Reading: Harry Potter

(Obsessively) reading Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince over the course of the last few days, I've often had pause to stop and think about what makes it so good, and in what ways it is good. It's not the kind of good that requires the use of the OED, or that entangles you in an elegant matrix of intertextual references and allusions, or even that will teach you any kind of important lesson, but the reading experience itself takes hold with the savage urgency of an addiction. So much of the pleasure (for me, anyway) seems to come from an almost physiological reaction to the text - I read HPHBP as soon as I can, whenever I can, feel annoyed and irritable when I am deprived of it before I'm ready to stop reading, and immerse myself in it as a kind of fantasy that just doesn't take shape with other books, even those I genuinely love.

Much of this pleasure simply comes from the amount of space J.K. Rowlings devotes to plot: the book is almost completely plot-driven, with probably 80% of the narrative devoted to exposition or to "first-order" plot advancement. In that way it's more like Hollywood cinema than a traditional novel: very little time given to the philosophical implications of the characters' decisions, setting descriptions are brief and utilitarian, and character behavior is, more often than not, goal-oriented (and, in a kind of delightful move, Rowlings has included more and more uncommon words in each subsequent Potter novel, forcing its masses of addicted adolescent fans - and, at least once, me - to expand their vocabularies).

The effect of all of this is that actually putting the novel down in the middle feels odd. On the level of the sentence, there's not much happening - no virtuoso displays of wordsmithery, no elegant, heartbreaking turns of phrase, just sheer narrative muscle. When a phone call interrupts your reading the entire point of reading a Harry Potter novel has also been suspended; you haven't got anything out of it because the only thing worth getting out of it is getting everything it has in it out of it; it's much more about the story than the discourse.

And of course it's very satisfying when you finish because what you've finished is the long, tortured thought that is the book in its entirety. Each sentence is a building block, unimportant without a picture of the entire structure. The teleology of reading such a novel is the drive to hammer home the keystone and erect the edifice in its totality. It's weird - this is not the type of novel I usually prefer to read.

The other thing, I think, that makes it so satisfying is how the magic in the novel functions. Magic in Harry Potter, in some sense, is the same as the writing that writes it - magic accomplishes tasks, and stands in for technology (that "magic" is just one of several elements in referential economy with the real situates Harry Potter in the realm of quasi-historical allegory anyway - but that's a different post). Magic is goal-oriented in much the same way as the characters and plot - all three can function as narrative pathways to a visible end. But the thing that makes it so absolutely satisfying is that it quantifies and "makes real" certain traits that usually have no concrete articulation. Words like "determination," "concentration," and the like usually, in my experience, simply mean "try harder." If I'm told that I'm not concentrating hard enough, or that I'm not determined enough, usually the person who is telling me to do those things is simply telling me to do whatever it was that I was doing before, only moreso. In the world of Harry Potter, though, it's different. Apparition, for example, is a verb as well as a noun in the world of the novel. To "apparate" is basically to teleport from one place to another. One of the things you have to do is "determine" where you want to apparate - that is, determination is a force you exert mentally. Now, usually this would mean "determine where you want to go, and use some other tool to get there," but in the case of Harry Potter determination itself, fierce concentration on a destination, will get you there. There is no medium through which determination moves - it is the agent of change in no abstract sense.

Going back, this seems to be another clue as to the reason why I personally feel so sucked in by the novels (aside from a few political reasons). The magic in Harry Potter, one of its biggest draws, is a code word for the unmediated realization of intellectual potential. Of course it is mediated is certain other ways, but by and large I get the sense that magic is a kind of metaphysical meritocracy whereby those who are born with natural talent excel, but those without are given the necessary tools to bring themselves up to snuff. Imagine, then, if among the multivalent meanings of "magic," one of them is in fact technology - imagine how we would live if we were forced to create that technology on our own, if, in some sense, its existence were predicated on whether or not it could be reproduced from the ground up by the individual. In a way Harry Potter itself builds and rebuilds this alternate technological model with each novel, suggesting that technology is not, in fact, an accumulation of better, faster, cleaner machines that come clunking to us through history; rather it may be the case that technology is the story we tell ourselves in order to organize our own moments of creation around a sleeker narrative, one clearly defined and teleological, totally rational, and not in the least magical.