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Jo Rowlings interviews 2003
The Daily Telegraph (London), 10 July 2003
Hugh Davies.
Harry Potter attack starts war of words Literary feathers fly as Booker prize-winner suggests latest best-seller lacks magic,
The Booker prize-winning author A S Byatt was accused yesterday of dumping "a goblet of bile" on J K Rowling by insisting that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was below par "ersatz magic", lacking the skill of the great children's writers.
Byatt, 66, said the hard question to answer was why Rowling was read by so many adults. While writers such as "the great" Terry Pratchett composed "amazing sentences", Rowling's world was small, with "no place for the numinous". It had little to do with "the shiver of awe we feel" looking through "magic casements, opening on the foam, of perilous seas, in faery lands folorn" of the poet Keats. She said: "It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated - more exciting, less threatening - mirror worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip." The Cambridge-educated author of Possession and Angels and Insects, noted for her intellectual skills and whose favourite writers are Proust and Balzac, made her point in an article for the New York Times. She said that while children were attracted to the Potter tales by the powerful working of the fantasy of escape and empowerment, the books lacked the "compensating seriousness" of writers such as Tolkien, Susan Cropper, Alan Garner and Ursula K Le Guin.
Adult readers were reverting to the child they were when they read Billy Bunter books or invested Enid Blyton's "pasteboard kids" with their own childish desires and hopes. Rowling spoke to a generation that had not known, or cared about, mystery. "They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not the real wild. They don't have skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing." Her criticism ignited a row, with San Francisco's literary web site, Salon, describing her as a snob. It was clear, Charles Taylor, the site's leading critic, said, that "we're dealing here with an acolyte at the temple of high culture barring the doors as the ignorant masses who love pop culture come a knockin' ". He called Byatt churlish to put Rowling's popularity in selling five million books in a day down to "the stupidity of the masses". Taylor added that in making Rowling the repository of everything that was cheap and phoney in contemporary culture, Byatt seemed to be arguing against the basic plea sures that drew people to books.
The "ugly truth" was that when Byatt was inevitably reduced to a footnote in academic history, the Potter author would be "laughing" in company with other "non-literary" writers such as Dumas and Conan Doyle. The attack came after Stephen King, the American horror writer, raved about Rowling's "slam dunk" book. He called the gently smiling Dolores Umbridge, with her girlish voice, toadlike face, and clutching, stubby fingers, the greatest make-believe villain since Hannibal Lecter. He concluded that Rowling was a natural storyteller "bursting with crazily vivid ideas and having the time of her life". Salon said Byatt's approach to Potter was misguided. She was talking "bunk" by writing that Rowling's world was "only dangerous" because she said so, and that there was an objective standard to discern if a book was "a gimcrack concoction". The site added it might be that Byatt was jealous, as she also had a "hissy fit" when Martin Amis was given! a lucrative advance against future books. "It's only human for writers to feel resentful and even contemptuous when what they consider good, serious work is being passed over in favour of some pop artifact.
"Byatt has it better than most, enjoying a modicum of fame, more than her share of respect, and the distinction of being one of the relative few who has been able to make a living at literary fiction. But success on the scale of J K Rowling's clearly gets under her skin." Ian Rankin, the author of the Inspector Rebus series, is reading the latest Harry Potter novel on holiday in Menorca. "My kids like it better than I do but I think it's fine," he said. He added: "She is not making any great claims that she's writing high-brow literature. She's happy to write populist novels enjoyed by children and adults. "But the novels give us a sense of comfort that there is always the potential for magic just outside our vision, so there is a seriousness there." Byatt, who is at her house in France recuperating after breaking her arm, declined to comment on the dispute last night.
A spokesman for Rowling said she was unavailable for comment.
Byatt's review
What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success of the Harry Potter books? Why do they satisfy children and - a much harder question - why do so many adults read them? I think part of the answer to the first question is that they are written from inside a child's-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology. But then how do we answer the second question? Surely one precludes the other. The easy question first. Freud described what he called the "family romance", in which a young child, dissatisfied with its ordinary home and parents, invents a fairy tale in which it is secretly of noble origin, and may even be marked out as a hero who is destined to save the world.
In J K Rowling's books, Harry is the orphaned child of wizards who were murdered trying to save his life. He lives, for unconvincingly explained reasons, with his aunt and uncle, the truly dreadful Dursleys, who represent, I believe, his real "real" family, and are depicted with a relentless, gleeful, overdone venom. The Dursleys are his true enemy. When he arrives at wizarding school, he moves into a world where everyone, good and evil, recognises his importance, and tries either to protect or destroy him. The family romance is a latency-period fantasy, belonging to the drowsy years between seven and adolescence.
In Order of the Phoenix, Harry, now 15, is meant to be adolescent. He spends a lot of the book becoming excessively angry with his protectors and tormentors alike. He discovers that his late (and "real") father was not a perfect magical role model, but someone who went in for fits of nasty playground bullying. He also discovers that his mind is linked to the evil Lord Voldemort, thereby making him responsible in some measure for acts of violence his nemesis commits. In psychoanalytic terms, having projected his childish rage on to the caricature Dursleys, and retained his innocent goodness, Harry now experiences th at rage as capable of spilling outward, imperilling his friends. But does this mean Harry is growing up? Not really. The perspective is still child's-eye. There are no insights that reflect someone on the verge of adulthood.
Harry's first date with a female wizard is unbelievably limp, filled with an eight-year-old's conversational manoeuvres. Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing "secondary worlds". Ms Rowling's world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature - from the jolly-hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from Star Wars to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that cliches endure because they represent truths.
Derivative narrative cliches work with children because they are comfortingly recognisable and immediately available to the child's own power of fantasising. The important thing about this particular secondary world is that it is sym! biotic with the real modern world. Magic, in myth and fairy tales, is about contacts with the inhuman - trees and creatures, unseen forces. Most fairy-story writers hate and fear machines. Ms Rowling's wizards shun them and use magic instead, but their world is a caricature of the real world and has trains, hospitals, newspapers and competitive sport. Much of the real evil in the later books is caused by newspaper gossip columnists who make Harry into a dubious celebrity, which is the modern word for the chosen hero. Most of the rest of the evil (apart from Voldemort) is caused by bureaucratic interference in educational affairs. Ms Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous.
It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his ! dream, "only personal". Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything b eyond Harry Potter and his friends and family. So, yes, the attraction for children can be explained by the powerful working of the fantasy of escape and empowerment, combined with the fact that the stories are comfortable, funny, just frightening enough. They comfort against childhood fears as Georgette Heyer once comforted us against the truths of the relations between men and women, her detective stories domesticating and blanket-wrapping death.
These are good books of their kind. But why would grown-up men and women become obsessed by jokey latency fantasies? Comfort, I think, is part of the reason. Childhood reading remains potent for most of us. In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 "best reads", more than a quarter were children's books. We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful. But in the case of the great children's writers of the recent past, t! here was a compensating seriousness. There was - and is - a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark forests. Susan Cooper's teenage wizard discovers his magic powers and discovers simultaneously that he is in a cosmic battle between good and evil forces. Every bush and cloud glitters with secret significance.
Alan Garner peoples real landscapes with malign, inhuman, elvish beings that hunt humans. Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures - from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil - inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled. If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for. Ursula K Le Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force. Ms Rowling's magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerou! s only because she says it is. In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild.
They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had. Similarly, some of Ms Rowling's adult readers are simply reverting to the child they were when they read the Billy Bunter books, or invested Enid Blyton's pasteboard kids with their own childish desires and hopes. A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books. But in the days before dumbing down and cultural studies no one reviewed Enid Blyton or Georgette Heyer - as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences. It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon. And it is the levelling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don't really believe exists.
It's fine to compare the Brontes with bodice-rippers. It's become respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called "consumable" books. There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's "magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn". A S Byatt is the author, most recently, of the novel A Whistling Woman.
Copyright (c) 2003 Telegraph Group Limited
