Rowling's Anodyne Assault

[dan]

No: HPFGUIDX 101727

At some point, reading Rowling, not always closely, but with a level 
of passion that belies any remonstrations
the serious reader of her work might make about the books being 
simply "good" or "well written," becomes
the desperate act of people who have been cast adrift from the 
apparent significance of what could be called
their own social, political, cultural institutions or constructions. 
Indeed, people who have lost the ability to
maintain a static, inane gaze through the constellations of sense and 
of meaning that characterize the
contemporary mainstream seem to be drawn to her work. Not just drawn 
to reading her works over and over,
but to expounding upon them fanatically, becoming "involved" in the 
richly interpretive meanings that squirt
from her Harry Potter novels like stinksap, if you start poking 
around in them a bit.

It's not, I think, the lack of character description that makes her 
books ambiguous for those who read them
with more than a casual critique, nor is it merely a plot device, but 
rather, it is her level of comfort with
ambiguity. Possibly, this comfort with the unspoken, with the 
enigmatic, arises from the fact that the story,
according to her, is, in its essentials, long finished. She knows 
where its going, if not what it will mean. It is also, though, a
gentle, non-judgemental, contrived but still easy touch with her 
characters.

>From so-called "reality" TV (a contradiction in terms that apparently 
has cachet because it's a contradiction)
to the lingering, persistent, mostly unspoken belief in so-called 
objectivity (as clearly witnessed in the silly
criticism directed at documentary film-maker Michael Moore, who's 
most striking merit, that he was honest
enough to admit he was partisan, became the sin of not being 
objective, according to mainstream critics,
particularly from networks for whom such an admission as Moore made 
would  not only be true, but entirely
unthinkable), the world in which Rowling's project intrudes is long 
past prevarication. It is quite possibly a
world where the vocabulary to even speak of prevarication at all no 
longer obtains. When is a contradiction
not a contradiction? When there are no words to describe what is not.

Rowling does what she does by positioning, within that magical world 
of Potter, all the meanings we so
readily identify, not just on the evening news (which doesn't, in 
fact, change every day, in some very
significant ways), but in the very quotidian exchanges in which 
signifiers of power and persistence spread
among us, a kind of viral common sense. While Minister for Magic 
Fudge becomes every politician who
fudges this way or that with policies, he is also the agent of every 
judgment made from positions of
power, which are most often, but not always, judgments from 
ignorance. The immovable in Fudge, the
intransigent denial in the face of evidence, will stand for 
implacable law. And this law, which comprises a
significant part of our social identity, though often, I admit, 
negatively, is then a kind of fudging itself, a kind
of hedging. It doesn't really matter if the current policy is hedged 
slightly in our favour or slightly out of it. We dwell,
Rowling seems to say, in a thick, sticky social substance with the 
consistency of soft confections. Here we have one subversion
in which, apparently, Rowling rollicks.

Where a standard reading sees Defense Against the Dark Arts as a stay 
against chaos, against anarchy (even if,
by some accident or coincidence it works out to in fact be the 
opposite), at least officially, the adult reading
of Rowling sees DADA for what it is: a recognition of the 
significance of facing, and embracing, the abrupt, the
convulsive, the anarchically sudden, very much like the historic DADA 
movement in art. DADA is
then, in another of Rowling's subversions, a stay against a greater 
evil than chaos, its stated target, ever was or could be. It is a
stay against banality.

Rowling can freely limn the stagnant weight of institutional banality 
for us because she hides her subversive
thesis with a patina, an invisibility cloak of magic, by which method 
the reader is removed from the Dursley House of their
daily grind. In that Dursley House, we may be closeted, abused, 
imprisoned, but with a flick of the page, we are transported into
her work like Ginevra and Harry into the memory book of Riddle. Many 
contemporary writers talk about the weight of this
banal social construct in which we plod, but few talk about it while, 
at the same time, providing a space to play with the idea,
the exciting possibility, of working beyond it, of removing oneself 
from its more deleterious effects. Perhaps this is what
attracts us to Rowling's work.

And what does Rowling talk about, then, in this place we read from 
behind the invisibility cloak, if not the world about which
those newscasts remonstrate? We see hatred, prejudice, horrible 
crimes, political machinations, but also acts of bravery,
compassion and all those other great things. But we must stay hidden, 
we mustn't be seen. We can only witness. Is it because it is
not our world, our time, that we are relegated to the status of 
observer?  I say not, because it is our world, our time, seen
through the lens of genre. It is because we can only witness, we can 
only read. Rowling, I submit, is in some sense always writing
about the limits of knowing, and the need to engage. It is, finally, 
her most subversive thesis.

There is disagreement on what genre Rowling's work occupies because, 
I think, edges of the cloak are always being turned up; a
head shows through here, a shoe there. And always, there are those 
who will see right through. I posted a couple years ago the
idea that Rowling refuses to let Harry break down because, if he did, 
we, in our reading, would find ourselves falling straight
back into our social confection, into the deadly banal. This still 
holds. Her work communicates the huge, hidden, ubiquitous
impulse to be, but meted carefully, and never without reference to 
the Ministry and its minion, and to the equally abrupt and
convulsive impulse to power. And behind it all is just us, our 
internal Harry, our cupboard of unknown self.

When I talk about the boy in the closet (BIC LIGHTER), that is what I 
am talking about. The reading demands that
somewhere, probably right where we are, the boy remains tightly 
locked up, for now.

To read Rowling critically, I am saying, as we adults do is to submit 
ourselves to what is truly the most difficult test there is -
sitting under the Sorting Hat. (From Grindelwald to the Sorting Hat 
in the space of a few pages. Did I catch an unsettling echo
there when I read Philospher's Stone?) And was the test about which 
our heroes were so apprehensive in fact a very
fundamental one? We chose our readings. We think its easy to do so. 
But if I am correct, and Rowling is presenting us with a
multi-facetted, subversive thesis of anarchy and chaos, then chosing 
a trivial reading is a choice that means ignoring everything
we do know about the social confection. It means giving up all 
readings to the banal.

Rowling's writing is then anodyne, in providing the patina, the 
invisiblity cloak, behind which, we are not expected to act.
However, it does so only in order to better conduct a frontal assault 
on that which is deadly banal.

Dan