child, to the point of writing my own fanfiction) a couple of weeks ago, and I was pleasantly surprised at just how much I enjoyed and was even moved by the experience. And yet, as an adult—after years of reading and studying the classics—I have to agree with Bloom and Byatt (and you!) that the books are not well-written in terms of prose quality and are indeed derivative.
I've been working on a newsletter post to try to grapple with these tensions and try to make sense of why the book is so personally meaningful to me, and I absolutely agree with you that one of the things that makes Harry Potter so compelling is that it taps into the power of myth really effectively. One aspect of the series that really stood out to me this time around, after having lost my father, is its interest in death and grief and mortality—to me that elevates it, whatever the flaws in its worldbuilding or prose.
I have to admit that the theme of death and the way it is treated was part of the appeal for me as well growing up. I’d be curious to read your piece on the matter - will you be writing it? have you written it already?
My daughter asked for the first two HP books for her ninth birthday because everyone at school was talking about them; Chamber of Secrets had just been published in paperback. Not because of Bloomsbury hype, not the later adulation, but on the recommendation of her peers who had enjoyed them. Reading them for herself taught her to read novels for herself, for which I am ever thankful. Adult opinion was and remains irrelevant.
I was struck by Byatt's claim that the New York Times did not review Terry Pratchett books. It seems she was almost right - they had reviewed the previous Pratchett novel a few months prior, but then seems to have been the first time, barring a highly negative far-earlier review of his co-authored Good Omens.
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/books/books-in-brief-fiction-poetry-259047.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/07/books/the-four-bikers-of-the-apocalypse.html
Ok, to be fair, I just assumed she is right as well, and to be honest, Good Omens is not the best of his works :-) Thanks for the correction.
I wouldn't call it a correction. As I said, she was almost right. If Pratchett (when we was alive) and others like him are reviewed by the critics now, it probably is because HP paved the way.
This was a lot of fun to read! Good points. Good analysis. Love your prose style. One piece of entirely constructive feedback (since I really like your writing): section titles would really help the pacing of your work; in a long piece like this, everyone needs a break once in a while, and finishing a section comes with a nice little feeling of reward. Just a thought!
Thank you for reading this. Thank you also for the compliments, not sure I deserve all of them, but it is nice to be appreciated from time to time. I know I have a bit of trouble with accessible pieces, and the tip about the sub-headers helps. I'll try to incorporate it in future writing :-)
This is exhausting tbh. It was a fun story. It gripped us. It’s not highbrow literature, because it is a children’s book. But she is, at heart, good at telling mystery/whodunnit stories in very basic accessible prose with a dry humour that appeals to kids because it feels honest. She’s still a bad person.
She is a bad person, and the books walked a generation of child readers through a politically complicated era with an explicitly political message that was rare in children’s literature at the time.
Many things can be true at once.
I'm not sure I understand why it is important that she is a "bad person" - because of some Twitter quarrels? - or why is it so important to mention twice, but your point about her character being irrelevant here rather holds. One of the things I've tried to show here is why, even though it is not 'highbrow literature', it might still be of some importance, and also why, specifically, *her* character doesn't have anything to do with the success of the books.
The only pushback I'd offer is that her books were by no means 'unique' even in the aspect of offering a political message in a children's book.
I think in the landscape of children’s literature at that time that they were quite unique in that regard. The books were, like you said too, highly unoriginal in many ways. The worst witch series has a tremendous amount of overlap, and it’s clear she was drawing (overtly) on plenty of existing works. There’s one whose title I can’t remember, but it’s about a boy whose parents disappear on vacation and leave him notes. Even there were parallels! But politically speaking, they were explicit in ways almost no children’s books were without being didactic, and especially for the era (I’m coming at this from a US perspective, but 9/11 and the London tube bombings and the subsequent wars impacted the entire anglophone world).
I put in the qualifiers on her character because people are often quick online to make accusations of latent biases if you have a nuanced point of view on anything lol.
I appreciated the second half of your essay; I am just exhausted by the constant evaluation of Harry Potter’s quality by adult metrics.
Thank you :-) I think you're spot on on several issues here. About the politics in children's books: post-1968, there were probably quite a few children's books that addressed politics. I'm not even talking about Orwell's Animal Farm or other older children's books. But you're also right that I'm not as familiar with the American landscape of that time, so you probably know better what was and wasn't original back then.
Very enjoyable. As a 90’s kid who grew up adoring the books and so locked into Byatt’s 8 year old perspective, I cannot analyse them seriously from an adult point of view, so appreciate this overview. As an adult, I can read and enjoy them still, but have lost the simple childish love.
I definitely identify with the living vicariously through Harry thematic, even though my childhood wasn’t ‘bad’.
I wonder about how to qualify the cultural effect, more than just counting how many books sold. To me, the world treated it as miracle, the book series that took kids off of screens and into the library. Perhaps it was related to a specific moment in time, when gameboys were still black and white, and Nokia played 8-bit snake, that allowed for the cultural phenomenon to take off. Hard to believe the same would happen in a Tiktok world.
It’s also fascinating how it’s a certain type of millennial that still loves the book as an adult - they tend progressive female. I find it ironic that the censorious schoolmarm Umbridge and the guns rights libertarians culture of Dumbledore’s Army don’t necessarily coincide with their politics.
I find the claims of a lack of depth to be slightly spurious. In particular, Sirius’ death beyond the Veil is quite sophisticated - in my youthful mind it evoked the same hopeful grief that Frodo’s departure at the Grey Havens did.
On sex - I recall Rowling once saying she hated Lewis’ treatment of sex, especially when he described one of the Narnia girls as growing up and getting too interested in clothes and vanity. Rowling specifically tried to counteract that (seems clear that Lewis was religiously motivated and Rowling in turn motivated by rebellion against that religious impulse), but the result was chaotic, the young romance in the novels seems manufactured.
Complaining that the world of Harry Potter is illogical seems like seriously missing the point.
I'm not sure who the object of this comment is - Me? Bloom? Byatt? Someone in the comments section? I don't think anybody was making that argument.
George Steiner considered the Harry Potter books to be very well-written. Each to his taste.
One of my students read Haroun and the Sea of Stories (published in 1990) and thought Rushdie had plagiarized Harry Potter (first book published in 1997).
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