I really dislike Harry Potter. Really, really.
How much do I dislike this scrawny wizard-boy and his accompanying cast of tedious characters? Enough to declare it publicly. Enough to have gotten into more than enough philosophical scraps about J.K. Rowling’s darling book series over the last few years.
Enough to write an entire column about it right after the release of the much-anticipated seventh Harry Potter film? Maybe only half of one.
My reasons for my Potter aversion are deep-seated and inexhaustible. Some are levelheaded concerns, for instance: the substitution of literary classics in young adult reading lists by fun-but-insubstantial books. Others—the majority, in fact—are pedantic and involve pointing out the clichés and adverbs of Rowling’s pedestrian writing style. Imagine, perhaps, a general attack on genre fiction. After all, fantasy novels are hardly real Literature.
“But Harry Potter’s great,” a theoretical fan objects. “You’re just a snobby English major with a stick stuck up your literary—”
“I’m not pretentious,” I counter. “I just have better taste.”
This is a non-argument, I know. In fact, the irony of this statement serves only to further prove the accusation to be correct. The accusation being: I’m a literary elitist.
I more than fess up to this classification, if you really insist on couching it in those terms. I find certain types of fiction more compelling, more insightful and more illuminating than the page-turners designed to be consumed overnight.
Don’t pretend you’re not judging too. When I say that I don’t like Harry Potter, Rowling fans accuse me of a multitude of flaws: lack of imagination, dullness, complacency, blahblahblah. What kind of a misanthrope doesn’t like magic spells and sorcery?
So it goes: I judge you, you judge me. Literary taste and Harry Potter are only the tip of the proverbially huge chunk of ice floating in the ocean. Let’s talk about clothing, or cars, or preferred drink at a coffee shop (or whether or not you’re the type to go to coffee shops in the first place). Let’s talk about music, one of the most intellectually charged topics ever to face socially anxious college students. Try your hardest to like the right obscure bands without looking like you tried too hard—the state of your soul is at jeopardy here, you know.
Such is the war of tastes in which we engage, and its seemingly petty battleground belies just how seriously we take it. So what if I judge your taste in books? Pretension has been happening for centuries, claims Mark Greif in a recently published New York Times essay. “Taste is not stable and peaceful,” wrote Greif, “but a means of strategy and competition.” His essay relates this tradition of social snobbery to the phenomenon of the “hipster” label so casually tossed around by young adults nowadays.
The term “hipster” pokes fun at the put-on pretensions associated with taste—the “hipster” is someone who justifies his own sense of superiority with his finer sense in art, literature, music. His arrogance is fed by his delusion of sophisticated taste. But stripped of his elitism, a hipster is the emperor who finally realizes the sad truth about his “new clothes.”
And yet, don’t we—as Darwinian creatures bent on securing a position on the social ladder, with our own self-images at stake—need a basis of comparison by which to bolster ourselves? And if taste isn’t a good enough rationalization of superiority, what is? Surely not race, gender, age, sexuality, nationality, economic status or any of the other categories we’re now too enlightened to mistake as indicative.
It seems to me that these pretensions of taste are a twenty-first-century, first-world manner of channeling our innate aggression and competitive urges. We must get a leg up and rationalize our own positions in society. We’ve been cured of dangerous instincts and violent tactics. Now, inoculated of tribal warfare, racial subjugation and gratuitous disenfranchisement, a little snobbery is relatively harmless.
Call me an elitist if you want. You can disagree with my line of thought and conclude that I’ve misappropriated Darwinism and butchered sociological concepts, or perhaps scoff at my overbroad generalizations. You can maintain that normal, well-adjusted people appreciate Harry Potter.
Go ahead—everyone needs something to ridicule. And if my something is a gaggle of college students dressed in wizard capes wielding plastic costume-shop wands at the midnight showing of a fantasy flick, then so be it. I stand by my literary elitism. In turn, you can judge my pretension.
Let the mutual mockery continue.
Shining Li is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Monday.
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