Fudging the issue
Mark Lawson reviews HP5 and says it proves JK Rowling is “artistically driven” despite the series being marketed beyond the possible merits of its content. “Rowling and Bloomsbury have turned literature into news” he writes, excusing his speed-reading of the novel. Whether the HP series is news that stays news (to use Ezra Pound’s definition of literature) is another question. All the indications suggest, in fact, that the definition of literature is the real question.
Lawson presents Newsnight Review, the BBC’s one serious cultural discussion programme (linked to in Friday�s blog). He is determindedly populist in order to resist the label of “highbrow”, which is a label imposed by cultural commissars in order to frighten the labelled thing into dumbing down. Usually, NR looks at movies, musical theatre and TV programmes. Sometimes, though it’s increasing rare nowadays, they review books. When not looking at those that somehow relate to current political chatter, he gets the panel to read some US crime thriller, always asking why such ripping good reads do not get the “literary recognition” they deserve. The question is always rhetorical. At least, an answer is irrelevant. Here’s why:
In today’s NYT (requires registration) Bruno Maddox says that the repackaging of HP books into a more adult covers helped readers display an interest in a “dense and improving” novels rather than a children’s book (again, reading is about display only). However, he is reviewing Jasper Fforde’s novel Lost in a Good Book, not HP. But he makes the connection because he says that:
“What we need � is an analogue of Harry Potter just for adults: a franchise brainy enough to feel like proper reading - playful and ironic enough to risk no confusion with the nubile elves and unbreakable swords of the appalling post-Tolkien ‘adult fantasy’ genre - yet as effortlessly readable and unashamedly escapist as the best children’s fiction.”
He says Fforde’s novel is such a book. The “story bounds along in one-sentence paragraphs that JK Rowling would be proud of”. “In other words” Maddox claims “this isn’t literary fiction”. What? Clearly there is a caricature going on here. “Literary fiction”, it seems, is the sort of thing that uses fancy words in long, endlessly strung-out sentences.
Yet I have just read an unpublished - and in the current climate of aggressive philistinism, perhaps unpublishable - literary manuscript of extraordinary compression, lightness of touch and emotional resonance that makes Fforde and Rowling look “dense and improving” in comparison.
What we have in Lawson and Maddox (two among many) is highly-paid cultural commentators using the Victorian notion of self-improvement � the sort of thing that lead people to work hard and unquestioningly for the Empire � as a means of revising the understanding of literary art from the dangerous, destructive form it took at the beginning of the 20th Century, back to the false naivete of Dickens. They’re saying that we can improve ourselves only by self-sedation; by becoming children again (the plot of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time is being encouraged into becoming reality). Can there be any other reason why the latest HP book has a character called “Cornelius Fudge”?
Other Splinters posts of interest:
