In Response to Jonathan Myerson

Hello loyal reader! It’s coming to the end of term, I have a test tomorrow which marks the last bit of physical work I have to do before the holidays and so I might end up blogging *twice* this week. How novel. I had a blog planned out actually; it was timely and political and stirring and I was excited about it. But then I read this article so instead of all that, you are going to get this blind angry rant in defence of Harry Potter and Twilight. Goody.

Let’s open by declaring interests. I may sort of maybe be planning (read: cooking up in my own mind and occasionally annoying friends with) a project for after graduation which would be the complete opposite of the article in every way. That is, well-thought-out, constructive, long-form and interested in making the exact opposite point. So I have that vested interest, as well as the vested interests of being both a huge Harry Potter fan and an English Literature student, but specifically the kind that wants to bash the canon apart like the out of date, intellectually limiting piñata that it is. I just thought it best to mention all that at the start, so that if you’re strapped for time, you can just guess what I’m going to say.

To this article then. If you didn’t click the link and read it, I can summarise it. I’ll be fair, at least a little fair, I promise. The University of Kent kicked up a big fuss this week by degrading children’s literature in its summary of a creative writing course, specifically by implying it was the antithesis of “great literature”. Many people got very annoyed at this dismissal of an entire form of writing as basically rubbish and the elevation of literary fiction above all else and they rightly apologised. But Myerson has decided to pick that dead mantle up for himself and write the above article which is, if anything, worse than the comments made by the University of Kent.

He opens by making a series of false equivalencies, arguing it is not absurd to claim:

“That Keats is different from Dylan, or, in this instance, that Philip Roth does say something rather more challenging than JK Rowling, that Jonathan Franzen does create storylines more ambiguous and questioning than Stephanie Meyer’s.”

It’s interesting, to me, that both the examples (ignoring Keats because Dylan isn’t a children’s author and that is a whole different argument in which I would make subtly different points) are modern American male authors. I happen to be a big fan of modern American male authors but it is interesting to me that the pool of writers from which his choose to draw is a specific kind of literary writer writing about specific kinds of concerns. By picking these two male authors, and comparing them to these two female authors, is to make a comparison not between literary fiction and children’s fiction but between the postmodern American novel and the large-scale fantasy franchise. Now that in itself doesn’t make his points invalid but it does show a limited conception of what constitutes either literary fiction or children’s books.

He goes on, don’t worry, to make greater mistakes.

“It isn’t about the quality of the prose: the best children’s books are better structured and written than many adult works…”

This might be my favourite line in the whole article. It smacks of the conservative line ‘you know, housewives do the most important work for society by raising a family’, in that its basically true but within it is also a note of placation before you go on to list your own achievements in the board room. Separate but equal, but I wouldn’t swap places with you.

 “It’s simpler than that: a novel written for children omits certain adult-world elements which you would expect to find in a novel aimed squarely at grown-up readers.”

Now to some extent, obviously, this is true. Children’s books tend to be based around children and young adult characters who, mostly, go to school rather than have jobs and have best friends rather than husbands and fall out with their parents rather than their kids and worry about their emotions rather than the economy. This, to me, is not a sign of one being better than the other, unless you have decided (as, in some ways, society has) that careers are more valuable than education or lovers than friends or being a mother than being a child. But this, in fact, is not his point. His point is not about ‘elements’ but about complexity.

A specific kind of complexity which, in fact, I would argue you absolutely find in children’s literature.

“I would not have wanted them [his children] – at 11, 12 or 13 – to confront the complexity and banality of evil. It’s quite right that they wanted to read about worlds where evil was uniformly evil and good people were constantly good.”

Yes, well, you definitely shouldn’t have given them Harry Potter or Twilight then (I am using these examples, incidentally, because they are the ones Myerson used but you could make equally strong arguments with many others including but not limited to the Chronicles of Narnia, The Hunger Games, Where the Wild Things Are, Alice in Wonderland and, indeed, Asimov who he uses to make the opposite point). 

If Harry Potter is about anything, it is about how there is no clear distinction between good and evil. Myerson makes the mistake a lot of people make, from only having seen the first few movies or read the first few books or taken in what is disseminated by the media. There is hardly a single character in Harry Potter who you would categorise as ‘evil’ who is not in some way humanised. We see Voldemort’s cruel family history, we learn about Snape’s love for Lily Potter, we get an insight into the inner turmoil of Draco Malfoy, we get Petunia Dursley’s jealousy. And the good guys, wow, are they sometimes bad! What about Sirius’ terrible advice and blatant hypocrisy? What about Dumbledore’s skewed ethics? Percy Weasley’s selfishness and snobbery? Or Peter Pettigrew! Sure, there are your Bellatrix’s and your Hagrid’s who have little to none of the ‘other side’ in them but every story has characters who are more fleshed out than others. The truth is that the central arc for Harry in the entire series is the realisation that Snape and Voldemort are men, men just like him, very like him in fact, purposely mirrored. In the final confrontation between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, he calls Voldemort by his first name, Tom, not to antagonise him (as it is taken) but to try and bring him back to the humanity that was once there, that Harry sees because he recognises it in himself. It is a story that teaches you that actions are evil, not people, and that everyone exists in a wider political and emotional context, in much the same way that Myerson’s SS solider example does.

And Twilight? Twilight is thematically less interested in good and evil at all. But, even stripped apart, it is the story of a young girl falling in love with a vampire (and a bit with a werwolf) who openly admits to murder, who can’t touch her because he might kill her and a terrifying, misguided leadership who are, ultimately, won round by argument and physical proof. It’s a story full of darkness: hints of sexual deviance and violence, secrets and lies; and these are not separated discreetly between our heroes and our villains. Indeed, different characters would argue about who constitute the heroes or the villains. And in the end? Well, it turns out everyone and no-one. Ultimately, it’s a Gothic text: you don’t have to read too hard or too deeply to see that there is, in fact, a lot of ‘ambiguity and questioning’ in Twilight. 

I guess this goes back to Myerson’s first point, and indeed the first point I made in this post. This is not an objective decision about which is more ‘challenging’ but a hugely subjective one about what debates are worth having in our society. Franzen’s concerns, Roth’s concerns are more important than Meyer’s or Rowling’s. It’s not that they are not there, not that they are not complex but that Myerson doesn’t care about them.

I have made a real effort in this ramble not to say that Myerson is also eschewing genre fiction and books written by female authors because I don’t think his intention was malicious, it was merely lazy. Regardless, his examples are telling. While later in the article, he makes clear that he is not against “imaginary” (note: not fantasy and what he is ultimately making room for is dystopian / literary science fiction) worlds per se, he makes sure his examples are male literary writers who have written genre texts rather than are genre writers. It sets a hierarchy: texts set in the real world, written by American men musing on the world post-9/11 or the culture wars or Clinton getting a blow job in the Oval Office (incidentally, just read ‘The Human Stain’ this week) are ‘greater’ than the concerns of a Gothic text about the interplay of desire and love and violence, or Rowling’s musings on whether actions or people are truly evil. I happens to like both, greatly, but this plays in, whether we like it or not, to historic debates which demonise those genres and concerns associated with women and elevate those associated with men until they become ‘great’, ‘universal’, ‘timeless’. Or, by another name, into the historic building of the literary canon. 

Look, you don’t have to read or like or value children’s literature. That’s your choice. I think you’re cutting yourself from a world of thought, just like if you dismiss all genre fiction or fiction originally written in another language. But you don’t get to make up lies about what constitutes a literature you have professed to be uninterested in. Children’s literature *can* be about clear distinctions between good and evil, as can adult literature, but it is not solely or entirely polarised and, perhaps more crucially, that point is badly represented by those two examples. I don’t love Twilight, I don’t think Harry Potter is flawless: but what they are definitely not is simple pictures of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’. My advice? How about you read them properly before you slag them off?