by Dave
Since we’re at the end of the Harry Potter cycle, the discussion now takes a shift. Travis mentioned in the last pubcast the need to branch SoG out a bit, and inject some discussion of of HP within a broader literary context. Up until now, most discussion at Harry Potter websites has focused on speculation about the ending of the plot, the fate of the characters, and some detective work about who was doing what and when. Since most of these points of interest have been answered to some degree, now comes the less sexy work of analyzing the stories for possible interpretations based on what was resolved and what wasn’t, and to figure Harry’s place in the broader literary world.
One way to do this is by reading Harry and his tale in comparison to some other stories with which the Potterverse seems to share a relationship. And one commenter, Amy, has posted her course description for a class she teaches on Harry Potter and his Predecessors. So, it might not be a bad idea to begin a brief and by no means exhaustive catalogue of books and short stories that provide some sort of context in which Rowling’s fictional world can be read.
There are the obvious:
- ‘Lord of the Rings
- The Chronicles of Narnia
- the Bible, especially the New Testament
There are other less obvious contexts, too:
- Superhero literature — Harry’s place as a hero competes with these characters
- Classical epic literature, like Homer’s poems or The Epic of Gilgamesh, from which most of our ideas about heroes and villains are born
- Contemporary Christian literature, like The Left Behind series, designed specifically to evangelize Christian faith
- Shakespeare (isn’t everything tied to him?!)
We all tend to place Harry in the pantheon of great English Literature. My wife has compared Rowling to Shakespeare, and John Granger has said openly that she draws on a list of writers including Dickens and Dostoevsky. The BBC is launching a debate comparing Rowling to Dickens here, and as recently as this morning the voting split was 51/49 in favor of Dickens — not too bad for a “dumbing down” of our culture. It’s perhaps unprecedented to begin a discussion about a story’s literary longevity and merit this early in its life cycle, especially with so many people weighing in publicly, even if not always cogently. The blogosphere has certainly changed the nature of these kinds of discussions.
And, keep in mind that Harry’s story isn’t contained solely within a book. In the most recent issue of Game Informer, one of the better slick magazines devoted to gaming, MIT professor Henry Jenkins says this:
[This] generation thinks about media in fundamentally different ways. They increasingly expect that a story that really matters to them will extend across every available media platform.
Harry’s particular story is one told through multiple media outlets: books, film, and videogames. All of us here are familiar at least with the books and the movies, and a some might be familiar with the games. Each medium has its own conventions that emphasize different things. We’ve all complained at one point or another about the films and what they missed or simply misportrayed from the books. The recent exchange between Reyhan and Scott over the merits of Prisoner of Azkaban-the-film in the comments section of a recent post will attest to this, and our widely varying takes on the distinctions.
And scholars still aren’t sure how to approach games (this discussion in academia has become pretty contentious over the last few years), but they’re becoming increasingly aware that videogames and interactive media are hugely significant to our culture, reshaping the ways we think about stories. But, imagine playing in a simulation of Harry’s world where you get to “cast spells” using very particular movements of a control device that mimics the motions of using a wand, something that the recent Order of the Phoenix game made use of on Nintendo’s new Wii console (how would this change the debate for a fundamentalist opposition to Harry?!).
I’m wondering: Do we see Harry’s story connecting with some other, less obvious stories told in these media and in these traditions, or others, for that matter? And is there a signficant difference in the stories as they’re told in these different ways?
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{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
Dave, there are a couple of other genres with which the Harry Potter books have a lot in common: detective stories, and spy stories.
The commonalities with detective stories are easy to see: in almost every book there is at least one character who is not who or exactly what he says he is. In book one, we have Quirrell. In book two we have Ginny, who is possessed, and Tom Riddle, who turns out to be (gasp!) Voldemort. In book three there is a wealth of deceptive characters: the black dog / Sirius Black, Lupin, Scabbers / Peter Pettigrew. In book four we have Alastar Moody / Barty Crouch Jr. The deception lets up a bit in books 5, 6, and 7, at least to the extent that everyone is who they say they are. But they are not what they appear to be: in book 6 Snape confirms our worst suspicions and turns out to be Voldemort’s right hand man; in book 7 Dumbledore turns out to be less than perfect and in a double-switch, Snape turns out to have been Harry’s protector all along. The sleight-of-hand with Quirrell, Ginny, Pettgrew and Moody especially are very reminiscent, to me, of the games Agatha Christie plays with her readers. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is perhaps her greatest example of people not being who or what they say they are (I won’t say who the murderer is, for those few who haven’t read the book, but I will say it is literally the last person you would suspect).
Also, every book contains a central mystery, sometimes more than one. What is the philosopher’s stone? Who wants it, and why? Who is killing the unicorns? Who is petrifying the children? Who is writing on the walls? Who put Harry’s name in the TriWizard Cup contest? Why is Harry dreaming about the Department of Mysteries? What is Draco up to? How did Dumbledore’s hand get burned? And the greatest mystery of all, the one that still compels conjecture: is Snape good or evil?
I have said before that a lot of the page-turning power of the books comes from the fact that they are above-all mystery stories: JKR gives us enough clues that we can drive ourselves crazy trying to figure out what’s actually going on.
There are also commonalities with spy fiction. I have compared Dumbledore to a spy-master, and Snape to a mole, both in the tradition of John Le Carre. Snape as shape-shifter is actually one of the best examples of a double-agent to be found in any genre. We never know for sure, until we are literally shown his own memories, where his allegiance lies.
I do think that the story works as well as it does for a lot of reasons, and that in parts of book 7 it transcends all genres and reaches the level of great literature. But the debt it owes to these two genres has not yet been adequately recognized.
The detective story really is a fascinating genre that I’m just beginning to explore, but based on my very limited knowledge, I think Rowling finally mastered it with Book 7 (and mastered it masterfully…because Harry needed to develop over the course of seven books in order to become Sherlock Holmes). The ending of Book 7 didn’t happen TO Harry, like all the other books, while the readers discovered the book’s mystery ALONG WITH Harry. In Book 7, we learned the surprise FROM Harry. He was a step ahead of the readers for the first time in the series. I doubt a single person had it all figured out that Harry was the Elder Wand’s true master until the climax of the book.
Thanks Dave
I have difficulty allowing the movies and games to help me understand Harry better. The reason is that other people are shaping the story rather than the original author.
If it is true that ‘Harry’s particular story is one told through multiple media outlets’ then I have to allow fan fiction, etc to help tell the story too. But I don’t want it to!
I guess I have a problem between ‘canonical’ work and ‘deutero-canonical.’ The movies, games, fan fiction may all be edifying and helpful, but they’re just not the same as reading ‘the truth’!
Polanski’s Macbeth and Branagh’s Henry V are masterful interpretations of Shakespeare’s work. But they are essentially interpretations.
West Side Story is a long way from Romeo and Juliet! When does something stop telling the story it’s based on and become something else again? I wonder how happy Rowling really is with the movies (apart from bringing home the bacon)…
I for one hate Harry-haters basing their arguments on things they saw in the movies. The movies are something else again. If there are clashes between the forms, I have to go back to canon.
So I have to disagree with you and say that Harry’s story is contained solely within a book. Or more accurately, within seven books and any other books Rowling publishes explaining the story. Anything else may be interesting and have value in itself, but if it is not by Rowling I don’t think I can say it tells the story about Harry.
Black Angus, I should probably let Dave speak for himself, but I think the key word here is “contained.” Sure, the story as Rowling has written it is contained in the 7 books she wrote, hence our use of the word, “canon.” But when thinking of Harry in the context of present and past literature, and especially in the context of current culture and its primary literacies, it’s impossible to say that the Harry Potter story is “contained” within the books alone. Culturally speaking, they’re not, and I think Dave is asking this question (among others): what effect have the various literacies of our culture had on the Harry Potter story?
Really, that last question he asked is a loaded one!
Black Angus, in some ways, this goes back to a conversation Travis and I have had in the comments of a post and via email.
I read your response and interpret what you’re saying as an author centered approach. It’s Rowling’s work, therefore the world as she constructed it is the only real story. For me, it’s a reader centered approach. Once Rowling puts the story into the public, she loses exclusive control over it. College English teachers argue about this point a lot. Personally, I think both can be valid at the same time.
But, like Travis said, as a thing existing within a culture, what the culture does with that story is of fundamental importance. And in some ways, the different media versions of Harry parallel the different retellings of oral literature from the classical world. Virtually every major narrative in our culture has been influenced in the popular imagination by a retelling of it. Even the Gospel story I grew up with isn’t precisely what’s in the New Testament, and I learned most of it in Vacation Bible School.
I just don’t read the author as the arbiter of “the truth” within any story. And, for what it’s worth, the crew on Pottercast did an extended interview with the Electronic Arts development team that creates the Harry Potter games. According to them, Rowling had significant input into the games’ development (although as videogames, they’re still pretty bad).
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, Dave, oral “literature” developed at a time when the majority did not read (possibly even before that, before the development of an alphabet and written words). Under such circumstances, retelling the story was the only way sharing it with others, including the story-teller’s audience. It was inevitable under such circumstances that a story would become “public domain” and change from re-telling to re-telling.
The technology has changed. Almost everyone in the world now has access to the original version, or the “canon”. The rules that describe the oral tradition do not apply.
Actually, the rules of oral tradition and how stories change in the public domain didn’t even apply in the days after Homer. There were “canon” versions of the Iliad and Odyssey – Mary Renault, a historical author known for her accuracy, talks about Alexander’s worn copy of the Iliad. This was more than two thousand years ago that the story was crystallized and no longer to be messed with.
Closer to us in age, take the example of Charles Dickens. The Old Curiousity Shop, with its heroine, Little Nell, excited as much attention one hundred and fity years ago (give or take) as Deathly Hallows did this July. Grown men waited at the dockside in New York for the ship to arrive from England carrying the latest chapter of the Old Curiousity Shop, so they could find out if Nell lived or died (read the original if you want to find out which!). Dickens, for all his immense popularity, did not become “public property”. The story did not change. There have been numerous movies made of his books, more so than JKR. There have been Broadway and Hollywood musicals. All these scripts take necessary liberties with the original, but the canon remains the canon.
Now an interesting point is this. When you ask most people about Oliver Twist, ask them, say, about Fagin, what will they remember? Dicken’s word description, or Alec Guinness, or Ron Moody or Ben Kingsley? Most people don’t read Dickens nowadays. And even for those who do, Guinness’ face is as inextricably linked with Fagin as Rickman’s is with Snape’s. Perhaps that’s what you mean, when you talk about the effect of different media depictions on Harry Potter.
Will the day come when Harry is remembered as a video-game character by all except the purists who, led by Harold Bloom, will decry the vulgarization of great literature?
Reyhan, your final point is what I was after, you just said it much better. For me, every reader is a potential retelling of a story, if for no other reason than a general lack of literacy in our culture. The vast majority of people in the Western world are taught the basics of reading comprehension; but not everyone “reads” with the same attention to detail that we might here. I agree with you and Travis, that there is a canon of text. But in the broader sense, the canon isn’t completely inviolate. As you said, it’s almost impossible for me to read Snape and not see and hear Alan Rickman.
Videogames create an even bigger dilemma because every user quite literally changes “the canon” of the text. Games have become advanced enough now that the user can have a significant effect on the story as it is being told, dynamically changing characters and even moral outcomes of the story the game is telling.
The Harry Potter games have a fundamental problem for all games licensed from adaptations of books or films — they have to create an environment for interaction that is interesting and compelling, but their source material is a canonical (which seems to imply “static”) text. The gameplay segments in the Potter games are often moments that are never present in the books. In the Chamber of Secrets game, Harry and Ron have to fight their away around the base of the Whomping Willow in a protracted escape while dodging over a bunch of jumps and obstacles and fending off the Willow’s attacks. In another instance, there’s a minigame in which Harry and Ron do some degnoming of the Weasley garden, and they later get involved in a competition at Hogwarts in which they are long-tossing gnomes off the battlements. In a couple of other instances from the games, Harry duels Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle, actually playing out the duel that never happened when Malfoy set Harry up for detention.
Sorry for the two replies, but I had another thought…
The summary of it is this: An oral culture posited the authority primarily within the storyteller. That person had primary ownership over the story and told it as s/he saw fit. Our culture diffuses that ownership across the readership precisely because we’ve gone to great lengths to make sure as many people as possible can be exposed to the “canon” itself.
I agree with Black Angus.
I am an avid video gamer and love heaps of games. I am symapthetic with gamers and games but, in my opinion, it’s a huge misconception to allow a story to be interpreted by a game of the same name- with some exceptions. Take a game like HALO and HALO 2. The game developer, or a story writer in their employ, writes a story. They develop a game and platform on that story. You can only advance the story by successfully completing the action sequences. This ensures that you follow the story the writer has come up with. It becomes extremely succussful. Makes millions of dollars. Novels are written to explain the back story. Movies are made or at least proposed. There we go- games, books and movies of the same story, not contradictory and bringing in the moolah.
vs:
Rowling is inspired to write a story. It’s a grand story that will take 7 years of story time and 12? years of real work to tell. She wants to tell her story even though it may flop. It’s successful and the publishers are happy for her to continue. Movie execs think ‘Great! Buy the rights and we can make movies and games and all manner of merchandising.’ The game developers either see the movie or read the books and say ‘What parts of the story can we use to entertain the kiddies and get the people spending?’. They are NOT telling the stories. The best they hope to do is give someone the opportunity to participate in the story as if they are a character. But they lie about doing anything more to the story.
Dave wrote:
Videogames create an even bigger dilemma because every user quite literally changes “the canon” of the text. Games have become advanced enough now that the user can have a significant effect on the story as it is being told, dynamically changing characters and even moral outcomes of the story the game is telling.
If you change “the canon” of the text it ceases to be the story in all ways except the title. I think it’s a marketing lie that suggests you can effect the story. It’d be better if the Harry Potter computer games were called “Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry” and allowed you to make up your own student and do your stuff rather that fiddle with Rowlings story. Harry Potter computer games, while maybe fun to play, add nothing to the understanding of Rowling’s story and do much to detract from it. The games will train the player to read the stories as a series of levels and obstacles to overcome rather than a journey to experience.
I also disagree that once an author puts their story out into the public they lose exclusive control over it. We all interpret the story when we read it but that is such a different thing from businesses creating related merchandise to ride the back of the stories. I am sure that no game developer or movie exec askes themselves how they can explore the stories further. They are asking themselves “What makes money? The books sold well because of X,Y and Z. We need more X and Z and it’ll really bring in the bucks.”
I have never seen Alan Rickman in my mind’s eye when reading Snape. I find it hard to buy him as Snape in the movies. He just didn’t fit in with how I imagined him.
Matthew
Matthew–
I agree with you on every point except Snape, but I guess that’s just because I like Alan Rickman. I have much more trouble with other of the movie actors–the dark-haired Dursleys, for instance. But I don’t picture any of the actors when I reread the books.
I think your idea about the games is particularly correct (and what a good idea, too).
Matthew and Trish, I understand what you both are saying, particularly about games. I’ll just say this and leave my point to stand as it will or won’t: I don’t believe that any text, “canonical” or not, is a sacrosanct, inviolate artifact that is never changed and has one “True” reading.
It’s all language, which means it’s all discursive, which means writing and reading are about getting involved in a dialogue and we all know those don’t always work quite like we want them to. That means texts “talk” to a culture, and that culture is also a bunch of stories built around a bunch of other stories. The very idea of a “canon” is iffy to me. Most of us here have at least a slightly purist bent, giving priority to Rowling’s writing (me included). But, many people don’t. And I think the cultural environment in which a story operates doesn’t particularly care about the author, either.
This is one of the main points both sides of the Harry-as-a-Christ-figure don’t appreciate. They’re speaking a fundamentally different language built on a fundamentally different set of assumptions. And, in general, they’re really speaking at each other instead of to each other, even if their intentions are otherwise.
I just wanted to raise a question about the stuff that influences Harry Potter as a cultural phenomenon. It seems that Rowling drew on some influences that are pretty clear, built some metaphors that are widespread in Western culture, and drew some references from some reasonably clear-cut sources. But, despite the fact that Rowling wishes for some critical distance from Tolkien, the books will be read in contrast to LotR because they share striking similarities. Some of Gandalf’s assessments of Sauron sound incredibly similar to Dumbledore’s speculations about Voldemort.
Anything that we read is read within contexts and relationships to other stuff. So, what is some of that other stuff?
We had a poet in Australia who removed her work from the English syllabus in High Schools because she was deeply offended by the (freudian) analysis that warped what her poems were actually about. And I feel she had every right to do that.
I read sites like this one because the posts and comments help me understand the work itself. You challenge me and help me see connections I can’t see myself.
But if we all own the story now there’s no point criticising O’Brien and Grossman because they’re telling it the way they see it.
Dave, to say ‘I just don’t read the author as the arbiter of “the truth” within any story’ seems to me to mean we can, for example, ignore Rowling’s claims of Christian faith and enlist the story to whatever we like.
Korg noted the disappearance of many speculators now book 7 is out. That’s because the questions have been answered, whether we like those answers or not. I might say ‘I didn’t like..’ or ‘I wish such-and-such happened’ but bad luck to me. It didn’t turn out that way.
I could go and write some fan fiction that plays my fantasy out, but at that point it ceases to tell the story of Harry and begins to tell mine. Or I could make a HP movie and cast an idiot as Dumbledore…
Very heavy irony there, Black Angus.
Dave, I’m not quite sure where you’re coming from. Are you talking about the stuff that influenced Rowling in writing the Potter books, either directly through her readings or indirectly, through cultural osmosis?
Or are you talking about how popular culture will now process Harry Potter, what he will look like after we’re done with him and how he will influence books and yes, videogames, to come?
I don’t think we can answer the second question yet. Although something tells me that Harry will be absorbed without a trace.
Dave, your piece struck me because I’ve seen Harry as a superhero story from the start; perhaps out of the need to remove it somewhat from the “witchcraft” context for the sake of explaining it to those who might be otherwise offended. It fits more appropriately with things like X-Men and The Incredibles, where the story involves relations between multiple individuals with like powers, rather than the Superman- or Spiderman-type story, where supernatural power is contained in one being.
Of course, The Incredibles and the X-Men movies both came after the early Potter books (at least if I have my pop-culture chronology straight), and I’ve never heard that Rowling got into the old Marvel scene. But hey, who knows …
If there’s any doubt that Harry is a superhero just look at the cover of the British, children’s edition of Deathly Hallows. He’s a spitting image of Clarke Kent!
Dave,
It’s an interesting question of what other stuff we read HP in relation to. I think the more widely read the reader the greater the appreciation of the books or at least the concept.
I’m sure, in time, that the movies will be re-made. Eventually, it will become apparent that Daniel Radcliffe cannot do justice to the part, Gambon was do-do, the stories are not “kid’s” stories or light entertainment and they will be redone for adult viewers.
That’d be great!
Matthew
Reyhan, obviously, the second part of your response is spot on. There’s no way we can forecast how or why HP will be worked into our culture in the future.
But the first part of your answer is only half of it. I look at Jennifer’s and Matthew’s responses as particularly fascinating, especially given that the HP movies tend to get shoved out the door with all the other summer superhero flicks.
That’s what I mean between “obvious” and “less obvious”. There are several traditions from which Rowling is drawing ideas and styles. But there’s all this other stuff that Harry’s world gets read/watched/played in conjunction with, and I wonder how those things shape the ways we think of HP, or how HP shapes the ways we think of this other stuff, for that matter.
This has been an interesting discussion. But my perspective seems to be different than most of you–I suppose because I’m older than most of you, or at least, I think I am.
I was never into comics when I was little (in the 50s–see? I told you I was older), but I have watched some of the super hero movies, including X-Men. I think that’s a good comparison for HP.
I love my computer, but I’m rubbish at any kind of gaming, so I just don’t go there anymore. So, for me, it doesn’t matter what they do with the HP games, it doesn’t have any affect on my reading of the story. I do want to comment, though, that while a game allows people to “change” the story as the play, it still doesn’t change what Rowling wrote. What she wrote is still what I call Harry Potter canon. What she says in interviews or on her web site can also be considered canon, IMO. But even though she may have been involved in the creation/concept stage of a game, we have no way of knowing what parts are hers and what parts belong to the person turning it into a game. Unless she tells us, or they include a disclaimer on the box, we don’t know which part is canon and which part isn’t. But what the gamer does with the story is not Rowling’s canon–it falls in the realm of fan fiction. Someone has taken the ideas and the characters and they have created their own vision of the story. I don’t see how that can ever fall in the category of “new canon”.
As for what I read that might influence the way I read Harry Potter? For the last three years, and especially since Half-Blood Prince, I’ve gone back to 19th century literature, mainly English. I’ve found that I like it better than most of the books written in the last 10 years, though I’ve read a few I liked. I’ve also read more Lewis, Charles Williams, one by Chesterton, and some of the children’s books that JKR mentioned that she particularly liked–ones that I hadn’t read.
In reading things that she said she liked, I’ve found many references to Dickens, Austen, Hardy (whom she must have read). Some are very obvious, while others are more subtle and probably fall in that range of the “compost heap” of literature that she says influenced her.
I’m sure that my reading isn’t typical. But since I’m not a gamer, watch very little TV and am very picky about my movies, the pop culture isn’t really changing how I read Harry Potter. Thoughtful conversations with people that I find here and at HogPro have influenced me, no doubt. But one of the things I like is that, especially now that we have all 7 books, people aren’t trying to figure out the story any longer, but just trying to sort out the meaning. And that’s different than changing the story to fit a game, or for that matter, the fan fiction that I’m sure will still be abundant.
Speaking of fanfic, I’ve read two book length ones. The first was quite good (written while we waited for HBP, and after a long forum discussion, of which I was part–and that was the reason I read it). The second one was after HBP, so naturally, some of the events were not the same, and she decided to stick with her newly created canon. While it was still well written, I had a hard time reading it, knowing that she’d gone a different direction and in some cases was so far from what happened in HBP, which made her even farther from what happened in DH. That same group is now very unhappy with DH, because it didn’t take the secular path they envisioned.
All the time I was reading that second fanfic, I was reading both OP and HBP to get ready for Deathly Hallows, so I kept reminding myself of Rowling’s story, and not the fanfic. I loved DH, and find now that I can’t join in the discussions of what I think she should have had the characters do or who should or shouldn’t have died and in what manner, etc. We have all seven books, and I’m happy to read what she’s given us and to discuss it within that context.
For me it was like reading “Gone with the Wind”. It was the complete story as far as the author, Margaret Mitchell was concerned. (The movie of that, IMO, is the best translation of book to movie.) But I could never read the sequel that someone wrote later, because it was written by someone else–a published fanfic really. The same goes for the books that have been written to continue the story of Pride and Prejudice. If Austen had wanted to continue their story, I think she would have done.
So, Dave, while I see your point that our culture will change the HP stories–at least for many–I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. We seem to have assumed that we have the right to do that, but I think we owe it to the author, the originator of whatever book we read, to take what they give us. The part that we add, and it’s impossible not to do so, is our understanding of the books–our own experiences make certain parts more interesting or poignant to us, the reader. But that still doesn’t change the books.
Sorry, once again, I’ve gone on too long, and I need to be heading out the door soon.
Pat
Jennifer, interesting analogy you made there, about the X-Men, and the Incredibles. The two aren’t actually in the same category; the Incredibles comes along further in the evolution of comic book heroes: the generation of self-parody.
I grew up with the X-Men, and also their Marvel contemporaries, the Avengers, Fantastic Four, and The Inhumans. There was also the DC contingent: the Justice League of America and the Legion of Super Heroes. The X-Men is actually the closest match to Harry Potter, although the Legion is pretty close; they both feature a group of super-powered teen-agers; the X-Men are led by Professor Xavier who gathers them together to teach them how to use their powers. They are feared and shunned by the world and they are only incidentally super-heroes; their main goal is survival. The Legion has a less dramatic backstory: they are a group of super-powered teens who happen to catch the interest of a millionaire who funds them in their fight against evil.
There are fundamental differences between the kids of Harry Potter and the X-Men (the biggest one of which is that witches/wizards are not hunted down / shunned by Muggles, and they see their powers as normal and fun rather than abnormal and scary).
But you’ve got me thinking. Some people see JKR’s world as derivative, with few if any original ideas. It would be interesting to see which of her ideas we could trace to others, and which ones seem to have either originated with her or changed enough by her so as to approach originality.
Dave, how right you are about the Harry Potter movies getting “shoved out the door with all the other summer superhero flicks.” I suppose it works for the movie business; if the HP movies were anywhere close to the books in quality level, it would really annoy me. Anyway, you’ve definitely got me thinking about the various influences of different genres, media, and storylines on each other. Maybe this is one of the reasons Harry Potter has such mass appeal: it meshes aspects of so many genres into one tale.
Matthew, I think you’re right; in ten or twenty years, the movies will be remade, hopefully with more faithfulness to the storyline and characters. It would be nice to see good actors, especially in the roles of Dumbledore and Hermione. I’m still laughing over Travis saying “Snape didn’t kill Dumbledore, Michael Gambon did.”
Pat, I actually read the sequels to Austen’s books, and found them dreadful. The author dramatically changed the characters of Georgiana Darcy and Margaret Dashwood to suit her purposes, and it didn’t ring true at all. Maybe this is why I avoid fanfic for the most part.
I hate to take a strict sola scriptura principle toward the books; what Reyhan called “necessary liberties” don’t bother me exactly. For instance, the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice, while somewhat less faithful to the text than the BBC version, in my opinion captured the spirit of the book best of the four movie versions I’ve seen. But I do agree that the author’s text is still the canon itself, and other renderings of the story merely reflect that. If an outside story introduces real inconsistency to the storyline, to the characters, or the themes of the book, it loses its right to pass itself off as reflecting canon–even though, for all intents and purposes, it might well be seen as canon to many people.
Reyhan, you’re absolutely right about X-Men and The Incredibles belonging in separate categories. As far as the latter goes, I was mainly thinking of its being a story, albeit a comic one, about a group of superheroes and therefore separate from the Superman/Batman/Spiderman-type single-hero tales. I liked what you had to say about the Marvel stories, with which you are much more acquainted than I am.
I found your last thought very interesting, and if you pursue it, would love to see what you come up with. It seems to me that people censuring JKR’s world as derivative are pushing the borderlines of literary and/or intellectual snobbery. It may be unacademic of me to say so, but it thrills me to discover the little connections between Harry Potter and other great stories coming from literature and legend. I am less impressed with originality for originality’s sake alone than by an original arrangement of features drawn from the wealth of artistic tradition.