A college acquaintance shared a milestone on Facebook this week: her grade-school daughter had read the entire Harry Potter series, in hardback, cover to cover, in under four months. Books this glimmering-eyed girl finished, not because some authority had assigned them, or because they provided some material advantage, but simply because the experience of reading brought her joy. This girl’s broad smile with her books was frankly an inspiration.
She shared this accomplishment the same week that Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling continued her years-long pattern of punching herself in the face on Twitter. Rowling, a longtime supporter of the Labour and Scottish National Parties, with their broad center-left positions, has cultivated an audience somewhat more progressive than the general population. Which makes this week’s tweets, frankly too distressing to reproduce here, even more upsetting to her core fans.
How to reconcile these two halves? On one hand, Rowling’s works encourage young people to sit patiently with a book, practicing skills of patience and self-discipline that aren’t always rewarded in today’s media-saturated culture of instant gratification. On the other hand, Rowling, once a darling of the economic left, has expressed opinions so reactionary, devoted fans have described her as “transphobic, hateful, harmful and factually inaccurate.”
Her works have attracted audiences of diverse ages for the same reason my friend’s daughter enjoyed them: they’re a pleasure to read. And I mean that on multiple levels. One can appreciate them as childlike diversions, the belief that a magical wonderland exists in parallel with the everyday banality around us. Or as modern parables of ethics, responsibility, and justice. Or as an attempt to reckon with Britain’s wartime history.
This complexity partly explains their appeal. My friend’s daughter probably enjoys these novels for reasons entirely her own, but by having read them, she opens herself to the nuance that comes from rereading them in her future. Like life itself, the interlocking layers of Rowling’s story permit events to reflect the reader back at herself. We, like Harry Potter, are constantly changing, constantly learning, and the story reflects ourselves.
I’ve written before that it's foolish to expect great artists to be good people. The churning mass of undigested trauma that usually turns humans into artists, also generally leaves lifelong scars on souls; the personal stench that follows time-honored authors, from Christopher Marlowe to Ernest Hemingway to [fill-in-the-blank] is inseparable from their creative process. Healthy, well-adjusted minds often aren’t prepared to wallow in the psychological refuse where art is conceived.
It’s tempting to spew time-tested bromides about separating the artist from the art. But in Rowling’s case, that’s virtually impossible. The combination of unprecedentedly popular novels and modern social media has provided Rowling a public platform almost unmatched in world history. The same Twitter feed she used to dribble out story revelations, she now uses to grandstand opinions which her audience finds execrable.
Thus I’m no closer to resolving the underlying conundrum. Like Orson Scott Card before her, Rowling herself lacks the underlying nuance and self-reflection embodied in her work. Both authors reassured youthful readers that their ability to navigate an innately abusive social order didn’t make them as bad as the world around them. Both authors encouraged readers to perceive themselves as something beyond the aggregate weight of their actions.
Yet both authors reduced themselves to slovenly caricatures. Both jettisoned their accrued cultural goodwill and chose to focus with laser-like acuity on forms of queer sexuality that, frankly, didn’t affect them that much. Their works remain in print, testimony to aspirational virtues that, sadly, the authors don’t seem to share. Youth, and former youth, who read and learned from these books, are left to wonder: what now?
By encouraging my friend’s daughter to perceive reading as a meaningful good in its own right, Rowling has accomplished something worthwhile. Today’s culture doesn’t reward slow, self-contained tasks like reading. Our economy insists anything worth doing should be monetized, while our technology and entertainment industries encourage instant gratification. In teaching a rosy-cheeked grade schooler to value reading, Rowling has encouraged her to be a deeper thinker and better person.
That accomplishment, however, cannot be read separately from Rowling’s odious opinions. She preaches a doctrine that insists some people are inherently untrustworthy and must be punished in advance, a position definitely more Voldemort than Dumbledore. Why, it’s almost like Rowling is neither all good nor all bad, neither saint nor sinner. This ambiguity is unacceptable in today’s stark moral climate.
Maybe that’s the lesson to take from this situation.
No comments:
Post a Comment