Matt Zeitlin

Via Peter Suderman, Ron Charles launches an oh-so-predictable tirade against Harry Potter and the state of novels and their readers. Now like any other cultural elite, I find it somewhat distressing that “70 percent of total fiction sales were accounted for by a mere five authors.” But this is blogging, so I’ll just ignore those points on which we agree.

Charles puts forward a model for novel reading, one that is expressed in so many schlocky books and movies; for Charles, reading is essentially an individual activity, the joy coming from one’s own interaction with the text, a feeling that the communal, quasi bacchanalian Harry Potter Reading Experience™ just can not provide:

Perhaps submerging the world in an orgy of marketing hysteria doesn’t encourage the kind of contemplation, independence and solitude that real engagement with books demands — and rewards. Consider that, with the release of each new volume, Rowling’s readers have been driven not only into greater fits of enthusiasm but into more precise synchronization with one another. Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy “The Deathly Hallows” on a single day. There’s something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves — without a movie version or a set of action figures. Through no fault of Rowling’s, Potter mania nonetheless trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide.

On the positive front, Charles is correct. The Harry Potter Experience is indeed different from reading any other novel, and that difference is having millions of people reading it on the same day, all anxiously awaiting plot twist after plot twist, revelation after revelation. Where we diverge, however, is on the normative question. Should novel reading be like this? Is the Harry Potter Experience in fact better than the type of contemplative, nearly Platonic novel reading Charles so loves and encourages?

I’d say it is, because the Harry Potter Experience more closely maps to how most people experience things, especially art. I don’t think the much hyped “demise of American fiction” is all that sad, because it assumes that there was once a time when a majority of people wanted to spend most of their day delving into literature, and having a personal experience with it. Has there ever been a time when the public read more Pynchon than Patterson? More importantly, do we expect people to experience any other type of art the same way as Charles, and so many others, expect us to experience novels? People rarely go to movies, art galleries, concerts or any other “art experience” by themselves, so why should we expect reading to be any different? Have we forgotten that the written word was originally spoken? That the transmission of stories for most of human history has been a communal event – shared and experienced by a group?

Perhaps the reason why Harry Potter has captured the hearts of millions in such a unique way is because it offers a reading experience that’s so derided by the Charles’ of the worlds. People oftentimes value the immediate over the long term, the social over the personal, the clear over the obscure and Harry Potter satisfies all these criterions. Humans are social animals, and Harry Potter is a social experience. While Harry Potter allows for the type of experiential solipsism Charles advocates – imagining which House you’d be in (Ravenclaw for me), how you’d react to the situations Harry was in, the wonderment in response to Rowling’s deliciously imaginative world etc – the real fun in Harry Potter comes in the hours long discussions with people at your school you’d never talk with otherwise, going back and forth with your predictions, speculations and insights gathered over nearly a decade of reading the series. It seems rather impervious to identify this type of “reading-experience” as lexically inferior to the ideal of individual pursuit and interaction with the novel.

Harry Potter seems to be the best of both worlds – it has the potential for engagement and interaction a la “literature” combined with the mass appeal of what me and many cultural elitists would decry as “genre fiction.” So maybe Charles is so pissed because what book reviewers say about Harry Potter has zero relevance to its popular reception…just a thought.