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Rowling urges readers to hope
Register-Guard OPINION Tuesday, July 25, 2000
By Sharon Schuman
Serving up her summer list of reading recommendations, columnist Ellen Goodman recently cast a somewhat jealous glance toward J.K. Rowling, the author of the wildly popular "Harry Potter" books. After earning a mere $3,000 for her first book, Rowling raked in a neat $10 million for "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," the 734-page fourth book of the series.
The speed and celebrity of it all has Pulitzer-winning authors such as Goodman shaking their heads. Is this what a fad looks like in the new millennium?
The symptoms of the fad are obvious: Children can't put the books down; adults stay up until 3 a.m. reading the latest volume. Meanwhile, parents, teachers and librarians cheer, while skeptical fundamentalists rue the promotion of magic and the absence of traditional Christian values.
Yet these books are much more than a fad. They are a cultural phenomenon that will influence the way we think and speak for decades. Before long, for example, the word "muggle" will be in the Oxford English Dictionary with a definition something like, "human being of nonmagical descent, but capable of magic under the right conditions or with the proper education and attitudes."
This definition would not begin to do justice to the richness of muggle experience Rowling has given her readers, beginning with the despicable Dursleys, Harry's foster family, who epitomize narrow-mindedness, neglect and malice. They are muggles, and we love to hate their very muggleness.
But then we find out that Hermione, Harry's friend, and the most gifted wizard-to-be at Hogwarts, the prep school of magic, also is a muggle. It turns out that muggles can make great wizards, and wizard children can be narrow-minded and malicious. Draco Malfoy, whose surname means "bad faith," traces his Aryan Nation pedigree to the first wizards and taunts Hermione by calling her a "mudblood."
Here, Rowling gives the reader the experience of feeling secure in our prejudices about muggles, then shifts the terrain just enough to make us question that prejudice. She does this often, and in unexpected ways.
In "The Prisoner of Azkaban," the third book in the series, for example, Hermione gets a cat, Crookshanks, who at every opportunity pounces on her friend Ron's sickly pet rat, Scabbers. This is very natural cat behavior, but we are made to sympathize with the terrified Scabbers as Crookshanks repeatedly tries to sink her teeth into his little rodent body. Only much later do we learn who Scabbers really is and praise the ginger cat.
This shifting of prejudices may seem to convey a simple message: You can never know who to trust. Such relativist cynicism is far, however, from Rowling's agenda. Her heroes can know who to trust: It's generally whoever has basic virtues such as honesty, generosity, selflessness and a sense of humor, and whoever is least interested in power.
In fact, Rowling presents evil as pure desire for power. Lord Voldemort, the wizard who turned to the dark side, killing Harry's parents but failing to kill the infant Harry, spends most of the first four books almost completely disembodied. He is all will to power and must subsist for 13 years in that state, until one of his followers (Scabbers) finds a way to get him back a body.
This fascination with power drives Rowling's books forward, tempting even the hero, who wants to be a Quidditch (magical soccer) star and to grasp the Triwizard Cup. Power tempts the reader, too, who wants to see the Dursleys suffer and rejoices when Dudly Dursley eats the ton tongue taffy and sprouts a 4-foot tongue that he can't lift from the floor.
Always, though, Rowling makes us uncomfortable with power and prejudice, which is what makes her books so fundamentally moral and decent, as well as entertaining. She does all of this with a fine ear for the ridiculous, an inventive imagination and a rich sense of classical, mythical and religious lore. Hagrid, the friendly half-giant, is reminiscent of the Titans; Fleur, the veela-girl, of the Sirens; Voldemort, who can speak to snakes, of Satan himself.
Harry Potter can speak to snakes, too, which emphasizes for Rowling that at the center of this Everyboy's quest is choice. Paradoxically, he must rise above the desire for power in order to vanquish the Dark Lord. And every success is only partial, because the quest is never definitively over. A muggle can be a wizard. A wizard can be a jerk. A hero is never finished struggling with the desire for power.
A reader who makes it to Page 629 of "The Goblet of Fire" and confronts the riddle of the Sphinx confronts the challenge to figure things out, to participate in the choices that are constantly defining who Harry is. With each book, these challenges grow, along with the vocabulary, plot and characters.
We can only thank Joanna Rowling for letting us into this fantasy world that encourages us to hope that the new millennium will not be all video games, MTV, consumption.com and mass violence or stupor. She makes us hope that Harry Potter, who is so normal in so many ways, can rise to the occasion, and so can we.
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