So it's the end of the Harry Potter phenomenon, and I feel I should say something about it. What is there to say, for me? I'd have a hard time calling them great books, and yet I feel like the HP phenomenon is, far and away, easily, A Good Thing.
The creation of fantasy, as a genre, was also its doom: Tolkien's progression from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings. When Tolkien wrote the former - an enormously inventive and wondrous adventure - he did what any other great storyteller would have done. He wrote his story in human terms, probably without even thinking about it. For years JRRT had been making up ancient legends along the lines of the old Norse myths he adored, even writing many of them down, but it was little more than a specialist's private game. When he wrote his great adventure, he naturally drew on all of it - as background. The characters had to have a world to dwell in, and because JRRT knew that world, knew it like the back of his hand, he made it uncannily convincing. Yet the center of The Hobbit is rather out of place in this world - as he should be. Bilbo Baggins is an unadventurous type who secretly longs for adventure - a wish so deeply buried that he spends the first half of the book loudly wishing he was back at home having tea. (Tolkien emphasizes, to an amusing degree, the physical uncomfortableness of having an adventure.) He's so clueless that he rather reminds me of Bertie Wooster. And yet, without breaking character throughout, he ultimately faces down every challenge and returns home a richer character (figuratively and literally). He does, in short, what you or I or Tolkien might well do if set down in his place.
When it came time to write the sequel, however, Tolkien found that he didn't have any more to say about Bilbo, whose character arc was finished. So he began writing, without any particular goal in mind, and sure enough stumbled right into the enormous and untapped universe that had been stirring in the back of his mind since the Great War. And here Tolkien made a dramatic transition. He quit writing a story and started writing history. The distinction is easily explained. The point of The Hobbit is not the hunting of a dragon and his stolen treasure, but that Bilbo Baggins went on an adventure and had his life changed. Whereas the point of Lord of the Rings is not that Frodo Baggins had his life changed, but that a Dark Lord was thwarted and peace restored to a troubled land. What is the difference? Well, the former is a story, but the latter is just made-up history - beautifully conceived and carried out, but essentially pointless.
It's that very (seeming) high seriousness that made LOTR so exciting to discover when I was 12; it seemed so much more purposeful and meaningful and exciting than anything I had ever read. Yet that seriousness is a mirage; it fades away when you try to examine it close-up. Most of it comes from a strange sense of mournfulness that hangs over the entire book - which is, after all, about the end of that imaginary world. LOTR is sort of a masterpiece (though not one I ever need to read again), but it created an awful genre by suggesting that you barely needed a story to write a book; all you had to do was invent things. Not much different from playing a game, really. Here literature ends and wish-fulfillment begins.
In Harry Potter, the "magical" trappings are just so much icing; wipe them off, and what you have is classic mystery: Harry is set with a riddle, puzzles his way through various complications, and ultimately finishes off a villain using his wits. And they are written in human terms. Voldemort does not matter because he is an evil dark lord who terrorized the wizard world; he matters because he is a terrible and intensely personal threat to our hero. The wizard world itself only matters to us because of the people in it. J.K. Rowling's great accomplishment was to return fantasy to its pre-LOTR state by writing a story, not fake-history.
Rowling is, on the word-by-word level, not an exceptionally good writer. She can't stop telling her characters how they should be saying something: "...said Ron heatedly," "...said Hermione anxiously," "...said Harry irritably." Her descriptions never take flight the way they should, never pull you all the way into a palpable physical world. And she's got a terrible sense of humor. The "funny" names and low slapstick might be gently amusing in a less ambitious series, but they don't gibe well with the increasing seriousness of the books. If we chuckle at them sometimes, it's not because they're funny but because they're endearingly stupid. Seeing them pop up again in every new book is like reminiscing about an old school friend.
Yet the books are utterly addictive. I think this is because Rowling has placed at the center of her series not one, but numerous stories. Harry, Ron, Hermione, Sirius, Snape, Voldemort, even Hagrid all have major character arcs that happen over the course of several books. And Rowling has a genuine gift for piling event upon event, complication upon complication, without losing the reader's interest. The later books are like Victorian serials in their giddy careering from one event to the next, one complication after another. You can trot through them at a leisurely pace and enjoy living in Harry's world - the real reason kids aren't put off by their length, I think. They feel as vast and airy and comfortable as the real world.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Reading Hannah Arendt's Crises of the Republic, I was struck by a long passage at the end in which she points to "an entirely new form of government" that arose, quite spontaneously, out of every revolution, only to be swallowed up by subsequent events and virtually written out of history. These councils occurred, Arendt writes, "in the French Revolution, with Jefferson in the American Revolution, in the Parisian commune, in the Russian revolutions, in the wake of the revolutions in Germany and Austria at the end of World War I, finally in the Hungarian Revolution. What is more, they never came into being as a result of a conscious revolutionary tradition or theory, but entirely spontaneously, each time as though there had never been anything of the sort before."
I must confess that the only one of these instances I've seriously studied in depth is the Russian Revolution. But doing my research, I was astonished at how little information most of the books contained on the Soviets (that is, the spontaneous councils that sprang up across the land), which seemed to me to be the primary spring of everything that happened in 1917. Hunger and opposition to the war and the decline of the tsar's authority provided the setting for the revolution, but they could not cause it; that there was a revolution was because of ordinary people's sudden discovery of what Arendt terms "political action." Discovering a "public life" where previously there had been only a vacuum, the disaffected soldiers and workers rushed to fill the available space.
Richard Pipes, a Reaganite scholar who has written the longest account of the Revolution and its aftermath available in the West, observed once that the tsar's absoluteness of power was precisely what made his rule so precarious; had he placed more of his power in the hands of lords and smaller rulers across the land (like putting money in a bank) he could have better safeguarded it from the people. Instead, Pipes wrote, the country's political system resembled a vast warehouse with a long line connecting the tsar and each person he ruled; when the line was snapped, the result was political chaos. This misses the point. The revolution was not merely "chaos," but the shifting of power away from the center to a vast and varied collection of groups who had seized it for themselves. Pipes, who believes in the oligarchic rule of the few over the dangerous many, condemned the (relatively few) radicals in the Duma for exacerbating the situation with their inflammatory words against the tsar. The Duma-radicals, however, comprised only one group battling for power as the tsar's authority waned.
It is truly astonishing how little has been written - at least in English - about the precarious existence of democracy between February and October 1917. Reduced to a chapter in most histories, as if the Bolshevik Coup were inevitable, the most crucial months in the history of Russia have been written out of its history.
Americans can see a similar omission in the numerous histories of our Civil War. The war began with a coup by the losing party in a presidential race; the Democratic Party, whose machines controlled most of the old South, chose to force a secession against the wishes of a majority of actual Southerners. A torrent of words has been wasted, by men as smart as Edmund Wilson and Gore Vidal, over whether the South had the "right" to leave the Union. The truth is that the South itself - that is, the people who made up its population - were barely consulted in the matter. Historians' refusal to acknowledge the power of political parties - who hold virtually all political power in this republic - has resulted in a war that makes no sense, for if the South was united in its wish to leave then the North's actions were obviously tyrannical. If, however, Southerners had remained loyal to the Union despite secession, the new government would have swiftly fallen apart. This explains the act that actually began the war: Jefferson Davis's government firing on Fort Sumter. Only a war could forge the unity possible to create a new nation independent of the old one, whose powerful hold on the people of the South could only be weakened by a war against the old government. Yet this conflict is all but absent in most histories of the Civil War, in which the Confederate nation itself barely exists.
I must confess that the only one of these instances I've seriously studied in depth is the Russian Revolution. But doing my research, I was astonished at how little information most of the books contained on the Soviets (that is, the spontaneous councils that sprang up across the land), which seemed to me to be the primary spring of everything that happened in 1917. Hunger and opposition to the war and the decline of the tsar's authority provided the setting for the revolution, but they could not cause it; that there was a revolution was because of ordinary people's sudden discovery of what Arendt terms "political action." Discovering a "public life" where previously there had been only a vacuum, the disaffected soldiers and workers rushed to fill the available space.
Richard Pipes, a Reaganite scholar who has written the longest account of the Revolution and its aftermath available in the West, observed once that the tsar's absoluteness of power was precisely what made his rule so precarious; had he placed more of his power in the hands of lords and smaller rulers across the land (like putting money in a bank) he could have better safeguarded it from the people. Instead, Pipes wrote, the country's political system resembled a vast warehouse with a long line connecting the tsar and each person he ruled; when the line was snapped, the result was political chaos. This misses the point. The revolution was not merely "chaos," but the shifting of power away from the center to a vast and varied collection of groups who had seized it for themselves. Pipes, who believes in the oligarchic rule of the few over the dangerous many, condemned the (relatively few) radicals in the Duma for exacerbating the situation with their inflammatory words against the tsar. The Duma-radicals, however, comprised only one group battling for power as the tsar's authority waned.
It is truly astonishing how little has been written - at least in English - about the precarious existence of democracy between February and October 1917. Reduced to a chapter in most histories, as if the Bolshevik Coup were inevitable, the most crucial months in the history of Russia have been written out of its history.
Americans can see a similar omission in the numerous histories of our Civil War. The war began with a coup by the losing party in a presidential race; the Democratic Party, whose machines controlled most of the old South, chose to force a secession against the wishes of a majority of actual Southerners. A torrent of words has been wasted, by men as smart as Edmund Wilson and Gore Vidal, over whether the South had the "right" to leave the Union. The truth is that the South itself - that is, the people who made up its population - were barely consulted in the matter. Historians' refusal to acknowledge the power of political parties - who hold virtually all political power in this republic - has resulted in a war that makes no sense, for if the South was united in its wish to leave then the North's actions were obviously tyrannical. If, however, Southerners had remained loyal to the Union despite secession, the new government would have swiftly fallen apart. This explains the act that actually began the war: Jefferson Davis's government firing on Fort Sumter. Only a war could forge the unity possible to create a new nation independent of the old one, whose powerful hold on the people of the South could only be weakened by a war against the old government. Yet this conflict is all but absent in most histories of the Civil War, in which the Confederate nation itself barely exists.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
If there's one thing outcast teenagers love, it's the Middle Ages. As far as I know, no one's ever tried to figure out just where this rampant "medievalism" came from, and why it exerts so tremendous a hold over the lives of - i hesitate to say millions of teenagers, so slight and barely-noticed/beneath-contempt is this curious non-movement, but i suspect it's right up there with any other weird subculture, numbers-wise. But where'd it come from? And more importantly, what does it mean?
This fascinating article - http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i44/44a00801.htm - reveals that many teenage-medievalists grow up to be medieval scholars - a more remarkable fact than it might seem, since teenage-medievalism has relatively little to do with the actual Middle Ages. (Witness the amusingly mistitled Renaissance Faires.) It draws more on relatively ahistorical inspirations - Tolkien, role-playing games, third-hand watered-down Arthurian legends, and even "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
Still, even ahistorical representations like this have deep resonance; why does the medieval world appeal so much to the social outcasts of our schools? I suspect the real answer has something to do with its remoteness from our own lives - its otherness. Now, I write about this stuff with the vaguely horrified sympathy of someone who was bordering on becoming this sort of person in 8th grade, and immediately abandoned it upon entering 9th grade (whereupon I instantly turned into the sort of (male) teenager who carries around a copy of "The Bell Jar" and aspires to someday turn into a Manic Street Preacher). As far as I can recall, I just liked the sense of dropping out of this world and moving into an older, richer, somehow (in an uncanny way) more familiar one. But there couldn't have been much of a deep connection, considering how quickly I dropped that interest. I'd studied medieval stuff back in 6th grade without being intrigued at all.
What resonance does that world have for people who remain in it well into their 20s - or, scarily, beyond? I suspect that the deeper, richer, more familiar "world" comes to eclipse the real one, which perpetually failed to live up to the standards of fantasy. In the world of teenage-medievalism, which plunders history and culture at random, one can - however briefly - escape the increasingly desolate, depressing real world altogether.
Or, hell, maybe there's a simpler explanation. Certainly the slightly stilted, ancient syntax of the medieval world appeals to many above-average-intelligence kids; certainly it did to me. More later...
This fascinating article - http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i44/44a00801.htm - reveals that many teenage-medievalists grow up to be medieval scholars - a more remarkable fact than it might seem, since teenage-medievalism has relatively little to do with the actual Middle Ages. (Witness the amusingly mistitled Renaissance Faires.) It draws more on relatively ahistorical inspirations - Tolkien, role-playing games, third-hand watered-down Arthurian legends, and even "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
Still, even ahistorical representations like this have deep resonance; why does the medieval world appeal so much to the social outcasts of our schools? I suspect the real answer has something to do with its remoteness from our own lives - its otherness. Now, I write about this stuff with the vaguely horrified sympathy of someone who was bordering on becoming this sort of person in 8th grade, and immediately abandoned it upon entering 9th grade (whereupon I instantly turned into the sort of (male) teenager who carries around a copy of "The Bell Jar" and aspires to someday turn into a Manic Street Preacher). As far as I can recall, I just liked the sense of dropping out of this world and moving into an older, richer, somehow (in an uncanny way) more familiar one. But there couldn't have been much of a deep connection, considering how quickly I dropped that interest. I'd studied medieval stuff back in 6th grade without being intrigued at all.
What resonance does that world have for people who remain in it well into their 20s - or, scarily, beyond? I suspect that the deeper, richer, more familiar "world" comes to eclipse the real one, which perpetually failed to live up to the standards of fantasy. In the world of teenage-medievalism, which plunders history and culture at random, one can - however briefly - escape the increasingly desolate, depressing real world altogether.
Or, hell, maybe there's a simpler explanation. Certainly the slightly stilted, ancient syntax of the medieval world appeals to many above-average-intelligence kids; certainly it did to me. More later...
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