Harry Potter: Part 3 - Fanfiction, an Introduction

I'm not going to say much here, partly because I've just written two posts and I have a life to lead. But I do want to lay down some preliminary questions about Harry Potter-related fanfiction, which I'm going to be thinking about over the next few weeks/months, especially as I continue to read examples of it:

• Why do people write fanfiction? Is it to fill in gaps they've identified in the books, to explore issues that are not resolved, to alter the world to fit their preferences, to experiment with alternate possibilities? (I suspect all of these are true in some cases.)
• Are there common themes in the stories that receive the most critical attention? (I am measuring critical attention in terms of numbers of reviews on a site such as fanfiction.net or harrypotterfanfiction.com. The vast majority of these reviews tend to be laudatory, often emphatically so.)
• How are new romantic/sexual pairings presented, and how often are the characters kept IC (in character) or taken OOC (out of character) in order to present them?
• How are themes that would be considered incompatible with the genre of children's literature (especially deviant sexual behaviour) presented?
• Who writes fanfiction? Male or female? What kind of age? (In the media, the genre is largely presented as a realm dominated by teenage girls, but this cannot be exclusively true.)
• How much of themselves do fanfiction writers tend to reveal about themselves, and how often does this relate to how they write or what they write about?
• How often is the loose generic allocation of 'fantasy' to the Harry Potter books manipulated or destroyed?
  

I'm sure other questions will appear during the course of this series, but for now we'll leave it there.

Harry Potter: Part 2 - Class, an Introduction

One big issue that is pretty obvious throughout the Harry Potter series is that of social status, especially social class. Various analyses have pointed out that there are several kinds of parallels to be drawn between relations in the books and social relations in our world.

More particularly, there are consistent representations of characters who, in our world, we would consider to be of a lower social class. For instance, we have the house-elves, a species servile by nature and employed almost exclusively without pay. They are presented as approximations of humans: they comically wear pillowcases, they speak in a non-standard dialect, and seem not to be able to police their own speech, having to resort to injuring themselves if they speak ill of their employers.

Then there is Hagrid, who is presented both as uneducated (he was expelled from Hogwarts for a crime he did not commit, and supposedly had his wand snapped) and governed more by impulsive emotions than common sense or intelligence (he lets out school secrets in the pub, he likes to drink too much and loses his guard, he sobs when any of his precious animals are hurt or taken away). He is frequently mocked by Draco Malfoy (more on him later), and geographically is an outcast as he lives in a hut cut off from the elite world of the school. He is oversized and clumsy (he, even more famously than Dobby, has a noticeable regional accent, rendered as West Country by Robbie Coltrane in the films), and it is revealed that he is half-giant, suggesting his cognitive abilities may be different (and by different, let's be honest, most will read inferior) to those of full humans. In Deathly Hallows, he nearly kills Harry by getting a spell wrong (a motif common to underdog-type characters); in general he is more of an inadvertent antagonist than an active protagonist.

There are the Weasleys, who, we are constantly aware, don't have much money. They have to buy second-hand school materials. In Goblet this results in Ron making a fool of himself at the Yule Ball, because he has to wear old-fashioned, frilly dress robes, and Harry mocks him mercilessly. This is interesting, because Harry is generally quite conscious of Ron's lack of money, being quite rich himself, and it is possible that Rowling has disguised social disadvantage with clownlike appearance enough that it becomes acceptable to take the piss. More on them at some other point.

There are other characters who are worth examining aside from these -Lupin, for instance, and Neville, as well as Harry himself - but for now I want to shape these by mentioning a point made by Andrew Blake in his The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter, which is that the Hogwarts house system could be seen to map quite neatly onto the British class system: Hufflepuff are the working-class labourers, who are relatively unskilled but highly dilligent; Gryffindor are the lower-middle-class, who are more educated but by no means intellectuals, and rely on their bravery and confidence to get them through; Ravenclaw are of course the upper-middle-class intelligentsia, and Slytherin are the "wicked aristocrats", rich and snobby.

I'm not sure I wholly agree with this - given Harry's wealth, and Ron's lack of it, I think Gryffindor is a less easily locatable social set, for instance - but the analogy does raise some interesting points. Bearing in mind the story of the origins of the Harry Potter books, which has now become something of a legend/myth - that Rowling wrote the books in cafes while she was a single mother on benefits - it is perhaps unsurprising that the very rich characters are the most evil. But it is more surprising that Hufflepuffs, the unskilled workers, are the least explored house in the books (Cedric Diggory is their main spokesman, and he is disposed of after four books), and the most obviously low-status.

As I mentioned briefly with Hagrid, the films reflect this class difference fairly reliably - especially the Slytherins. Alan Rickman, Jason Isaacs and Ralph Fiennes all produce cut-glass drawls for Snape, Lucius Malfoy and Voldemort, as does Tom Felton, more or less, for Draco Malfoy. Both Felton and Isaacs are far less 'BBC' in their accents in real life. The G ryffindors, meanwhile, are less identifiable - whilst Richard Harris was fairly 'posh' (excuse the term), Michael Gambon's Dumbledore often sounds slightly Celtic, Professor McGonagall has a well-to-do Scottish accent, the Weasley parents are Midlands at times and RP at others, Ron/Rupert Grint have a non-RP Essex accent, and so on. Harry is fairly RP, and Hermione/Emma Watson is, it's fair to say, amongst the upper classes accent-wise.

This is where the films blur into real life, of course, since Emma Watson is certainly from a well-off family and went to a private school. Perhaps one could draw an analogy between her and the 'Posh Totty' in the film St Trinian's, who run a sex chatline with their Queen's English voices, given how objectified Watson has been by the media, especially tabloids and men's magazines.

This has been a fairly meandering exploration, mainly because it is possible to explore all of these points in more detail, which I inted to do at some point. The complement of class issues one can tease out of the books is by no means complete here. So there is definitely more to follow.


References:
- Andrew Blake, The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter (Verso, 2002)

The Harry Potter books: Part 1

I've had an ongoing interest in children's literature for quite a few years now, both as a reader and critic. Parallel to that, I've always adored the Harry Potter books, and got quite into reading and writing fanfiction when I was about 14, a fascination which has never really left me.

More recently, I've discovered that there was a spate of books published about the Harry Potter series in 2002-4 (some of which have been reissued in revised forms since the Deathly Hallows came out), and have been reading a couple of them. They're riveting stuff, full of analysis of power relations, class issues, gender representations, alternative sexualities, the significance of blood, religion, reception and banning, the films etc. In particular, Suman Gupta's Re-reading Harry Potter is wonderful, though I haven't finished it yet.

To call the effect of the Harry Potter books a 'phenomenon' (and I think it's fair to include the films as an effect rathr than a cause of this phenomenon) is, in my view, totally justifiable. Never before had a series of books, let alone those ostensibly for children, been so devoured, banalised, universally known. (The Twilight series will never match this, because its audience is so limited to teenage girls. And, quite frankly, because they're dreadful.) So they deserve special attention, and how 'literary' or 'good' they are, or any other value-judgement-type terms you can think of.

Every time I start thinking about this kind of analysis in any detail, my mind fills up and goes mad. There is so much to say about these books. They are rich with characters, subplots and backstory, and nearly everything is of interest. So I'm going to write a series of entries on these books, looking at broad themes, posing questions, perhaps formulating answers to them. These entries probably won't be in any logical order. But I'm doing a media module as part of my teacher training course, so I think it is going to be extremely helpful to me to start getting my thoughts together, so hopefully I might be able to write about them in the future.

I will also be thinking about a selection of fanfiction texts, because for me and hundreds of thousands of other readers, they have become an integral part of the Harry Potter experience. Ditto the films - but replace 'hundreds of thousands' with 'millions'. I'm excited about this. Enjoy, folks!

Adam Bede by George Eliot

This isn't going to read much like my other book reviews, since George Eliot is so well established as a 'classic' author that only quite personal reflections on the novel can really add anything new.

I first read Adam Bede when I was preparing for my first year at university. It was one of a long list of weighty Victorian novels, and the list also included Bleak House and Middlemarch, as well as The Mill on the Floss and Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. In such star-studded company, Adam Bede didn't exactly stand out from the crowd. Still, it was the first written of the three Eliots on the list, and so the one I read first.

The book revolves around four characters, principally: Adam himself, a fairly obvious cipher for Jesus, since he's a straightforward, self-improving and eloquent carpenter. Then there's Hetty Sorrell, the girl he's loved for years, despite the fact that she's vain and self-centred, to which Adam is blind. Thirdly, we have Arthur Dunnithorne, the squire, who falls quite under Hetty's spell, and manages to seduce her. Finally, there's Dinah Morris, a Methodist preacher, who is plain but forthright and impossibly good-hearted, who is Hetty's cousin.

The drama of the plot doesn't really kick off until about halfway through the book, so one has to plough through an awful lot of description, characterisation and Christian doctrine. This is wonderful if you love Eliot, which I do - and I found the religious stuff particularly inspiring since I lost a relative around the same time - but it is quite dense, so people in search of a light read should stay away. Eliot captures the small-town attitude, quick to judge, sometimes happy to forgive but never to forget, perfectly, as well as - and I think this is a quality of Eliot that is often overlooked - managing to be very witty and amusing.

You can't help but love Adam, since he comes across exactly as a bumbling man in his mid-twenties might in a modern novel: frustrated but affectionate with his mother and brother, susceptible to irrational and largely appearance-based attachments, yet highly moralistic. I don't know how popular Dinah would be, since she is pretty damn well perfect and readers tend not to like these kinds of characters, but I thought she was marvellous, the kind of character that makes you see how much your own personality is wanting of essential kindness.

The most interesting character is probably Arthur, who does not lack this kindness by any means, but surrounds it with rashness and a propensity to care too much what people think of him. There is a particularly deft scene where Arthur nearly confesses to his vicar that he has been playing with Hetty's heart, but at the moment when he is about to unburden himself, the clergyman changes the subject and the opportunity is, for Arthur, lost. This is exactly how conversation works today, and it seems both marvellous and unsurprising that so little has changed over the years.

I was also struck by the fact that Hetty and Arthur's dalliance turns out to have gone much further, in physical terms, than we are led to believe (Eliot, of course, embraces the Victorian delicacy which consists not so much in euphemisms but in complete silence. Bring on the feminist critics.). They tend to meet in a wood, and Eliot is quick to capitalise on the inherent mystery of events that disappear into the trees and reemerge at some point later. If someone you know spends a great chunk of time elsewhere, it is impossible to calculate their movements accurately enough to know what they have been doing the whole time - and, consequently, easy to slip in a little illicit activity.

Rereading Adam Bede, much more slowly than the first time round, makes you able to appreciate how sleepy the first half is, and therefore how great a shock to the system the quick-moving crisis of Hetty's unplanned pregnancy and flight, and subsequent disasters, are. It is a long book, facts is facts: my Penguin classics has fairly small font and still runs to 540-odd pages. But it is a book that rewards patience, as few seem to nowadays. My former tutor edited the Oxford edition once; no doubt he will agree with me. If you like being in for the long haul, there are few better places to go than a Victorian tome, and I will always hold a peculiar affection for Adam Bede.

Other books read recently ...

... for which I shan't be posting reviews, however much I'd like to.

• Geoffrey Eugenides, Middlesex - a long but readable and funny epic of incest, dislocation and hermaphroditism;
• Sarah Waters, The Night Watch - an again long, but highly readable and fascinating, peek into nascent homosexuality, and associated emotional issues, in 1940s London;
• Linda Grant, The Clothes on their Backs - shortlisted for the Booker last year, though many of my book club couldn't quite see why, this is funny and unusual, but emotionally rather sterile;
• Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life - this is brilliant - profound and delicate, with both reverence and wry humour shown towards Proust and his work;
• Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin - two fairly meandering, short novels based around Nazi-ising Berlin in the 1930s. Funny and vivid - and they based Cabaret on Goodbye to Berlin, so look here if you want to see the original Sally Bowles ...
• Jessica Adams, Imogen Edwards-Jones, Maggie Alderson, Kathy Lette et al, In Bed With - a selection of erotic stories which are supposed to subvert the genre. To be honest, I only got that subversion vibe from two of the twelve odd stories in there. The rest were playful, yes, occasionally funny, but rather predictable, and a bit too many rippling muscles for my liking (qv. Mills and Boon). They're all anonymous, but the one written by Ali Smith is pretty easily identifiable, and that one is rather nice (naturally). (Oh yes - on a wee tangent - I met her recently at a Cambridge Wordfest event, and she is super-nice. I now have lovely messages inside a few of my books. And I made her giggle. Eek!)
• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (oh yes)- no introduction needed, of course. I hadn't read this since I was 16, and had forgotten how wonderful it is. More on which soon.
• Shakespeare, The Tempest (for some tutoring I've been doing)- am realising how much better (and how much easier to understand) Shakespeare is if you read it aloud. It takes rather longer, but it does mean I can put on an Ian McKellen-style voice for Prospero.

Currently I'm on Fiona Shaw's Tell It to the Bees, for a book club.

The End of Alice by A. M. Homes

(256pp; £7.99; Granta Books, 1997)

If someone had given A. M. Homes the brief -

"Write a short novel exploring at least three forms of sexual activity considered deviant. Be as graphic as you can; break as many taboos as you like. Make sure a good 30% of readers won't be able to finish it."

- then she could hardly have produced a more intense, shocking novel than she has. Ali Smith described it as a flipside to The Great Gatsby, showing the grotesque side of "doomed yearning" that characterises many great American novels. A customer, according to a friend of mine, returned it to the bookshop where I used to work, claiming it made her physically ill. Reading it in the Orchard cafe in Grantchester in the blazing sun of a Sunday morning, surrounded by giggling families, I was gripped by waves of furtive guilt - and thrilled nausea.

The plot has four strands, each dealing with a new and delicate issue.

A male narrator in his sixties reminisces about his seduction, and eventual murder, of a twelve-year-old girl named Alice, who, by his account, was just as instrumental in initiating and perpetuating the relationship as he (plain old paedophilia).

His memory drifts sporadically back to his childhood, when he was abused by his mentally deteriorating mother (incestuous paedophilia).

He has now in prison for twenty-six years, and spends a lot of time imagining a narrative for his correspondent, a nineteen-year-old girl now engrossed in carrying out her own seduction of a pubescent boy, including a pretty disgusting scene where she eats one of his scabs. Her brief missives, and the vivid, detailed conclusions he draws, form the third strand (female paedophilia, rarer and more refined ...!).

The final thread in this sordid, though expertly woven, braid is the details of the narrator's time in prison, including how he has become the plaything of his gay murderer cellmate (homosexual rape, voyeurism). It's like Lolita, with the volume turned up, and probably the most shocking book I have ever read.

Nine times out of ten, the novel I've just described would be a disaster. Luckily, it was in the hands of a dangerous author who can make the unimaginably appalling seem banal, humorous - and attractive. A. M. Homes is an author who understands the fraught, ambivalent relationship we have with our society's taboos, and she capitalises on it. It's a troubling result. As with Lolita, I frequently had to remind myself exactly what my moral standpoint on such events was, because I was being so insistently besieged.

One point about the style before I begin urging you to read this novel. Homes occasionally repeats verbatim a few lines, even a chunk, as the narrator remembers and re-remembers. His memories are already crystallised, instantly accessible, and replaying them is a quick, repeatable process. Is it overly Freudian to draw similarities between this experience, this regular release of mental energy, and the relief gained through masturbation? The narrator is near-impotent during his time in prison, after all. It's a thought I'll leave you with, and now get on with the recommendation ---

This is a book to challenge yourself with, to test yourself, to see how mentally robust you really are. I read it pretty slowly, which is suggestive in itself, but I managed to get through it without vomiting, and without ceasing to be aware that I was reading an extraordinary piece of work. (But maybe avoid the bit with the scab-munching.)

Absence, and chickening out

In the drafts folder of this blog there is a long and indignant post about Susan Boyle, the 'unlikely' singer who blew away the judges of Britain's Got Talent. I was arguing that people had overreacted to her talent, which is not so rare as many believe, and I was especially annoyed with Clive James, who wrote smugly - and ill-advisedly so - that there were many members of professional opera choruses who were just as good as Boyle but could never hope to be stars. I wanted to add my ha'penny's worth of bile by spitting scorn at him, since Boyle's voice is untrained and therefore nowhere near as strong, reliable and wide-ranging as any professional singer.

In the end, though, I decided the post was too long, and too vitriolic, to actually publish. It is true that people often wax lyrical on subjects they know nothing about - but this is what we call the public consciousness. If people just stuck to what they know, we'd be a nation of closeted specialists, scurrying around in tight gangs and expressing approximately eight opinions a year, the rest of the time restricting ourselves to curious, neutral observation, nodding gravely as singing instructors and musicologists pronounce on a performance that has brought joy to many people, however amateur.

Susan Boyle will never have the voice of a trained opera singer; that is fact. But I think the longer version of the article I have saved simply misses the huge emotional point far more than it makes a new, rational one - so I'm going to censor myself. I like doing this. It makes me feel responsible. How clear-headed and mature I am!

Now I'm off to terrify twenty eleven-year-olds into bewildered submission. I've got to let my anger out somewhere, after all.