Read Online Harry Potter's Bookshelf by John Granger - Free Book Online
Authors: John Granger
Ads: Link
conventional school stories, is thus, at least in part, measured by his compassion for underdogs. 17
School Story as Morality Tale
Along with these stock players and themes, Harry Potter novels, as David Steege puts it, “have one more trait in common with other public school novels, seen especially strongly in Tom Brown’s Schooldays : a tradition of providing a moral tale as well as a ripping good yarn.”
In writing Tom Brown’s Schooldays , Hughes knowingly preaches to his audience. In his preface, he freely admits: “Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching!” 18
Rowling, too, has often been quoted in response to the idea of her books as morality tales. She has said that she “did not conceive it as a moral tale,” but that “the morality sprang naturally out of the story.” Although she “never set out to preach,” 19 “undeniably, morals are drawn.” 20
What saves Harry in the end are his “free will, courage, and moral certainty.” 21 The author values courage “more highly than any other virtue and by that I mean not just physical courage and flashy courage, but moral courage.” 22
Ms. Rowling shudders at the idea that she is a “formula writer” 23 or a moral pedant. Nonetheless, the setting of her stories in a boarding school and the creative but remarkable conformity of these stories in the characters and to the themes of the public school novel genre make the books deliver a predictable moral worldview that C. S. Lewis praised as “training in the stock responses.”
As he explained in A Preface to Paradise Lost, one of art’s “main functions” is to “assist” in the organization of “chosen attitudes,” namely, being able to recognize vice and virtue and to praise the latter with truth and beauty and to despise the former with falsehood and ugliness. Such training, fostered by the great poets like Milton and, if Chesterton is to be trusted, even by formulaic schoolboy fiction, yields “all solid virtue and stable pleasure.” 24 Sydney, Wordsworth, Horace, and Aristotle all argued that story hits its mark when it is simultaneously “instructing while delighting.”
Wouldn’t it be odd if a story set at a school wasn’t about instruction of some kind and, given its roots in Victorian England, about implicit and explicit moral instruction instead? The students and the readers come to learn—and the schoolboy story instructs and delights.
Harry Potter Not “Just Another Schoolboy Formula Novel”
The Potter novels are schoolboy fiction, wonderfully reimag ined but true to the conventions of the genre all the same. And this setting and Ms. Rowling’s conformity to formula does tell us a great deal about the literal and the moral meaning of the books.
It is by no means, however, the whole of the literal meaning or of the books’ moral layering. We have seen other dimensions on these relatively superficial levels of meaning in the previous chapter discussions of narrative voice and drive and of the formulas and moral weight of “manners and morals” fiction à la Austen, Sayers’s character-driven detective stories, and Dickens’s orphan novels. The literal level and the devices and set pieces Ms. Rowling borrows from the various traditional genres bleed with moral meaning that informs the reader’s experience of the surface story.
The upcoming chapters exploring the explicitly moral, allegorical, and transcendent layers of meaning reveal that dismissing Ms. Rowling’s oeuvre as simply schoolboy fiction, as academic critics have, is to miss the source of the novels’ power and popularity. What separates Rowling from more formulaic books in the schoolboy genre is her level of planning. She planned her seven books for five years before completing the first novel, Sorcerer’s Stone . Planning is an integral part of the process for Rowling. In an interview with the South Australian Advertiser , she talks about how important it is to
School Story as Morality Tale
Along with these stock players and themes, Harry Potter novels, as David Steege puts it, “have one more trait in common with other public school novels, seen especially strongly in Tom Brown’s Schooldays : a tradition of providing a moral tale as well as a ripping good yarn.”
In writing Tom Brown’s Schooldays , Hughes knowingly preaches to his audience. In his preface, he freely admits: “Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching!” 18
Rowling, too, has often been quoted in response to the idea of her books as morality tales. She has said that she “did not conceive it as a moral tale,” but that “the morality sprang naturally out of the story.” Although she “never set out to preach,” 19 “undeniably, morals are drawn.” 20
What saves Harry in the end are his “free will, courage, and moral certainty.” 21 The author values courage “more highly than any other virtue and by that I mean not just physical courage and flashy courage, but moral courage.” 22
Ms. Rowling shudders at the idea that she is a “formula writer” 23 or a moral pedant. Nonetheless, the setting of her stories in a boarding school and the creative but remarkable conformity of these stories in the characters and to the themes of the public school novel genre make the books deliver a predictable moral worldview that C. S. Lewis praised as “training in the stock responses.”
As he explained in A Preface to Paradise Lost, one of art’s “main functions” is to “assist” in the organization of “chosen attitudes,” namely, being able to recognize vice and virtue and to praise the latter with truth and beauty and to despise the former with falsehood and ugliness. Such training, fostered by the great poets like Milton and, if Chesterton is to be trusted, even by formulaic schoolboy fiction, yields “all solid virtue and stable pleasure.” 24 Sydney, Wordsworth, Horace, and Aristotle all argued that story hits its mark when it is simultaneously “instructing while delighting.”
Wouldn’t it be odd if a story set at a school wasn’t about instruction of some kind and, given its roots in Victorian England, about implicit and explicit moral instruction instead? The students and the readers come to learn—and the schoolboy story instructs and delights.
Harry Potter Not “Just Another Schoolboy Formula Novel”
The Potter novels are schoolboy fiction, wonderfully reimag ined but true to the conventions of the genre all the same. And this setting and Ms. Rowling’s conformity to formula does tell us a great deal about the literal and the moral meaning of the books.
It is by no means, however, the whole of the literal meaning or of the books’ moral layering. We have seen other dimensions on these relatively superficial levels of meaning in the previous chapter discussions of narrative voice and drive and of the formulas and moral weight of “manners and morals” fiction à la Austen, Sayers’s character-driven detective stories, and Dickens’s orphan novels. The literal level and the devices and set pieces Ms. Rowling borrows from the various traditional genres bleed with moral meaning that informs the reader’s experience of the surface story.
The upcoming chapters exploring the explicitly moral, allegorical, and transcendent layers of meaning reveal that dismissing Ms. Rowling’s oeuvre as simply schoolboy fiction, as academic critics have, is to miss the source of the novels’ power and popularity. What separates Rowling from more formulaic books in the schoolboy genre is her level of planning. She planned her seven books for five years before completing the first novel, Sorcerer’s Stone . Planning is an integral part of the process for Rowling. In an interview with the South Australian Advertiser , she talks about how important it is to
Similar Books
