Harry Potter and the Childish Adult

By A.S. Byatt

Published: The New York Times, Monday, July 7, 2003

What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success of the Harry Potter books? Why do they
satisfy children and -- a much harder question -- why do so many adults read them? I think part of the
answer to the first question is that they are written from inside a child's-eye view, with a sure instinct for
childish psychology. But then how do we answer the second question? Surely one precludes the other.
The easy question first. Freud described what he called the ''family romance,'' in which a young
child, dissatisfied with its ordinary home and parents, invents a fairy tale in which it is secretly of noble
origin, and may even be marked out as a hero who is destined to save the world. In J. K. Rowling's books,
Harry is the orphaned child of wizards who were murdered trying to save his life. He lives, for
unconvincingly explained reasons, with his aunt and uncle, the truly dreadful Dursleys, who represent, I
believe, his real ''real'' family, and are depicted with a relentless, gleeful, overdone venom. The Dursleys
are his true enemy. When he arrives at wizarding school, he moves into a world where everyone, good
and evil, recognizes his importance, and tries either to protect or destroy him.
The family romance is a latency-period fantasy, belonging to the drowsy years between 7 and
adolescence. In ''Order of the Phoenix,'' Harry, now 15, is meant to be adolescent. He spends a lot of the
book becoming excessively angry with his protectors and tormentors alike. He discovers that his late (and
''real'') father was not a perfect magical role model, but someone who went in for fits of nasty playground
bullying. He also discovers that his mind is linked to the evil Lord Voldemort, thereby making him
responsible in some measure for acts of violence his nemesis commits.
In psychoanalytic terms, having projected his childish rage onto the caricature Dursleys, and
retained his innocent goodness, Harry now experiences that rage as capable of spilling outward,
imperiling his friends. But does this mean Harry is growing up? Not really. The perspective is still child's-
eye. There are no insights that reflect someone on the verge of adulthood. Harry's first date with a female
wizard is unbelievably limp, filled with an 8-year-old's conversational maneuvers.
Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing ''secondary worlds.'' Ms. Rowling's world is
a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of
children's literature -- from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from ''Star Wars'' to Diana
Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that clichés endure because they represent
truths. Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and
immediately available to the child's own power of fantasizing.
The important thing about this particular secondary world is that it is symbiotic with the real
modern world. Magic, in myth and fairy tales, is about contacts with the inhuman -- trees and creatures,
unseen forces. Most fairy story writers hate and fear machines. Ms. Rowling's wizards shun them and use
magic instead, but their world is a caricature of the real world and has trains, hospitals, newspapers and
competitive sport. Much of the real evil in the later books is caused by newspaper gossip columnists who
make Harry into a dubious celebrity, which is the modern word for the chosen hero. Most of the rest of
the evil (apart from Voldemort) is caused by bureaucratic interference in educational affairs.
Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose
imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening)
mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby
said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ''only personal.'' Nobody is trying to save
or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.
So, yes, the attraction for children can be explained by the powerful working of the fantasy of
escape and empowerment, combined with the fact that the stories are comfortable, funny, just frightening
enough.
They comfort against childhood fears as Georgette Heyer once comforted us against the truths of
the relations between men and women, her detective stories domesticating and blanket-wrapping death.
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These are good books of their kind. But why would grown-up men and women become obsessed by jokey
latency fantasies?
Comfort, I think, is part of the reason. Childhood reading remains potent for most of us. In a recent
BBC survey of the top 100 ''best reads,'' more than a quarter were children's books. We like to regress. I
know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality
in his world, which is restful.
But in the case of the great children's writers of the recent past, there was a compensating
seriousness. There was -- and is -- a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark
forests. Susan Cooper's teenage wizard discovers his magic powers and discovers simultaneously that he
is in a cosmic battle between good and evil forces. Every bush and cloud glitters with secret significance.
Alan Garner peoples real landscapes with malign, inhuman elvish beings that hunt humans.
Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture,
when supernatural and inhuman creatures -- from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and
evil -- inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled. If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of
significance we mourn for. Ursula K. Le Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world
where magic really does act as a force. Ms. Rowling's magic wood has nothing in common with these lost
worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.
In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that
hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild.
They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the
ersatz with what imagination they had.
Similarly, some of Ms. Rowling's adult readers are simply reverting to the child they were when
they read the Billy Bunter books, or invested Enid Blyton's pasteboard kids with their own childish
desires and hopes. A surprising number of people -- including many students of literature -- will tell you
they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys
the life of the books. But in the days before dumbing down and cultural studies no one reviewed Enid
Blyton or Georgette Heyer -- as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is
metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for
strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling
originality. Who writes amazing sentences.
It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon. And it is the leveling
effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit,
which they don't really believe exists. It's fine to compare the Brontës with bodice-rippers. It's become
respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called ''consumable'' books. There is nothing wrong
with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's ''magic casements,
opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.''