Goodbye Mr Lensherr

[burningblood]

Over at the Bad Place I see that the old "pop-culture figure vs deity" row has broken out yet again, with the l33t ch40z majykyanz arguing that a practice centred around a pop-culture figure is every bit as powerful and rewarding and meaningful as one centred around a traditional deity; that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, if anything, a more potent

Comments

[burningblood]

I think the thing missing from that debate is that the HP books are fundamentally and inexcusably broken in ways that the Aeneid is not. The HP books are poorly structured in ways they don't need to be, the characters are poorly drawn in ways they don't need to be, and the events and actions depicted in the books are dodgy and messed up in ways they don't need to be. So someone could sit down and write a politically progressive fic where eg Dumbledore stands in for the wanton exploitation of relatively disadvantaged youth by entrenched patriarchal structures and Harry stands in for youth as endlessly exploitable self-renewing pool of risky labour and then Snape kills Dumbledore and then Harry and Snape get married and adopt Dobby etc.

BUUUUUUT to get to that point you basically have to do an enormous amount of work since the HP books are written are such collosal fixer-uppers. As they actually stand, the HP books are very much about cheerleading for eg. entrenched class structure inc. the Tolkien thing of giving different races different jobs in the narrative (gnomes = bankers, house-elves = domestic slaves etc) WHICH OF COURSE THEY ARE HAPPY TO DO BECOZ RACE; the indescribable dodgyness of going through posh boarding-school being the only way you could use your inborn magical gifts without being locked up; non-magic-users on the wizard side of the fence being condemned to be school caretakers catladys etc

AND IT'S NOT EVEN PRETTY.

Most of the writing is meh, with occasional nice bits and then dips into GAHH. The woman or her editors can't even spell "shufti" right. Whereas the Aeneid does at least have beauty to recommend it. Its political dodgyness is largely a product of having been written in HULLO 1ST CENTURY BC whereas the political dodgyness in HP is down to JKR being culpably a muppet.

[burningblood]

To tie this into Big God Magic vs Pop Culture Magic, it might be worth looking at the issue of textual accesibility. I mean, is the Aeneid actually intrinsically "hard" in ways that HP is not? If HP is easier to read than the Aeneid (assuming a good, sensitive translation done by someone with an eye on the modern reader), isn't that because there's just less in HP to uncover?

I get this a lot with heathenry vs pop-magic. "Pop-magic is more egalitarian than what you're doing," the argument goes, "because pop culture is more egalitarian. It is available to rich and poor alike, whereas to approach the Tivar you basically have to have had the benefit of a classical education and the privilege of an academic background, ivory tower, Oxbridge university, etc chiz moan drone." To which I reply, "douchemop, I went to technical college."

I did used to think like this myself. I mean I guess I knew the Eddas and Sagas were _out_ there when I started getting interested in All This back in my teens, but I just kind of assumed that people like me didn't read them. I had this vague picture in my head of TEH PRIMARY TEXTS being great big tomes bound in leather and brass which you were only allowed to look at if you were terribly clever and special. The idea of strolling into Waterstones and picking up a paperback copy of the Faulkes translation to read in my lunch hour would never have entered my head. But that's perception. The Eddas are certainly deep, certainly repay long-term indepth study, esp. if you're going to get mixed up with the pantheon; but they're not magically unreadable except by extra-special-clever people who went to Big Skool. You can spend years reading the Eddas because they are so rich. You spend an evening readin HP&tPS because it's a shit book. The non-accesibility of the texts is down to ingrained modes of thought, which JKR does nothing to address.