I think this is why I read the BBC...

Perusing the New York Times this morning, I found this lovely little tidbit from Christopher Hitches on Harry Potter. My favorite bit:

Perhaps Anglophilia continues to play its part, but if I were one of the few surviving teachers of Anglo-Saxon I would rejoice at the way in which such terms as muggle and Wizengamot, and such names as Godric, Wulfric and Dumbledore, had become common currency. At this rate, the teaching of “Beowulf” could be revived. The many Latin incantations and imprecations could also help rekindle interest in the study of a “dead” language.

Few? Surviving? I realize Hitchens is trying to make a point here, but it's kind of lost in the implication that anyone who wants to teach Anglo-Saxon must be slightly nuts and hopelessly lost in the fantasy that Beowulf has something to do with popular culture.

I'm being touchy, clearly, but still: that unfortunate collocation of adjectives suggests that Anglo-Saxonists are a dying breed. Hitchens continues to convey the false impression that all Anglo-Saxonists are both old and throwbacks to another era, irrelevant to modernity (though, apparently not without hope, impressively drawn through philological use of names rather than actual ideas or storylines) -- and given that Hitchens seems incapable of mentioning a female author who can match his beloved Orwell, Conan Doyle, and Pullman (whose entire oeuvre ends up a tedious attack on CS Lewis), that they're all men too.

Yes, I'm being unfair. But as a female Anglo-Saxonist who turned 25 last Monday and loves such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin and Agatha Christie -- I couldn't just let it slide.

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Harry Potter and Time, Part II

Yes, I stayed up until 5 AM reading on Saturday morning. No, I didn't finish until quite late in the evening -- and as my mom put it as I wandered towards bed early this morning, "welcome to the "Old Farts Club," which apparently includes in its activities not staying up to finish things you've been waiting years for. No spoilers in this post, just some tangled thoughts on time, and what I wanted so badly in my written exams to call "the time of reading."

It's funny, that now that "we know everything," as JK Rowling has put it, I'm feeling a bit sad. Not disappointed--if there's one thing I didn't think The Deathly Hallows approached even once it was disappointing--but sad. Lost, as it were.

I think I'm already feeling nostalgic for Harry Potter.

I've been reading the books since sometime in college, when I finally overcame my "Kids' books are dumb" thing. And I liked Harry Potter. I disparaged the series often (for length, for unwieldiness, for their hodge-podge of half-used mythology, for the debt Rowling clearly owes to Tolkien...etc), but I think it was because I felt bad liking something so much that wasn't "high literature." Tolkien I could make an excuse for: He's one of "us," an academic, a man who wrote a book to house languages he dreamed up in the spare time left him from writing one of the most influential (if often too much so) articles on Beowulf in the 20th century

What I forgot in all of this is one simple thing, of which I was reminded during a dinner table discussion with my family when I was still about half-way from the finale's close. Literature is what survives, what remains. As much as literature is a constructed category -- it depends, as it is passed down, so much on chance. Take the Ruin, for example.* So much of our engagement with this poem is predicated on the things about it which we cannot know. Literally a ruined text, we can only proceed on fragments of the poem -- and so our supposition that this is Anglo-Saxon poetry, Anglo-Saxon literature, is based on an incomplete object, a text that will never be whole. We can't really say its status in the time of its writing -- but it, and many other poems left to us, were similarly fragmented in an 18th century fire, and we'll never know what texts we lost.

The fragments of the past are something we engage in collecting, enshrining, fearful of what might happen if they pass away. And I don't think that's a bad thing. But there's a simultaneous necessity, one I think Rowling points to strongly in her final book -- the responsibility of humans to one another. The responsibility of living, thinking beings to one another.

And so I feel -- ironically, perhaps, but truthfully -- exiled at the end of this long series, which began so long ago. I didn't know about Harry Potter before September 11th 2001. But it was first published in this country in the fall of 1998, when I was only a sophomore in high school. I wrote here about Ron Silliman's beautiful review of the movie, which was so evocative in its description of the way the movies illustrate the effect of time, and their connection to photographs and film which present images out of the past. I was particularly moved by these lines of Silliman's review:

There was a world once, all of these objects say to us, in which so much had not always already happened. In which the irrevocable, that irreversible flow chart, had not already occurred, with all the consequences that can never be undone.

For me, the Harry Potter series will always be connected to the terrible aftershocks of a single day in September of my sophomore year of college. It's a tangled web of problems and forces, questions that aren't easily answered and "enemies" that aren't easily recognized or understood. And that description isn't just for one or the other, the books or the wars being fought in the real world.

But the one unfailing tenet in these books is that in a world where love is possible -- perhaps there was still hope. Hope that "good" could triumph over "evil". Not without pain, not without loss. And not without questions, terrible questions that have no easy answers. But the premise, it seems, of these books is that the better side of what it means to be human can win out over the side that is cruel.

I don't know if these books will ever be called "literature" -- I won't be around in a time that can make those distinctions. Doubtless there are many worthier books by less known authors that might deserve that distinction more than Rowling.

But it seems to me they're part of a tradition of narratives written that argue there is still hope. And maybe it's the childish part of me -- but when such distinctions are made, I hope the lessons of Harry Potter do remain: That choices matter more than talents. That every living thing deserves respect. That people can change, and are often more than what they seem. That sacrifices made for love -- real love, whatever that is -- are worth something. That that same love can "save" people, help them become more humane, help them recognize that we have so much to love each other for.

I can't return to the world of Harry Potter again for the first time. I don't know if I'll ever pass it on to children who will encounter it anew, meeting Harry and his friends and their magical world as if it were the first time those books have ever been opened. And I know the time of their readings will be different from those of my own -- though for better or worse I don't know. What I do know is that the time of these books -- a well-loved refuge for me and many as we navigated the end of one millennium and the blood-stained beginning of another -- have many things to teach the readers to whom one passes them on.

And I sincerely hope I do. Because for all its many pitfalls -- perhaps the greatest gifts we can give to each other are at once the simplest and most elusive things we have: hope, and love.

One final note: As I was getting ready to head to bed Saturday evening, my younger sister, GMH, who had been reading the book all day too, knocked on my door.

"I'm glad we've been expelled from Hogwarts, Kate."

I was confused, and asked her why.

"Because now we can stop worrying about Harry's world, and start fixing our own."

And maybe there's some truth in that, for all of us who've grown up (though not all at the same ages) with the Boy Who Lived.

Back to our regularly scheduled orals reading reports sometime early this week.

*-Thanks are due to both my brilliant little sister -- formerly Opera Sis on this blog, now GMH (who survived reading not only Harry Potter but this post in one day), and LJS, for forcing me to clarify my thinking on the part of this about literature.

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Harry Potter and Time

I've been reading Ron Silliman's blog for awhile now, and so have come to both enjoy and expect its brilliant thought on poetry and the world. Today's post, it seems, speaks to some of the issues of time that have been discussed -- here and also over at In the Middle of late, though from a very different subject matter. His post today reviewing the new Harry Potter film is well worth a read, for wonderfully interesting insights on both the films and on time. An excerpt:

This is the intersection between film & time, something that has fascinated both photographers & their critics almost since the dawn of daguerreotypes. We see a star, say, Judy Garland frozen at a particular moment in her adolescence in The Wizard of Oz, even knowing full well what a sodden mess she later made of her adult life, but in this scene, this film, she is for all purposes perfect. The intersection works other ways as well. Think of how many times in recent years you’ve seen some old film with a pre-Lord of the Rings Viggo Mortensen in it, playing some sleazy young thug. You may have seen the film, or parts of it, a half dozen times on the telly, never before paying attention to this secondary role whose actor seems to have been selected for his ability to convey sliminess. Or the next time you see To Kill a Mockingbird, note Robert Duvall as Boo Radley, or catch Harrison Ford as a young officer in the opening scenes of Apocalypse Now, or both Ford and Duvall in minor spots, Duvall technically uncredited even, in Francis Ford Coppola’s great detective drama, The Conversation.

It doesn’t need to be film, or cinema, to create these effects. Any photograph of Abraham Lincoln, for example, carries this effect, or any still of JFK & Jackie in the convertible in Dallas before that turn onto Elm Street. Or even a photo of the New York skyline with the twin towers still intact. Or maybe a sun-bleached Polaroid with your dead grandparents, or an uncle who died before you were born. There was a world once, all of these objects say to us, in which so much had not always already happened. In which the irrevocable, that irreversible flow chart, had not already occurred, with all the consequences that can never be undone.

HP5, as the critics have all noted, is a much darker film. Potter is, as he says, “angry all the time.” Ron Weasley has his own surly moments, as does Nigel Longbottom. It’s the dark night of the teen years, only in this fable the dysfunctionality of the family (fabulously figured by Sirius Black’s literal family tree, many of its faces burned or blackened by scandal & conflict, the worst yet to come) is weighted with the whole axis of good & evil. In the portraits that invariably decorate the walls of this film, old Hogwarts faculty, dead ancestors, even kittens move & blink & meow. So also in the aging of its cast, this curious & flawed film franchise manages to figure its most powerful message, that of time.

It's an inspiring piece -- one I'm still too busy to address with the attention it deserves. But I was caught by his words -- particularly There was a world once, all of these objects say to us, in which so much had not always already happened. In which the irrevocable, that irreversible flow chart, had not already occurred, with all the consequences that can never be undone. He catches here part of the difficulty in deciphering the messages (intended or not) bequeathed to us by the past. There is a way in which these representations are never simply objects -- they become, in their own right, the sign of a world already past. Yet, caught momentarily in a picture or a film -- those of us who live always already after glimpse a moment where things still could have gone differently, where the world as we know it was still in the process of becoming. A temporal oddness asserts itself (at least, it does in my mind, which is by no means representative!): the intuition of a world in which our present becomings will have already passed. The knowledge that we're not immune to the effects of time. All commonplace thoughts, until they're brought home in a striking vision of a world that could have become differently.

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There's hope for my inner ten-year-old yet...

Posting at three in the morning might seem a bit strange for someone who will be at Wake Forest's Library again in a mere 4.5 hours. But when offered, last minute, a trip to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the jaded graduate student in me dissipated, and all notions of a 6.30 AM wake up time fell away.

And the funny part is -- I thought I wouldn't see this movie. That this fifth film would finally be the time I sat back and watched the hype from afar, only interested in how it goes because -- let's face it -- I can't wait for this damn series to be over. But from the moment the music started -- it was like the very first time. I was immersed in the world -- and I finally cared again. I found the movie moving. Worth the time, and worth how tired I'll be in a few hours.

I've always suspected my enduring interest and indeed affection for the Harry Potter novels is half to do with nostalgia for a time I thought someone would show up and tell me I was special, and half to do with a rather scathing article AS Byatt wrote about the books a few years back (if she belittled the books, and in such a terribly academic way, the contrariness in me had to like them). But for some reason this movie surprised me.

Yes, the books are unwieldy and could probably do with an editor who cut more of the secondary characters and plots. And perhaps the mythology isn't as complex or interesting as other fictional mythologies (there's an interesting set of words). But -- like so many things -- maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's what we do with it. Maybe it's the little kids who dress up, pretend to have magic, and hear (incidentally) Dumbledore's words to Harry -- that what matters isn't how similar Harry is to Voldemort, but how very, very different; in another book (and movie) that it's our choices, not our abilities, that determine who we are.

And that subtle distinction -- maybe, just maybe -- is worth staying up all night on the 20th to read The Deathly Hallows (two copies and three avid readers at home this month means the night owl -- me -- gets the late shift)...at least, for this 24-year-old kid.

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