A Debate About Harry Potter JOAN ACOCELLA Joan Acocella was born in 1946 in San Francisee and was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and Rutgers University. She be her writing career asa dance critic for Dance Mag: the New ly News, and the Wall Sireet Journal before joining the staff of the New Torker. Her books include Mark Morris (1993), Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple I ity Disorder (1999), Witla Cather and of Criticism (2000), and Tireney-Fight Artiste and Two Saints (2007). In “Unde reprinted from the New Yorker (2000) ark Di te Spell,” Acocella appeal of the Harry Potter books lies in their willingness to raise complicated moral questions. Under the Spell N: SINCE V2x have we seen a fuss like the one o “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” the fourth vol- in J. K. Rowling's series about a junior wizard, Biggest advance order ever (including Amazon.com's three hundrec and fifty thousand), biggest first printing ever (three million eight hundred thousand copies in this country alone), biggest takeover, ever, of the Times best-seller list by a single riter, As “T let alone a children’s Goblet of Fir being printed, the three preceding volumes were all still in the ranking—a circumstance that resulted, last Sunday, in the didn’t ne en’s best-seller list just what we {. Prior to publication, the book was shrouded i 430 ACOCELLA = Calehe Spt 43 cecrecy, There were no copies for publication day, July 8th. uiltra-tight, press-inflami ‘iewers, or for anyon Many stores stayed open | te on July 7th—indeed, threw ies—and started ringing up the sales at a went to Books of Wonder, Harry Potter minute after midnig cn West Fightcenth Street, and stood in line for ewo hours vith a lot of excited children and bleary-eyed parents as Harry Potter lookalike, presumably associated with the store cruised the sidewalk, distriburing press-on_lightning-bolt ‘The subject of the Harry Potter series is power, an important matter for since they have so little of it ren, , Around 1:48 4.M., T made it to the let of Fire.” tattoos and fake chi font of the lin After all that, I would love to tell you that the book is a big nd was allowed to buy “The G rothing. In fact, it’s wonderful, just like its predecessors. Part of the secret of Rowling s success is her utter track fairy tale, plus a bild tionalism, The Porter story is a a murder mystery, plus a cosmic war of good \d evil, and there’s almost no classic in any of thse genres that doesn’t reverberate between the lines of Harry’s saga the Arthurian legend, the Superman comics, “Star Wars,” the “Chronicles of “Cinderella,” “The Lord of the Rin, Narnia,” “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Exodus, the Divine Comedy, “Paradise Lost”—they're all here. The Gothic paraphernalia, too: turreted castles, pur Lurprise visitors arriving in the dark of ni bined letters, a backed by forked lightning, If you take a look at Vladimir of the Folk Tale,” which Propp’s 1928 book “Morpholo lists just about ev rer used in fairy tales, you can check off, one by one, the devices that Rowling has of the story, Propp unabashedly picked up. At the beginnin432 PERSUASION AND ARGUMENT says, the villain harms someone in the hero’s family. (‘The evil wizard Voldemort murdered Harry's good-wizard pai when the boy was year old, and tried to kill him, too.) The ‘Voldemort’s attack left Harry with a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on his forehead.) The hero is banished. ( hero is branded. ‘Harry is forced to go live with k e aunt and uncle, the Dursleys,) The hero is rele: is f nally informed that he is a wizard, and goes off to live at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.) The hero must survive ordeals, seek thin which Harry does. The villa bloody trails; Voldemort ob| acquire a wise helper, all « form and lea! ro Propp, a fairy but Row! must change s. Accordin; with the hero's mare ing may break ranks here. She has said that the series will be seven novels long, one for each of Harry’s years at Hogwarts. He started there ar we say goodbye to hi tale is supposed ro er even, so he will be seventeen when In the line in front of Books of Won. der, there was heated speculation as to who is going to end up as Harry’s girl. (I say Ginny Weasley. weddin So Rowll and she de T doubt we'll have a ng, though, Seventeen’s a little youn, ’s books are chock-a-block with archetypes, 1° just use them; she glories in them, plays with them, postmodernly. At the Dursleys? house, Harty lives in a cupboard under the great showoff when j rs, with spiders, Rowling is also. a ind this, T comes to surprise endings think, is actually a fault of the books, of of the last two. The dénowements last for pages and pages, as red herrings ar eliminated, false identities cleared up, fiends unmasked as foes, and vice versa, Not only is this too complicated, the sur t00 surprising. How can Sirius Bl Harry throw soner of Azkaban out to be a good g «can Scab ay—indeed, the boy's godfather? How , whom we have known and loved for three vol uumes as a dusty, useless little r g in the sun, eme at the end of that book as a deep-dyed villain scems to invalidate all our prior experien to speak of the sheer confirs sd with the equally cou disguise? Tc terintuitive revelations ar the end of “The Goble of Fire, ACOCELLA & Unkerthe Stt 433 Harry thinks, “It made no sense with him, Tagree Rowling has said that she has no trouble a all thinking her salf back to age eleven, and the novels show it. There are toi let jokes, booger jokes. There is ab four kinds of players (all fying on uidditeh—wit ‘ooms) and three kinds of balls—that sounds as though it were made up by a clever cen-yeat-old. And the book dl e filled with children’s prob. lems. Do you have bad dreams? Did you find your Christmas presents rather a letdown? Do you hate the new baby in your house? Do you wish you had different parents? Is there some thing weird that lives under your bed and makes noises at night? Ifso, Joanne Rowling is thinking about you, Best ofall js her treatment of the social nightmares of the schoolyard: cliques, bullying, ostracism, kids who like to remind you that your family doesn’t ave much money. Such problems are pethaps more pressing in the English boarding school, on which Hogwarts is modelled, (Last year, in the Times B Review, Pico Iyer claimed that Hogwarts was a Bur the situation replica of Fron, where he did his time clearly rings a bell with Rowling's American readers, 100. More, even, than the Potter books’ sensitivity to preteen terrors, it is their wised-upness, their lack of sentimentality, that must appeal to Rowling’s audience. However much they have to do with goodness, thes © not prissy books, Harry lies to adults again and again. He also hates certain people, and Rowling hates them, too, Unele Vernon Dursley is not only cruel; he spits when he talks. Harry says the Dursleys wish him dead, and he’s right. As for the forces of good, they are often well out of reach. In “The Sorce aheart-stopping scene in which Harry comes upon a mirror, tke so-called Mirror of Erised, and sees his dead parents in it. His father waves at him; his mother weeps and smiles, Read ing this, you think, Oh, good, thank God —Harry’s nor realy alone, not really an orphan, Yes, he’s being hunted down by a him—but his ss Villain—in each of the books, Volkemort pursues rovect him, Th ents” spirits are there t0 p434 PERSUASION AND ARG id tells Harry that the Mirror of Erised shows us not what is but what Dumbledore, Hogwarts’s wise headmaster, appears 4 wwe desire. (Read “Frised” backward.) Harry is alone. The great beauty of the Potter books is their wealth of imagination, their sheer, shining fullness. Rowling has said that the idea for the series came to her on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990 started writing the first volume, she spent ye out the details of Harry's world. We and that, even before she just working ests the in Ice Mice, Jelly Slugs, Fizzing p the hi ventory of magical treats Whizbees—levitating shi store; the wide range of offerings (Dungbombs, Hiccup Sweets, Nose-Riting Teacups) in the wizard joke store Hogwarts isa grand, creepy castle, a thous: bet alls) in the wizard candy id years old, with es than you can shake a stick more dungeons and secret passag at, There are a hundred and forty-two staircases, some « which go to different places on different days of the week The and get the words wrong, There are poltergeists—Peeves, for example, who busies himself jamming gum into keyholes, W also get ghosts, notably: Nearly Headless Nick, whose execu tioner didn’t quite finish the job, so that Nick’s s of armor that sing carols at Christmastime, by an “inch or so of ghostly skin and musele”—ie keeps flop ping over his ruff—thus, to his grief, excluding him from par ticipating in the Headless Hunt, which is confined to the pitared. dligplay ease all its owns Mad-Pye Moody, the professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts, who, apart from his ocular problems, has a chunk of his nose missing and a wooden leg ending in a clawed foot; Rubeus Hagrid, the gentle-giant gamekeeper, with his pet, Norbert, a baby dragon, whom he feeds a bucket of brandy mixed with alf hour chicken bi Norbert isn’t the only mon ster gether with hinkypunks, bo, cre are also centaurs, basil s, and hippogrifis, to- J, my favorites, the grindylows. Harry encounters his first grindylow in a tank in a professor’s office: “A sickly green creature with sharp little horns had its fice pressed ass, .. leving its long ACOCELLA Under shesplt 435 sgindly fingers.” (Later, the grindylow shakes its fist at him To deal with such encounters, and other life events, the stadents must learn many spells: “Expellia of something; “Waddiwasi,” to extract gum from keyholes mus,” t0 get rid i Pesternomi,” to maki tsis a whole, bursting world. Most of Rowling’s characters are types, and excellent as such, but some tise to a richness beyond the reach of British central casting. Voldemort, for example. When he failed to. kill the infant Harry, Voldemort was disempowered, and itis, in this weakened state that we first encounter him in “The Goblet of Fire.” But he isn’t just w disgustingly, terrifyingly- a dark, raw, reddish black. Irs arms and legs le, and its fa fe ever had a face like that fed eyes.” Soon—as soon as ak, He is—grotesquely, a baby: “hairless and scaly-lookis were thin and heis immersed ina potion made from Harry’s blood and some- one else’s hacked-off hand and various other ingredient he becomes his adult self again, which is nor so handsome cither, but that first sight of him, thar litle red thing, swad dled in blankets, is a triumph of horror fiction. Ie’s horror with a difference, though. Rowling's fivorite writer, she has told interviewers, is Jane Austen. SI loves Dickens. And it is in their bailivick—-English morals manners realism, the world of Pip and Miss Bates, of money and position and trying to keep your head up if you have neither—that she scores her greatest victories, A nice ox ample is the scene, in “The Sorcerer’s Stone,” where Harry ard Ron meet for the first time, on the train that is taking them, as entering students, to Hogwarts, Each is handi capped. Harry, though he is famous throughout the wizard world (because, as an infant, he repelled Voldemort’s attack} old Teft to him by his parents, is and thongh he has a pile of without fimily and witerly ignorant of wizardry. Ron comes from a long line of wizards, and he has family galore, but that is his problem: five older brothers, no position. He is ways forgets Iways dressed in hand-me-downs; his mother what kind of sandwich he likes; he has no spending money436 PERSUASION AND ARGUMENT Together, in the train compartment, the two boys comfort and help cach other, Harry shares the wizard candies he buys from the vender (he can afford them); Ron explains the wiz ard trading cards that come with the candies (he understands them). Harry gives Ron prestige; Ron gives Harry a sense of belonging. All thisis done very Englishly, very subtly, in sm gestures, but in the end each boy, because of the other arrives at Hogwarts si htly better armed against the harsh ness of the work ‘The subject of the larry Potter series is power, an important matter for children, since they have so little of it. How does one acquire power How can it be used well, and ill? Dy power lie with the good? (In other words, is th Iuimate God) Ifso, why is there so much cruelty around? These are questions that Milton, among others, addressed before Rowli not ashamed to follow in their wake, Voldemort is an Milton’s Lucifer; Dun and she ear of bledore of Milton’s God, who so myste riously permits evil in the world, Each ofthe novels appro: angle. heroic hes the problem from a different The first. We m him grow into competence and faith “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,” is ¢ our champion: he is a child; we watch The second volume, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” is quite different: secular, topical, political. Sexism is not a major problem a Hogwarts, The school is coed. Several of the Quidditch girls Harry’s friend Hermione, the know-it-all c hand-up-in-class 1s said she based the character on herself as a child—is not forced to go throu atharine Hepburn treatment (take off her glasses, unpin her hair) before she becomes likable. But racism at Hogwarts. Yes, ¢ r: a problem student body includes Cho Chang and arvati Patil and Dean Thomas, who has dreadlocks. (Rowling got about a few other groups, though. I would not hav minded if the evil Professor Snape had not had a hook nose, greasy black hair, and sallow skin—standard fearures of the ra pacious Jew—or if the chief villain of “The Sorcerer's had nor worn a purple turban, id weep, ACOCELLA Umesh spit 437 and had the name Quirrell, which is rather close to “queer.” But the wizard world is in the grip of an overarching, race war, a campaign to tid wizardry of those with Mu gle, oF non-wizard, blood. This ethnic-cleansing campaign, led by Voldemort, is the subject of “The Chamber of Secrets.” It fils but only for the time being. We will hear about it again The strangest volume is the third, “Harry Potter and the int, featur soner of Azkaban,” the psychological installn ing. a pack of demons—operating at Voldemort’s bidding— 10 ate the most frightening monsters in the series so far ese are the Dementors: huge, cloaked, fiveless erearures, with rotting hands, who, if they get you, clamp theie jaws on your mout! The Dementors represent de ind stick out of you every thought of happiness ession. Actually, if 'm not nistaken, they represent a specific, British theory of depres sion—John Bowlby’s theory that loss of childhood is a major risk factor for that disorder. At Harry lost both his parents. (I don’t know much about Rowling's childhood, but she has cold interviewers that she red a period of depression as an adult, and had 0 get professional help.) In any case, the Dementors are after Harry, and he escapes them only with the help of a teacher named Lupin, To Lupin alone can he fally confide his fears, ind Lupin’s teachings are che closest thing, in the Potter se fies, 10 overt psych end of “The Prisoner of Azkaban,” this nice man out to be a werewolf but he’s a good werewolf T -y Potter gical counselling of child readers. At Rowling’s antisentimentality again new book, ind the Goblet of Fi the central pillar ¢ transitional volume. the projected series of seven and is thus a tably sex. (Harry is fourteen now, and mightily taken with Cho Chang.) Also, the politics become more ambitious. Rowling now asks her readers to consider the cynicism of gow eenment officials, the injustice of the law courts, the vagaries of international relations, the mendacity of the press, even he psychology of slavery. (“They"re happy.” Ron's brother says of the honse-elves, Hermione does not agree.) This is 3438 PERSUASION AND ARGUMENT reat, toppling heap of subjects, and Rowling rakes seven hundred and thirty-four pages to deal with them, (Has there ever before been a children’s story seven hundred and thirty four pages long? What confidence!) Where the prior volumes moved like lightning, here the pace is slower, the energy Ac the same time, the tone becomes more grim. Voldemort has been restored to power. Things will now become harder for Harry, and for all the wizard world. more-dispersed. Dumbledore There is much for Rowling to resolve in the remaining vol mes, above all the question about power—is it reconcilable with goodness?—that she poses in the firs four books. Already in “The Sorcerer's Stone,” Quirrell says, “There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seck it.” As Harry has grown, he has hecome more powerful and ambi tious and, at the same time, more virtuous, In “The Goblet of Fire,” as in all the books, there is a big contest, which Hart Jongs to win. The contest in three parts, and in each part, lest ‘we miss the point, Rowling shows Harry handicapping, him self, hurting his chances of victory, out of concern for others. He wins, bur how will he do, thus compromised by altruism, in future contests? Remember: Voldemort is back. Even mote interesting, however, is a strange something about the kinship of good and evil—th Rowling hhas been hinting at since the beginning of the series, Harry we Mi nds contain feathers from and Voldemort have a lot in common. Both blood; hoth are orphans, Their the same phoenix, When they mer in armed combat in “The Goblet of Fire,” their wands, as stream oflight, which binds them together. There is some con nection between these two, (Shades of “Star Wars.”) I don’t know what Rowling has in mind here, Maybe it’s the b -y touch, produce a single idea of evil as merely good perverted. Or maybe nor. Bur that is the main virtue of these books, their philosoph and she d at it promotes unchris: ical seriousness. Rowling is a good psychotherapist teaches excellent morals. (Those parents who h to the Potter series on the ground ¢ tian values should give it another read.) She also spins a good ACOCELLA Unerste Spit 439 tis Voldemort and the Dementors and yarn, Undoubredly the grindylows that forty languages and won them sales, before * Fire,” of more than thirty million copies. But her great glory, and the thing that may place her in the pantheon, is that she asks her preteen readers to face the hardest questions of life, and does not shy away from the possibility that rotten these books translated int ‘he Goblet of t have may be sad: that loss may be permanent, evil ever-present, good exhaustible. In an odd, quiet moment in “The Goblet of Fire,” Harry stands alone in Hogwarts’s Owlery, gazin ont into the twilight. He sees his friend Hagrid digging in the earth, Is Hagrid burying something? Or looking for some- thing? Harry doesn’t know, and for once he doesn’t investi gate. He seems tired. He just stays there, watching Hagrid, until he can see him no more, whereupon # ne owls in the Owlery awaken and swoosh past him, "In this volume, some darkness hae Ellen, With the light-—the next three books—new griefé will surely come. For Study and Discussion QUESTIONS ABOUT PURPOSE 1. Although the Harry Porter books are written for children, this was written for the New Yarker, a maga setious review of the zine for sophisticated, well-educated readers. Why do you tl Acocella chose them for her audience 2. Why does Ac lla trace the traditions, from the King Arthur that underlie legends to Sear Wa shat range from the Bible and literary classics to comic books? ne books, giving references QUESTIONS ABOUT AUDIENCE hoys are a notoriously difficult audi ence for wri ‘bur both boys and Harry Potter in record numbers. How does Acovell ey wide appeal? Who hesides the readers of the Pos interested in learning more about this publishing phenomenon 1, Educators know that you rs to reach, | girls are reading books themselves might be440 PERSUASION AND ARGUMENT QUESTIONS ABOUT STRATEGIES 1. Acocell of the goes into great detail to show the lurid and er stories. How does she engage her readers with these descriptions? 2. How does Acocella present herself in this essa establish her eredentials to analyze the traditions an that are so importa to the Porter series? For Writing and Research 1. Analyze how Acocella uses the expert testimony of Vladimir Propp's book ay of the Falk Tale to suppor ment that the Harry Potter books have “clase reverberations.” 2. Practice by writing an argument supporting the a film sequence sich as “Spiderman,” 3. Ange that power and goodness are or are not compatible 4. Smnthesize the evidence from the last three volumes of the series that supports Acocella’s argument about the kinship of good and evil : HAROLD BLOOM Harold Bloom was born in 1930 in New York and was educated at Cornell University and Yale Unit versity, In his distinguished teaching career, he has tanght literature at Yale, Cornell, Harvard, and New York University. A staunch defender of the tradition, his numerous critical lu of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), A Map of Misreading (197 The Breaking of Vewel ( The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994 recently Hensler: Poent Unlimited (2003 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes, tom the Wall Street Jon that the Harry Porte and most, In “Can reprinted nal (2000), Bloom argues books are inferior to classic children’s books, Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes. ee anus AGAINST Harry Potter, at this moment, is to emulate Hamlet taking arms against a sea of troubles. By opposing the sea, you won't end it. The Harry Potter epiphenomenon will go on, doubtless for some time, as J. R R. Tolkien did, and then wane. The official newspaper of our dominant counter-culture, the Nes York Times, has been startled by the Porter books into new policy for its not very literate book review establish Rather than ecowd out the Grishams, Clancys, Crichrons, Kings and other vastly popular prose fictions on its fiction bestseller list, the Potter volumes will now lead a separate ' list. J. K, Rowling, the chronicler of Harry Pott asan unusual distinction: She has changed the poliey of ld thus the policy-maker, 441