Harry Potter’s legacy

JUL 15 -

Once upon a time, children’s literature used to be full of predictable moral tales. Along came Harry Potter, and the genre was never the same again.

For the first time in children’s literature, HP discussed mature issues like death and depression, candidly and without patronising. Its immense popularity meant that the bar was raised for maturity in children’s books. Its successors (many of whom, like Clarissa Clare, admit to being fans of Harry Potter) have followed suit. Artemis Fowl’s father is dead and mother deranged, Katniss Everdeen is her family’s sole breadwinner at twelve, Lyra of His Dark Materials watches her friend die, and A series of Unfortunate Events is exactly that, beginning with the death of the children’s parents and getting worse. The predictable morality, the safe ending where only the villain (conveniently) dies, exists no more. Some books have gone farther than HP by dabbling in the one field that HP left alone: forbidden sexuality. Twilight depicts a man falling in love with an infant, while in Mortal Instruments, siblings fall in love. These love stories have come a long from Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn raised his cup to Eowyn and she nodded back.

Further challenging the notion that children’s literature belongs at the lower end of the IQ scale, the new writers quote a plethora of “intellectual” material that is hard to undermine. JK Rowling has an advanced degree in literature and cites Jane Austen as an influence. Lemony Snicket quotes such a mind boggling array, but is particularly taken with Herman Melville. Hunger Games has drawn parallels to Greek myths, and even Twilight consistently quotes Emily Bronte and Shakespeare. His Dark Materials and Mortal Instruments quote Paradise Lost and the Bible, introducing a new generation to complex theological issues.

However, what has been gained in intelligence has been lost in the persona. Pre HP books treated magic with the utmost reverence, their grave and lyrical language molded on the language of real myths. Words like glorious, awe, high, wonderful, often accompanied magic, and you would be hard put to find a single joke in them. Along came harry potter, with Fred and George making stink bombs and pig shaped firecrackers, and Mad-eye Moody giving tips on how to avoid setting your butt on fire from carelessly placed wands. Likewise, successive writers reserve the grave voice for deaths, and use humor in the most unexpected situations.  In Mortal Instruments, a woman upbraids the adopted protagonist by saying that “the crow is forced to raise the cuckoo’s enormous, ungrateful child”. Jace’s response: “are you calling me fat?”

A prominent characteristic of this new persona is demystification. When Gandalf roused Theoden out of a decades’ long stupor, he did not use spells. Instead, he used words—normal words like awaken, behold, and watch, to heal the king in a magical ambience of thunder and lightning. All in all, a thoroughly mystical scene where you do not know (and are not supposed to know) where the magic is coming from. Cut to HP, where Dumbledore will tell you exactly what spell he used to drive the inferi away and save Harry. Rowling dragged mysticism to its deathbed by giving the details of every wand jab required for each piece of magic. The time is past when you could use hazy words like magic, love, or “something out there” to explain plot loopholes. Today the slightest plot mistake could be plastered all over the internet as the next meme. (Twilight, the only modern fantasy that veers towards mysticism instead of explanation, happens to be the most lampooned of the bunch).

Once upon a time in Narnia, children could vanish into the cupboard and magically acquire a new royal manner of speaking on the other side. Today, the transitions are handled more realistically. Even though death eaters address Lord Voldemort in Victorian language, Harry calls him “your boss.” Edward uses flowery, hundred year old words, but Bella responds normally. Some writers still struggle with the transition. Some writers, like Lemony Snicket and Philip Pullman, deal with the transition by creating parallel universes where the rules of our universe just don’t apply.

Alternate universes mean that that with each new book, we have new magical creatures and substances. His Dark Materials has external souls called daemons, Hunger Games has mutants, and Mortal Instruments has runes carved into people’s bodies. As long as the writers create everything anew, it’s fine, but when they borrow old mythologies and create variations, then comes the trouble. In Twilight, vampires are called “cold ones”, who sparkle in the sun instead of burning. In Mortal Instruments, vampires are demonic “children of the night” instead. Elves were tall, wise creatures in Lord of the Rings; they became tiny chatterboxes in HP; and mean shape shifters in Mortal Instruments. In Lightening Thief, the writer has created farfetched loopholes to explain why long dead characters from Greek myths (like the Minotaur), are still walking around.

Some of these books have been around since before Harry Potter—notably Wind on Fire and His Dark Materials. But they languished in a small corner of the reading world —read only by diehard fans. George RR Martin wrote fantasy in a casual voice long before Rowling did, and His Dark Materials won several book awards despite competing with HP itself, but even such brilliant books could not find much popularity because fantasy simply was not as big then. Hunger Games might have suffered the same fate if it had come before HP. HP’s success opened the floodgates, and today even mediocre fantasy books like Twilight are riding high on HP aftershocks. Bringing fantasy into the mainstream may be HP’s most significant legacy for the future.


Source: http://www.ekantipur.com/2012/07/15/oped/harry-potters-legacy/357172/