In Which I Explain Harry Potter for Matthew Yglesias, A.S. Byatt, Harold Bloom, and All Y'All Motherfuckers

Matthew Yglesias wants someone to say something interesting about Harry Potter that places the series in a broader cultural context, that explains its origins and antecedents, that accounts for its popularity as well as the anger and disdain it engenders, and generally to do so without sounding like the cranky A.S. Byatt. There are really two questions here: Why is Harry Potter popular; and, What does Harry Potter's popularity signify? The answer to the latter question is "not much," and the failure of both advocates and detractors to appreciate that simple truth is at the root of all the hateration between the two camps.

But let's put the horse before the cart, or the dragon before the sled, or whatever. Harry Potter is popular because it provides a simple narrative of eminently and entirely recognizable parts. It's real literary antecedent isn't The Lord of the Rings, but the Odyssey. That's not a claim about literary merit, but about narrative technique. It occurs episodically, and like the narratives arising in the old oral traditions, its formal structure derives from the material of familiar, recognizable, memorizable, easily repeatable tropes. The characterological simplicity of its personae is the point, as are the predictable mechanics of all the dei ex machina--the secret rooms, sudden discoveries, help from above, beside, below, abroad. It is in many regards the oldest form of storytelling that we have, and the most familiar. Like Odysseus, its main character is both beset by trials and fortune-favored. Like the Odyssey, it's a story built on aggregation rather than narrative unity. Tolkeinian world-creation--the building up of a single, coherent, alternate mythopoesis--is in fact a very modern and rather unusual technique. The spells and secret rooms in Harry Potter stories have a lot more in common with Odysseus bag o' wind.

Each episode in a classical epic is itself a style and strophe that recalls for the audience another very much like it elsewhere in the tradition. There are tales of physical courage and tales of cunning; there are domestic interludes; there are comic set-pieces; there are little passion plays, etc. The reason that the narrative progression feels effortless is because it is effortless. The reason that all the trappings of magic and fantasy in the world can't derail its underlying familiarity is because of . . . its underlying familiarity.

On the merits of Harry Potter as a character or as an artistic creation, I have little good to say. For the most part, he appears to be a brat. I can be more defensive about the relative flatness of all his foils and enemies and even his drably psychotic nemesis. In an epic, agglomerative story, secondary characters are always unidimensional. They exist not for their own sake, as do the lavish casts in more sophisticated tales (especially the high-novelistic tradition of the late 18th century onward), but as catalysts for the further adventures of the hero, who may develop some depth along the way, but who remains, as I said, both beset and fortune-favored. That, also, is the point. Does Harry Potter pass ungraciously through puberty? Yes. Is Harry Potter a Bildungsroman. Not on your fuckin' life, my little witches and wizards. J.K. Rowling's real nod away from this tradition is the crafting of a few supporting roles with more meat than the main character. This is Shakespearian in kind if not in quality. Beatrice and Benedick are way more interesting than Claudio and Hero.

So. To the great and eternal question of why Potter is pleasant fiction: Familiarity breeds favor. It is no more or less than that.

As for its vast popularity, well, that's just an accident, no more significant than Hello Kitty. Disco Sucks!, yes, but man did people love to disco. To plumb the depths of every pop cultural phenomenon for signification is to run up against the impenetrable wall of human whim. Why are some things big and some things bombs? The truth is: Luck, location, accident, chance. J.K. Rowling wrote an easy story with a broad appeal that found word-of-mouth buzz and then had the good fortune to be well and often marketed. She avoided the pitfalls of undoing expectations in her follow-ups. She didn't tinker with her successful formula, and she gave readers what they clearly wanted. The shocks were never too shocking, and the payoffs never too stringently withheld. The humor is broad, and of course Potter stories have no aspirations to any great literary status, so their workmanlike composition moves them along at a neat clip, never taxing a reader's patience by making him interrupt his reading to consider what precisely just happened or what exactly it means. Potter is a huge commercial success because it is hugely commercial. It is a nigh-unto perfect product. Getting angry at it for ruining literature, or extolling it for saving it, is perfectly beside the point--like trying to figure out the future of vegetables from the fortunes of Heinz Ketchup. Harry Potter bodes neither well nor ill for literature. It has very little to do with literature at all.