Official Philip Nel Discussion Question #4--Will HP become classic?

[lucky_kari]

No: HPFGUIDX 38097

Wonderful official question. I've been bouncing up and down waiting to 
get a chance to answer it. 

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "caliburncy" <caliburncy at y...> wrote:

>  Philip Nel writes:
> --------------------------------------
> 
> Nigel Newton, the chief executive of Bloomsbury Publishing, has 
> predicted the HP books "will still be bought for children in 100 
> years' time."  (Prynn).  Is he merely promoting his company's 
> interests?  Will the Potter novels be classics?   What do they share 
> in common with other classics?  In your answer, decide how you'll 
> define the word 'classic.'  Does it denote 'classic literature for 
> children,' 'classic fantasy,' 'classic British literature'?  
> Something else?  In defining the term, choose some points of 
> comparison.  If you think they are classics, are we to compare the 
> novels with works by Lewis Carroll?  C.S. Lewis?  Charles Dickens?  
> If not, what would be your point of comparison?  Enid Blyton?  
> Against what other works are we to measure the HP series?  What are 
> the criteria of a classic?

I'll be answering a lot of this later, but I first want to touch on 
what the books are being compared to. Pitching them to a tough crowd, 
I was asked if I would compare them to Lewis or Tolkien or Blyton? 
(Blyton apparently being on the lower scale of things vs. Lewis and 
Tolkien.) And, I said, it's not as good as Tolkien (b/c I'm Tolkien 
nut,) but in a way it reminds me of

1. Tolkien
2. Lewis
3. Arthur Ransome
4. Enid Blyton
5. Roald Dahl 

And the first response I got was, "IT'S NOTHING LIKE ARTHUR RANSOME!"

Very quickly, others informed me that Harry Potter bore no resemblance 
to Tolkien and Lewis, while someone else said that it bore no 
resemblance to Dahl's cutting satire. Blyton was allowed to stand, 
apparently since both Blyton and Rowling write a lot about boarding 
schools and kid-sleuths. And, Blyton, let's face it, isn't the 
pinnacle of children's literature. I loved her books, I still am known 
to say, "Food always tastes better outdoors" on family picnics, I just 
realized right now that I've been thinking of Sirius Black as Bill 
Cunningham, but they haven't got that something which the other four 
authors I mentioned have. That something is..... I have no idea. 
Perhaps it's that they've realized their prototypes so well that I 
know them in real life, whereas Blyton characters to me at least stay 
inside the book, however entertaining.

Judging by my experience, the comparison game will go nowhere. At 
least JKR isn't making a scene about the comparisons, like Tolkien who 
(with entirely too much time on his hands) was publicly complaining 
about Lewis comparing him to Ariosto, whom Tolkien said, he hadn't 
read and would have detested if he did. (Someone has to make a movie 
about Tolkien. He was such an eccentric but likeable character. I can 
just seem him chatting with Dumbledore and Mundungus Fletcher. I 
don't think Tolkien would have really liked HP. He made a point of 
being contrary, but I think it's just his personal style, if not his 
writing style. )

> 2)  Does Harry Potter contain any possible social 
> commentary, or is it more concerned with 'timeless' matters of the 
> human condition?  If it does contain any social commentary, is this 
> the sort that is only of value if read as an indictment of certain 
> present-day issues, or does it continue to hold appeal even without 
> such comparisons?

I once had an answer to this. I thought, when I first read GoF, that 
the ending was relevant but definitely dated. Relevant because it was 
about moral courage, dated because it seemed to be directly about 
appeasement in the 1930s. Both aspects interested me. Now, I'm not so 
sure. It's a truism by now that September 11 has changed the way we 
saw the world, but it is true. I first saw the LOTR movie in 
mid-December, and I began crying in Moria at this conversation.

"I wish the ring had never come to me."

"So do all who live to see such times. But that is not their choice. 
All we can do is decide what to do with the time that is given us."

As a Tolkien fanatic, I'd read that passage a million times and it had 
never really caught my attention. But now, a book written during the 
Second World War was stating a truth for the dark year of 2001. 

Similarily, I am amazed by how prescient GoF has turned out to be. I 
am very glad for JKR that she published GoF before September 11th. If 
afterwards, she would have forever been accused of "making 
connections": something that I expect to see critics saying when OotP 
comes out. We are in a world now where people are accusing each other 
of appeasement: something we thought was a 1930s thing, where our own 
Magic Law Enforcement heads must choose between security and liberty, 
where everyone of us realizes that one day we may see the Dark Mark 
over our own homes. The HP books have become way too relevant. I 
expect JKR is feeling frightened of the reception for her book. It not 
only will contain timeless truths, but temporal truths, and expect her 
to be hammered by those who feel her take on the wizarding world's 
problems doesn't line up with their take on the 'War on Terrorism.' 

I read HP quite a bit the days after September 11, to distract my mind 
a little, though I can't say it really worked. And the line that spoke 
to me was "What's coming will come," and Hagrid's little speech on the 
subject. Whenever I begin to feel irritated with the man, I have to 
remember how much that line comforted me.

Have you ever seen the French movie: "Les Miserables." It's mostly set 
during WWII and tells the story of a moving man and a Jewish family, 
who go through absolutely incredible hardships, to the point where my 
Mom was saying, "Something happy's got to happen or I'm going to 
scream." The story is incredibly labyrinthine and intriguing in its 
own right, but that's not the movie's point. The point is that 
everything in the movie can be related back to Victor Hugo's Les 
Miserables. The Second World War connected with 19th century France? 
Haven't things totally changed? No, the characters learn. Even in all 
its horrors, their time is full of the Valjeans, the Thenardiers, the 
Javerts, the Cosettes, the Fantines, the Mariuses, the Gavroches etc. 
 (The movie does mess up Javert, which as a Les Mis fanatic bugs me.)
What I love about the movie is that the characters begin to take note 
of this themselves. They fall in love with Les Miserables, the book, 
and begin to apply the book to their daily lives. About to secretly 
flee with his wife across the Swiss border, Ziman tells Fortin, "Don't 
let the Thenardiers get you down. They're even worse than the 
Germans." Fortin reflects that his mother was Fantine, and he was 
Cosette and so on. 

That struck me as so true. On the spot, my mother and I established a 
new rule for determination of the classics. Classics are stories 
which, once read, you begin to use to make sense of your life. If 
you're ready to cry, after losing a battle over something very dear to 
you because of the lack of supporter from a bureacracy with no 
backbone, and you say, "Cornelius Fudge has ruined everything again," 
(and this happened to my mother) I think HP is on its way to being a 
classic.

>Does Harry 
> Potter have the potential to achieve this cross-generational 
> sharing?  How might Harry Potter's existing cross-generational 
appeal 
> be indicative of this?

Well..... First of all, I don't think the cross-generational thing is 
entirely off the ground yet. Way too many adults who don't bother with 
kids' books, and are buying their kids HP because the HP books are 
hyped. Yet, growing are the number who are already buying kids books 
because they want the kids to enter the experience. Even if they 
haven't read the books, I've heard many adults say they are buying 
them because they want their children to experience them, as they 
experienced Narnia etc. in their own childhood. It's not the kids who 
will keep HP going, in the long term. Too many children, 
unfortunately, go through a stage where they push away the books of 
their childhood. There is an encouraging section of teenagers (I was 
one of them) who absolutely love HP, but I'm sure you've all met some 
past HP fanatic, who now, at the mature age of 15, goes "I'm way too 
old for that now." The problem's not a new one. If you go to the first 
page of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," you will see it well 
stated. Lewis dedicates the book to his god-daughter Lucy, but 
expresses fear that Lucy is now too old to read the book, because 
little girls grow up so quickly. However, he is sure that one day when 
Lucy is completely grown-up, she will read and enjoy the book, and 
think of her godfather. Adult support is what gets books to survive 
the teenage doldrums, imho.

> 4) One complaint frequently lodged against Harry Potter (aside from 
> allegedly promoting witchcraft 

Let me interrupt and predict that the people who are now saying they 
promote witchcraft will be completely replaced in 50 years by people 
who have accepted them as good  moral children's literature, and will 
have turned their criticism on some other book. Work after work has 
gone that route. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer for example.

>is the assertion that Harry Potter is basically derivative of 
> its preceeding works.  

I like this one. I always ask, "How?" and get some answer about Greek 
Mythology and the fight of good vs. evil. plus a little fluff about 
English boarding school novels.

>Most persons involved in the literary world 
will 
> tell you that, while obviously something can be clearly derived from 
> other works in almost plagiaristic fashion and/or can be heavily 
> dependent upon cliche, there is no story in existence that is 
> truly "original".  Consider the difference between a derivitave work 
> and an archetypal one.

Is it time to bring up the Willa Cather quote about there only being 
three or four stories in the world? I had an English teacher once who 
claimed that everything was about appearance vs. reality or the loss 
of ignorance. We used to bug her incredibly by trying to come up with 
scenarios that didn't invoke either. But, if you think about it, those 
two highly unoriginal phrases are absolutely accurate descriptors for 
the Harry Potter series. 

Gwen wrote:
> For that's the final criterion and perhaps the most important: a
> "classic" must be an overall *satisfying* story. And that 
satisfaction
> must continue, no matter how often or how many times one returns. 
The
> reader need not be *happy* with every authorial decision, but rather
> the reader must concede that, after all, it's for the best.

Oh, I don't know. I'm still very offended over what George Lucas did 
with Star Wars. Nothing can convince me that Return of the Jedi was 
for the best. I find it totally unsatisfactory, and yet I love Star 
Wars. Maybe movie classics are different than book classics?

Well Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" is a bit of a classic, 
and the ending just leaves my head swimming and my mouth swearing 
every time I read it, but I keep coming back nonetheless.  

Abigail writes:
> And I don't think that would be so terrible.  Nothing lasts forever. 
  Every work of 
> art, ever mastepiece, is eventually consigned to oblivion.  There's 
very little point 
> in being sad about it.  All I want is the chance to share the books 
with children 
> who have never read them before.  I'd like to see their surprise at 
discovering 
> something that's so good and enjoyable, it would be a bit like 
reading them for 
> the first time all over again.
> 
> Oh, and also I want not to live to see a world in which, as a poster 
to another HP 
> group once suggested, Harry Potter is a series of classic 
chilldren's... movies.  
> I don't think that's too much to ask.

AMEN TO ALL THAT!

Eileen