One of my favorite things to read is well-done criticism of texts
I enjoy--especially if that criticism is fan-facing rather than geared towards
academics. It's not that I don't enjoy a good, rigorous academic discussion; I
just find that writers who expect their audiences to be fans usually do a
better job remembering that they like the text in the first place. I like to
analyze things I love; I like to think about them and see how they fit
together. That's one reason I like to read criticism. Another is that good
criticism opens the text up and points the way toward fuller understanding,
toward greater engagement. The very best criticism makes me want nothing more
than to read or watch the texts in question immediately--no matter how many
times I've experienced them already.
I've been on a Harry Potter criticism kick lately, partly
because I reliably roll around to a renewed interest in HP criticism every couple of years
and partly because I recently heard "Potter pundit" John Granger
speak at the Roanoke Harry
Potter Festival last month,
and I defy any Potter fan to listen to Granger talk and
not be excited about Potter criticism
afterward. Most of the criticism I've been seeking out as a result does what I
love--it opens up the texts (rather than closing them down) and helps me
understand the books more fully. I feel like I'm getting somewhere with this
criticism, rather than spinning my wheels.
I have noticed, however, an
unfortunate tendency in some of this criticism, a tendency I'm sure is most prevalent
in criticism of texts with large fan bases and certainly in criticism of texts
which create an expansive secondary world. That tendency is to try to
understand, on the level of the practical rather than that of the symbolic,
every little piece of the world in question. Criticism that does this is
relying on affirmational fandom,
fannish activities that are about identifying all of the nitty-gritty details
within a secondary world (Star Trek technical
manuals, for example) and which are interested in getting all of those details
"right." While this is usually not the way I prefer to engage in
fandom, I don't see these ways of interacting with texts as any less
celebratory or valid than other forms of fannish activity. However, I do wonder
if, when it comes to textual criticism, affirmational activities don't serve to
pin down the texts rather than opening them up. Affirmational fandom tends to
be interested in practicalities of reality, even if the reality in question is
that of the secondary world of the text. But when criticism becomes overly concerned with the
practicalities of a text, the criticism can strangle access to the substance of
the text, to what the text is about beneath the surface.
I don't mean to say that we
shouldn't, if we are interested in performing textual criticism on texts we
love, ever engage in affirmational fandom about that same text. Getting
immersed in the surface-level details isn't going to prevent anyone from being
able to look beneath the surface. But a focus on those surface-level details when we are trying to look below
them can result in a strange
inability to see past the ends of our noses. The point that has set me off on
this line of thinking is consideration of the Dursleys and their treatment of
Harry.
Why do so many people talk
about the Dursleys as if they are realistic child abusers? I certainly see the
value in considering them
as such, in thinking about and talking about child abuse and the effect it has,
especially if such a conversation helps, in any way, any real child dealing
with such trauma. But I find the fixation I sometimes see in critical
conversations about the Dursleys and their treatment of Harry as some kind of
literary realism to be really perplexing. To do so within the context of the
stories themselves is surely to miss the point, is to look at the surface
details with such intensity as to miss entirely that there's something else
going on.
Now, if there's one thing I'm
not, it's an expert in either children's literature or pediatric psychiatry,
but it seems to me that the Dursleys' treatment of Harry, which if it were
happening in reality,
would be physical and emotional abuse of the most heinous sort, is pretty
solidly situated within a kind of fantasy common in stories written for
children. Their abuse stands in for the way children see the world, not
realistically, but within their imaginations. I remember thinking as a child
that the most reasonable parental actions were atrocities almost too horrible
to be born. Being sent to my room (locked in a cupboard?) or asked to do chores
(made to wait on the Dursleys?) periodically made my parents seem monsters in
my eyes. There is no doubt that the Dursleys actually treat Harry terribly
within the story (they aren't doing reasonable things Harry just sees as awful
through his childish imagination), but that treatment is an exaggeration meant
to appeal to child readers who see in them the exaggerated abuses they haven't
experienced but which they sometimes feel as if they have. (This presupposes
child readers who have not been actually abused, of course,
and that is a
conversation about Harry
Potter and abuse I think it
would be well worth having--though it wouldn't be textual criticism.) Notice,
too, that the Dursleys' abuse is not portrayed particularly realistically--the
story is innocent of the horrific specificity that would arise for a child
subject to such abuse in reality; there is plenty of darkness in HP, but most of it is not to do
with Harry's treatment by his relatives. Trying to pin down the Dursleys'
behavior within a real-world understanding of abuse seems utterly pointless to
me if the goal is to understand the
text more fully. Because the
abuse isn't there as a way to look at real-world
abuse. That's not its function. The abuse is surface-level stuff. The real
story is underneath it. Compare this to, say, a hypothetical YA novel about
child abuse. (I'm sure there are many.) For such a book, the abuse would be the story.
If the real story in Harry Potter is not the
abuse and if we are looking to understand the text more fully, questions such
as, "How could none of Harry's (muggle, pre-Hogwarts) teachers have ever
noticed how abused he was?" or "Why doesn't Harry have PTSD?"
seem completely beside the point. They are trying to pin down facts that are
outside the text (in that we have no information about them in the text) and which would be important
in reality but may
not be important to the story.
They feel like affirmational fandom in the same way that questions like
"Where the heck are the toilets on the Enterprise?"
do. There's nothing wrong with those questions. I kind of want to know about
starship bathrooms, actually. How many people have to share one? Is there water involved? And I
would (I have) read fanfic
exploring a Harry Potter with PTSD. But these questions are not textual
criticism. They do not engage with the text itself, with what the text is
doing.
One of the most wonderful
things about fandom is that there are so. many. questions we can ask. Some of
them are about exploring how everything works within the secondary world. (How
far away can you be from an object to use accio on
it? How does one invent a spell, anyway?) Some of them are what ifs. (What if
Aunt Petunia had told Vernon he was an abusive P.O.S. and had run away with
Harry and Dudley to raise them lovingly and supportively?* What if the story
were told from Hermione's point of view? What if Harry were Latino?) And some of
them are about how the story works as a text, rather than how the world works within the text. (How does the series sit
within the history of British fantastical children's literature? What
structures underlie the telling of the story? What are the themes of the
series?)
We use similar and overlapping
techniques to answer all these kinds of questions, and all these kinds of
questions are glorious. But when critical consideration of the text turns into
affirmational exploration of the world within the text, turns into answering
all of the realistic yeah-buts, I think we get bad answers to our critical
questions, not least because affirmational questions are about pinpointing
facts and making them hold still, while critical examination of text is about opening
a text out to new ways of understanding what's there.
*If you want to read that
fanfic, hit me up. I have a rec for you.
