One Last Trip On The Hogwarts Express

Odds are, you’ve felt it. That itch in the back of your mind. Or maybe it’s a flutter in the pit of your stomach. It started in the background, and then last week it began to build. By now, it’s an all-out full-body thrill.

Harry Potter is back—for the last time.

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” hits bookstores at midnight tonight, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” opened in movie theaters last Wednesday, and for fans of the series, the ten days in between have been magical.

Julie A. Duncan ’09 is in Ecuador for the summer, and she confesses that missing the movie and book release posed “a serious problem” to her summer plans. Apparently, Amazon doesn’t have much respect for Potter-ites overseas.

“I’ve spent hours online Googling things like ‘Ecuador+Harry+Potter+release+date+please+god+tell+me+when,’ all to no avail,” Duncan wrote in an e-mail. “I have a friend in Japan who told me that she had to wait for months for the books to be translated into Japanese, but I think that the Spanish version miiiiight be available within a few days of the English release, July 21. I’d prefer to read it in English, of course, but I’ll take what I can get!”

Critic and essayist William L. Safire, writing for The “New York Times” in the wake of the books’ first wave of popularity, praised the first three “Harry Potter” books for “captivat[ing] a world of kids.” As for their literary value, Safire was far less optimistic.

“These are not, however, books for adults. Unlike ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ the Potter series is not written on two levels, entertaining one generation while instructing another,” he wrote. “Rather, it is in the category of Tom Swift and Dr. Dolittle; I was hooked on reading by them, but have laid aside my electric rifle and no longer talk to horses.”

Even as the country was devouring the “Harry Potter” novels, critics like Safire and Harold Bloom, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, were trying to get people to spit them out. Safire admits in his essay that he enjoys “Harry Potter,” just as he enjoys “short films, featuring anthropomorphic porcine cartoon characters.” Bloom ends his critique with the backhanded “hope that my discontent is not merely a highbrow snobbery, or a nostalgia for a more literate fantasy to beguile (shall we say) intelligent children of all ages.”

Duncan got hooked on the series at age 11, and can still recite the first line of the first book from memory. But now she’s 20 years old, well outside a children’s book’s intended audience.

According to these two critics, fans like Duncan participate in the great “dumbing-down” of literary culture. Criticism and controversy surrounded the books during their early popularity—adults were admonished for buying the books for their children and for themselves, an obscure children’s book author sued J.K. Rowling for copyright infringement, Christian groups tried to ban the books for promoting witchcraft, and the series made the American Library Association’s Top 10 “most challenged” books of the 1990s.

Through it all, Duncan—and millions like her—kept reading.

‘NOT CRAPPY WRITING’

“Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” debuted in England in June 1997 and generated immediate buzz. According to a 1997 review of the novel in British newspaper The Guardian, author J.K. Rowling sold her manuscript to her UK publisher Bloomsbury for £100,000, and less than a month later, she had attracted movie offers from two Hollywood studios.

Scholastic Press released the book to U.S. audiences in September 1998 under the title “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” and three months later it made its first of 79 appearances on The New York Times fiction bestseller list. In 2000, The New York Times created a special bestseller list for children’s books after publishers complained that the Harry Potter series kept other, deserving adult books off the list.

When it announced the changed, the paper itself cited the expected popularity of the series’ fourth book, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” which debuted that summer.

Negativity persisted, but popular consensus was that “Goblet of Fire” had upped the stakes for complexity in the series. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures Maria Tatar published an article in The New York Times in late 2001 that contained traces of skepticism, calling the Harry Potter series “children’s ‘classics’ for our time,” if not “classics for all time.”

“Regardless of what we adults think, we aren’t the intended audience,” she wrote. “Roald Dahl believed that it was the duty of every author of children’s books to conspire with children against adults. With her books, J.K. Rowling has formed a powerful alliance with our children.”

Since then, Tatar has had a change of heart.

“Goblet of Fire was something of a turning point, I think,” Tatar said. “A lot of adults who weren’t super enthusiastic became fans at that point—it’s not that they were jumping on the bandwagon; I think they just felt the later novels more compelling. My own reaction mirrors in many ways the critical response from adult readers.”

The Harvard Bookstore held its first Harry Potter release party that summer, in response to demand for the books from people of all ages. Amanda Darling, the store’s marketing manager, said that she has seen a community of readers develop around the series, which strikes a basic human chord in readers.

“They’re more interesting to read than . . . I haven’t read a lot of Don DeLillo recently, but I find it a lot more interesting to read than a lot of literary novels,” Darling said. “There’s a lot of crappy writing out there, and this is not crappy writing.”

UNSTITCHING THE FABRIC

For Duncan, Yock, and Barron, it is the storyline that puts the” Harry Potter” series in a class of its own. More than one journalist has compared the series to Charles Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop,” published in serial form from 1840 to 1841. The last chapter arrived from Britain in November 1841, and New Yorkers crowded the docks to greet the ship, calling, “Is Little Nell dead?”

As it turned out, Little Nell was dead, which may bode ill for Harry. Rowling has said that two major characters die in the final volume of the series, and judging from the way the sixth book ended, Harry could certainly be one of them.

“ABC News called, and the first question the interviewer asked was, ‘Do you think that Harry Potter will die?’ It seemed like such a frightening prospect,” Tatar said. “So many children have grown up with these books. The only real requirement for a children’s book is that the hero survives.”

According to Tatar, the books we read as children become a part of our emotional fabric, and regarding Harry Potter, we have grown as he has grown—almost in real time. The fabric stretches and becomes a security blanket for older readers, who are able to return to the series and recapture some of that childhood warmth.

“Since I was 11 when I first started reading HP, I feel like I grew up with Harry,” Duncan wrote. When he was young, so was I, and I wasn’t necessarily ready for the darker themes that show up in the later books. Now that I’m older, I can appreciate that Harry’s world is becoming steadily more complicated, because I, too, have had to learn that the world is not always as simple as it seemed when I was 11 years old.”

Around the time the fifth book, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” was released in the summer of 2003, the media discovered that Harry’s audience was growing up along with him.

At the end the fourth book, Harry confronts the enemy masquerading as an ally and witnesses the death of an innocent friend, and in the fifth is tortured by memories of the death and angered by his apparent inability to stop the dark wizard Lord Voldemort’s regaining power. In between, Harry also gets his first crush, his first kiss, and takes his first standardized tests.

The fact is that Harry’s life is our life, enmeshed in a completely fanciful world.

RELIVING THE JOURNEY

Re-reading is as much a source of enjoyment for avid Potter fans as reading for the first time—Duncan has read each of the books between two and four times, and even Tatar confesses to re-reading the fifth book this summer.

“You always have bifocal vision as an adult looking at a children’s book,” she said. “You get lost in the story, but you’re also thinking about its complexities and real-world implications of what’s being told.”

“Rowling may be writing for children but she never writes down to them. She takes on what I call the ‘great existential mysteries’—death and loss, good and evil—although for Rowling, it’s really more about power than anything else. And then there is the pairing of depression and desire: the Mirror of Erised and the Dementors, who rob you of hope. Is there anything more frightening?”

Adam D. Yock ’08 said that while he once read for the fun of the story, he now finds himself looks for the details Rowling planted throughout the series that will bear fruit in the final book. Exactly where his insight comes from, however, he said he can’t determine.

“I think it’s largely due to progression through the series. You realize things are more related or relevant than you originally thought,” Yock said. “At the same time, I don’t think that if I were a fifth grader . . . I comprehend it at a level above a fifth grader.”

Owen C. Barron ‘10 may best embodies Tatar’s idea of a “bifocal” reader. He said he was openly skeptical of Rowling’s writing style, employing the ultimate Potter put-downs: “She can’t write like Tolkien.” But still, he’s hooked.

“People talk about, ‘Is ‘Harry Potter’ great literature? What are the themes involved with this?’ I just have to shake my head,” Barron said. “It’s a great, entertaining book. What Harold Bloom says about it, what literary merit it has or doesn’t have doesn’t really matter to me.”

Regardless of what Bloom and Safire might think about it, “Harry Potter” is a phenomenon. In the ten years since “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone debuted” to such widespread acclaim in the UK, the books have been translated into 67 languages, broken printing and sales records with each successive installment, and inspired everything from academic theories to tabloid scandals. Even Harvard Square will join in celebrating the culmination of the series by transforming itself into “Hogwarts Square” through midnight tonight.

“Harry Potter” lovers like Duncan, Yock, Barron, Tatar and Darling all agreed that the books’ unprecedented worldwide popularity speaks louder than any high-minded critic.

“People can read for education, people can read for transcendence, people can read to forget their troubles, people can read for fun, and I think those are all valid reasons,” Darling said. “I think the important thing is that people read.”

—Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu.