[LINK] Two critical Harry Potter links

[rfmcdonald]

First, imomus's "Dickens, the humanity!", excerpted below.

Nobody is telling us the new Harry Potter, or the last series of The Wire, or Bill Viola's new triptych is great because it shares insight with Kafka or Beckett or T.S. Eliot. No, we make a big lacuna over everything artists told us in the 20th century -- stuff rooted in Nietzsche and Freud and the Futurists and the Surrealists and all that nihilist dynamite.

Instead, they're invoking Dickens. Now, I have nothing against Dickens -- it's amusing, if a little exhausting, to keep meeting a man with a funny name who proclaims "I'll eat my head!", or to weep over the death of Little Nell. But is rolling out the name of a 19th century writer really the best way to legitimize art being made now? Have we just decided to skip the 20th century entirely?

"Rowling understands that grief is part of what makes us wholly human, along with the ability to love and forgive and show remorse. And while magic is ultimately seen to have limits -- Death has its dominion, even at Hogwarts -- love does not." That's novelist Elizabeth Hand, writing about the new Harry Potter in the Washington Post.

I'm already disturbed, in that, by the idea that some humans are not "fully human". You can already see, right there, how this brand of "humanism" might be employed in an inhumane way. We have to work to be human? Some of us aren't?

The kind of big-canvas, 19th century humanism being touted here is secularized religion, and therefore teleological (does love really have no bounds? Does human life really only gain meaning from suffering, vicar?) and rhetorical, designed to sweep us along, sweep us away, make us cry. Hand tells us she wept at the end of the Potter book, which reminded her of Dickens.

Next, via Marginal Revolution, Megan McArdle's "Harry Potter: the economics".

There are two ways, I think, that one can present magic: as something that can be done, but only at a price; or as a mysterious force that is poorly understood. So in Orson Scott Card's Hart's Hope, women who perform magic must pay the price in blood, their own or that of others.

Those prices provide the scarcity needed to drive the plot forward. In the Narnia books and the Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, magical power has no obvious cost. But we don't need to understand the costs of magic, because the main characters can't perform it. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having a deus ex machina in a story; your average fiction writer does not need to explain the operation of the law of gravity, or provide a back story for running out of gas at an (in)convenient moment.

But there have to be generally accepted rules. Characters can't get out of the predicament the author is sick of by having the car suddenly start running on sand. Similarly, if your characters will be using magic, they must do so by some generally believable system.

Yet in the Potter books, the costs and limits are too often arbitrary. A patronus charm, for example, is awfully difficult - until Rowling wants a stirring scene in which Harry pulls together an intrepid band of students to Fight the Power, whereupon it becomes simple enough to be taught by an inexperienced fifteen year old. Rowling can only do this because it's thoroughly unclear how magic power is acquired. It seems hard to credit academic labour, when spells are one or two words; and anyway, if that were the determinant, Hermione Granger would be a better wizard than Harry. But if it's something akin to athletic skill, why is it taught at rows of desks? And why aren't students worn out after practicing spells?

The low opportunity cost attached to magic spills over into the thoroughly unbelievable wizard economy. Why are the Weasleys poor? Why would any wizard be? Anything they need, except scarce magical objects, can be obtained by ordering a house elf to do it, or casting a spell, or, in a pinch, making objects like dinner, or a house, assemble themselves. Yet the Weasleys are poor not just by wizard standards, but by ours: they lack things like new clothes and textbooks that should be easily obtainable with a few magic words. Why?

I disagree with the authors--the style of the popular novels of the 19th century has remained popular for a reason, and users of magic of the Potterverse are constrained in their abilities in certain predictable ways--but their essays do raise interesting points about, respectively, the structures of popular literature and fictional universes.