Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » Harry Potter as Complex Event: A good complex-system story, it seems to me, is always a history. It’s a story about how many tributaries flow into a river. Once you’re at the river and you’re looking back at the terrain, then of course it seems inevitable that they would flow as they did. But if you start at the point when one glacier started to melt as it grinded its way back up a mountain valley, trickling this way and that, the precise placement and flow of the river isn’t at all inevitable, and very small shifts in how that river evolved over long periods of time is what makes for its unique character, what makes for an Angel Falls or a Grand Canyon.
So take Harry Potter again. Here’s the story I think you could tell.
The first tributary: over the course of the past century, “children’s literature” grew both in the range of stories it contained and in the amount of books. This growth was fed by the democratization of education, the spread and valorization of literacy, the idea that childhood was a special time of life needing special forms of appropriate entertainment and leisure, by the growth of consumerism after 1945, and by the huge demographic bulge known as the “Baby Boom”.
The second tributary: a common narrative structure and set of tropes within children’s literature based around schooling and coming of age, an early representative of which was Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
The third tributary: JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings popularized the genre of fantasy in the 1970s and contributed a key conceptual vocabulary that then mutated and took on new forms in other books and in other genres of popular culture.
The fourth tributary: a specific set of children’s books published between 1975 and 1996 whose protagonists and themes helped make the Harry Potter books seem familiar in both theme and tone (Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, Lloyd Alexander’s Taran series, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Margaret Storey’s The Dragon’s Sister and Timothy Travels, lots more)
The fifth tributary: a convergence of adult and children’s entertainment produced in part by films like Disney’s A Little Mermaid but also by the coming of age of a generation of parents who continued to preferentially consume cultural works resembling some of their favorite works from childhood, who were for various reasons less concerned with emphasizing their adulthood through rejecting childhood leisure habits.
The sixth tributary: JK Rowling’s extremely appealing mixture of established themes, character types and narrative structures. (E.g., the Harry Potter books aren’t just a random pastiche, but instead a markedly skilled and creative combination of familiar elements, forming an original whole.)
The seventh tributary: the initial slow popularization of the series among children and fantasy-reading adults, giving the first book an air of authenticity, combined with new communicative networks (e.g., the Internet) that allowed people making such cultural discoveries to exchange their discoveries more rapidly through networks of similarly minded consumers.
The eight tributary: smart marketing of the series once its popularity began to take off.
The ninth tributary: the intensifying feedback loop of the media attention to the series popularity, bringing in new readers and making the phenomenon structurally permanent. (This commonly happens to other cultural “series” of various kinds, and the quality of subsequent installments has to be truly dreadful in order to dampen the feedback effects.)
I don’t know how to tell that story in as compact a fashion as “It’s because Scholastic advertised the series heavily” or “It’s because Rowling is derivative, kids have lousy taste and our mass culture sucks” (the Harold Bloom approach). But I think you can organize this kind of story so that it’s not just a random list of contributing causes, either. I’ve tried to go chronologically (oldest cause first, most recent effect last) and from levels of structural depth to levels of contingent immediacy. (e.g., “children’s literature” is a really complex phenomenon in its own right, structurally embedded in its own complex history; “smart marketing” is a very episodic, fast-moving response to a situation where arguably “dumb marketing” could have affected this history in an opposite way).
The important thing is not to get gulled into giving one of these mini-stories the prize of being the key or singular event. Instead, this is like a simultaneous version of “for want of a nail”: all these stories have to flow into the river for the river to flow its spectacular and specific course, to make its waterfalls and canyons and change everything downstream. There’s a place for some determinism in this story: by 1997, children’s literature was an established cultural system, fantasy was an important part of it, adult-children crossover was well-established in the marketplace. There would have been books and films produced by the confluence of those things. There’s a place for some contingency in this story: Rowling’s creative abilities, the marketing by Scholastic, the identification by “early adopters” of the book’s appeal.
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