Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, and: The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter (review)

Growing up in New York, we were reminded every fall of the preemption by the film Heidi of the last few minutes of a historic Giants football game—or it might have been a Jets football game; the story has passed into myth now, and the details have become blurred. The network executives having decided that the outcome was inevitable, as the Giants were so very far behind, felt it was reasonable to begin showing the film as scheduled. That they could not have known that those last few minutes would be some of the most miraculous in football history did not spare them the wrath of New York, as the Giants came from well behind to win the game, though I don't remember how.

That myth springs to mind while reading these first two book-length collections of critical essays on the Harry Potter novels. As is so frequently mentioned throughout the essays, we are in media res in a series which the author considers to be essentially one long novel. Is it too early for literary analysis that means to consider the technique and mode of the books? Is it too soon to evaluate the achievement of this artist?

The evidence of these two books is equivocal. Already they seem dated, based as they are upon only the first four of the series. Both were compiled before the publication of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in June 2003, so at times conclusions, and arguments based on those conclusions, are off the mark. In Anatol's collection, for example, Ximena Gallardo-C. and C. Jason Smith argue that Harry's return to the Dursley home each summer fulfills a "spatially recursive narrative" (195), but fail to acknowledge that there is now a new plot dimension to the necessity of that return. When Veronica L. Schanoes suggests that "Snape is, at heart, mean-spirited" (134), she has not yet read that this characterization is complicated quite a bit by the mean-spiritedness of—surprise—James Potter in Book 5. Similarly, in Whited's collection Mary Pharr notes Snape's "badgering" of Harry Potter and company is done "inexcusably" (59), but that assessment is now quite wrong. Later, M. Katherine Grimes notes that like the evil step-mothers of fairy tales, Petunia Dursley "is willing to abandon the child entrusted to her care" (95); she later notes that "Harry's feelings about his father are not ambivalent" (111); neither, of course, is quite the case by the end of Book 5.

And there is also the spell of the current mania to deal with. Would it be wise to wait for assessments until after the series is complete as the author envisions (rather than as critics too quickly predict), and even—dare one presume that the time will come—when assessments are not clouded by fan-dom? Are the quotations from Internet chats that form so much of the evidence of so many of these essays really the stuff of literary criticism?

No, they're not; one feels over and over again in many of these essays the lack of solid scholarly foundations. In Anatol's collection, Brycchan Carey's declarative opening to his essay, that slavery "has always been central to children's literature" (103), and his statement that the Harry Potter novels are "among the most politically engaged novels to have been written for children in recent years" (105) feel like the kind of overstatements—and just plain errors—made by someone not solidly familiar with the field. Anatol's own leaps come in her postcolonial desire to connect Rowling's work to the empire building of the last century. Rowling's link between snakes and fear depends, she says, "upon the reader's assumption of the exotic qualities of India" (169); similarly, the presence of the giant spider and its offspring in the Forbidden...