On Critical Reception of Harry Potter and Twilight: “It’s Deja Vu All Over Again” (Part 3: Artifact)

For Part 1 of this post, click here. for Part 2, click here, or just scroll down on the home page.

I went to the library tonight to pick up Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on CD (I am driving to Connecticut tomorrow for a Zossima Press lunch and to sit in on a class at Yale; they’re reading Goblet and discussing Christology so I thought I’d listen to Jim Dale telling the TriWizard Tournament story on the long drive up 287N). Our local library has a wonderful woman at the helm and she teased me because it took me so long to find the Potter CDs. “Your children would have been able to find them right away.” Because she knows what I write and talk about, she asked me why I needed the audio versions of Goblet and what I was thinking about these days.

I took a deep breath and said I was reading Twilight. After reading this afternoon one self-anointed Potter maven’s disdain for my suggestions here that there is something more than Harlequin Romance in Stephenie Meyer’s books, I half expected her to laugh or do the eyeball-rolling headshake dance. Instead she asked what I thought of them, obviously very interested, and, when I expressed my doubts that teenage girls were the niche audience propelling these books to sales approaching 20 million, she laughed. She admitted that her experience was only anecdotal, but that what she had noticed was readers of every age, male and female, asking for, borrowing, and reading the library’s copies or their own in the library. Other than Harry Potter, she’s never seen anything like that.

I share this conversation for you to make of it what you will. It doesn’t demonstrate anything conclusive, of course, but it makes me think I’m not silly for thinking I’ve seen this situation before (“deja vu all over again”). The desire to bottle and stopper the Twilight Saga phenomenon as a tweenie fad is similar to the insistence in media and reviews for several years that Ms. Rowling’s novels were “just for children” and their success was due to kids loving Goosebump like stories, their susceptibility to clever marketing, and the madness of crowds. Potter mania couldn’t be about the stories being masterfully written and having transcendent meaning.

I suspect we’re seeing the same sort of collective dismissal of Ms. Meyer’s work, which, it should be noted, is counter intuitive given her success. Yes, not all best sellers are great literature, but popularity is a marker of an author having at least touched a nerve or created some resonance within a large group of people with the writer’s answer to an important human question or need. Our reflex, mysteriously, though, when a book sells well is to look for ways to sneer at what the plebians are reading. Eliade’s thesis about the role of entertainment in a secular culture being mythic and religious tells us this thinking is upside down; if a book becomes a “mania,” we should assume at least that it has spiritual trappings and look seriously for allegorical and anagogical meaning.

But that’s not what we’re seeing with Twilight or the three and a half other books of Bella’s adventures running with wolves (and vampires). Just as with Harry Potter at its debut, we’re getting superficial looks from culture and Christian cognoscenti and their commentary about the reflection of the surface rather than exploration of what is beneath, behind, and within that is causing the response these stories generate in readers.

On Monday we talked about how Ms. Rowling’s debut and Ms. Rowling’s have both been met with critical disdain largely consequent to their choice of genre and yesterday I reviewed how each of their series has been used as a litmus strip by Culture Warriors for fidelity to tradition or apostasy. Harry is the gateway to the occult; reading about Bella’s relationship with Edward undermines a young woman’s innocence, and consequently, her commitment to chastity and virtue. Tonight, I want to note that the Twilight Saga and the Hogwarts Adventures have also been critiqued by Culture Warriors on the left, ironically and with as little merit, for being insufficiently postmodern or politically correct.

This ‘pc’ reading is actually something of a step-up from the other two critical reactions, both of which featured specific communities marking their territories and members with easy to identify touchstones. Notable academics condemned Harry Potter and Bella Swan as “slop” so reading or not reading Rowling and Meyer has become a sign of not belonging or belonging to the educated class (academia is a remarkably bourgeois and class conscious culture that, because the pay is so bad, has to use other things than expensive possessions or power to visibly signify membership). Culture War faith community leaders have done the same thing with Harry and Bella as the ivory tower mavens, only differing in their nominal reason for thinking these books something “other” and somehow defiling. The virtue of a politically correct dismissal of Harry and Twilight, though, is that it reflects at least a greater degree of engagement with the text than a genre or catechism check.

My favorite example of Harry’s being skewered for being an elitist vessel of capitalists to enchant and ensnare the young in order to train them to be consuming automatons is Andrew Blake’s The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter (Verso, 2002).

It came out the same month as Hidden Key to Harry Potter, my first book, and Prof. Blake and I took different approaches to understanding Pottermania and Ms. Rowling’s first four books. I read them as literature and found literary alchemy and Christian symbolism by the boatload; Prof. Blake examined the books and excitement they generated as cultural artifacts and, not surprisingly, found a crime being committed against the young.

Here is the publisher’s book description at Amazon.com:

As the British state begins to unravel, and journalists compete to pronounce on the death of Britain, a schoolboy from suburban Surrey who lives for most of the year in a semi-parallel universe becomes the most popular figure in contemporary world literature. Now read on …everyone else does …Harry Potter is an orphan, oppressed and abused by the adults around him, who retreats into a fantasy world. But ironically, as Andrew Blake makes clear, J.K. Rowling rescues her character through the reinvention of that apex of class privilege, the English public school, a literary conceit that problematises Harry Potter’s status as a role model and raises important social questions about the state of Blair’s Britain.

The books are packaged for both adults and kids, and they are supplemented by objects more squarely aimed at children. Everything that could be taken from the books and films is available in Muggle-friendly form …and there are plenty of websites and in-store promotional posters to tell you all about it, and encourage you to save, bully your parents or otherwise spend, spend, spend. Thus the new generation becomes the new consumer, and Harry Potter, having done his bit for the future of publishing, plays another significant part in the development of consumer capitalism. Magic. No wonder so many adults identify with him…”

Prof. Blake is the Head of Cultural Studies at King Alfred’s College and he, no doubt, is a credit to his field of study. But for getting at what drives Potter mania, his holding the books at arm’s length to see how their success is only a function of marketing requires his beginning with and never stopping to examine the assumption that these novels are the “the literary equivalent of fast food.”

Prof. Blake takes the PC stance and denounces the work. Other academic critics who are much more sympathetic to Harry and Ms. Rowling, though, also insisted on deconstructing the text, “murdering to dissect,” as a cultural totem rather than a literary work per se with an effect on readers due to their artistry and meaning. You can find these treatments (mixed in with some wonderful essays) in the table of contents pages for Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter, Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays (Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture), and The Ivory Tower And Harry Potter: Perspectives On A Literary Phenomenon.

Unlike Prof. Blake’s Irresistible, there is a lot of value in these essay collections. The essays in each about Tom Brown’s Schooldays, for example, were wonderfully helpful to me, even enlightening, when I wrote the chapter in Harry Potter’s Bookshelf on the schoolboy novel genre. But every one of the books has essays that are more about social values, gender issues, politics, even economics than literary interpretation or just historical antecedents and influences.

Here are a few examples:

*From Sexist to (sort-of) Feminist: Representations of Gender in Harry Potter

*Potttermania: Good, Clean Fun or Cultural Hegemony?

*Accepting Mudbloods: The Ambivalent Social Vision of J. K. Rowling’s Fairy Tales

*Class and Socioeconomic Identity in Harry Potter’s England

*What Would Harry Do? J. K. Rowling and Lawrence Kohlberg’s Theories of Moral Development

There is merit and meaning in each of these essays, none of which are inimical to either Ms. Rowling or Pottermania in the way Prof. Blake is. None of them, though, suggest there is anything of genius or even an especially creative or mythic artistry with spiritual valence and value in the series. Outside of Prof. Tumminio’s class at Yale, Prof. James Thomas’ at Pepperdine, Prof. Sturgis’ at Belmont, and Prof. Priggie’s at Augustana College, I’m not aware of other teachers that are looking at the books as much more than artifacts of this historical period and our confinement in the prejudices inevitable to our capitalist, racist, sexist (etc.) culture. (Forgive me for the many excellent Potter-phile literature teachers of whom I am unaware and fail to mention here! Please note them in the comment box below.)

To my knowledge, there have been no collections of essays deconstructing Ms. Meyer’s work but there have been plenty of folks writing to share their objections to her medieval ideas of sex, race, sex, family, courtship, and, well, sex. The books are, at the moral level, all about responsibility, chastity, virtue, doing the right thing, and such, even in the face of selfish desires or a mutually felt love. Edward is remarkably controlling and possessive even for a centenarian teenager, to which failings Bella is largely passive and submissive. Her father congratulates Jacob for forcing himself on Bella and it’s hardly clear we get a consensus that this was a bad thing despite Bella’s feelings of outrage (Edward’s murderous thoughts seem to be a function less about love than someone damaging his property).

At least one feminist is chagrined by women loving books that celebrate, in her mind, a decidedly anti-feminist image of the helpless woman who cannot get by without her perfect man, which casting she thinks is a function of genre:

Such are the tortured internal contradictions of romance, as nonsensical as its masculine counterpart, pornography, and every bit as habit forming. Search a little deeper on the Internet and you can find women readers both objecting to the antifeminist aspects of Twilight and admitting that they found the books irresistible. “Sappy romance, amateurish writing, etc.,” complained one. Still, “when I read it, I just couldn’t put it down. It was like an unhealthy addiction for me … I’m not sure how I could read through it, seeing how I dislike romances immensely. But I did, and when I couldn’t get ‘New Moon’ I almost had a heart attack. That book was hypnotizing.”

Some things, it seems, are even harder to kill than vampires. The traditional feminine fantasy of being delivered from obscurity by a dazzling, powerful man, of needing to do no more to prove or find yourself than win his devotion, of being guarded from all life’s vicissitudes by his boundless strength and wealth — all this turns out to be a difficult dream to leave behind. Vampires have long served to remind us of the parts of our own psyches that seduce us, sapping our will and autonomy, dragging us back into the past. And they walk among us to this day.

The Native American community, quite understandably, is of two minds about being depicted as “magical negroes” in this series; why is it always the Natives who have the mystical voodoo solution to the white man’s nightmare? As Mariana observed at The Hog’s Head:

What irritated me most about Meyer’s attitude towards Native Americans is the way she perpetrates old stereotypes, stereotypes that are indicative of the general public’s complete ignorance of the reality of the Native American situation. How many books and films have portrayed Indians as wise and peaceful people with mystical powers and and a mysterious connection to the natural world?

And what about this heroine choosing the resplendently white man over the person of color, who is a beast? In ‘White Vampire yes, Indian Werewolf no,’ Bob Schmidt responds to a woman’s observation that “critical reception has been mixed. Bella’s enthrallment with Edward, and her near-constant need of being rescued, make some women (including me) cringe” by saying:

So the Disneyfied heroine (pretty, dependent, hungry for a man) will choose the handsome white guy over the not-so-handsome person of color, who happens to be a Quileute Indian. Nice message to send to the kids, Stephanie.

Meanwhile, Jacob the Indian werewolf is hairy, snarling, and savage just like a demon. He’s literally a beast-man. So we see the duality Meyer has unwittingly set up. The white character is superhuman and the Indian character is subhuman.

But are these supposed sexist and racist failings of the Ms. Meyer’s novels what they are about and what readers love about them so much that they read the books again and again? It is hard to believe these books represent a Birth of A Nation moment, in which Americans set outside all their postmodern sensibilities and sensitivities on race and gender issues to enjoy a good laugh at Tonto and return to second-class citizenship based on gender. As we’ll see and as you’d expect, the Twilight Saga books are remarkably postmodern and upfront in denouncing prejudice, limits on individual freedom, thinking, and choice, and restrictive, outdated mythologies.

Just as with Ms. Rowling, serious readers are missing the cause of what makes these books work by focusing on their surface meanings and the reflection of these surfaces in cultural issues of the day. I have one more point to make in my list of shared critical responses to Twilight and Harry Potter before I try to explain what it is in each series that these critics have failed to see.

To be continued.