Thread: HP and JKR

What I am about to say will be met with scornful laughter. My words will be ridiculed, and if this site and these entries were to last so long, my words will continue to be ridiculed for at least the next 80 years.

That's how long it will take for a majority of people to start to understand what Harry Potter is all about. That's how long it will take for Rowling to be recognised for what she is, and her work to be given its proper place.

Broader in perspective, more biting in its denunciations, richer in its political and religious satire, the Harry Potter series will one day be put on the shelf beside '1984', 'Animal Farm', and 'Brave New World'. The politics, religion, culture, and economic underpinnings of the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries have come under brutal attack, and no one seems to have noticed.

Read the entire series, straight through, eyes and mind open. Read with the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old but the understanding of an adult.

Eighty or a hundred years from now there will be a slow awakening. This is not a bad joke. I'm dead serious.

I think Rowling's contemporary reputation is greater than you're making it out to be. She's quite appreciated. I doubt anyone on this site - save one or two who don't know any better - will dispute what you're saying. And unlike many books that people claim will stand the test of time and still be read years later, that's pretty much a given with Harry Potter because it's sold eighty billion-gajillion copies and those books aren't going anywhere.

gosh, i love her stories *blush* not that i've read any of them

i mean, well, it's not the sort of thing an adult likes to admit

I think a lot of people here will dispute what Garza is saying. But there is a reason so many adults got into the Harry Potter series. Perhaps not as many writers, but I think the readers of the world got it.

It's not clear that I love the series from that is it?

I love the series.

I'd certainly like to see garza's reasoning for that assertion. I haven't gotten through the first book. Found it much too derivative, with roots in Ms. L'Engle's work and a smattering of L. Sprague deCamp and countless Scholastic books. The writing was okay, but I found the auteurial voice pitched at a much younger person than I.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the OP was entirely correct.

The first and second books really do speak to kids, and I read it when I was 14 with my little sister who was 8, so it was easy for me to get through then. The third is my favourite, and starts maturing. By the sixth and seventh books they speak to adults, I think.

As much as I love the series, I did read an excellent, hilarious parody of the seventh book. I can't for the life of me remember where it is or what it's called (I'll report back. It's saved on my laptop).
It breaks the seventh book down to it's main plot points and makes fun of it, but with a loving touch. Like the one who wrote it really loved the books but was disappointed by the ending.

Edit - Found it! http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com/...-spoilers.html

caelum - I'm judging by what I've read on a number of websites, ridiculing Rowling (say that fast a dozen times) as a no-talent writer of bad books for children and calling any adult who would read a Harry Potter book a mental defective. You are probably right, but in a subterranean sort of way, meaning that most adult fans of Rowling are in a literary underground, fearful of discovery.

ash somers - Oh, come on. Admit you've read them all and loved them.

Like a Fox - Everyone who sees the world as it really is today and would like to see changes made has gotten it, I believe. But will they say so, out loud?

I agree with you about the growing adult content as the series progressed. Probably Rowling planned nothing but a book for children, but as she went along realised that what she was saying had a deeper meaning. That happens to all writers. The sub-conscious takes over. Perhaps she decided to go with the flow. But the early books are a necessary preface, just as 'Hobbit' is a necessary preface to 'Rings'.

moderan - Once, in the dim recesses of the past, an early hominid ancestor scratched a row of symbols in the dirt, creating the world's first writing. Everything that followed was, and is, derivative.

That Harry Potter is derivative is a given. That Rowling made brilliant use of her source material is my contention. And I'm sorry, forgive my ignorance, but you lost me with the OP. Who or what is that?

Everything that followed was, and is, derivative.

Demonstratively untrue. You keep hearing people saying it's all been done, etc. But it's not true.

I have a hard time seeing the HP books as any sort of knockoff or echo, myself. They have a very fresh premise and attitude. And reaped the results.

The only people you hear whining about Rowling are writers. Who will make less money writing in their lifetimes than Rowling takes in over a fortnight. Whine, whine, whine.

In fact the writing isn't bad or even mediocre--it's just simple and transparent and pitched to the readership.

They're never going to be acclaimed as great lit though. They're never going to be held up alongside "Catcher In The Rye" (which I thought sucked when I read it, by the way) beause they don't fit the lit rat mold. They're about a popular kid, not some self-styled rebel calling everybody else phonies. They're fantasy (not the stark, gritty reality Holden Cauflied lifes in).

But it's lame for people to diss the books or the writer. They're some of the most successful novels ever written and they didn't get there by pandering or writing down or exploiting. They stand on their own feet, and those are some huge, firm feet.

lin - With all due respect, I'm surprised. Having read my way through libraries on three continents in everything from Attic to Tagalog - not fluently, you understand, but struggling to find a reasonable level of comprehension - I can assure you that people have been repeating plots, themes, concepts, metaphors, jokes, and bearded clichés for thousands of years all over the world.

Two of the obvious sources for Harry Potter have been pointed out by moderan. No doubt scholars of witchcraft and fantasy literature could name many more. What is fresh is Rowling's use of the ideas, the way she turns them to her own purpose. She is, in a word, brilliant.

And yes, I too would like to have deposited in my account the income from Harry Potter for one fortnight. Oh, wouldn't it be loverly? I've not the gift, but yet can rejoice that someone does have the gift and has given it to us to enjoy.

I'm not sure how J.D. Salinger got involved here. I see no parallel between 'Catcher in the Rye' and Harry Potter, and I frankly doubt that 'Catcher' will last 80 or a hundred years except in lit classes.

I remember reading 'Catcher' a year or two after it was first published. I must have been 12 or 13, and remember that I was able to relate to what Salinger was saying. But we lived in a different world, then. Salinger's message is not as relevant today as it was then, except in a broad sense. 'Potter' will remain relevant, as will a handful of other writers of our era - Faulkner, Eliot, Stevens, for example, along with one or two people writing today.

can assure you that people have been repeating plots, themes, concepts,metaphors, jokes, and bearded clichés for thousands of years all overthe world.

Yep. But it's a far cry from saying that "everything that followed the first scratchings is derivative". Obviously, I would think.

And you're inability to clump Harry with Holden (both books about schoolboys), but to mention it with 1984 and Brave New World is just flat-out peculiar.

The mark of a great book is not how many copies it sells, or how many people flock to the store to buy it. Instead, it's how long it remains in print. Since their publication date, there are only two books still in print today. One of them is the Bible (not saying the Bible's great, by the way ). Kudos to the person who can tell me what the other one is.

Hint: It was first printed in the fifteenth century.

lin - Thank you for reminding me of Holden Caulfield's first name. I'd forgotten it (getting old) and too lazy (and tired) to go look it up.

Perhaps saying everything from the first scratchings is derivative is a bit of an exaggeration, but not, I believe too much of one. If you like, we can adjust that and say there's been nothing really new for around three thousand years. There's a carving on a post-classic stella down south somewhere that starts out, 'An Aztec, a Mayan, and a Toltec went into a bar...'

As for not being able to 'clump' Holden and Harry together, in what way are they alike other than being schoolboys? Their backgrounds, attitudes, abilities, surroundings, development, everything, indeed, about them is different. 'Catcher' is a realistic tale of teen-age angst in post World War Two U.S. 'Harry' is a fantasy tale set in more or less present day U.K. They are different genres that happen to have adolescent boys as their central characters. Everything else is different.

'1984', 'Brave New World', 'Animal Farm', 'Man's Fate', 'Darkness at Noon', are all commentaries on the social and political realities of the 20th century. The last two are realistic, while the first three deviate from strict reality in one way or another. If you read all four of these books, then read all of Harry Potter, you will begin to see what I'm talking about. If you have already read Potter without considering its social, political, and religious metaphors, then a re-reading may be needed.

The four books I've mentioned here, taken as a group, go a long way in explaining what happened in the last half of the 20th Century.

Five books. There are three kinds of people in the world. Those who can count and those who can't.

Perhaps saying everything from the first scratchings

No perhaps about it. It's a ridiculous hyperbole that doesn't stand up to the simplest logical tests. (So there were a few dozen scratches, now there are millions of books...but none of them are new? Gimme a break)

OK, so "Catcher" and Harry are from two completely and totally different universes, but Harry and Brave New World are similar. Sure thing.

Not really as peculiar as the idea that Harry has anything whatsoever to do with satire or social commentary.

Originally Posted by garza

And I'm sorry, forgive my ignorance, but you lost me with the OP. Who or what is that?

Original Post or Original Poster
If synthesis is genius, as some believe, then JK Rowling may well be a genius. I don't see the social satire angle, but then, I can't get through the books. I may not have enough ten-year-old left in me and will have to wait until I reacquire such.
Interesting discussion nonetheless.

lin - Millions of books repeating the same ideas in different ways. How different, really, are the concepts expressed in 'The Art of War' from North Korea's statements in the last few days, and the West's response to them? Move and counter move, outlined long, long ago.

We as a race have changed little in the last 50,000 years. Our thought processes are much the same as those of our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago. So of course we keep repeating ourselves. What we write varies from one year to the next, from one culture to the next, but scrape away the accumulated societal clutter and what you find underneath is the bedrock of human thought and emotion.

Young writers are often urged to 'write about what you know', but in truth we can do nothing else. The wildest bit of fantasy literature will have an underlying structure built on what the writer has learned and lived. Rowling is a gifted writer, but she can't invent what has already been invented. She can improve on it, make it hers, point the way she wants it to go, but that's all.

As writers we are re-writing what has been written before. The idea that we are not capable of coming up with a totally new idea for a story or a poem may damage our ego, but it's the truth.