The Battle for Rowling

[dan]

I know a number of you are on livejournal, but I really wanted to post
this to a wider audience. Perhaps I can massage it into shape for the
big group, but it seems to fit here better.

Iwrote this right after seeing Jo emerge on the BBC from what seemed
to be four years of silliness and being coy. As usual, I pass up no
opportunities for dissing the sillier parts of fandom.

The Battle for Rowling

The real battle of Harry Potter isn't what takes place in the books,
and we most of us know this, but a battle for defensible, intelligent
critical approaches to Rowling's work.

Squeeing over "scar" no longer being the last word, for example, has
nothing to do with anything at all besides, well, the knowing of this
fact - it is an entirely self-referential rubric, knowledge of it is
brandished like a flag, it is not news and it is no more important
than knowing the last word was "scar", when it was. That is to say, it
is insignificant. It is sports. However, in most public forums, fandom
and its ships are exactly, and I mean exactly, like fandoms for sports
teams. Fun, no doubt, but entirely meaningless. In other words, no
critical understanding of Rowling wil come from that particular part
of HP fandom.

Another example is the insignificance of Rowling's statement, some
months ago, that she'd revised the 7 book such that one character got
a reprieve but two die she hadn't intended. If we knew who lived and
died originally, this would be a meaningful revelation to us now. We
don't, however, know, and so this revelation was entirely meaningless,
and yet much of the fandom went coo coo crazy over this, until the
statement, as Rowling notes in her recent interview, takes on an
entirely fandom based take of its own.

Mugglenet and Leaky and many other sites, and even the more "serious"
sites, all fall prey, more and more as time has gone on, to hordes of
the silliest readers imaginable, who all seem to post frequently,
unsurprisingly. The editors in their heads, it seems, are drowned out
by the squeals.

Rowling's note about changing a couple deaths and a life did, at the
time, however, raise one alarm. It was around the time of the public
reading with Irving and King, who both seemed to be suggesting Rowling
had to let Harry live. We, some of us, at any rate, watched this event
with a growing horror - these men, these experts, were, in spite of
statements to the effect that Rowling was top billing and they merely
warm-up acts, presuming to influence her anyway, not out of what could
be percieved as deep love of the character Harry, but for some larger
purpose - they thought he should live, and thought Rowling should be
persuaded.

Well, fuck right off, you presumptuous men. This was a deep and
pervasive chauvanism that all of fandom, with rare exceptions,
completely missed. Went over their heads. I don't care if they've
defended Rowling as a writer for years, they might have said " we
trust you to write the best last novel you can, whether or not Harry
lives or dies." But they didn't. So, fuck them. I hate Stephen King
anyway, and Garp was more cute than compelling.

The battle for Rowling, as I'll call it, is not a propaganda war as
such, however, King and Irving and Byatt notwithstanding, a battle for
"ownership" of Harry Potter - to speak of it as such is to give up,
before starting, all sense of reality. And Rowling's own questionable
decisions, the full import of which we don't yet know, and I mean here
most importantly, and most recently, the "theme park", contribute to
the carnival atmosphere surrounding HP. Her strange, and to be honest,
somewhat ridiculously saccarine relationship with a couple online
fansites, I take as a growing sort of weakness to the adulation, which
I hope is ultimately only a ploy, part of the advertising, part of the
will to get as many people to go the HP journey as she can get, just
to twist it in at the end. I don't doubt her ultimate message, but I
do doubt that her choices of late have been as astute as previous
ones. It's, I presume, a combination of fame and wealth, after a few
years of it. 

The recent interview on BBC captures for me the Rowling I've always
identified - and which has been rather hidden these past few years.
The interview gives me hope that all the silly trinkets and what have
you are just carrots, offered to the masses, for the end goal of
subverting the greatest number of people possible. 

The Battle for Rowling is a battle for her themes - which are not
trite, but subtle, subversive, in their own right, without injecting
slash or whatever into them. (In fact, this slash is banality itself,
frequently, with merely a surface, a patina, of what is called
subversive, but it is in fact simply posturing, in the worst possible
sense. Those crazy people who claim ownership of HP over Rowling seem
to come from slash as often as they come from Harry/Hermione, I'd
say.) It is a battle against the banal and the mundane, which, I think
Rowling knows, must wade through the banal to reach transcendance.

I have nothing against the midnight booklines - obviously, I go
myself. What I do have something against is confusing fandom with
appreciation - after all, sports aren't about anything - they imply
nationalism, or regionalism or whatever, but they are meaningless.
Books, on the other hand, are build on meaning through and through.
Nevertheless, dressing up and being fanatical don't preclude critical
appreciatons, they do, however, help maintain a massive block of
readers who all seem to get in front of the cameras and talk utter
nonsense about HP - avoiding anything political, when the books are so
obviously political, and avoiding anything that suggests they are
overt attacks on anything in the real world, which they so obviously
are. From the new age to organized religion to the nation state,
Rowling is questioning all these things, their utility, their validity.

But all we see are people talking about actors and actresses, arguing
about who should sleep with who, and a million other boring things,
that serve to eliminate the meaningful in Rowling.

Part of me hopes that the folks who want to build that theme park are
utterly appalled by Deathly Hallows.

posted also at http://darkthirty.livejournal.com/95554.html