A.S. Byatt, J.K. Rowling, D.W. Jones
Back in 2003, when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was published, the writer A.S. Byatt put up a snarky essay in the New York Times condemning JKR and her work. I have not been able to find the entire essay online, but you get the idea:
(Quote) According to Byatt: "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."
She said children were understandably attracted to fantasies of escape and empowerment but the books lacked the "compensating seriousness" of novelists such as Susan Cooper and JRR Tolkien.
Byatt, best known for her novel Possession, said she believed adults had become fans because the books allowed them to regress into the comfort zone of childhood.
"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," Byatt said. "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."
She also said the books were "derivative" as Rowling's world was a "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". (Rebecca Allison in the Guardian, July 11 2003.)
Has anybody read Possession? A friend of mine described it to me recently. She loved it. But, to use Byatt’s own word, to me its plot sounded like some Platonic ideal of ersatz-vast conspiracies, in this case literary ones, and so on. My friend’s description certainly didn’t give me a jones to go out and read it. And did you notice Byatt’s implied ownership of the ability to decree what is ersatz and what is not? This is a classic mind game perpetrated by elitist wanna-be’s, and it is big philosophical anger point with me. Nobody but NOBODY owns human language or any part thereof. Period.
Anyway.
In the end we learned that JKR was in fact very much concerned with the numinous. Which, if she’d had eyes to see, Byatt would have seen coming long before Goblet of Fire, IMO.
But.
I’m not here to dwell on the usual snootery that occurs when "one or two of the literati" are gathered together (I want to cheer every time I read Tom Shippey’s introduction to JRRT: Author of the Century). We’ve all had our fill of it long since (although wasn’t that a marvelous take-down of Toynbee, Wilson, and Bloom in the film Ringers? *grinning Cheshire-catly*).
No, my real intention is to recommend Diana Wynne Jones to anybody who likes J.K. Rowling. The two have very different styles and approaches, but their theme is much the same.
Both writers center their characterization on children. Kids in general are not yet adept at reading the world around them, which makes them prone to mistaken beliefs and impressions. (Harry’s ongoing difficulties with Snape, for example, or in Howl’s Moving Castle, Sophie’s unquestioning acceptance that she will fail in life because, without yet having tested reality, she has read it in so many books.) When they are neglected or abused, it can lead them to take on a sense on fatalism that is downright tragic (Harry again, and Conrad Tesdinic in DWJ’s Conrad’s Fate).
In the tradition of E. Nesbit and C.S. Lewis, DWJ and JKR both put their lost children in worlds where there is magic that must be dealt with in one form or another. Both writers use magic as a metaphor for insight, creativity, art, wisdom, self-confidence, self-knowledge, spiritual gifts, faith, growing beyond a dreary materialism into a sense of wonder. Into the numinous, if you will.