Harry Potter: a great representation of our time?

[Valli Porter]

No: HPFGUIDX 77299

An interesting proposition, which I reply to with an anecdote:

I am planning on going back to school to get my MFA in creative writing, and in the past week I spent some time in the library, reading graduates' dissertations. Can I even begin to express my disappointment with the works produced at my next alma mater? I expected to find stories filled with rich, poetic, or even experimental language; I expected word play and wit, rhythm and cadence. Instead I discovered stories that were well-told and even, I suppose, reflective of our time. But none of them exhibited the mastery of language that I am interested in.

Often I think there are two factions among people who author books: the storytellers and the writers. I want to be a writer because I'm attracted to expression through language and "saying something," which isn't always conducive to story form. But often storytellers are the authors that capture the public. Who cares about the writers? Let them retreat to their little coves in academia and produce their literary journals.

Of course, our greatest books are written by authors who have both the knack for weaving a worthwhile tale in such mesmerizing words that we can't help but read. That is the highest definition of "literature" I can conjure. Toni Morrison's work is, for me, the ultimate example of the marriage of lyricism and storyline in the last twenty years. I have no doubt the world will be reading her works in one hundred years, even after Oprah's stupid, stupid book club is dead and stamped out of our cultral memory.

For me, J.K. Rowling's work is great because she is plainly a wonderful storyteller. And she doesn't drag us through the tale with the same sordid approach all of those MFA graduates did. She incorporates word play and a certain colloquial rhythm. She isn't constructing sentences that are impossible to diagram, and she is of course limited by the form she chose in writing the series (how many times do we have to joke that the most shattering events in Harry's life always happen in the first three weeks of June?). But I know that I love to lose myself in Jo's imagination. Sometimes I wish I could live in it instead of my own -- the Wizarding World seems to hold so many possibilities. If people in fifty or a hundred years want to lose themselves in the same way we all have been, then I don't doubt Harry will survive the harsh critic of time, even if our best simile for how his story is written is warm beer. 

(And this from the chick who has had absolutely no use for fantasy novels of any sort -- give me nineteenth century British literature over Tolkien any day.)

I just recently became and will remain,

Veritabatim, who thinks Dumbledore and Lupin are the two characters off-limits to be ESE!, but she'll save it for a more sane hour of the day



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