NN A.S. Byatt re Potter/Pynchon re gothic & genre fiction

[pynchonoid]

Compare and contrast:

July 7, 2003
Harry Potter and the Childish Adult
By A.S. BYATT
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/07/opinion/07BYAT.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=>

[...] But in the case of the great children's writers
of the recent past, there was a compensating
seriousness. There was — and is — a real sense of
mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark
forests. Susan Cooper's teenage wizard discovers his
magic powers and discovers simultaneously that he is
in a cosmic battle between good and evil forces. Every
bush and cloud glitters with secret significance. Alan
Garner peoples real landscapes with malign, inhuman
elvish beings that hunt humans.

Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put
back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when
supernatural and inhuman creatures — from whom we
thought we learned our sense of good and evil —
inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled. If we
regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we
mourn for. Ursula K. Le Guin's wizards inhabit an
anthropologically coherent world where magic really
does act as a force. Ms. Rowling's magic wood has
nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small,
and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because
she says it is.

In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling,
I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't
known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are
inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild.
They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from
the real thing, for as children they daily invested
the ersatz with what imagination they had. [...] 



[...] The craze for Gothic fiction after The Castle of
Otranto was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious
yearnings for that earlier mythic time which had come
to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and
less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that
once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible
which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The
laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated
back then. What had once been true working magic had,
by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery.
Blake's dark Satanic mills represented an old magic
that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion
was being more and more secularized into Deism and
nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of
God and afterlife, for salvation -- bodily
resurrection, if possible -- remained. The Methodist
movement and the American Great Awakening were only
two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age
of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and
Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel.
Each in its way expressed the same profound
unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however
"irrational," to an emerging technopolitical order
that might or might not know what it was doing.
"Gothic" became code for "medieval," and that has
remained code for "miraculous," on through
Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of-the-century tarot cards,
space opera in the pulps and comics, down to Star Wars
and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery.
To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine
at least some of its claims on us, to assert the
limited wish that living things, earthly and
otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough
to take part in transcendent doings. By this theory,
for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic
Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the movie, you
recall, goes, "Well, the airplanes got him." "No. . .
it was Beauty killed the Beast." In which we again
encounter the same Snovian Disjunction, only
different, between the human and the technological.
But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the
laws of nature -- of space, time, thermodynamics, and
the big one, mortality itself -- then we risk being
judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently
Serious. Being serious about these matters is one way
that adults have traditionally defined themselves
against the confidently immortal children they must
deal with. Looking back on Frankenstein, which she
wrote when she was 19, Mary Shelley said, "I have
affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy
days, when death and grief were but words which found
no true echo in my heart." The Gothic attitude in
general, because it used images of death and ghostly
survival toward no more responsible end than special
effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious
enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not
the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature
so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good
people always win. In romance novels, love conquers
all. In whodunits, murder, being a pretext for a
logical puzzle, is hardly ever an irrational act. In
science fiction, where entire worlds may be generated
from simple sets of axioms, the constraints of our own
everyday world are routinely transcended. In each of
these cases we know better. We say, "But the world
isn't like that." These genres, by insisting on what
is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so
they get redlined under the label "escapist fare."
This is especially unfortunate in the case of science
fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one
of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent
and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just
as important as the Beat movement going on at the same
time, certainly more important than mainstream
fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been
paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and
McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis
of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to
have been one of the principal refuges, in our time,
for those of Luddite persuasion. [...] 

Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?
The New York Times Book Review
28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41. 
<http://www.libyrinth.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html>




__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com