In less than two weeks’ time, the eighth and final film of the Harry Potter franchise will hit the theaters. The release of that film will mark the end of a saga—what will the world do without Harry?
According to a not-even-so-recent article in The Guardian, more than 400 million Harry Potter books have been sold. J.K. Rowling is already high up on the list of best-selling authors of all time—having long ago passed favorites like Stephen King, Louis L’Amour, and Dan Brown. Box Office Mojo’s website cites Potter films at #9, #11, #12, #13, #18, #21, and #30 on a list of the all-time highest grossing films. Held together, the films have grossed more than $6 billion.
 |
| Sirius (Gary Oldman) and Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) in a still from one of the films; via wikia.com |
I’m not a huge fan of citing statistics in a discussion about art, but the sea of numbers surrounding Potter mythology are staggering and difficult to ignore. The reality is that Potter is at the point where one cannot simply dismiss him the way one might dismiss Lady Gaga or Michael Crichton. These numbers might mean that Beethoven is to the Beatles as Shakespeare is to Rowling. The cultural impact of 400 billion books is not an easy one to measure, much less even grasp. It’s the way you’d talk about The Catcher in the Rye or Lolita; the world might not quite be the same without them.
~
So what happens after the film? With no forthcoming books or adaptations, the Potter parade has trundled to a halt. Nothing newsworthy will remain save the future availability of Potter via e-Book and the upcoming release of “Pottermore”—a Harry Potter website/online-community/something-or-other. Primed for an October release, J.K. Rowling appeared on Youtube to make the announcement:
“Just as the experience of reading requires that the imaginations of the author and reader together to create the story, so Pottermore will be built, in part, by you, the reader. The digital generation will be able to enjoy a safe, unique, online reading experience built around the Potter books.”
This all sounds perfectly pleasant, but I’m lost as to what she’s talking about. Rowling’s description isn’t so much a description as a failure at qualification. What does “online reading experience” mean? There are promises of further exposition regarding central characters and other features of the magical world, but couldn’t an encyclopedia/world narrative a la The Silmarillion be nicer? How can the reader possibly “build” a narrative story? Are we talking about a videogame here? (Potter videogames are already on the market, so I’m assuming not…although a World of Warcraft scenario may not be altogether out of the question…)
I fear that the last film truly marks the end. Thinking that Potter’s world lives on somewhere past the last line and the last frame would be whimsical indeed. But that doesn’t mean Potter won’t stop being there; it certainly doesn’t mean that it will stop being read. With 400 million copies of the books in circulation, it seems as if a copy ought to reach everyone’s hands at one point or another.
~
Even my father read The Sorcerer’s Stone (or Philosopher’s—why did we change it?). Not that it seems like much of an accomplishment; he didn’t read the second book or any of the others. But the fact remains that my father sat down with the book—my father, who has read, on average, probably two books a year for as long as I can remember. He wasn’t mesmerized by it like his children, but he certainly read it.
Reading up on the universe of criticism surrounding Harry Potter, one of the bitterest critics must be the Ron Charles, book critic for the Washington Post. He would have taken issue with my father reading Harry Potter; Charles had problems with most adults reading it, suggesting (correctly, I think) that these same adults—even the ones enthralled by the book—never bothered to take the literary paths that Potter opens up for them, paths that lead to writers like Philip Pullman or Susannah Clarke (Charles’s examples). They read Potter and little else. Potter, for them, is a dead end experience.
Charles’s complaints did not end there:
“Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy The Deathly Hallows on a single day. There's something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves—without a movie version or a set of action figures. Through no fault of Rowling’s, Potter mania nonetheless trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide.”
Charles is concerned with this “training” that happens to everyone who reads the Potter series. He’s worried that the public perception of the nature of the novel is shifting and the thought of this makes him unhappy. Reading a novel, for him, is about experiencing “something intimate and private” and the “sense that you and an author are conspiring.” The Potter series admittedly lacks this sense of solitude. I’ve heard stories of families running out on a book’s release date and bringing a single copy back home, trading it back and forth, literally racing to the end. The book then becomes a social experience, something that novels aren’t...*ahem*…supposed to do.
But, given my particular editorializing, you’ll see that I’m not entirely in step with Ron Charles on this one. I can only nod my head as he scolds those badly-read adults who are shortchanging themselves with only Potter and those high-school students who stop reading for fun altogether. But we can’t tell people how to read or tell them that reading’s not social. People will do what they’ve always done: whatever they want to.
~
Back to those statistics at the beginning: I wasn’t quite up front with you. Not to say that they were wrong…more that they were somewhat misleading. However much I hate to seek out the distinction between high and low art or high and low anything, an important point should be made regarding that list of best-selling books and authors.
I somewhat heedlessly compared Harry Potter to Lolita and The Catcher in the Rye. Is that entirely right? Nabokov and Salinger rubbing elbows with J.K. Rowling—not just in terms of sales, but in influence? The fact, however, is that other books also share this elusive company, including Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, and a whole ton of self-help and spiritual guide books that have all faded into obscurity. Being at the top of the list brings neither guaranteed longevity nor guaranteed influence.
What will happen to Potter? We’ll have to wait and see. My only surety is that online communities have no part in this issue. Pottermore will not add more nor less to the Potter saga; Harry will be right where she left him.
~
Best-selling authors of all-time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_authors
Best-selling books of all time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books
No comments:
Post a Comment