Sorting Out Genres and Modes

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are overstuffed (sometimes literally). Fellow fantasist Bruce Coville credited her, especially at the start of the series, with putting more neat stuff into every chapter than anyone else. But the books also hit all the buttons for several storytelling genres at once.

There’s the genre of the British school story, itself a subsection of coming-of-age narratives. There’s the mystery genre, as Ken Jennings noted. In some books there’s the sports-book genre, where conflicts get worked out on the playing field. And of course there’s the chosen-one-battles-against-evil genre, which many people mistake for all fantasy.

In fact, I don’t think fantasy is a genre at all. It’s what I call a mode. Genres are defined by the plots readers expect: detective solves puzzling crime, couple gets together, gang pulls off heist (or not), soldiers carry out mission, chosen one defeats evil, and so on.

In contrast, modes are defined by their settings and what is possible in those fictional worlds. The major modes I see are:

• contemporary realistic—stories set in the world that readers recognize as like their own.
• historic, and thus constrained to some extent by past events.
• fantastic, breaking the currently known laws and limits of physics. This mode could be defined through science (science fiction) or magic (fantasy). 
• heightened, in which coincidences, emotions, and stakes are turned up a couple of notches above the realistic. When played for laughs, this produces farce. When played seriously, it’s melodrama.   

Genre stories can be told within each of those modes. Thus, there are mysteries set in a fantasy world, romances told in the historical mode, sports stories with extraterrestrials, crime novels either farcical and melodramatic, and so on.

Rowling as a Mystery Writer All Along

Last week’s revelation that J. K. Rowling has published a pseudonymous murder mystery sent folks back to the archives for clues they wished they had seen all along: her remarks that she might publish under another name, a brief mention of a Scottish mystery she was trying out.

But the most perspicacious commenter was probably trivia master Ken Jennings, who wrote back in 2007:

I read the Harry Potter books as enormously sophisticated Scooby-Doo mysteries.

Structurally, these aren’t fantasy novels at all. They’re fair-play mysteries in wizard’s clothing–novels with not just plots and characters and setpieces, but “solutions” as well. J. K. Rowling is justly praised for her elaborate and meticulous world-building, but I’m convinced that a lot of that endless detail is just there for standard detective-novel purposes: to distract, to confound, to envelop the real “clues” in a Cloak of Invisibility. . . .

Rowling seems to draw more from the Agatha Christie tradition: a multiplicity of colorful “suspects,” many with hidden agendas; red herrings galore; and a final drawing-room exposition-fest in which Hercule Dumbledore explains How It Was Done.

Just as in a murder mystery, the guilty party is always the least likely suspect. . . . Some of these reveals even involve the Hogwarts equivalent of a Scooby-Doo rubber mask coming off the crotchety caretaker: Quirrell’s turban, Pettigrew’s Animagus disguise, Barty Crouch, Jr.’s Polyjuice Potion. “Like, zoiks, Hermione–it was Old Man Milligrew all along!” . . .

I bet Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter book–talk about a hard act to follow–will be a classic mystery of some kind. I don’t know if it’ll be a hard-boiled gumshoe case, a true-crime police procedural, a classic manor-house throwback, or what, but it’ll be a mystery novel. She’s been writing them all along, after all. It’s just that no one’s noticed.

And couldn’t Rupert Grint play a fine Shaggy?

TOMORROW: What this should tell us about genre.

Harry Potter Changes the Rules Again

Every new Harry Potter book changed the rules of American publishing. The first book signaled the resurgence of fantasy after years of doldrums. Then readers started using Amazon.co.uk to get the second volume. That necessitated worldwide publication dates, which led to midnight book parties.

The New York Times changed its bestseller lists to keep those darned kids from annoying authors of adult fiction. Volumes 4 and above showed that ten-year-olds gladly read books more than twice as long as people expected, and so on.

I thought that the end of the series might mean the end of its disruptions. But the recent release of J. K. Rowling’s digital editions is making the same sort of waves. Not only is she managing those rights herself through her Pottermore site, but her team decided to release the ebooks without digital rights management (DRM) protection.

Mike Shatzkin passes on the results he heard from Charlie Redmayne of Pottermore:

The key to Charlie’s disruption was his willingness to substitute watermarking for DRM. He said it definitely made him nervous to do it, but he couldn’t see any other way to achieve what he wanted for Pottermore. He had to be able to sell to any device; he wanted to be able to allow any purchaser complete interoperability. There was no way to do that and maintain DRM. . . .

Apparently, Potter ebook files started showing up on file-sharing sites pretty much right away after they opened. But before they could serve any takedown notices, Charlie says the community of sharers reacted. They said “C’mon now. Here we have a publisher doing what we’ve been asking for: delivering content DRM-free, across devices, at a reasonable price. And, by the way, don’t you know your file up there on the sharing site is watermarked? They know who you are!” And then the pirated content started being taken down by the community, before Pottermore could react. And very quickly, there were fewer pirated copies out there than before.

Shatzkin also reports that major British publishers were saying they might discard DRM as well. Already Tor announced that it would stop using it. Paid Content quoted an anonymous publishing executive saying that he or she now breaks DRM on ebooks. The industry may decide that going DRM-free is the only way to stem the rising flood of Amazon.

Of course, whenever the Harry Potter books shift the ground in publishing, the big question is whether those changes will benefit, or even affect, ordinary titles. Most books don’t have thousands of people lined up to buy them before pub date. Most authors haven’t become richer than the queen of England and therefore able to take chances with their digital domain.

Moorcock: “the prose of the nursery-room”

From Michael Moorcock’s essay “Epic Pooh,” as archived at Revolution SF (it was originally written in 1978, revised in 1989, and revised again to note recent authors):

The sort of prose most often identified with "high" fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft:

One day when the sun had come back over the forest, bringing with it the scent of May, and all the streams of the Forest were tinkling happily to find themselves their own pretty shape again, and the little pools lay dreaming of the life they had seen and the big things they had done, and in the warmth and quiet of the Forest the cuckoo was trying over his voice carefully and listening to see if he liked it, and wood-pigeons were complaining gently to themselves in their lazy comfortable way that it was the other fellow's fault, but it didn't matter very much; on such a day as this Christopher Robin whistled in a special way he had, and Owl came flying out of the Hundred Acre Wood to see what was wanted.

Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926

It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful. It is the tone of many forgotten British and American bestsellers, well-remembered children's books, like The Wind in the Willows, you often hear it in regional fiction addressed to a local audience, or, in a more sophisticated form, James Barrie (Dear Brutus, Mary Rose and, of course, Peter Pan).

Unlike the tone of E. Nesbit (Five Children and It etc.), Richmal Crompton (the 'William' books) Terry Pratchett or the redoubtable J.K.Rowling, it is sentimental, slightly distanced, often wistful, a trifle retrospective; it contains little wit and much whimsy.

Wait a minute! Milne’s characterization of Eeyore is hilarious. But his narrative voice is indeed the voice of an adult looking back/down on childhood. Nesbit’s narrative voice, on the other hand, is an author in conspiracy with young readers.

Perhaps the “voice of the nursery-room” is one reason why some of the novels Moorcock mentions—Lord of the Rings and Watership Down among them—are treated as books for young people even though their authors conceived them as books for adults.

Male and Female Storytelling Energies?

Last week, in a discussion on Facebook of whether Harry Potter is a feminist saga (prompted by this essay), author Bruce Coville shared some interesting thoughts about what defines a “boy book”:

It's not the gender, it's the energy. I've spent a couple of decades thinking about this, in no small part because of the reaction to MY TEACHER IS AN ALIEN. This is a book I wrote first person female, yet it is still considered a "boy's book." I cracked my brain over this for a long time, and in the end I came to the conclusion that it's about the "storytelling energy" of a story. . . .

The very best (and most successful) books partake equallly of male storytelling energy (action!) and female storytelling energy (relationship).

Jo Rowling merges them seamlessly.

Coville has been talking about that blend for years, which is why I feel comfortable quoting his Facebook comments.

I think gender roles are one of the areas in which Rowling’s execution actually undercuts the values on the surface of her books. But Coville is correct about the types of energy she’s combined in her story, whether or not those are intrinsically male and female.

Google? They Don’t Even Have Felt-tips Yet!

In the latest New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes:

When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion.

The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far.

Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she doing that?” they whisper. “Why doesn’t she just Google it?”

Well, yes, but mostly no. While it’s true that the internet has run ahead of many authors’ foresight, J. K. Rowling wasn’t trying to depict even mid-1990s technology. Personal computers had been well established by the time she conceived and wrote the Harry Potter books, but it’s difficult to find them in her universe. And even without Google, an up-to-date Hermione could have used computerized library catalogs, Altavista, and Yahoo.

Rowling chose to make Hogwarts a quaintly old-fashioned place. Its students don’t even use ballpoint pens. They use quills, giving the WB Shop one more thing to sell. That sort of pen is so old-fashioned that it seems delightful, but preparing and maintaining a quill pen was a real chore, and people gave them up a century and a half ago as soon as metal nibs became readily available.

Harry Potter and the Flawed Interpretation

Last month The Awl published Maria Bustillo’s attack on the Harry Potter series in the guise of a review of the movie adapted from the sixth-and-a-half book. The essay struck me as far more ad hominem and nasty than it needed to be, and simply erroneous in some aspects.

Bustillo is correct, however, that J. K. Rowling’s books undercut her progressive surface themes through the structure of the magical world where they take place. Most particularly, as the article notes, there’s the congenital divide between wizards and muggles, and the never-resolved issue of the house elves.

But Bustillo misses how the books give so many of their good characters solid Anglo-Saxon names (Harry Potter, Granger, Weasley, Dumbledore, Black) while the worst villains have Latinate and French names (Lucius Malfoy, Voldemort, Lestrange). And foreigners are always funny—even as the books depict a modern multiethnic British society. In other words, Rowling’s fantasy world is both founded on some deep British prejudices and inclusive in how it defines being British.

Bustillo errs in identifying the Weasleys—middle-class civil servants—as aristocrats in Rowling’s world simply because they’re wizards. In fact, the Weasley clan is dedicated to good governance, deference to democratic authority, and protection of “muggles.” Symbolically, I think their ancient homestead actually reflects another deep prejudice: that the countryside is nicer than the city, regardless of class.

Bustillo closes with praise for Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which I can’t fault but I also can’t see as a ground-breaking recommendation. I wonder if she’s ever applied her critical eyes to that series and how it, too, reflects British notions of class. (All servants’ daemons being dogs, for example.) And perhaps we can discuss whether fantasy literature’s potentially Manichean presentation of good and evil needs to be reflected in critical thinking about it.

Rowling’s Patriotism

The Times of London, a right-leaning newspaper but eager as any media outlet for a superstar byline, just published this essay by J. K. Rowling on why she dislikes the Conservative Party platform.

Even more important, Rowling explains why she pays taxes on her many millions of pounds in income in Britain when many other subjects with incomes nearly as high—including, it appears, the deputy chair of the Conservative Party—live outside the UK for most of the year in order to pay less. It’s a little something called patriotism.

the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize.

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.

Rowling goes on to say, “Child poverty remains a shameful problem in this country, but it will never be solved by throwing millions of pounds of tax breaks at couples who have no children at all.”

Indeed, I like to think that the guiding purpose of a democratic government should be to provide more equal opportunity in an unequal world, for the benefit of future generations. Which gives me an opportunity to note that this is National Library Week, and public and school libraries are one great equalizer.

Confirming the True History of Harry

Back in 2005, I set forth a hypothesis about how Scholastic's purchase of U.S. rights in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone produced extra press attention in Britain, which gave the book an aura of magic and helped to make the American firm's gamble into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I repeated that thesis here in 2007.

I was pleased to see that Harry, a History, a chronicle of the Potter phenomenon by Melissa Anelli of The Leaky Cauldron, confirms my understanding of events. The following passage starts on page 54, just after Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic bought the U.S. rights to the first book for a $105,000 advance.

The auction was huge news in Britain, and hardly anyone failed to notice it, least of all Bloomsbury [the London publisher]. The Sun, the British tabloid to whom the racy New York Post would be considered a modest cousin, offered Jo Rowling big bucks for her life story. She didn't sit with the tabloid, but Bloomsbury did want her to tell her story, preferably to the mainstream press in an attempt to get the Harry Potter story seen as a breakout hit that shouldn't be relegated to the children's review pages and specialty magazines like Carousel and Books for Keeps.

"Partly because we loved the book as grown-ups, and partly because of the very newsworthy sales of the book, we took the view that this was a story that we could place in the news pages," said Rosamund [de la Hey, marketer]. "We were very confident that here was something a bit special, so it gave us the brash confidence to go for the moon."

Two days before publication, the Herald in Glasgow published a story in a way that would become very familiar: "Three years ago Joanne Rowling landed in Edinburgh with a baby under one arm and dog-eared manuscript under the other." A few days later Eddie Gibb in the Sunday Times ran a story called "Tales from a Single Mother." In the first week of July came Nigel Reynolds's story on page three of the Telegraph in London: "$100,000 Success Story for Penniless Mother." . . .

The truth combined with assumptions and romance minted her as an icon for struggling young mothers everywhere, whether she liked it or not. . . .

Press around the auction ensured that the first printing of 2,500 paperbacks and 450 hardbacks wasn't enough; the books went into a second printing only four days later.

The small first printing is why those first hardcovers are so valuable today. When it came time to set a print quantity, Bloomsbury was still cautious.

That doesn't take away from the effect the first book had on its readers, as opposed to people reading about it in the press. Anelli also describes (without specific dates) how Bloomsbury began to take in fan mail for Rowling. Some of those letters began "Dear Sir," so--assuming they weren't junk mail--those readers had enjoyed the book without seeing any of the welfare-mom press coverage.

Is Latin Becoming More Popular with Kids?

This week the New York Times reported that more kids are learning Latin in schools, based on a couple of examples from greater New York and these national statistics:

The number of students in the United States taking the National Latin Exam has risen steadily to more than 134,000 students in each of the past two years, from 124,000 in 2003 and 101,000 in 1998, with large increases in remote parts of the country like New Mexico, Alaska and Vermont. The number of students taking the Advanced Placement test in Latin, meanwhile, has nearly doubled over the past 10 years, to 8,654 in 2007.

As one possible factor behind this trend, the newspaper noted that Latin is the basis for the spells in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. That series appeared in the US in 1998.

However, participation in the National Latin Exam rose steadily from 1977 to 2006, with no notable bump from the Harry Potter books or movies. Likewise, in 2004 the Deseret News reported, "The number of students taking Advanced Placement Latin nationally is nearly double what it was a decade ago" in 1994. So that test's rate of growth didn't accelerate in the Potter period, either.

Furthermore, the number of students taking standardized Latin tests might not actually indicate that the language's popularity is rising at the same rate. Six years ago, CNN noted:

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages reports that in 1990, there were 163,923 public high school students--or 1.5 percent--studying Latin. Ten years later, 177,477 public high school students--or 1.3 percent--took the language.

Thus, even though there were more students in Latin classes in 2000 than in 1990, the percentage of all high-school students taking those classes had declined slightly. And that decade overlaps with the periods when more and more students took the NLE and AP tests.

So why the rise in the number of students taking those standardized tests? Well, such tests are what American schooling is all about these days. What's one more exam to smart kids trying to get into top colleges? Indeed, tests are so important to modern American education that one of the most popular arguments for taking Latin now is the promise of doing better on standardized tests of English vocabulary.

A Liberating Discovery from J. K. Rowling

Showing a fine sense of priorities, this year's Harvard class got to hear from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at Class Day exercises and author J. K. Rowling during their more formal commencement. From her remarks:

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

She went on to speak about poverty versus failure, her work at Amnesty International, and lifelong friendships. I suspect her speech will in fact be memorable.

Rowling and the World of Intellectual Property

J. K. Rowling doesn't have a new book out or one anywhere on the horizon, but she's still making publishing news--in two different ways, yet! Both this month's developments involve the wrinkles of copyright law.

Today Rowling is scheduled to testify in New York in her lawsuit to stop RDR Publishing from issuing a "Harry Potter lexicon" based on Steve Vander Ark's website of the same name. She has praised this website (and others), but feels that a book version would compete with her own plans for an encyclopedic guide to her fantasy world.

Everyone agrees that critical writing about Rowling's storytelling and universe (like my own) falls under the copyright law's "fair use" provision. But simply cataloguing and repeating statements from her books, website, and interviews probably would not. The legal question in this lawsuit is whether the Harry Potter Lexicon in book form displays enough creativity to justify its borrowings.

The suit filed by Rowling and her partners says the book lacks "any new creativity, commentary, insight or criticism" about the Harry Potter series. RDR responds that the work "provides a significant amount of original analysis and commentary." I suspect that much of the appeal of the online Harry Potter lexicon was that it didn't claim to offer much original analysis, but rather reflected the books' factual statements with as little editorializing or speculation as possible.

According to the New York Times report,

Mr. Vander Ark said he had initially worried that a book might constitute copyright infringement. “I honestly can’t tell you the origin of that belief,” he said. But when RDR assured him it wasn’t a problem, he said he assumed that because the material was available online and had never been challenged by Ms. Rowling, the book wouldn’t be either.

Vander Ark is not a party to this lawsuit, apparently making this the exceedingly rare case of a publisher indemnifying an author against plagiarism complaints rather than the other way around.

In other Rowling news, Amazon.com is promoting a writing contest for young people with the prize of a look at the company's copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Rowling hand-wrote seven copies of this book and offered them for sale through a charity auction last year. (Ironically, the contest limits entrants to 100 words; Rowling herself is not notable for terseness.)

Amazon has posted lots of photographs of its purchase, either taken with a very small depth-of-field setting on the camera or digitally blurred before posting, so that almost none of the text comes through clearly. That's because Amazon owns one physical copy of Beedle, but Rowling still owns the work's copyright, and the text can't be issued without her permission.

Amazon has published what look like rather thorough summaries of the stories, but those come with critical interpretations. All those in-house reviews are positive to the point of gushing, and focus on the stories' valuable lessons about life rather than on the storytelling:

"Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump" highlights the winking ingenuity of the old witch--who should remind fans of a certain wise and resourceful wizard--and you can imagine how old Babbitty might become a folk hero to young wizards and witches. But more than just a story about the triumph of a clever witch, the tale warns against human weaknesses of greed, arrogance, selfishness and duplicity, and shows how these errant (but not evil) characters come to learn the error of their ways.

Nevertheless, Amazon's reviews are reviews, with creative and critical thought added to the derivative material. Plus, Amazon hasn't moved to publish them in book form in competition with Rowling's own ultimate plans for Beedle.

Models of Magical Law Enforcement

My recent return to the world of Artemis Fowl left me thinking about magical law-enforcement. It's widely recommended that fantasy authors figure out how magic works in the worlds they create, communicate those processes and limits to readers, and then stick to them. So rules of magic are part of nearly all fantasies.

But rules against magic that characters could do but shouldn't are another matter. These, too, have a long history, back to the sorcerer's apprentice and beyond.

Sometimes such laws are given the force of government, as when Princess Ozma of Oz forbids her subjects from practicing magic, excepting only Glinda and the Wizard--and herself--and Dorothy, when she needs to--and her other friends, come to think of it. Hmmm.

Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci is also a magical law enforcer and fixer, though his source of authority is not exactly clear. This is an aristocratic model of government: a carefully educated strong man chosen for his power, passing down his title and property (though not within his family).

In recent years, magical regulation has become more bureaucratic. We met the feckless Ministry of Magic in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, a branch of the British civil service headed by a politically minded wizard. Harry and his friends get a close-up look at its workings in HP7, when they penetrate its headquarters in disguise, and that book's epilogue tells us that as adults they basically seize its levers of power.

We also encountered an entire magical government of Great Britain in Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy. In these books, wizards don't serve a non-magical Prime Minister but hold the ministries themselves, oppressing the commoners who can't work magic and the genies who actually perform all the spells.

All these models of magical law enforcement involve human magicians regulating other humans. Magical creatures, even sentient ones, basically remain above (or below) any law but nature's. A genie or giant might have to be suppressed here and there, but no one expects magical creatures to significantly adapt their behavior to society. After all, such creatures are basically embodiments of mysterious natural forces.

Which brings me back to Artemis Fowl. In that novel Eoin Colfer shows us all the bureaucratic rivalries and back-biting of the Bartimaeus books, the abject concern for public relations and petty rules of the Ministry of Magic. But in Colfer's world, the law enforcers are fairies themselves. They have natural laws they must follow, but they also have rules they've decided on for their protection and enforce ruthlessly. Far from being beyond human-style politics, they're in the thick of it. No wonder the series leaves some readers dyspeptic.

Rowling's Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

I'm finishing this past Harry Potter Week (and a Day) with an observation I've been musing on for a while. Author J. K. Rowling's recent remark that she considered Prof. Albus Dumbledore to be gay adds another example to a pattern of how her books have been progressive on the surface but undercut those themes in how their larger story plays out.

Rowling is clearly progressive in her politics. She went to work for Amnesty International right after college. Since 2000 the British press has tried to peg her as a supporter of Gordon Brown, now Prime Minister for the Labour Party. She's used her celebrity to support aid for single parents.

That progressivism shows up in her books' messages of inclusion, particularly at Hogwarts School. Both that school and the quidditch played there are for girls and boys equally, contrary to the history of British (and most other) schools and sport. The student body reflects the modern UK's multi-ethnic population, with no visible tensions. The headmaster is Dumbledore, so far the most important figure in children's literature identified by his creator as gay. The books also have a progressive attitude toward notions of aristocracy.

From the start inclusion and exclusion has been a major theme. In the family or under the stairs? Muggle or wizard? Rich or poor? Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin? On the quidditch team or off? In the Triwizard Tournament, in the Order of the Phoenix, in Dumbledore's Army? In Hogwarts itself?

The overarching story is a battle for inclusiveness against aristocratic racists who want to exclude "mudbloods," "half-breeds," and other undesirables. The final battle in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows turns out to have its roots in a similar battle against fascism before 1945, and to require the combined forces of wizards, elves, centaurs, giants, and other creatures.

Fantasy lets authors depict evil in embodied form, and we readers expect that evil to be vanquished by the end of the saga. That victory can restore an old order or give rise to a new one with more promise. Consider the government reforms under way at the end of the Bartimaeus and Lionboy trilogies, their outcomes undetermined. Consider the breakdown of theocracy itself in His Dark Materials.

Rowling chose a different path. Her story is one of restoration, not reform. No part of the wizarding world is more tradition-bound than Hogwarts School, which becomes Harry's true home. In each book, Hogwarts is threatened and rescued. Its restoration includes the traditions that Harry comes to love because they define Hogwarts culture. The epilogue assures us that the Sorting Hat and house rivalries that divide the school remain intact, and there's no hint of pedagogical change. Thus, however much the books espouse progressive values, their primary narrative is a regression to the past.

Another overarching plot follows Harry's desire to enjoy a happy, intact family of the sort he briefly knew as an infant. The epilogue to HP7, set years after the rest, shows him with his wife and three children, his best friends with their children. (And his old school rival with his children, too.) Support and love outside the nuclear family structure, as the Order of the Phoenix provided in the middle of the series, is not apparent. And there are no single-parent families of the sort that Rowling supports in real life.

And what about the books' inclusiveness? Dana Goldstein's "Harry Potter and the Complicated Identity Politics", published in The American Prospect, suggests that the fantasy genre itself complicates any message of tolerance and mixing:

Rowling's ideology cannot simply be described as anti-racist, for as strongly as she condemns racially-motivated violence, Harry Potter remains a classic work of fantasy. And fantasy is a literary genre intent, above almost all else, on the reassuring order of classification and categorization, of blood lines and inheritances.

I think that's too reductive. Just as fantasy authors don't need to show a return to "reassuring order," they don't need to emphasize categorization and inheritance. But Rowling chose those strains within the fantasy genre, and I think they ended up working against her stated themes. Again and again, we see the action of her books undermining the values that Harry learns.

Stated Value: Inclusiveness for all ethnic groups. Action: Harry, his two closest friends, apparently all of his teachers, his godfather, and all but one of his mentors and protectors appear to be white and English. The British learn to appreciate French and Bulgarians as relatives and friends--but they still talk funny.

Stated Value: Equality of the sexes. Action: Boys get beat up a lot more than girls.

Stated Value: Appreciation of other species. Action: In HP7 Griphook snatches up the Sword of Gryffindor because goblins believe artworks never stop belonging to their makers. But later the sword magically pops into Neville's hand; a human idea of property not only prevails but receives magical endorsement. House elves start out enslaved to the human owners of their homes, and end up more loyal than ever. Centaurs want nothing to do with us, but come around to seeing that attitude as a mistake. Humans don't have to compromise their lifestyles or their values.

Stated Value: Respect for differences. Action: The books assure us that it's okay to be a werewolf like Lupin, and it's okay to marry one, as Tonks does. It's okay to be a free house elf like Dobby. It's okay to be gay like Dumbledore. But all those characters are violently killed. Killed by the racist villains, to be sure, so the books don't endorse their murders. Nonetheless, they're all still quite dead.

For me this amounts to a recurring dance of two steps forward, one step back. That does leave us a few steps forward. But Rowling might have been able to create a more thoroughly progressive narrative by choosing a different structure and details that better reflected her themes.

Circling around to the announcement that spurred this week of Oz and Ends postings, I suspect that Rowling's identification of Dumbledore as gay will become a milestone in children's fantasy literature. However, it's such a limited picture of gay humanity that within a generation it will seem no more progressive than the portraits of African-Americans in Uncle Tom's Cabin. We'll have to struggle to remember just what an impact Rowling had.

Manly and Expressive

Yesterday I wrote about how the Harry Potter books depict the Continental Powers, especially in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Tonight I’ll backtrack to a pattern I've noticed even since the first or second book in the series, about deeply-rooted stereotypes within Britain's wizarding society.

But haven't I already written about how J. K. Rowling has taken pains to include young wizards from many ethnicities within modern Britain? That's true, but in one area Rowling still reflects old--very old--cultural fault lines in British culture.

Almost all the English Hogwarts students in Harry's generation have first names that today's young readers would easily recognize. In the recent past, some wizarding families used such names, too: James and Lily Potter, Arthur and Molly Weasley. But many other families favored old-fashioned Latinate given names: Albus, Sirius, Remus, Severus, Minerva, etc.

The nice characters with Latinate given names have Anglo-Saxon family names, like Black. Many of the good guys' surnames connect to rural life, as in Lupin (a plant, though also wolfish), Dumbledore (bumblebee), and Granger (farmer or farm steward). This pattern fits well with the books' preference for life in Britain outside metropolitan London.

In contrast, the nastiest characters have Latinate or French surnames to go with their Latinate given names: Bellatrix Lestrange, Lucius Malfoy (shown above, as impersonated by Jason Isaacs). Harry's class rival is Draco Malfoy, which translates as "dragon bad-time." The series' chief villain was born Tom Riddle, a solid Anglo-Saxon name, but--showing his villainy--demanded that people call him something that sounds deadly French and aristocratic: Lord Voldemort.

That pattern reflects an old Whig preference for the Anglo-Saxon yeomanry over the Norman aristocracy. I quote from Scott's Ivanhoe:

At court, and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and state of a court was emulated, Norman-French was the only language employed; in courts of law, the pleadings and judgments were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other.

It would be hard to find a more "manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon," working-the-good-English-earth name than Harry Potter.

Harry Potter and the Bulgarian Invasion

My favorite single shot from the Harry Potter movies appears in the fourth, when the ship from Durmstrang school bursts out of the lake beside Hogwarts, its furled sails shedding water like a mallard's wings.

That image comes directly from J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and appears to the right as illustrated by Mary GrandPré.

Much as I like that sight and how well the CGI-effects crew brought it to life, something about the idea nags at me. This ship is basically a submarine from a European power surfacing off the British shore. And where in British literature have we encountered that motif before?

In invasion literature, of course! I've discussed this genre before in connection Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker, which wears its xenophobia on its sleeve. It may seem incongruous to bring it up in regard to the Harry Potter books since they try so hard to be inclusive.

Yet Rowling also plays off traditional British xenophobia, especially in HP4. Invasion literature could never figure out whether the UK's sneaky enemy would be Germany or Russia. Durmstrang is cleverly located in Bulgaria, at a longitude between those two powers. There's something sinister about that school: its students study the Dark Arts, ostensibly to protect themselves, but you never know about foreigners, do you? Durmstrang's champion, Viktor Krum, turns out to be a muscled, brooding fellow lusting after an Englishwoman.

And then there are the other foreign wizards in HP4: students from Beauxbatons of France. They're represented principally by Fleur Delacour, who's one-quarter Veela--a magical temptress of men. Ooh la la!

Obviously, Rowling is using the shortcut of cultural stereotypes. Viktor and Fleur are painted in broad strokes and familiar colors so they make easy rivals for Harry (and dear, noble, doomed Cedric) in the Triwizard Tournament.

Then Rowling turns the tables by using those same characters to provide lessons in how We Can All Get Along. Fleur becomes engaged to Bill Weasley, and in one scene her concern for him and her blunt indignation wins over her future in-laws. (Of course, she's still French. Why do you think she has that outrrrrrageous accent?)

Similarly, in HP7 Viktor returns to show how he as a good Bulgarian is even more upset by old fascist symbols than his British hosts. Yes, now We Can All Get Along. ("So it's all forgotten now and let's hear no more about it. So that's two egg mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Herman Goering and four Colditz salads. . . . No, wait a minute...I got confused because everyone keeps mentioning the war.")

That's two John Cleese quotes in one posting, but they seem appropriate because Rowling plays the same game as the Monty Python gang: portraying ethnic stereotypes for both their familiarity and their shock value, their rudeness and their reassurance that we enlightened folks can see them for what they are.

Still, we don't see many different types of Bulgarian men in the Harry Potter books. Or many different types of French women.

Credit Where It's Due

J. K. Rowling's recent statement that her character Albus Dumbledore is gay has produced a chorus of wishfulness. I've seen people wishing that Rowling had been clearer in her intended clues about Dumbledore, that she had depicted him as more open, that she had identified other adult characters as gay, that her Hogwarts students had keened about same-sex pairings as loudly as they do about opposite-sex pairings. Basically, these critics wish that Rowling had written different books.

But let's not neglect the books Rowling has written and what she's now said about them. What other children's fantasy writer has been as explicit about a beloved, admired character being gay?

Sure, there's now a fair amount of contemporary fiction for teens about being gay or having gay friends or relatives, as well as some in which homosexuality is present but not central. But Rowling has "outed" an authority figure and beloved mentor in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, a book for and about eleven-year-olds. Dumbledore is a major character in an ongoing series of multimillion-dollar movies, with his own articulated action figures (shown above, courtesy of The Collector Zone). Has any other children's novelist come close to giving a gay character that positive exposure?

Wikipedia's "List of LGBT characters in modern written fiction" now includes Albus Dumbledore. What other characters from children's literature does it include? What other children's author has contributed to that list?

Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence, Marion Dane Bauer's 1994 anthology, contains stories by Bruce Coville, Jane Yolen, Gregory Maguire, and other fine fantasists. Coville's Skull of Truth from 1997 has what Wendy Betts calls "a fairly minor subplot" about a gay uncle (which was still enough to get it removed from school shelves in one Illinois town). But a targeted anthology and a subplot just don't have the heft of Dumbledore, the greatest wizard of his age.

I've written about the close relationship of the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman in L. Frank Baum's The Tin Woodman of Oz, and about Glinda the Good's appreciation of female beauty and lack of interest in men. But Baum would have surely disavowed any interpretations of his characters as homosexual (or sexual, for that matter).

I've noted the same-sex couple who mentor the kids in Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard, a portrayal of a relationship that's less fraught with tragedy and cliché than Rowling's. But according to Tsukara, Duane's response to questions about Tom and Carl's partnership is: "It's their business, so why should it matter to you?" Rowling has certainly not been that coy.

Only in comics have I seen writers do more to include gay characters in fantasy stories meant (at least in part) for young readers. And of course those efforts are far from bullet-proof against criticism.

For the people who have complained that Rowling wasn't forward enough in portraying gay characters, who among children's fantasy writers is ahead of her?

Damned If She Does, Damned If She Doesn't

J. K. Rowling's recent announcement that she conceived of Prof. Albus Dumbledore as gay has produced a lot of critical comments. I'm not talking about knee-jerk homophobic bigotry, which largely deserves pity. I'm talking about complaints from people who would otherwise welcome the news that a major character in a bestselling children's fantasy series was gay.

Those complaints seem to fall into three categories:

• The Harry Potter books didn't offer readers enough clues or indications that Dumbledore was gay.
• Dumbledore is sexless, perhaps closeted, as well as doomed, and thus an all-too-common literary type.
• The books don't have enough other gay characters, especially among the Hogwarts students.

All these complaints point to the conclusion that Rowling didn't have the courage of her convictions, that she wanted to make her novels more inclusive than they actually turned out. I'll come back to that basic thought later this week. But first, I want to point out a damned-if-she-did, damned-if-she-didn't quality to such complaints.

If Rowling had clearly "coded" Dumbledore as gay, then she would have been perpetuating stereotypes, and would have deserved criticism for that. Many readers have in fact engaged in just such profiling to interpret other Harry Potter characters as gay: Severus Snape, Remus Lupin, and even the little-known Justin Finch-Fletchley. I recall complaints that the unfortunate Quirinus Quirrell reflected queer stereotypes, though his sexuality never came up. This whole situation reminds me a bit of the old joke about a person telling his psychoanalyst after a Rorschach test, "Doc, you're the one with the dirty pictures!"--except that this time folks want to see more dirty pictures.

The next complaint is that Dumbledore was too discreet about his sexuality, that it never became part of Harry's story. Of course, if Rowling had taken that route, then people could have complained that Dumbledore couldn't just be incidentally gay, but that his sexuality had to be dragged in to aid the straight hero.

I can easily see an opening for Dumbledore to speak clearly to Harry about his past. They do, after all, talk about both love and mistakes. But none of my gay high school teachers came out to me (in the early 1980s), even when they were "out" with colleagues. And it makes sense for Albus Dumbledore as an individual to be discreet.

According to other out-of-book comments from Rowling, Dumbledore was born in 1881 or earlier, which means he graduated from Hogwarts in 1899 at the latest. Four years earlier, in real Britain, Oscar Wilde had been sent to jail for "gross indecency." England didn't repeal its laws against sodomy until 1967, Scotland (where Hogwarts apparently is) until 1980. For most of the last century, most gay men in Britain were in denial or in the closet at some level. Of course, the history of Rowling's "world" doesn't have to match that of ours, but we usually assume it does.

Furthermore, Dumbledore's first deep love ended badly: something about a world war, deadly duels, and having to lock up his inamorato for life. Readers seem happy accepting that Snape never had another love after his frustrated infatuation with Harry's mother, Lily. Why must Dumbledore behave differently? Given all those personal experiences, it's not hard to accept that the headmaster is private about his private life.

As for the complaint that Dumbledore--sexless and doomed--is the only gay character in the Harry Potter books, I think that's valid, but all we can say for sure is that he's the only gay character Rowling has identified. She usually reveals her unpublished thinking in response to questions from fans, so let's see if anyone asks her about others.

More specifically, people have criticized Rowling for not portraying any of her young characters as gay, thus ensuring that readers would know that homosexuality isn't just for old men. But we don't see most Hogwarts students past the age of eighteen. In March the Advocate reported on a recent study of US men, finding that on average those born since 1970 "came out at 19 before having their first serious relationship at about 19 and a half." Britain's Queer Youth Network wasn't founded until 1999, two years after the Harry Potter series began. Hogwarts is drawn as a tradition-bound school in a traditional segment of British society. It's not hard to think that its students might not come out until after graduation, and that Harry himself has other things to think about than their love lives.

TOMORROW: Credit where it's due.

The Wizarding World Beyond the Books

Back in August I discussed J. K. Rowling's pattern of revealing additional information about her characters during interviews and author appearances. Her statement last week about Dumbledore's love life, as well as similar remarks about Neville Longbottom marrying and lesser details, obviously extends that behavior.

Rowling has made most of these statements in response to questions from her readers, not spontaneously. And she's often prefaced them by saying some variation on "I think...," perhaps hinting that the words that follow aren't as authoritative as those she's authored on paper.

Nevertheless, I think that it will be very hard for fans or interpreters of the books to ignore Rowling's statements, to insist that if a particular "fact" about characters isn't in the novels themselves then we can ignore it.

That's because Rowling has produced two overlapping accomplishments.

• The first consists of her seven novels, plus two ancillary books. In the terminology of current literary criticism, these are the "texts," and they stand above all.
• Rowling has also created a "world," mostly through those books but also through her collaboration with filmmakers and artists in other media, and through her public remarks about the characters and places in her books.

Indeed, I think Rowling has been more successful in imagining her "world" than in getting it down on paper--hence the need for these interviews to address unanswered questions.

Rowling is obviously aware that her "world" stretches beyond her books, and in some ways beyond her control. Right after her Dumbledore revelation, she said, "You needed something to keep you going for the next 10 years! ... Oh, my god, the fan fiction now, eh?" (I don't know when she became Canadian.) There are already thousands of unauthorized, unofficial stories about Harry Potter characters, including probably every variation on romances and sexual relationships that one would want (or not want) to imagine. There are Harry Potter movies and video games enjoyed by people who have never read or plan to read the books.

I see three qualities of Rowling's work making her "world" more important to fans than the texts which convey that "world":

• She wrote in the fantasy genre. As in science fiction, her "world" doesn't have to match the objective world, making it an independent universe to explore.
• Her storytelling style relies on a large cast of characters, myriad details, and complex storylines. At the same time, her prose is straightforward and often undistinguished, not drawing attention to itself.
  
• When the first Harry Potter book arrived, the internet was waiting. It allowed fans to create a worldwide community that no previous new fantasy series had enjoyed.

Other authors before Rowling have clearly felt the wish to say more about their characters than got into their books. That is, after all, the motivation for sequels. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a great deal of tedious background material, and his family continues to squeeze books out of those manuscripts. More recently, Philip Pullman has, like Rowling, published a small guide to part of his Dark Materials world, and clarified his intentions and thoughts in interviews.

Other authors before Rowling have also seen their fantasy worlds become widely known through avenues other than their books. My favorite fantasy universe, Oz, is an obvious example. A century ago, more Americans probably knew of it through a wildly successful stage extravaganza than through L. Frank Baum's books. For the last few decades, it's best known through the 1939 MGM movie. Both of those adaptations made significant changes from Baum's original, but the books' core mythology remains intact.

But the clearest analogues to what Rowling has created, I think, are George Lucas's Star Wars universe and the two "universes" created over several decades by DC and Marvel Comics. (The Star Trek universe might fit the bill as well, but I'm not as familiar with it.) All of these "worlds" exist in many media: movies, comics, prose stories, TV shows, video games, and more. All contain many stories, indeed many somewhat contradictory or alternative versions of stories. But each has a core of characters, settings, and "rules" defined by the creators/copyright-holders.

Under this approach, Rowling's books are merely one manifestation of the "world" she's created. On the one hand, we can admire that "world" and how she produced single-handed what's previously taken a large corporation or two. On the other hand, a good measure of Rowling's books might be how well they reveal that "world": imperfectly at best.

In any event, I suspect that understanding the difference between "world" and texts will only become more important in our multimedia world. We critics and interpreters of fantasy literature will have to get used to the idea that universes aren't contained within two covers, or even (in this case) fourteen covers.

Harry Potter Week Revealed

I'd been saving up some comments on the Harry Potter series for the future, but J. K. Rowling's recent comments on Prof. Dumbledore have prompted me to toss my vague schedule and bring Harry Potter Week out of the closet.

The Associated Press offered the highlights of Rowling's appearance in New York on Friday, but the Leaky Cauldron had the most comprehensive report, naturally. Here's the exchange that everyone's talking about:

Q: Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?

JKR: My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation] ... Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that's how I always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair... [laughter] I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter: "Dumbledore's gay!" [laughter] If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!

Many fans are pleased; some fans and critics are dismayed, for different reasons. I think Gail Gauthier at Original Content has, as so often, gotten to the heart of the matter:

To me what was interesting about J.K. Rowling's announcement last night that Dumbledore is gay is not that he is gay but that she had to tell us that he is. Does that suggest to anyone else that she didn't show us in the books?

Indeed, Rowling had to tell the screenwriter for the next movie, Steve Kloves, about how she conceived of Dumbledore--and he's written four previous Harry Potter screenplays. If after turning those books inside out he hadn't picked up any clues that Dumbledore wouldn't have gotten dreamy over a girl, then perhaps those clues weren't really there.

For the next few days I expect to muse on what this revelation says about the Harry Potter series. How does Dumbledore's sexual orientation play into the seven-book saga? Does the late revelation reveal ambivalence on Rowling's part, or difficulty in managing all she hoped to accomplish? Has the nature of storytelling in an internet age gone beyond books to authors' remarks and supplemental writings? How does Dumbledore's love life relate to the history and cultural stereotypes of gay men? And, of course, that other Harry Potter stuff I've been saving.