Books That Don't Exist: A Slight Side Step

In my previous post on books that don’t exist, Matt noted in the comments thread that J. K. Rowling does this with the Harry Potter books.

On that note, I’m linking here to this article in The Australian: Kirsten Tranter’s “Turning Young Muggles Into Readers Not In Harry Potter’s Bag Of Tricks.”

I’ll leave you to read the article by yourselves, but essentially the author responds to suggestions that children’s obsessive reading of the Harry Potter series has not, in fact, translated to a broader interest in literature, and suggests that this is partly because there is no literature within the books themselves.

Textbooks and spellbooks, yes. But no novels, or poetry, or drama. Even girly swot Hermione is primarily interested in non-fiction works.

Tranter does point out Gilderoy Lockhart’s output, but rightly indicates that

he is gradually exposed as a liar and a coward. His fraudulent tales are the closest thing to fiction in the magical world, but become worthless once their invented status is exposed. He might make up fabulous stories but he is not what we would call a novelist.

I would go further than that, myself, since I don’t think Lockhart does actually make up the contents of his books: if I remember correctly, and it’s been a while since I read the books, the events that occur in them are factual—Lockhart’s real skill is in tracking down people who have, for example, saved villages from werewolves, leaching the details out of them, and then performing accomplished Memory Charms so they can’t challenge the publication of his latest best-seller.

But, though we never see Lockhart’s prose, the implication is that the texts are narrative and frequently autobiographical (judging from the pop quiz Lockhart gives in the first class), and certainly the way in which Defense Against the Dark Arts classes devolve into constant reenactments of pivotal scenes from the books (with Harry as the monster in each instance) is the closest thing to dramatic performance in the novels.

Similarly, Tranter points out the eventual fate of The Tales of Beadle the Bard: “the only recognisably fictional story in the whole series [. . .] also turns out to be based on real events (within the frame of the novel) involving Harry’s ancestors, and so is not fiction at all.”

I think some degree of pendantry is necessary here, though: Ron clearly read these as fictional when he was a child, while the Muggle-raised Harry and Hermione have never come across them. True, Ron is made aware of their ultimately factual nature, but he is part of an elite group. Depending on how broadly the events of the final battle with Voldemort are broadcast through the wizarding world, there’s reason to assume that the majority of wizard children will continue to read these stories as fictional.

And yet this pedantry doesn’t seek to undercut Tranter’s main point: to the central characters through whom the readers’ experience of this world is focalised, this book—the only prominent fictional work in the universe—is revealed as factual, instead.

(Tranter does seem to have overlooked—or perhaps considered and dismissed—one text: in Ron’s room at The Burrow, his “school spellbooks were stacked untidily in a corner, next to a pile of comics which all seemed to feature The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle“ (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 35). This suggests that Ron, at least, draws a distinction between fact and fiction in his reading, but the comics are essentially set dressing; they have no further importance in the novels.)

Do I have a point to this post? Only in a manner of speaking.

I was talking lightly in my last post about how frustrating fictional fiction is to those of us who are easily excited by books.

This post is a counter-argument to that, or rather Kirsten Tranter’s excellent article is the counter-argument: while I may be frustrated by the presence of books that I will never be able to read, it had not occurred to me that an absence of such books in literature might cause even greater problems.