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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:04:57 EDT
From: FrancesVanScoy@aol.com
To: dem@wvu.edu, rnakaishi@hotmail.com, albertos@csee.wvu.edu, momoku@gmail.com,
mcdermott.jimmy@gmail.com, sondheim@panix.com, llohoffman@comcast.net,
m5101217@u-aizu.ac.jp, charles.baldwin@mail.wvu.edu, FrancesVanScoy@aol.com,
esklar@mix.wvu.edu, manesgk@gmail.com
Subject: [vel] life after Harry Potter
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i28/28b02401.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
From the issue dated March 21, 2008
OBSERVER
Little Muggle ISO Her Next Hogwarts
By PAULA M. KREBS and CLAIRE BUCK
Last summer we sat in a walk-in campsite in the mountains — two 11-year-olds
and two middle-aged English professors, with four copies of Harry Potter and
the Deathly Hallows. It took skill and management from the adults and a lot of
self-control on all of our parts to allow us to finish all at one time. But
none of us really wanted it to be over.
"I feel like someone close to me has died," sobbed our daughter, who couldn't
decide whether to start all over or "go home and burn all my Harry Potter
books."
And as we told her that yes, it was indeed as if someone had died, we didn't
tell her that the someone was her young self. Instead, we encouraged her to be
angry and sad and to wait it out. Neither of us wants her to hurt. But we
both love that she can feel so deeply, not the loss of a character — anyone can
cry at the death of Little Nell or Old Yeller — but the loss of something
bigger, the loss of an entire imaginary, a world, an ethos. What has that imaginary
meant to her? Or to the 20-year-old in back of us in line at the bookshop on
July 18 — the one who burst into tears when she got the book and said to us,
embarrassed, "I just don't know what I'll do without them"?
It's not worth fighting with Harold Bloom or A.S. Byatt about the Harry
Potter books' literary value. Whether or not J.K. Rowling made lifelong readers out
of a generation of kids, she created, at least temporarily, communities of
readers. And maybe it was that loss of community that was behind the tears of
both the college student in the bookshop and our daughter.
There was a time in our daughter's childhood when none of us knew about Harry
Potter. One summer day in 1999, we wandered into the University of London
bookshop to browse the lit-crit shelves and pick up a new copy of the London A-Z
book of city maps. When we arrived at the cashier, he asked us, "Don't you
want to buy the Harry Potter?" We hadn't a clue what he was talking about. "It's
Harry Potter Day," he said, as if that explained everything. It turned out
that the third book in the series had been released that day, and it was a huge
media event. It's hard now to believe there was a time when we wouldn't have
known exactly when a Harry Potter book was being released, and it's funny to
think that we left the shop without the book, having not read either of the first
two volumes.
Thanks to the series, our daughter has learned not just the pleasures of
reading but the different pleasures of varying approaches to narrative. The film
version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was magic to her as a
5-year-old, but it was nothing compared to the pleasure she then took in the book,
first when we read it to her and then when she began to read it for herself.
Now she moves gracefully back and forth between the books, the new films as
they come out, the old ones on DVD, the audiobooks, and various Potter Web
sites — she takes her pleas¿ures from the full range of 21st-century media. She
can explain with some sophistication what each medium can do best, and she has
come to enjoy the literary criticism and, yes, the philology that comes out of
the Harry Potter fan community. As she progressed through the series, she
developed a hawklike eye for significant details mentioned many books earlier, and
she parsed their significance with a skill we cherish in the college students
we teach. Most of all, she has learned to be absorbed, to enter a magic world
that has nothing to do with wands.
Our students are, of course, the Harry Potter generation. But is their
experience of the books like our family's? Did young people reading the Harry Potter
books collectively inhabit one of Stanley Fish's interpretive communities?
Lecturing on Frankenstein to a large class of biology students last semester,
one of us asked about the theme of wanting to conquer death: "Does that theme
still appear in our culture? In any recent books?" she asked. No one budged.
"Are you telling me that none of you read the seventh Harry Potter?" Hands went
up, one by one, and a tall, scruffy fellow in the second row confided in a
stage whisper, "I have the poster on my wall." The students then started a lively
discussion of Voldemort's quest for immortality and what it had to do with
Victor Frankenstein's feelings about his mother's death. There is something to be
said for shared cultural references, as the Blooms, Harold and Allan both,
would tell us.
For our family, too, the books are about community; they created a world we
have been coming into and out of for years. Our daughter has one British and
one American parent. All those hours of reading about London streets, castles in
Scotland, and even Surrey suburbs; all the car trips listening to the British
actors Jim Dale and Stephen Fry on CD reading the books; and even the films
and their surrounding hype connect her to her English side, in some way to her
English mum's childhood. Not that we would have chosen British boarding-school
culture as our daughter's ideal entry into Englishness, but it meant a lot to
us that she could see herself as English in relation to the books. Her years
of hoping against hope for her letter from Hogwarts gave her one way to focus,
in a good way, on her differences from the kids around her: having an English
mother, being the daughter of academics, being a bit of a gender rebel, and
any number of other factors that make her, like every other child reader of the
series, identify with Harry.
The books have also given our family a lot to talk about. It isn't just that
we know the difference between Kingsley Shacklebolt and Mundungus Fletcher or
how to perform a summoning charm. It's that we talk and talk and still talk
about the books. We share theories, but we also share intense feelings about
them. We debate Rowling's skills as a writer, her debts to Susan Cooper and
Rudyard Kipling, and the issues Rowling dramatizes. We have learned to talk
together about emotions and ethics and politics.
First we talked about why a government might think it was protecting its
people by hiding the truth from them. Then our daughter wanted to understand why
we found the Ministry of Magic's security precautions leaflet, "Protecting Your
Home and Family Against the Dark Forces," so funny. So we ended up talking
about homeland-security measures and the color-coded threat levels and how
parody is a different kind of humor from slapstick or wordplay or the other types
Rowling employs. The grown-ups provided the historical and political context,
but the child then took that information and ran with it, pulling out examples
from other volumes of the series and comparing scenes. Those moments in which
we need to explain things to her are rare, however. Much more often, she
points things out to us — the reference in an earlier book to Dum¿bledore's family,
or the significance of a character's being interrupted midsentence, leaving
us without what will undoubtedly be key information later.
The books gave our daughter equal status in discussions in which her parents
would normally have been the teachers. We have learned to give her space and
respect.
But now it's over, or Rowling's part is. And we must get used to the idea
that we're all less like Harry Potter and more like Petunia Dursley — Petunia, or
"Tuny," Lily Potter's hopelessly muggle little sister who was, like our
daughter, destined never to get her acceptance to Hogwarts. The tough job now is to
transform the mourning for the loss of magic into a recognition that the
Harry Potter books never were magic; they were imagination — and that's still
there. Our daughter is already beginning to see that although life is not the same
anymore because she can't expect more Harry Potter books, she can
nevertheless go back to Hogwarts, and to equally exciting places. She is learning that
when you love fiction, the mourning at the end of a tale will lessen but will
never go away.
After all, one of us, and not the child, hasn't yet read The Old Curiosity
Shop. Can't bear to be left with no more Dickens.
Paula M. Krebs and Claire Buck are professors of English at Wheaton College,
in Massachusetts. Krebs also edits Academe, the magazine of the American
Association of University Professors.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 54, Issue 28, Page B24
**************
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