Re: Harold Bloom on Harry Potter

["Workers World, Chicago Bureau" <wwchi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Does this mean that we now have to solidarize ourselves with Harry Potter
against the right wing? :-)  We could do worse.  Suppose we could induce the
grateful Potter to say a good word about socialism here and there.

This is such a bad review by Bloom.

>The Harry Potter epiphenomenon will go on, doubtless for some time, as
J.R.R. >Tolkien did, and then wane.


What on earth does Bloom have against Tolkien???  The man was a scholar, a
philologist, an Oxonian, certainly had "imaginative vision", he was an
intimate of Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, and his works are full of racist
imagery.  I can only conclude that Bloom doesn't like anything that has been
written since 1900.

>The official newspaper of our dominant counter-culture, The New York Times,

geez

>The ultimate model for Harry Potter is "Tom Brown's School Days" by Thomas
>Hughes, published in 1857. The book depicts the Rugby School presided over
by the >formidable Thomas Arnold, remembered now primarily as the father of
Matthew >Arnold, the Victorian critic-poet. But Hughes's book, still quite
readable, was realism, >not fantasy. Rowling has taken "Tom Brown's School
Days" and re-seen it in the >magical mirror of Tolkien.

He really hates Tolkien for some reason.  Probably it's because hippies read
it in the 1960's.

>The resultant blend of a schoolboy ethos with a liberation from the
constraints of >reality-testing may read oddly to me, but is exactly what
millions of children and their >parents desire and welcome at this time.


Here he seems to be opposing fantasy AS fantasy.  I'd like to know how much
reality-testing there is in "Alice in Wonderland".  Or in "The Odyssey" for
that matter.

>One can reasonably doubt that "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" is
going to >prove a classic of children's literature, but Rowling, whatever
the aesthetic >weakness of her work, is at least a millennial index to our
popular culture. So huge >an audience gives her importance akin to rock
stars, movie idols, TV anchors, and >successful politicians.

A little envy here?  Sour grapes? :-)  WAIT, that's a cliché :-(  But it's
an allusion to an ancient Greek, so perhaps it's ok

>Her prose style, heavy on cliche, makes no demands upon her readers. In an
>arbitrarily chosen single page -- page 4 -- of the first Harry Potter book,
I count >seven cliches, all of the "stretch his legs" variety.


THIS is the ONLY substantive criticism of Rowling's writing which is to be
found in the entire damned review.  That's why I said at the top that it was
a bad review.  It's not just that Bloom is a right-winger.  It's that all he
does is sneer at it and say it is bad and pillory it by association with the
New York Times.

>And yet I feel a discomfort with the Harry Potter mania, and I hope that my
>discontent is not merely a highbrow snobbery,

hope on..

>or a nostalgia for a more literate fantasy to beguile (shall we say)
intelligent children >of all ages. Can more than 35 million book buyers, and
their offspring, be wrong? >Yes, they have been, and will continue to be so
for as long as they persevere with >Potter.


A pennyworth of criticism to this intolerable deal of sneer.*

>At a time when public judgement is no better and no worse than what is
proclaimed >by the ideological cheerleaders who have so destroyed humanistic
study, anything >goes. The cultural critics will, soon enough, introduce
Harry Potter into their college >curriculum, and The New York Times will go
on celebrating another confirmation of >the dumbing-down it leads and
exemplifies.

This is the stupidest book review I have read in ages (barring some of the
Amazon reader reviews).  It just goes to show that if you have right-wing
credentials you can get away with anything in the Wall Street Journal.

I haven't read any of the Potter series yet.  In general, fantasy (as
distinct from science fiction) seems to attract a lot of right-wing male
authors, and also a lot of feminists.  Robert Jordan is a graduate of the
Citadel, a horrible military college in South Carolina.  Terry Goodkind is
now finding it impossible to keep his right-wing views out of his books, so
in the more recent volumes of the Rahl saga you find jarring speeches
against communism and affirmative action.  It's hard to find a progressive
male, although there was William Morris, who was a Fabian socialist if I'm
not mistaken.  Actually there's also Steven Brust, who is, if I recall the
rumor correctly, the son of a person around the old Healy tendency (?) and
has in fact incorporated some elements of class struggle into a couple of
the recent volumes of his Taltos series.  But the dominant spirit of most
fantasy is the escape from the alienation of the capitalist world backward
into feudalism, and from the alienation of "science" backward into a world
of "magic".  The important distinction here, I think, is that "science" is
industrial, the product of institutions, whereas "magic" is craft, the work
of gifted individuals.  I think this is what appeals to the feminist
writers, who often try to envision a non-sexist feudalism, if you can
imagine such a thing, in which either (a) women warriors have equal rights,
or (b) the power of male warriors is balanced by the power of female
sorceresses.

The guiding principles of feudal society are inheritance and inherent,
immutable status; and most fantasy adopts them wholeheartedly.  Thus,
typically, the hero is heroic because he/she has inherited special gifts;
one IS a wizard just as one IS a noble.  If one is a "muggle" one can not
LEARN wizardry.  One just has to learn somehow to accept one's limitations.
This is why, contrary to Bloom, I suspect that wizardry probably fits in
quite nicely with the imagery of a 19th-century elitist British public
school.  Typically the individual hero defeats the army of evil him/herself
because of the great powers which he/she individually possesses.  From the
world of capitalism, where the individual is nothing, we go to a world where
the fortunate individual can destroy or save the universe with his/her own
power of mind.  Although one of the distinguishing features of Tolkien's
"Rings" is that the world is saved by an ordinary hobbit, not by a great
wizard.  In general, however, Tolkien's imitators do not imitate this point.
Note that this element comes back in "The Matrix": Keanu Reeves is the
prophesied one with inherent power.

Evil is also generally an inherent, immutable, and inherited quality.  There
are evil races:  orcs and trollocs are ALWAYS evil, can't be rehabilitated,
and they should just all be exterminated.  And generally can be, because of
the superior powers of the good.  If you have read Tolkien's battle scenes,
where orcs are hewn down in huge piles, they will come back to you
disturbingly when you read a book like "Black Hawk Down", about the U.S.
Rangers who crashed their helicopters in Mogadishu, Somalia, and then
slaughtered hundreds and hundreds of Somalis while awaiting rescue.

The above comments apply to "genre" fantasy, meaning "the stuff you find on
the shelves labelled 'fantasy' in the bookstore."  Thus I am talking almost
exclusively about Anglo-American writers.  I know, however, that there are
literary currents from other cultures which are entirely different.

Please don't ask me how I know all this stuff, or how much time I've wasted
in the research :-(

L. Paulsen

* An allusion to Shakespeare.