Posted on 07/18/2005 6:36:15 AM PDT by Kitten Festival
J.K. Rowling is history’s richest-ever author, enjoying an incomparable global readership. With eager consumers lined up at midnight to buy her book on the date of release, she stands as the literary phenomenon of our times.
Rowling resembles no one in popularity so much as Charles Dickens, who inspired excited crowds in America to meet the packet ships from England, calling out for the next installment of the story of Little Nell.
She also rivals Dickens in her ability to create some of the most delightful names in literature. Uriah Heep, meet Severus Snape.
Few authors today write books for adolescent boys, who readily fall away from reading and are lured to the video tube. Daring to write long and complicated plots, Rowling doesn’t underestimate her readers. Her books contain delightful inventions on almost every page: from mail delivery owls to the winged boars (flying pigs) that grace the Hogwarts school gates.
But huge success makes for a big target. Rowling does not lack for critics.
Some are bothered by her abundant use of adverbs, or worry about exposing very young children to the violence in the books’ good vs. evil plot lines. Occasional gross-out humor and love of annoying practical jokes dismay some adults, but meet the literary tastes of the adolescent boy.
By far the most serious criticism of the Harry Potter series comes from those Christians and Jews who believe any mention of magic in literature is completely and automatically off-limits based simply on the Biblical prohibitions against witchcraft.
I respect such critics, but I disagree with them. A few of them go overboard, muttering darkly about bargains with supernatural forces. But many are sincere and intelligent.
There is a basic difference between reading a Harry Potter book and invoking the dark forces. Casting actual spells is one thing. Reading about them while engrossed in a struggle between good and evil on the magical plane of childrens’ literature is quite another.
Magic has become a literary convention of imaginative literature, positing forces fo
You should see my 3-year-old and 18-month-old waving paint sticks at one another, going "ZZZZZ! ZZZZZ! ZZZZZOT!"
That's "magic"?? !!!
Oh boy are you misguided.
Ping.
Do you have an "Incredibly Long Screen Names" ping list?
And after watching years of BeWitched, I only cast spells upon liberals.
Spells are so 1990's. Now we stune liberals with our beeber-like devices.
You're painting with an awfully big brush. Certainly there are times when the children in Narnia do things that would be considered "evil" -- in "Wardrobe" Edmund, of course, betrays his siblings; in "Dawn Treader", Eustace is a selfish prat, and even Lucy succumbs to envy and starts to read the spell in the Magician's book to make her more beautiful than Susan. There are good magicians and bad magicians in the book -- it is the characters actions, not their vocations, that make them good or evil.
As one who grew up with reading Tolkien, I can say that The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings helped to instill a love of reading that I continue to this day for those were among the first books I picked up to read "just for fun" as opposed to being made to read a boring classic assigned by a teacher. In fact, I later came to appreciate many of the classics that the teachers force-fed me as a kid as a result of all my independent reading, of which Tolkien played a key role.
Before Harry Potter came on the scene, it was even a worse situation with the current generation. Many children couldn't even read Tolkien even if they wanted to because they were too difficult for the average child to get through. I tried getting my kids to read The Hobbit when they were young but they found the book ridiculously long and boring. Even though Hobbit wasn't that long (compared to LOTR), the average children's book rarely exceeded 100 pages. Harry Potter changed all that. I believe the 5th Harry Potter book had close to 900 pages! Never again will my kids look at a thick book and be intimidated.
Fans of Tolkien's work today don't realize that Tolkien wrote those books for children. Back in the 1950s, your average 6th grader could read LOTR with no problem. Today, many high school kids are intimidated by it!
So if the Harry Potter series can get kids reading again, I'm all for it. Since my two sons started reading the Potter books, they have been much more open to reading other books that they never otherwise would have even attempted.
I think C. S. Lewis says something like that in his essay on Fairy Tales. For most people, fairy stories are less dangerous than stories about becoming rich and famous, because they don't feed into the vein of self-absorbed wish-fullfillment (Lewis was writing at a time when Freud's take on literature was dominant). But I agree, if a kid seems to be taking the idea of magic seriously, then he needs to be educated or diverted to something else.
The difference between magic and religion, which some folks on this thread don't seem to get, is that religion is about service to God, and magic is about power over others. It's clear to me that Rowling disapproves of greed for magical power in her stories, and approves of magic used wisely as a trust in the service of others, but perhaps naive readers might not get the distinction.
Back to the subject of Harry Potter, my son has already finished his first reading of it, and starting it over again. I don't think he played video games all weekend! I am just starting it, and I am thoroughly enjoying it so far. (We bought two copies)
You know, when I was in high school, I gobbled up Tolkien and just about any E. R. Burroughs story I could lay my hands on. I tried rereading both series not that long ago, and I found the prose to be stultifyingly thick. I may have killed far too many brain cells in the past couple of decades...
Somebody dies in the book...
No
To a third-party observer, those would be magic.
LOL! I'm buying our second, too. Five people in our family and most want to be reading it at 8:00 at night!
"Saw" Fat Albert on a plane. My 14 yo liked it. ( I say "saw" because I didn't have headphones!) We all also liked Madagascar, if the big guy will still go to cartoons.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic...
(and vice versa)
Thanks!
Excellent point.
It's clear to me that Rowling disapproves of greed for magical power in her stories, and approves of magic used wisely as a trust in the service of others,
The moral problem with that is, who decides what "wise use" is, and who decides what's good for others? This is, of course, the moral problem with any sort of power. I haven't read the Harry Potter books, so I don't know how Rowling deals with these issues.
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