J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels have sold in excess of 325 million copies, with the first run of the last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, having a first print run of 12 million copies in the United States, making Rowling the highest paid writer in literary history. Her novels have turned an illiterate generation into avid readers.
Yet she, and other writers such as Dan Brown, seem to have begun the end of literature. Their poorly written novels appeal to a DVD generation that wants easy, fast reads with little substance. Bookshop windows are full of copies of the most popular novels, alongside guides to said novels, and spin-off books. You get biographies of J.K. Rowling and other celebrities, a few cookbooks, and some travel guides. My local Waterstones has ‘Literature’ section smaller than my own little bookcase, with one copy of each of a small selection of well-known authors’ works, and twice as many of each edition of each Harry Potter book than the whole ‘Literature’ section put together.
But hell, Waterstones and co. are big businesses that need to make profits. They are just doing what they have to do to stay a float. Sadly, if they were to stock a thousand copies of ‘Howl’ I doubted they sell them in a year. You can’t force the population to get good taste, all you can to do is give them what they want.
And if the people like Harry Potter, then so be it. Rowling can’t be held accountable for the damage her books appear to be doing to real literature. She’s created a monster that is unstoppable and subject to the whim of the readers.
Thanks to the widespread love of Harry Potter, every shop wants to be able to sell the latest book in the series. But of course, competition comes into the picture. Shops must sell the book at profit, or else there is no point in selling it, and so they all compete for the buyers. And because of this, the companies with the greatest spending power will usually prevail, at massive cost to those smaller companies who just can’t keep up. It’s sad, but that’s the way the world goes round.
And when it’s not just bookshops that sell books, then there are even bigger problems for smaller shops to face. With Tesco and Asda and the rest selling Potter, customers are more likely to buy there, with better prices and convenience. In fact, the big supermarkets can afford to sell the books at lower prices than they buy them, and absorb the cost through the spending of the customers in other departments.
And so we have Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code in supermarkets and in the windows of Waterstones, and the little bookshops scrape by with the help of readers of real literature, who are dwindling in numbers are getting little in the way of decent new literature, because every publisher wants the new hit book about wizards and guns. Why should Bloomsbury want a revolutionary new literary style on their books when they could otherwise have to dig through a pile of cash to find ‘the books’?
The champions of mad new literary forms have often been the small time publishers, and the small time bookshops. But these are closing and folding under the pressures of a saturated marketplace.
Who can imagine Six Gallery and City Lights being as influential today as they were so many years ago? It is impossible to see similar organisations having the same beautiful influence in a world where everyone is home watching Big Brother, and who know only of Rowling and Brown in the world of books. There would be little interest in a prophetic poetry reading or cheap little chapbooks that change the readers’ lives.
But no one wants change. They don’t want to read a new style of writing or hear revolutionary ideas. The people want to be cheaply amused with silly little tales and not have to think too much. Generations of big ideas and social change have contented and exhausted people into a mass of lazy rabble with no hopes or aspirations or mad notions.
It’s hard to see a generation of idealist radicals ready to make the world a better place stemming from the cult of Potter. I can’t imagine millions of fans becoming wizards and witches and learning about spells and potions and the dark arts, like Kerouac sent millions ‘on the road’. I can hardly see brilliant writers of the future (if they come to be) remarking upon Rowling’s influence upon their work. And it’s doubtful English PhD students will be writing magnificent glowing studies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
But Harry Potter has turned kids onto reading… True, and this is great, if the kids understand that there is more to books than the merchandise and movies that accompany them. If the kids go back and read Dahl and Carroll and Kipling and develop wide varieties of interest that spawns new and creative writers, then that’s fine. If the kids themselves continue a wider spectrum of interest that turns them into a generation of experimental and thoughtful writers, then that’s fine.
But it’s all about the cult of celebrity and the cheap pacification and the aisles of lunchboxes and t-shirts and action figures. Harry Potter has become an obsession and created narrow-minded readers with little care for anything beyond ‘does he die at the end?’
Critic Harold Bloom argues against the tide of praise, saying ‘Rowling’s mind is so governed by clichés and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.’ However, the series has mostly gathered critical acclaim, except for the usual circle of religious and feminist ‘critics’ who apply the same rhetoric to Harry Potter as to any non-conventional text. Mostly, the criticism from even pro-Potter critics seems to centre on the rigid structures and plot devices Rowling uses: having Harry start ever novel in the same place, have clichéd and poorly drawn characters, and similar situations and character responses throughout each book.
But back to Bloom. His 2003 article for the Boston Globe, ‘Dumbing down American readers’, attacks J.K. Rowling and Stephen King for their awful books, and the literary community of today for rewarding Rowling and King, due only to their commercial success. In savaging her work, Bloom remarks upon Rowling’s use of phrases such as ‘stretch their legs’ being used dozens of times within a few pages.
