Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.
--Walter Tevis
by Jerome du Bois
Recently I gave in to a persistent itch and ordered another copy of the 1980 futuristic novel Mockingbird by Walter Tevis, to reread. Years ago, I pressed my original copy on one my children: Read! read! I'm sure I ranted, or you'll end up like these people! This modern classic is about the rediscovery of reading in the 25th Century, when a few sophisticated robots supervise a dwindling, dope-addled, sheeplike, and just plain dumbass human population.
As I finished the novel I came across this article in the NYT, with the headline "Potter Has Limited Effects On Reading Habits." After ten years of this phenomenon, somebody finally did some research on the "Rowling has got kids reading again" meme. (Catherine pointed out to me that Rowling is the latest example of the "Educational Messiah Complex," even though she is outside the pedagogical institutions. I had no idea there was such a well-developed dysfunction in educated minds.)
The results, briefly:
. . . federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.
More precisely, from a piece in the Joplin, Missouri Globe:
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of federal tests given every few years to students in grades four, eight and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun dropped from 43 percent in the fourth grade to 19 percent in the eighth grade. That was in 1998, the year “Sorcerer’s Stone” — the first book in the Harry Potter series — was published in the United States. In 2005, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” was published, the results were unchanged.
Most of these people --I refuse to call them kids, youngsters, or children-- there is, woe betide, at least one college course about Harry Potter-- these people read a Potter book, then, between installments, apparently go back to what they were doing before --probably being spoiled, boring, creatively empty, and endlessly needy, impatiently demanding the next cultural tchotke in a long line of diversions from real life. They don't go on to read other novels, or, if they do, they choose more fantasy titles, not realistic novels. Why not? Why the dead end?
I have a couple of ideas, which I'll attend to after the jump. But some clues appear in this announcement by Changing Hands Bookstore, detailing all the events they'll be hosting this weekend, starting Friday at 9 PM:
Time: Friday, July 20, 2007 9:00 PM
HARRY POTTER MIDNIGHT LAUNCH 9PM-12:30AM Pre-purchase your copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from Changing Hands Bookstore and receive our exclusive lightning-bolt rubber bracelet—your pass to our VIP midnight release party featuring popular local rock band Seconds to Breathe and the fire arts troupe Fyrae, who demonstrate their wizardry skills in fire-breathing and fire-eating! Changing Hands Bookstore will donate $7 in free books to a charity of your choice for every pre-purchased copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ($34.99). There's no limit to how many copies you can order, or how many dollars in book credit we'll donate on your behalf!
But that's not all. Le partie continue:
Time: Saturday, July 21, 2007 10:00 AM
HARRY POTTER BOOK LAUNCH PARTY 10AM-3PM. The party continues with lots of Harry Potter activities for the kids (and kids at heart), including free rub-on tattoos, wand-making, tea leaf and tarot card reading, creating a Make-A-Spell Book and a special reading of the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The Harry Potter package is not about reading at all, sad to say. The books are merely the tickets, the heavy, plodding tickets, the price of admission to Potterpalooza, a careful carnival of merchandise and venues regularly replenished by money which flows, with each book, each movie, each wanky wand, one way --away from the readers and into the coffers of all the participating sycophants, including "independent" bookstores like Changing Hands. And what the customers get, besides took, are infantile feelings of belonging, an excuse to talk to other people about something safe, that hollow sinking stomach you get when the sugar rush evaporates, and an exclusive lightning-bolt rubber bracelet.
Because Harry Potter has nothing to do with this world, and this world's problems. I can say this just from reading reviews and plot synopses. Everything significant takes place in the "magical community." The only touch with reality is the arrogant elitism of Rowling calling normal human beings "muggles" in a pathetic vengeful swipe at the decrepit but persistent British class system. The real world is like Harry's horrible aunt and uncle: something you want to leave behind. Otherwise there is scant intersection between the wizard world and ours. Ours is irrelevant, simply the background before which the wizards whip out one deus ex machina after another, dazzling the dutifully dull.
Rowling has created a self-contained world (and a marketer's dream), but from what I've read about the phenomenon this Potterworld is like The Truman Show; it provides no roads out into the wider world --no references to, say, the science of gemology or astronomy or ancient alchemical symbols-- which would pique a reader's interest in something other than Harry Potter, get the mind itching, get the brain busy, get the curious engine going in a spiral ever outward, diminishing the margin of ignorance while immeasurably enriching one's reflective capacity.
But no. And it shows in the figures, but it shouldn't be surprising. Almost half of American adults don't read one single novel during the course of a year. This according to Ron Charles, a book editor at The Washington Post, in his revealing Sunday column "Harry Potter and the Death of Reading." "Not one. And the rate of decline has almost tripled in the past decade." So why should we expect the children of these people to read regularly? I'm pretty sure I read all the time because my family read all the time --especially my father, who subscribed to about six book clubs and read everything they sent him. We were always tripping over books. I started reading later than most --I grew up on the beach in Hawai'i-- and certainly loved going through Tom Swift and other space cowboy books, but when I was thirteen I picked up The Fountainhead and started reading seriously.
Potter partisans can claim that the books teach all kinds of solid humanistic values, and demonstrate the complexities of friendship and loyalty, and other good nourishing examples. But do they really? In one of the books, when the Dark Mark appears in the sky --what sky? the wizard sky? everybody's sky?-- as an omen that the Dark Lord, who else, is rising again, what's the response of the good guys? Some kind of extreme magical sport tournament. Reminds me of Doc Holliday in Tombstone: "I know! Let's have a spelling contest."
Of course I can't object to people reading the Harry Potter books. I've read a lot of crap in my time; I even got through a James Patterson "thriller" once; it was submental, and I kept throwing it against the wall to convince myself that it was real, but I survived.
Some things bother me, though. One is the odd notion that a huge number of people reading a certain thing could lead to the death of reading. Ron Charles depicts a chilling scene:
Perhaps submerging the world in an orgy of marketing hysteria doesn't encourage the kind of contemplation, independence and solitude that real engagement with books demands --and rewards. Consider that, with the release of each new volume, Rowling's readers have been driven not only into greater fits of enthusiasm but into more precise synchronization with one another. Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy "The Deathly Hallows" on a single day. There's something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves --without a movie version or a set of action figures. Through no fault of Rowling's, Potter mania nonetheless trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide.
Reading Rowling en masse is not singing at the edge of the woods; it's chirping in chorus with the faithful flock in the choirs of the big safe tree. But again, Harry Potter, Registered Trademark Goes Here, is not about the reading. It's about riding that collective wave every year or so, and submerging oneself in an artificial and temporary community. That's the sad need, and the sad news. And that's where Cindy Dach and the other managers at Changing Hands, rubbing their hands, come in. They create that loud and colorful bubble bauble, and profit from it.
I guess I'm the last to realize how sold-out this so-called Independent Bookstore has become. They must really have come to depend on this weekend's income, because they're going all out to spin magic into every one of their sidelines. They even have the bread company next door making butterbeer and eyeball cupcakes. (Shades of Goosebumps.) As booksellers, they must have already learned in the last ten years, through six Potter hardbacks and paperbacks, what the NYT article now tells the rest of us: the youth-reading surge was and is an illusion. Their spreadsheets, year after year, would tell the tale. There was no traction, no chain reaction, so to speak, after the appearance of each Potter book, and no lasting or overlapping waves of growing eager readers, no expansion of the young readers' section, and not a lot of repeat business. (Is this why they have eleventy-two reading "clubs"? Just to get people physically into the store? To maybe also buy a jasmine-scented sandalwood bookmark? It's locally made. Hey, come back here . . .)
The Changing Hands managers have to know about this phantom reading phenomenon, but they have no problem shilling out this mental popcorn, this chewing gum for the mind, this hodgepodge of old ideas, beginning with Harry as a changeling, and expanding outward into yet another fantasyland, replete with wands, cloaks, and spells-books (see price list); and with the real world, not the wizard's world, reduced to cardboard and paper.
You could argue that Mockingbird is a fantasy novel as well. True, but it is firmly grounded on the Earth. Harry Potter isn't. Walter Tevis, probably drawing on his fifteen years of university experience with young people, extrapolates from the narcissistic trends just forming in his time: political correctness, multicultural equality, moral relativity, not giving offense, "you're so special," "gotta love me," and "my feelings count."
So that in his future, to protect Personhood and Privacy and so-called Individuality, people wander about in a pot- and sopor-induced stupor. Social communication is nearly nil. Everything, from the drugs to the clothes they wear, is provided by automatic equipment and human-looking robots lined up smiling at the Super Shef! Would you like fries with that? And reading is a crime,
. . . the subtle and thorough sharing of ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth ages. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.
The book kept coming to my mind because of a buildup of other persistent cultural phenomena: they range from the world-wide solipsistic blanket of the iPod (it's my small world, after all), to the recent double handful of prescription drug abuse cases spilled rattling across our TV screens, to the kudzu of what Catherine calls FaceSpace personal web pages, which record the minutiae of mediocre lives to create the illusion of fame and immortality. (We ourselves have no such illusions.) People who don't really read; they text-message.
So I must be a fool to complain about Harry Potter and Changing Hands and the whole money machine, right? So what if the kids don't go on to read His Dark Materials, for example, or even Moby Dick. At least they're reading. Being contemplative. Exercising their imaginations. Aren't they?
Remember, there's no such thing as magic. It's all sleight-of-hand. In the real world, even fun takes work, and the rewards of deep reading sometimes feel like wounds.
Posted by Jerome at July 18, 2007 01:30 PM | TrackBack