Not what he said
And yet another follow-up to the story – Jon Stewart says with much emphasis that he’s not calling Rowling anti-Semitic and that Newsweek is full of shit for saying he is.
That’s roughly where I am, except that I’m much less keen on Harry Potter, precisely because of the crude stereotypes and Manicheanism.
Nice to see him giving more detail to the event that Newsweek was talking about — now I have a bit of respect for him. He should have told everybody to calm the eff down and stop throwing slurs at people just because you don’t like their stand on an issue but we can’t expect much.
A few disconnected thoughts.
I think this incident is an excellent example of the labeling phenomenon in current discourse. Someone says or does something that might be described as racist, and the argument is over whether this person “is racist”. The point should perhaps be more focused on what was said or done and why that is a problem, not on digging up dirt on this individual and casting this person out of polite society. Yes, it’s reasonable to wonder whether JKR should have been conscious of the interpretation of the portrayal of goblins as an antisemitic trope, but that’s where the problem should be focused, not on whether somehow JKR hates Jews in her heart of hearts.
But this is JKR, and any misstep she makes gets examined in great detail.
There are Manichean elements in the Harry Potter books, and some of them are false impressions in the early part of the story that are thwarted later on. Among them is the impression of Slytherin as an evil house.
For some reason my metaphor-oriented mind remembers that I never finished Moby Dick. I thought it was going to be a story about a sea voyage. There was all this stuff that took place in seaports and taverns. I got bored and gave up. Some might say that I got an inaccurate impression from not continuing to read the story.
I guess that in the “Sky is Falling” reporting on wokeness and cancel culture, it’s sometimes a good idea to go out and look at the sky before jumping in on the panic.
(I’m aiming at Newsweek, and not anybody in the comments or posts related to this particular tempest that wasn’t.)
If I want to see antisemitic and racist tropes in modern English-language culture, all I need do is re-watch “The Phantom Menace”. I am not going to, of course, but it’s a solid go-to.
Ah, so it’s exactly what it seemed like…
OB:
I am no longer into fairy stories and fantasy literature. My last plunge into the genre was Peter Pan and Wendy, taken some time before my age hit double digits. But ‘crude stereotypes and Manicheanism’ IMHO form the backbone of children’s literature, for a reason: the kids like it that way. It’s easily understood. For the same reason, their decor and visual art features large blocks of primary colour.
Subtlety? Feed that to the dog..
I don’t agree. I didn’t like it that way. I liked jokes, irony, characters that learn and develop and change – that kind of thing.
Not all kids, obviously. But many. I agree with Omar that that kind of format seems popular.
I do read some fantasy. Not much fantasy aimed at kids, but occasionally an author I like will write a book in that vein, and I read it. But there is plenty of fantasy aimed at adults. There is an overlap between science fiction and fantasy, and sometimes I find myself reading a book that is billed as SF but is really more fantasy, and it’s too damn good to put aside. One such work is N.K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy. Not really SF, really fantasy, but darn fine writing.
OB: Whatever floats your boat, and at whatever stage of life..
But in its own way, that Harry Potter stuff is in the same genre as movie Westerns, of which latter I have never grown tired. I think that the appeal is to our basic human/animal survival instinct. Hero vs villain; good vs evil is also the dominant theme of the mediaeval morality play, and a fair whack, if not the bulk, of classical art and drama.. JC Rowling just plugged into that.
But Westerns aren’t simplistic the way Harry Potter is at the start. (People are telling us things get more complicated over time.) Characters are conflicted as opposed to being Gryff or Slyther. There are some uncomplicated baddies for the sake of the plot, yes, but generally major characters have a little more to them.
But what are we debating here? The characters JKR wrote, or the interpretation of those characters by the film makers?
Goblins are fictional characters, so can take on any form an author desires to create.
JKR’s goblins are far less anti-Jew than, say, Shakepeare’s Shylock. But is that the way the character was written, or the way various perfomances have played the character? Some more, some less, sympathetic to Shylock.
The goblins in Harry Potter are a distinct race with distinct values who are in a subtly-antagonistic business relationship with the wizarding world, in which goblins handle and secure the wizards’ gold supply at least in Britain and presumably elsewhere, though possibly not — the one Magical Beasts film I watched didn’t seem to have any goblins in, to my recollection.
The metaphor for “Jewish bankers” is definitely there, but it is not explicit or even necessarily crude — in the latter books and films, one of the Gringotts goblins is featured in an interesting and sympathetic light, and his actor’s performance is filled with a quiet dignity that the child actors do not (and are not asked to) give. And, crucially, a child reading the books will probably not come away with “those goblins are just like those evil Jews!” unless they are guided to this opinion by someone else who held it before the child read those books. And it is entirely within the realm of possibility that Rowling did not have that metaphor in mind when casting goblins as the guardians of wizarding currency — one of the few dissonant goblin values she exposes, that goblins consider anything a goblin crafts as perpetual goblin property and every purchase by a wizard essentially as a lease that expires upon the death of the original purchaser — has nothing to do with any antisemitic idea that I have heard of.
Remember that these books are not just written for children, but they are almost exclusively from the point of view of a clever and proud and very neglected child who has been deliberately kept ignorant of how the “normal” world works for all of his years, much less the new magical world he’s plunged into at the age of eleven. We see the goblins and the house elves and the centaurs and everything else through Harry’s eyes; we are introduced to them as he is introduced to them, and any complexities they have are those which can be at least conveyed through (if not quite understood by) the perspective of a child as he grows through adolescence.
I would say the HP books are some of the best at telling that kind of story, where a child of similar circumstances and a similar age to the protagonist can read them and grow with them, until the later books are dealing with much more complicated themes in a more mature manner than even standard “adult” fantasy tends to do.
The war between the wizards is not born of some otherworldly Lovecraftian evil set to destroy the world for inscrutable arcane purposes combatted by knights in shining armour, but of a petty and ambitious and cruel and ultimately pitiful little man who has taken his personal traumas as an excuse to become a terrible and powerful person bent on living forever and making sure nobody can ever hurt him like that again, set against a flawed and vain and very fallible hero who is willing to lie and use child soldiers in order to defeat said antagonist. Harry Potter is notably not the hero of this war, but rather a child soldier, marked by the villain and manipulated by the hero in a cynical-but-not-sinister way. There is a great depth of humanity and pathos in the villain and the hero alike to which the Lord of the Rings cannot even begin to hold a candle.
That being said, I can see why an adult would find the first two books unreadable, except for reading aloud to an even younger child than those of the story; even as a fan who began reading the first book at age eleven myself, I could not finish re-reading the first book in my mid-twenties. I would say book 3 is the earliest one that an adult could reasonably expect to enjoy, and book 4 is my personal favourite, as it retains much of the childish wonder of the previous instalments while moving firmly into the more heavy themes of the latter works, especially by the end.
So, if you are curious, I would recommend starting with book 4, and either letting the details of the previous books fill themselves in along the way or reading executive summaries of them. They really are quite good, despite how popular they are.
People: tell stories for thousands of years about imaginary humanoid creatures called gnomes
Racists: compare jewish people to gnomes
JKR: incorporates gnomes into a fantasy series
People: OMG! JKR is an anti-semite!
Glinner references a few tweets that suspect the attacks on JKR were some sort of “tu quoque” argument in response to her calling out antisemitism in the UK Labour Party.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/glinners-twitter-ba5
I’d say the Harry Potter books started out pretty Manichean and symplisitic, but became somewhat more nuanced as they went on; see for instance the introduction of Slughorn – a genuinely good Slytherin, a clear distinction between “evil” and “complete jerk” displayed in Malfoy’s character arc and the revelations of Dumbeldore’s flirtation with dark magic. The Rowling haters seem to mostly consist of overgrown children who don’t want to give up on the simplistic morality of the early books, their animosity to Rowling has strong undertones of a bratty child throwing a hissy fit.
Totally agree with clamboy at #4!
Complaints about Jar Jar Binks have been well known since 1999 I’m sure.
But don’t omit Watto, the money-worshipping shopkeeper with the huge nose.