Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling

Conceptual Fiction

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

by J.K. Rowling

Reviewed by Ted Gioia

One might think it unnecessary to make a case for this book. After
all, it did more for the cause of reading than any novel of the last
century. It gave an enormous boost to the purveyors of books far
and wide, launching a series that has sold more than 400 million
copies to date. It has inspired other writers to publish more than
300,000 (no, I am not kidding)
Harry Potter-inspired stories of
their own in various on-line forums.
It has enchanted readers, young
and old, and will certainly continue
to do so for many generations to
come.

In short, if you had to place a wager
on the one book published in your
lifetime that will still be widely read
a century from now, this is where
all the smart money would go. It’s
a no brainer. Today’s children will
read it to their own children and
grandchildren, who in turn . . .
Well, you get the idea.

Yet when I suggested in an article that J.K. Rowling might be as
deserving of a prestigious literary award as, say, Doris Lessing, I
was subjected to some serious eyebrow-raising. Of course, we will
see if Lessing’s work in speculative fiction, Canopus in Argos:
Archives, is still in print in a hundred years. The fact that it is out
of print now, only a little more than year after Lessing was
honored with the Nobel, is not an encouraging sign. No smart
money on that horse, my friends.

Now Harold Bloom will tell you that "Rowling's mind is so
governed by clichés and dead metaphors that she has no other
style of writing." A.S. Byatt has suggested that the Harry Potter
books were written for “people whose imaginative lives are
confined to TV cartoons." Given J.K. Rowling’s apparent
ineptitude, one wonders why these books have become so much
more cherished than, say, The Flintstones or those manga
paperbacks remaindered in stacks down at Barnes & Noble. Could
it be that J.K. Rowling knows something that Professor Bloom
doesn’t? Hmm, can I wager on that one too?

Anyone who has spent some time with the Harry Potter books will
quickly discover why these works are so appealing. I have written
elsewhere that the most successful works of speculative fiction are
similar to what anthropologist Clifford Geertz described in his
influential 1973 work The Interpretation of Cultures as “thick
description” ethnography. While the “thin description” focuses
solely on one aspect of a culture, the “thick description” aims
more ambitiously to convey the context as well.

In conventional realistic novels, this context is often fairly
straightforward. It is the external world, and all its trappings. The
author does not need to specify it in all its richness, since this
contextual knowledge is brought by the reader to the act of
reading. But for writers of conceptual fiction, who tinker with our
sense of reality and exercise the license of fantasy, the context is
of paramount importance. The majesty of an endeavor on the
scale of Rowling’s project—as with similar imaginative
constructions of Narnia, Middle-earth, Dune, etc.—is the suchness
of this context, and its capability to astonish and delight us. This
is more than the invention of a story; it is nothing less than the
construction of a universe.

How difficult is it for a writer to do this? Building a vivid and
enchanting fantasy world from scratch, a Hogwarts or a Middle-
earth, is a massive undertaking, much more challenging, I would
argue, than writing crisp dialogue or creating an engaging
character. Readers understand this, even if Yale academics miss
the point. This is why any list of the most popular novels of the
last century is dominated by precisely these “thick description”
works of imaginative fiction.

But don’t jump to the conclusion that Rowling is weak on
character development, pacing or the other more traditional
components of the novelist’s craft. She has peopled her magical
universe with some of the most striking characters of
contemporary fiction. And I’m not just talking about Harry Potter
and his two chums, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley. The
secondary characters are also remarkably well constructed. Even
in these long tomes, Rowling can hardly find enough time on
center stage for all her memorable role players. While reading
these books, I always find myself wanting more of Snape and
Malfoy, two of the most perfectly realized villains I have
encountered. Hagrid is compelling, as is Dumbledore, and a dozen
or more of the lower profile cast members. Even a ghost like
Peeves has more personality and makes a bigger presence on the
page than those characters in other books who have the benefit of
a fully functional non-transparent body.

These are not "realistic" characters in the conventional sense.
They are compelling figures, nonetheless. Recall that the
characters one finds in Dickens and Proust—to cite two revered
predecessors—are hardly more realistic. Rowling, like Dickens,
creates artfully conceived "types" who are larger than life. They
are decidedly not like your neighbors next door, nor would you
want them to be. By exaggerating certain qualities and hiding
others, Rowling enhances the drama and vibrancy of her
narratives.

In series books, the most imaginative energy is typically evident in
the first volume. This is where the new universe comes to life (or
fails to do so, as the case may be). If everything clicks in book
one, half of the work for the sequels is already finished. This is
true for Rowling as it was for Frank Herbert or C.S. Lewis or J. R.
R. Tolkien. Once she had created Hogwarts and its denizens, the
magical universe that surrounds it, and above all the charismatic
Mr. Harry Potter & company, J.K. Rowling could have given us
countless stories with these same chess pieces. For this reason, I
give special marks to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (or
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in its original British
title), the work that set this whole enterprise in motion.

Rowling has blessed us with seven Harry Potter novels (although
her fans have added, as noted above, several hundred thousand
other related tales), and there is no better place to start in
exploring her richly inspired alternative world than this opening
volume in the series. If Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is
not a classic, than the term hardly has a legitimate meaning. This is
one of those books that is meant to be enjoyed and shared. I read
this book aloud to my son when he was five years old, and I
daresay that I was as enchanted as he was by Rowling’s story. We
went on to read the rest of the series together. I suspect he will
have the same joy sharing these books with his own children. In
the often isolating and esoteric world of the modern novel, this
sense of sharing and community is in itself remarkable. But no
less remarkable—and canonical—than what J.K. Rowling has
conjured out of her head.

This article originally appeared on Blogcritics.

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[kuhn-SEP-choo-uhl FIK-shuhn]

Noun: Storytelling raised
to a higher degree through artful
reconfiguration of the reader's conception of reality.

Notes on Conceptual Fiction

by Ted Gioia

1.

Is it possible that the idea of "realism" as a
guiding principle for fiction is itself unrealistic?
After all, there are no Newtonian laws in
stories—an apple can just as easily fly upward
from a tree as drop to the ground.   Characters
can ride a magic carpet as easily as walk.   Any
restrictions are imposed by the author, not by
any external "reality," however defined.

The first storytellers understood this
intuitively. That is why myths, legends, folk
tales and other traditional stories recognize no
Newtonian (or other) limitations on their
narrative accounts. These were the first
examples of what I call "conceptual fiction"—in
other words stories that delight in the freedom
from "reality" that storytelling allows.
Conceptual fiction plays with our conception of
reality, rather than defers to it.

In the past, conceptual fiction existed at the
center of our literary (and even pre-literary)
culture. Nowadays it is dismissed by critics and
typically shuffled off into "genre" categories
such as science fiction and fantasy.   Realism
gained preeminence as a supposedly rock hard
foundation for fiction. From that moment on,
Newton's laws (and a million other laws) gave
orders to the imagination, with the stamp of
approval of the literary establishment.

But here is the more interesting question. Is it
possible that this trend is reversing, and that
conceptual fiction is now moving back from the
periphery into the center of our literary
culture?

2.

How important is realism in storytelling today?
If one judges by the comments (and, even more
importantly, the unstated assumptions) of
critics as diverse as James Wood and Michiko
Kakutani, then realism is the foundation of our
literary culture, and storytellers ignore it at
their own peril.

But take a look at the most formative and
influential stories of our age, namely the best-
known motion pictures. (We will return to the
novel in a second.) Of the 50 top grossing films
of all time, only 7 reveal even the slightest
tendency toward realism. (And I need to
categorize Forrest Gump, The Titanic, Raider of
the Lost Ark, and Jaws as realistic to even get to
seven.)   You can denounce Hollywood as much
as you like, and ridicule the uneducated tastes
of moviegoers. Yet we see what they think of
realism every time we go the local multiplex.

But I can sense your scorn of Hollywood even
from where I am sitting across the great world
wide web.   And I am confident that you have
never debased yourself to the point of seeing and
enjoying any of these megahits. So let's turn to
the novel. Is it possible that even the novel—the
serious novel--is now falling out of the
gravitational pull of realism? (Ah, I love that
adjective: whenever I hear "serious" used by a
literary critic, I am reminded of John McEnroe
taunting the umpire at Wimbledon in his
whiny voice: "You can NOT be SERIOUS?")

Let's look more deeply into this matter.

3.

During the middle decades of the 20th century,
literary works that experimented with
language were seen as harbingers of the
future.   These Joycean and Poundian and
Faulknerian creations were singled out for
praise and held as models for emulation. These
works won awards, were taught in universities,
and gained acceptance (at least in highbrow
circles) as contemporary classics.

During these same years, another group of
writers, universally scorned by academics and
critics, were working on different ways of
conceptualizing reality. Unlike the highbrow
writers, they did not experiment with
sentences, but rather with the possible worlds
that these sentences described. These authors
often worked in so-called “genre styles” of fiction
(science fiction, fantasy), publishing in pulp
fiction periodicals and cheap paperbacks.
Despite the futuristic tenor of their writing,
these authors were not seen as portents of the
future. And though these books sold in huge
quantities and developed a zealous following
among readers, these signs of commercial
success only served to increase the suspicion
and scorn with which these books were dealt
with in highbrow circles.

4.

In a strange quirk of history, literature in the
late 20th and early 21st century failed to follow
in the footsteps of Joyce and Pound. Instead,
conceptual fiction came to the fore, and a wide
range of writers—highbrow and lowbrow—
focused on literary metaphysics, a scenario in
which sentences stayed the same as they
always were, but the “reality” they described
was subject to modification, distortion and
enhancement.

This was seen in the magical realism of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie; the
alternative histories of Michael Chabon and Philip
Roth; the modernist allegories of José Saramago;
the political dystopias of Margaret Atwood and
Kazuo Ishiguro; the quasi-sci-fi scenarios of
Jonathan Lethem and David Foster Wallace; the
reality-stretching narratives of David Mitchell and
Audrey Niffenegger; the urban mysticism of Haruki
Murakami and Mark Z. Danielewski; the meta-
reality musings of Paul Auster and Italo Calvino;
the edgy futurism of J.G. Ballard and Iain Banks;
and the works of hosts of other writers.

5.

Of course, very few critics or academics linked
these works to their pulp fiction predecessors.
Cormac McCarthy might win a Pulitzer Prize
for his novel The Road, a book whose apocalyptic
theme was straight out of the science fiction
playbook. But no bookstore would dare to put
this novel in the sci-fi section. No respectable
critic would dare compare it to, say, I Am
Legend (a novel very similar to McCarthy’s in
many respects).   Arbitrary divisions between
“serious fiction” and “genre fiction” were
enforced, even when no legitimate dividing line
existed.

Only commercial considerations dictated the
separation. Literary critics, who should have
been the first to sniff out the phoniness of this
state of affairs, seemed blissfully ignorant that
anything was amiss.

José Saramago’s Blindness might have a plot
that follows in the footsteps of Michael Crichton’
s The Andromeda Strain or Greg Bear’s Blood
Music, but no academic would ever mention
these books in the same breath. Toni Morrison’s
Beloved might have as its title character a ghost
and build its action around a haunting, but no
one would dare compare it to a horror novel—
even though it has all of the key ingredients.

It almost seemed as if the book industry (and
critics and academics) had reached a tacit
agreement. “If you don’t tell people that these
works follow in the footsteps of genre fiction
books, we won’t either." Yet this was merely a
commercial decision. After all, what serious
reader would buy these books if they had the
taint of sci-fi or fantasy? When would any
Pulitzer or Nobel panel give an award to a book
that was explicitly linked to genre fiction? They
wouldn't. So a charade needed to be played, in
which some works of conceptual fiction were
allowed to sit on the same shelf as the serious
books (ah, that McEnroe voice again), while
others were ghetto-ized in a different location,
whether it be in a library or a bookstore or
something more intangible like your mind.

6.

This state of affairs pointed to the fundamental
flaw in viewing works of science fiction and
fantasy as similar to other genre books.

Other genre categories—mysteries, romances,
etc.—have very strict limitations on their plots,
characters, narrative structures, etc. A
mystery book must have a crime and a solution
to the crime. A romance book must have a love
story that proceeds along more or less familiar
lines. These formulas must be followed at all
costs.

But the science fiction and fantasy categories
were far more freeform. Almost anything could
happen in these books, provided they played
some game with our concept of reality. The
only promises these works made were to
astound and delight us.   This was not a
formula—indeed it was the exact opposite of a
formula.

Just look at the names of the early sci-fi
magazines: they were called Amazing or
Astounding or Fantastic or tagged with some
equally ambitious title. . . (my favorite: Weird
Tales). Ah, what could be grander than
magazines that forged such extravagant
covenants with their readers? Not even The
New Yorker promises that every issue will be
astounding.

In essence, sci-fi and fantasy never fit nicely
into the genre pigeonhole. And given their
focus on surprising and delighting readers—
rather than following strict formulas of plot
development and resolution—it was inevitable
that “serious writers” would begin borrowing
from these scorned writers who existed at the
fringes of the literary world.

7.

Critics and academics and even readers have
largely missed the implications of this.   They
prefer to live in denial. A critic as astute as
James Wood—who ranks, for better or worse,
among the most influential writers on
literature of our time—can continue to pretend
that the “realist” tradition in fiction somehow
reigns supreme.   Yet any perspicacious reader
should be able to see that tinkering with
reality is the real driving force in
contemporary fiction, and has been for a long
time.

8.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz differentiated
between “thin” and “thick” ways of describing
cultures—labels that have since been borrowed
by other disciplines. The “thin” approach
focuses on a specific aspect of a social situation,
whereas the “thick” perspective also tries to
capture the context as well.

Fiction can also adopt “thick” or “thin”
perspectives.   And it should come as little
surprise that many of the most notable
examples of “thick” storytelling reside in the
world of conceptual fiction. J.R.R. Tolkien’s
Middle-earth, Frank Herbert’s Dune, C.S. Lewis’
s Narnia, J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez's magical-realist landscapes . . .
these all stand out as marvelously thick,
ethnographies of the imagination.   And why
the connection between thick descriptions and
fantasy / magical / sci-fi stories? Because these
genres cannot take context for granted, as do so
many so-called “serious” novels. The
meticulous creation of a vivid and inspired
context is usually essential to the overall effect
in any extended work of conceptual fiction.

In contrast, when a literary writer attempts a
thick description in the context of a traditional
narrative—for example, in writing a novel set
during the time of the French Revolution or the
Civil War—the many telling details that
establish the context are typically drawn from
research rather than from the grand leaps of
the imagination that created Middle-earth or
Rowling’s magically-charged variant on
contemporary Britain.   And when a literary
novel is set in the current day, the approach
taken by the writer is, more often than not, a
thin one, since the context is largely familiar to
all readers.   The writer working in conceptual
fiction genres has no such support.   One might
even decide to rename conceptual fiction as
“contextual fiction,” since so much of the power
of these works depend on the author’s ability to
create a powerful context within which the
story is situated.

We should not make light of the difficulty—or,
indeed, the artistry—involved in creating a
successful work of “thick” fiction out of pure
imagination. Yet how many literary critics
will even deign to notice a book such as Frank
Herbert’s Dune, let alone praise it? The
invisibility of this “thick account” masterpiece
in literary discussions is hardly a sign of any
failing on the part of Herbert. Rather it reveals
that the literary world, for all its espousal of
open-minded, egalitarian attitudes, has its own
unexamined areas of snobbery and intolerance.

Of course, readers pay little attention to these
things. The “thick” works of conceptual fiction
mentioned above by Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling
and Herbert are among the most widely read
books of the last century.   According to many
in the literary establishment, this must simply
be a sign of the stupidity of the masses. And
they must be especially stupid to read
thousands of pages (since these are usually long
books or parts of series) of such poorly written
books.

Then again, this glib dismissal from highbrow
critics might itself be suspect and worthy of
scrutiny.

9.

The term "science fiction" as it is applied to
many of these works is especially unfortunate,
since the inclusion of science is not the decisive
factor in setting these books apart. Otherwise a
book such as Richard Powers' The Gold Bug
Variations—which rhapsodizes about science on
almost every page—would be a work of
conceptual fiction. It is not. At no point is the
reader's sense of reality challenged by the
straightforward narrative style of Powers'
novel, which is a fine book indeed, but with
little in common with the stories discussed here.

By the same token, it is easy to see how
mistaken those fans are who proclaim the
superiority of so-called "hard" science fiction—in
other words stories with a large dose of "real"
science in them. Even a quick survey of science
fiction books shows that the science is almost
always bogus, and simply serves as a gateway
for bringing imaginative elements into the
narrative. The greatness of these books does not
derive from their chemistry or physics or
genetic engineering (which almost always
prove to laughably wrong-headed a few years
after the book is published, if not sooner), but in
the writer's visionary reconfiguration of our
conceptions of the real.

10.

Given this situation, we need to return to the
many masterworks of conceptual fiction from
earlier decades, and reassess their importance.
Authors such as Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein,
Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, J. R. R.
Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, C.S.
Lewis, Frank Herbert, Robert Silverberg, Alfred
Bester, Stanislaw Lem, and many others
deserve a new reading and a sensitive re-
evaluation of their role in the evolution of
modern fiction.

It will not be possible in every instance to
“rehabilitate” these authors. The pulp fiction
environment in which they worked encouraged
sloppy writing and perhaps made it difficult for
these writers to develop to their full potential.
Yet there is more substance to this body of work
than is usually acknowledged, and a sensitive
study of the history of conceptual fiction
(which, in any account of the history of the
novel, would link back to Don Quixote, Gulliver's
Travels and Tristam Shandy, among other classic
works) is an undertaking both fruitful and
necessary if we hope to understand our current
literary environment.