The Whole Point

Hey, world.  Let’s talk about how The Casual Vacancy destroyed my otherwise lovely day.

I am TERRIFIED to read this book.  I was terrified about its very existence back when J.K. Rowling announced that she was going to write another book.  I was scared because I was worried that the book would undermine the beauty of the Harry Potter series because there was no way it could ever be as good.  Now I know that my fears were completely valid.  

I have not yet read The Casual Vacancy as it has only been out for a day, but I have already read some reviews that make me want to cry.  I knew that The Casual Vacancy was going to be a book for adults.  But I had no idea that it was going to be a book involving rape, drugs, and suicide.  I’m not particularly pleased that the most influential person in my childhood is choosing to do a book like this, but it is not my place to tell J.K. Rowling what she can and can’t write.  Besides, I have learned long ago that just because I love a book that does not mean that I have to love the author’s real life choices.  Less Than Zero and Ender’s Game are two of my favorite books.  And because they are so fantastic as stand alone pieces of literature, I have forced myself to accept and ignore the fact that Bret Easton Ellis and Orson Scott Card are ignorant jerks.  I love Harry Potter, but that doesn’t mean that I have to love J.K. Rowling or any of her other books.

Anyway, what’s worse than the reviews of The Casual Vacancy are the people who comment on these things because predictably, just like I thought they would, they start bashing Harry Potter.  I just read the New York Times review and found the biggest onslaught of hatred for Harry Potter.   So many people insisted that the books were silly and meaningless and poorly written.  These people have forgotten that Harry Potter was originally a series written for young children.

Many people are upset because the reviewer compared Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings.  As both a Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fan, I found the reactions to this statement to be particularly disheartening.  I know that the world is going to insist that I’m only saying this because I’m a petty child with undeveloped intelligence and no concept of what makes good literature, but I don’t care, I’m going to say it:  I think that Harry Potter is definitely the equal of Lord of the Rings in every way as far as literary merit goes. But that hardly matters.  Because “literary merit” is the biggest heap of bullshit ever to stain the world of entertainment and literature.

Now, before you decide to discount everything I say, I’ll have you know that I am an English major.  My life revolves around reading the classics.  I enjoy the classics.  The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, Brave New World, Dubliners– I think they’re all brilliant.  But I also think that Harry Potter is brilliant.  For different reasons.  Anyway, I’m about to go into the most long-winded rant about why Harry Potter is just as good as all of the classics.  But I’m going to get really crazy here and say that Harry Potter isn’t alone in this.  All literature is just as good.  ALL of it.  That’s right.  I’m talking Twilight, Eat, Pray, Love, The Hunger Games, Fifty Shades of Grey.  I went there.  And I stand by it.  In order to keep this shorter than a Harry Potter novel though, I will use only Twilight, Harry Potter, and Eat, Pray, Love as examples.

Most who know me, or know of me, immediately think of me as “that Harry Potter girl.”  I don’t really have a problem with this.  As far as identifying features go I’d say this one is rather complimentary– better than being “that guy with the creepy mustache” or “that girl who wears too much eyeliner” anyway.  I guess I bring it upon myself, I must subconsciously want people to think of me this way.  Otherwise I wouldn’t proudly saunter around campus with my Quidditch schoolbag, Undesirable Number One t-shirt, and Gryffindor lanyard, I wouldn’t deck out my room with a plethora of posters consisting of mostly Neville, the trio and many of the movie titles, and I definitely wouldn’t stand outside of classrooms reading Harry, A History or Looking for God in Harry Potter for the third time.  I’m a big fan of outwardly expressing my love for these books, because then people notice and comment and for a moment or two we are connected by something we both passionately love.  And that, ultimately, is what I believe the purpose of literature is:  to connect all of humanity, celebrate in our unity and discover ourselves to have a better understanding of life.  That’s always been my problem with other English majors.  A lot of us seem to think we’re too good for books that are accessible, because we as English majors have a rather pretentious view that our heightened knowledge of literature elevates us above the average reader and therefore we should have higher standards in a book’s “literary merit”.  This is not how it is supposed to be.  We’re supposed to be trying to understand all of humanity, not the only the privileged few.  In many ways, Harry Potter, Twilight, and Eat, Pray, Love have succeeded in a way that complex and acclaimed novels have not.  Because they have connected to a greater number of people, they have increased the world’s shared experiences and connected people so deeply in a way that they could not otherwise be connected.  The lessons learned from these best-sellers, whether they be cheesy or not, have meant something powerful to a much larger number of people, and that seems like the whole point to me, that people would find a shared feeling of passion and understanding from reading a book and feel a strong sense of kinship because of it.

 On that note, if you would try to deny the effect these kinds of books have had on society, you would be a complete idiot.  Some people think it is despicable that you can take the Eat, Pray, Love tour of Italy.  So here’s my question.  Why?  Here it is once again, the proof that this bestseller is bringing people together in a way that they otherwise would not have been able to experience– it’s bringing people together out of love and passion for something.  What about that seems wrong?  In Forks, Washington on September 13th they now celebrate Twilight day as it is the setting of Stephanie Meyer’s novel.  Maybe to the non-Twilight fans of Forks, this seems irritating, but to someone on the outside, someone who could care less about the birthplace of Bella Swan, I think it’s a fantastic idea.  People being united by a common love always seems like a good idea to me.  And then of course there’s the fandom of Harry Potter.  Now, this I know the most about so I can tell you for sure that the effect this fandom and community has had on my life is astounding.  I'm sure you've heard this before, but I'll say it because it's true: Harry Potter is more than a book or movie series, it’s one of the most widely recognized and loved communities in the world.  Harry Potter has brought together people in ways that nothing else I’ve ever seen has.  How many books series do you know that have their own musical genre?  Maybe you’ve never heard of Wizard Rock, but believe it or not there are over 700 Wrock bands just in the US and millions upon millions have been connected through their concerts.  Did you know that Wizard Rock sky-rocketed John and Hank Green into YouTube superstardom?  Did you know that this resulted in a community of watchers called “Nerdfighters” who band together to decrease what they call “worldsuck” donating to charities all because they have realized their shared love of Harry?  Did you know that there is a real life Dumbledore’s Army called The Harry Potter Alliance that fights for equality and hosts charity events all over the country in the spirit of the books?  I don’t know about you, but to me, all these things –music, charity, friendship– all because of a book, that seems like a real world miracle to me.  This is all just proof of how much these accessible books have deepened our understandings of one another, connecting us all through shared experiences that go even beyond just reading the novels.  This is the whole point, people– this is the point of literature epitomized, it’s supposed to bring us together, and that it what these novels do.

I can understand people not liking Harry Potter because they’re not into fantasy.  I can understand people not liking Twilight because they’re not into romance.  I can understand people not liking Eat, Pray, Love because they don’t sympathize with or understand Gilbert’s plight.  What I cannot understand, is how people can condemn these books because they are happy.  Are we that bitter, people?  Why does everything have to be about drugs or suicide or rape?  Those things are important, tragic books are important, but so are books that inspire hope.  And I do not think it is foolish to endorse hope.  I do not think it is foolish to say that a happy ending is not cliché.  A happy ending is what we all secretly want for ourselves, right?  So why can’t be accept them in literature?  Why does a happy ending make a book less adequate?  People seem to forget that a number of Shakespeare’s comedies end in happy marriages and that nearly every single Jane Austen book ends the same way.  These are perhaps the most celebrated artists of all time.  And we accept these endings from them, so why can’t we accept it from today’s literature?  Why do we cringe when Harry and Ginny and Ron and Hermione and Bella and Edward and Elizabeth and whoever her husband is get together in the end?  We’ve extolled it in the past.  We still praise it actually.  So why is it suddenly stupid for a story to end this way?  It doesn’t make sense.  You would think that after all the grim drudgery of everyday life that we would want to see a happy ending.  Being optimistic isn’t a sin, people.  One of my favorite author’s, John Green once commented “…what I really do like about Twilight…it’s fun, it distracts me from the pain and brokenness of the world and it argues that true love will triumph in the end, which may or may not be true, but if it’s a lie, it’s the most beautiful lie we have.”  In the end, all novels are fiction (yes I am aware that Eat, Pray Love does not apply to this point, but bear with me), they’re all lies.  So why is it so wrong for them to be beautiful lies every once in a while?  I, for one, understand why people would want to be distracted from “the pain and brokenness of the world” and I am not going to mock them for it.  The world can suck sometimes and guess what?  Stuff like Twilight and Harry Potter makes it better.  Because it brings some happiness to people’s miserable lives.  And again, I fail to see how this is a bad thing in any way, shape, or form.

I also refuse to believe that these books make people stupid.  There is something to be gained from any book.  If you do not learn anything from reading a book, you are not reading it right.  If you look closely enough, there is always something significant lying within the text that may not be noticeable upon the surface.  As someone who has read the entire Harry Potter series six going on seven times, I can tell you that if you read closely there is symbolism and deeper meaning that goes far beyond just the simple pleasure of reading a children’s story.  There is much more there than wizards and house elves, and plot twists.  I’m not as much of an expert on Twilight and whether or not it contains something beyond sparkling vampires (I once read that the entire thing is a Mormon allegory but who knows), but if the entire point of the series is to relish in the fact that true love with conquer all, then I fail to see why this is an insufficient message for a book to have.  The same goes for Eat, Pray, Love.  It gives people hope.  Call that cliché if you want, but with that one word, “hope,” President Obama had a campaign that eventually won him the election.  It’s a powerful thing for sure.

So here’s my last argument.  Are these books indulgent?  Hell.  Yes.  ALL LITERATURE IS INDULGENT.  You are in denial if you think otherwise.  Anyone who has ever written anything is indulging in a passion.  Also, we as readers are indulging in our passions every time we pick up a book.  Entertainment is always indulgent.  Read one poem, watch one movie, see one play and tell me how it is not indulgent.  Oscar Wilde once said that “All art is quite useless.” So in his eyes, all art (having no purpose at all) was on an equal playing field.  I would like to alter this idea slightly and say that all art is quite indulgent.  But just because it is indulgent that doesn’t make it a bad thing.  I know I sound like a broken record but I’ll say it again since this is my conclusion:  the point of literature is to share in an experience that can help us to better understand each other– and indulging in our passions this way is how we do it…so remind me…what about this is a bad thing?