Seeing Past the End of Fandom's Nose

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.