Tag Archives: J.K. Rowling

A Good Holding Vessel

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Team Rocket

“Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.”
–Pauline Kael, I Lost It At The Movies

An epigraph beginning with the word ‘sex’ might not be an auspicious start for a piece about education, but Kael’s words have much to say to teachers. Beyond concepts, equations, and writing mechanics, teachers teach taste, whether they intend to or not.

Think back to your time in school. Can you remember the warmth and security of having your interests affirmed by your teacher? Can you remember the quick spin of doubt when your preferences fell short of his or her esteem? I remember feeling stomach sick when my seventh grade teacher implied that New York Times Bestsellers List did not mean the book was “good.” I wondered what my choice of The Dragonriders of Pern said about me. A student’s taste might be personal, but its expression is a public performance, and a form of mass communication. Carried books, branded t-shirts, and the music leaking from ear buds invariably broadcast a person’s taste to the people around them.

As teachers, we witness our student’s passions and refuges on a daily basis, with varying levels of sympathy and comprehension. Our authority complicates things. I remember how a boy’s eyes popped open wide when I admitted to playing Diablo 3. I relish students’ trust and delight when I talk about Pokémon with them. Is it for this connection that I converse enthusiastically about Marvel Comics and Harry Potter, even though I don’t actually enjoy these properties? (How often do their iconicity, film adaptations, merchandising, and release parties account for more of their popularity than the books themselves?) There are few things I enjoy more than great conversation. Better put by Hannah Arendt, “Gladness, not sadness, is talkative, and truly human dialogue differs from mere talk or even discussion in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says. It is tuned to the key of gladness, we might say” (Men in Dark Times, 15). When I share and respect the things my students love, I earn the privilege of being in class with them.

So what happens when the façade drops, and my students learn what I actually think about Guardians of the Galaxy or Diary of a Wimpy Kid? That Pauline Kael is my personal hero and favorite snark, not Iron Man? That I believe superhero comics embody America’s worst power-fantasies? That while I was a passionate Pokémon player up through college, I pale at Nintendo’s sorry attempts to justify the exploitation of its dog-fighting monster pets? Deep down inside me, I don’t like some of the things that adolescents like—including things I loved as a teenager. Everyone is allowed to have his or her personal taste, but I sometimes cringe that these stories could be counted as valid options. I sometimes see them as depressing manifestations of systems that tear people apart. At other times they seem like developmental stepping-stones, or an ice floe that thinkers eventually pass across and see through. I have become the no-fun schoolmarm pushing Nathaniel Hawthorne on the one hand, Ratatouille’s Anton Ego on the other, and maybe a faint echo of James Baldwin on a very good day.

Trying to protect this “key of gladness,” I resist sharing my killjoy opinions about a wide assortment of stories, united chiefly by their phenomenal popularity and marketing rollouts. There’s a time for soapboxing, for criticizing, and for bemoaning, and while these kinds of talk are necessary for survival, they don’t make me happy to be alive. They lack the ring of joy. I came to teaching because I associate school with this thrill of recognition, of “Yes! I see that too!” I have no affection for converting and being converted. I did not return to school to be a missionary of taste, or have my tastes disapproved of and changed.

I save my breath for niche blogs, and blissfully, for the company of my critic friends, ideally huddled around a few beers on a Saturday night. I support others in their resistance: “Harry Potter makes me feel weird too!” I am at home in our sardonic distance from these things—in the communal wondering what life is like for a creature trapped inside a tiny Pokéball. Or whether a student wearing a Slytherin Quidditch jersey is akin to her sporting the confederate flag of the Harry Potter world, in light of how the seventh book goes down.

As a teacher, I keep this thought to myself, and modulate my voice to bob and float with a student’s excitement about the work of J. K. Rowling. Yet I want my students to dig deeply into Slytherin House. Does it make sense for all the cruel and cunning children to be sorted together? Why aren’t there consistent resisters in Slytherin? Why does Hogwarts support a cabal of violent blood purists? As students dig, won’t they expose my preferences and prejudices against these books, so shallowly buried?

If I could change one thing about young adult novels, superhero movies, and video games, it would be to make their villains relevant. I suspect that the more popular a story-world is, the less its evil mastermind, empire, or force corresponds to our present-day equivalents. Players spend the Pokémon games fighting incompetent mafia groups bent on igniting an apocalypse and ruling over the remains of society. We know they are evil because they treat their Pokémon cruelly, but the games never address how the player’s relationship with Pokémon is substantially different. In Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, totalitarian authorities herd huge groups of dispossessed and hungry people into public squares to watch their district’s children murder each other, which is part of a national strategy to subdue revolt. How does this square with the reality that apartheid governments violently restrict the public congregation of oppressed people, who have a better ability to revolt when gathered together?

These fictions make mockeries of their villains, but they become fiercely popular ‘escapist routes’ for a reason. They are poignant metaphors for the experience of youth, even if they obscure how real boarding schools, criminal organizations, patriarchs, and dictatorships work—how power works. To students, bullies are a kind of dependable taxonomy, and they are institutionally supported. Students resonate with the experience of being pitted against each other for the entertainment of adults, and that this competition coheres a dystopic, divided nation. And everyone knows that superpowered people are too busy fighting each other to do anything about systemic injustice.

These are truths worth honoring, and can organically raise questions about what the villains mean. A friend pointed out that the Harry Potter books examine the paradoxical existence of Slytherin in the text, (but blink, and you might miss it.) The world of The Hunger Games descends into revolutionary chaos by the third book. Pokémon White & Black featured a compelling villain who wished to free Pokémon from slavery, and released his monsters after using them in fights. I wish these factors changed my mind and heart, but I also wish that these factors changed their stories. The Hunger Games sells itself upon the appeal of the tortuous games it pretends to decry. The Pokémon villain turns coat in the end, and celebrates the capture and keeping of sentient creatures. The villain always ends up being someone else—someone vanquishable. Why does our culture spends so much time hiding the hero’s complicity with evil, or tokenizing the struggle with inner darkness as one obligatory step in the ritualistic triumph over an external “Big Bad?”

If these stories are archetypal, so are the people who oppose them on the grounds of taste—and especially on the grounds of good taste. Consider the “Wicked Witch of West Harlem” in Walter Dean Myer’s Bad Boy, where “educated” Mrs. Dodson horrifies the young narrator when she condemns comic books as “a road map to the jailhouse.” Mrs. Dodson is evermore referred to as The Wicked Witch. Her complaints presage the words of Frederick Wertham, a psychiatrist and social justice crusader still demonized for his hatred of the violence in popular culture. You can’t spend an hour inside a comics convention without overhearing some fan or creator still trotting out insults at Wertham and his legion of church lady minions. We forget Wertham’s actual life mission to establish an affordable psychiatric clinic for black youth in Harlem, tucked away on a street that Myers likely dashed down, a Lone Ranger cap pistol in hand.

While I, with the best of intentions, complain about the villains and plot mechanics of my student’s favorite stories, about the banality of fighting Voldemort, I’m busy becoming a villain myself. A villain, at the end of the day, is someone who doesn’t see, and so profanes what is most meaningful in life. And if adolescents could ever be defined, they could be called people who have freshly seen truth. They might not feel passionate about every song they listen to, every book they read, or every stretch of road they drive, but some small collection of things has sung the song of their lives to them. Not every student will part their clasped hands to show their truth to their teacher, but when I’m lucky enough to be shared with, I want to be a good holding vessel. I don’t want to be locked out.

Quidditch By Dummies

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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I was supposed to go see the last Harry Potter movie with my utterly obsessed seven-year-old son. We got into the car to drive to the theater with our son gibbering on about Quidditch and Hogwarts and Voldemart, and then I pressed the power button on the Prius… and pfft. Nothing. The battery was dead.

Which is fairly typical of my entire experience with the Harry Potter franchise. Lots and lots of build-up followed by a big fat zilch. I don’t hate the Harry Potter books. I read the first four of them, and watched the first movie. My son’s obsession with them has moved rapidly from amusing to annoying to thoroughly oppressive, but still, it’s better than Thomas the Tank Engine or superheroes. The Potter books are at least marginally readable… especially since my son has learned to read himself and is going through them on his own.

Nevertheless, what bugs me about the series is that it should be better than just tolerable, and not just because the whole world is apeshit over it. The first book opens with a horrid family right out of Roald Dahl, and I quite like that lovely scene with the owls dropping drifts of letters addressed to our hero. The idea of a wizarding school seems pretty solid. And there are lots of excellent British children’s books series. If the How To Train Your Dragon books can be consistently top-notch, why not Harry Potter?

And the answer is: Quidditch. The notion of wizard-soccer on broomsticks is pretty clever, and I can certainly see the appeal for kids—who doesn’t want to fly? But the actual game is incredibly stupid. Most of Quidditch is devoted to goal scoring, but a huge bushel of points are awarded not for scoring goals, but for catching a special ball called the Snitch. Whoever catches the Snitch also ends the game—all of which means that, for most intents and purposes, the vast majority of the action taking place on (or above) the Quidditch field is pointless.

You can see why J.K. Rowling designed Quidditch as she did; the rules make the Seeker, who goes after the Snitch, by far the most important player on the field. Since Harry turns out to be a supremely gifted Seeker, all the matches end up being about Harry’s wonderfulness. This, observation of my son has informed me, has a huge appeal to the core under-nine audience. But for anyone else, Quidditch as repetitive occasion for transparent hagiography gets very old very quickly.

This is nit-picking to some extent. But it’s also emblematic. There are a lot of things like Quidditch in Harry Potter; places where Rowling failed to fit the pieces together right and the result is the irritating sound of audible grinding. A friend of mine pointed out that the thing that gets him is that Harry, when we first meet him, should be a volatile, unstable wreck. He was systematically emotionally abused by his foster parents, the Dursleys, throughout his childhood, and while nurture isn’t everything, it’s something. Kids treated that way have real problems; they don’t just shake it off in a few pages and become do-gooding everyboys with loads of inner resources.

The problem isn’t the scenario per se. As mentioned above, if the same story was told by Roald Dahl, you wouldn’t think about it for a second, any more than you ask questions about the actual logistics of building Mr. Wonka’s chocolate emporium. Instead, the difficulty is Rowling’s tonal control—or the lack thereof. Harry Potter comes out of the Lewis Carroll/E. Nesbit/Dahlian tradition of British nonsense, with its fantastical illogical goofiness. But Rowling also wants to create an epic battle between good and evil indebted to Lord of the Rings.

The result is a lurching hodgepodge; a magical world that isn’t internally or externally consistent, but is too concerned with it’s own inner-workings to ever really take flight into whimsy. The first book gets at some of the rush of wonder in classic fantasy… but as the kids learn more, magic is rapidly domesticated, turned into a series of recipes. You’re left with endless piles of prose explicating labyrinthine rules, most of which don’t even have the geeky satisfaction of making sense.

I know lots of folks say that the last movie is pretty good, and that the series in general becomes darker and more effective as it goes on. Maybe so, and maybe my car will work well enough to go see it. I’ve had enough exposure to the series, though, to feel fairly confident that wherever Harry Potter goes, he will go there with a pfft.
 

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Harry Potter, Race, and British Multiculturalism

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Hagrid’s half-Giant identity is a plot arc in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, so too are the House Elves and Hermione’s crusading, if not paternalistic, attempts to free them from oppression. In the Deathly Hallows the penultimate “other” becomes the mudblood, a term we first hear in Chamber of Secrets. The final book, too, revolves around non-wizarding creatures of, as the Ministry of Magic and Dolores Umbridge put it, “near human intelligence,” and Harry is labelled as a very odd, special, and different wizard by Griphook the Goblin because he treats non-humans with courtesy and respect. The books are dedicated to highlighting the fallacy of “the other” but, and file this under uncomfortable truths, all the human characters of colour are relegated to the sidelines.

JK Rowling has called her books “very British” in a number of interviews, and has even stated that they are a “prolonged argument for tolerance.” However, I can’t help but draw parallels (note: I’m drawing parallels, not determining causality) from her treatment of race and “otherness” in the books to the conversations about multiculturalism and race theory that have occurred throughout British history and continue today.

Rowling has been very explicit about the connection between Pure Blood Wizarding ideology and the Nazism that led to the holocaust. But race theory, the belief that attributes and abilities could be determined by the socially constructed notion of race, was equally dominant in the United Kingdom. Weeding out “undesirables” wasn’t particular to Nazi ideology and was common across Europe.

British identity was partially constructed using internal colonization, where Welsh, Scottish and Irish minorities were subsumed into Britishness, an identity which still remains ambivalent and dynamic. Britishness was also constructed in opposition to a number of external European threats and was only reinforced through colonialism, which was justified by applying race theory.

Even after the Second World War, Great Britain restricted entry to Jewish refugees while simultaneously citing its own tolerance. Jewish bodies were and continue to be racialized, but even though Rowling has been explicit with her works’ connection to the Holocaust, racism is constructed as pureblood witches and wizards versus muggles, mudbloods, and magical creatures.

I’m not the first person to note that the fantasy genre has a history of replacing PoCs with monsters and magical creatures. Writing for Fantasy Book Review, author Lane Heymont states:

…[I]t feels like white authors have an easier time, or are more comfortable, writing from the perspective of  dragons, ghosts, elves, Minotaurs, and other non-humans than another human being. Seems ironically odd, don’t you think? And the writing suffers for it, as does the cause.

I target fantasy specifically because I know that Rowling has the ability to write from a PoC’s perspective as evidenced in The Casual Vacancy, but her fantasy works imitate most of the genre: There’s a brilliant ability to create non-human cultures and magic systems, but fantasy novels with people of colour as main characters are sadly rare.

If these books are “very British” and the quintessential “others” in British society are racialized minorities, than why has race been rendered invisible? Whether intentionally or not, side-lining characters of colour matches the British multicultural model that defines racial integration as near invisibility.

Racialiazing “otherness” has been part of the British experience, and Rowling, with her progressive roots, seems to be reacting towards this kind of cruelty by dedicating seven books and several years of her life to combatting it, only to create works that replicate the systemic exclusion of minorities. To clear up any confusion, I’m not saying that Rowling had to talk about how it feels like to be black at Hogwarts, but what it feels like to be Dean Thomas at Hogwarts. (Incidentally, I was disappointed that while Thomas’ backstory was potentially up for inclusion in the official cannon, it eventually had to be axed due to editorial limitations. I look forward to reading more about him in Pottermore.)

As a series that practically begs the reader to take it personally and that has birthed devoted communities and fan conventions, issues of representation and inclusion become incredibly important: fans want to know that they’re allowed in, and if you’re aiming for an emotional reader response, then this is a reaction that should be taken seriously. Further, the exclusion of active people of colour in fiction constitutes a form of erasure that undervalues their construction of and contributions to both fictional and real societies.

As it stands, we know that Hogwarts plays host to a variety of people of colour (Cho Chang, the Patel sisters, Dean Thomas, Blaise Zabini, Kinglsey Shacklebolt etc.) but they are, in a sense, rendered invisible. Their races are so invisible, in fact, that they’ve become model minorities; their races do not detract from their Britishness.

The idea of integration as a key to a successful multicultural policy stems back to the Second World War. British politicians knew, especially after Kristallnacht, what Germany’s Jews were facing, but still worked actively to limit the number of entries into the country. In 1965, Roy Hattersley, a Labour politician argued that “without integration, limitation is inexcusable, without limitation, integration is impossible,” the idea being that immigration should be restricted because it might rile the emotions of British citizens, the same rational for restricting entry to Jewish refugees. Minorities became responsible for the resentment directed towards them.

The subtle casuistry of this linkage of a commitment to “harmonious community relations” to necessary restriction on immigration and immigrants has continued to be employed by successive British governments. It has a wonderfully corrupt, but popularly acceptable rhetorical formula which argues that:

  • as decent and tolerant people we are naturally opposed to any form of racism or discrimination.
  • simultaneously, we are committed to a harmonious society.
  • however; immigrants and ethnic minorities have a capacity to generate racial hostility and discrimination from the majority population.
  • consequently: in order to guarantee harmonious community relations we must rigorously control immigration.
    –Charles Husband, Doing Good by Stealth, Whilst Flirting with Racism: Some Contradictory   Dynamics of British Multiculturalism

More recently, government officials stated that the reason the London Bombers carried out the 2005 train attacks was because they were insufficiently integrated into British culture, even though the evidence pointed otherwise, thus starting a firm government push to ensure that Britain’s Muslims were also “well-integrated.”

In 2003, in response to the Labour government’s proposed legislation on asylum seekers, British tabloids exploded with accusations that immigrants were abusing the system and dirtying the country with AIDS, Hepatitis B, and TB. These accusations don’t seem so far off from the hearings held in the Ministry of Magic, where we saw a witch being accused of stealing a wand (stealing from the system) and not being sufficiently magical (British.) While Rowling’s stories may have been inspired by the holocaust, they still play out in Great Britain today. They are indeed “very British” books; Rowling is both prescient and astute when she highlights government and media sanctioned oppression and she’s at her strongest when she writes these scenes.

Only last week The Guardian published a piece by David Goodhart, who accused liberals of favouring a highly-individualistic identity that transcended the boundaries created by the nation state, roughly defining certain liberals as being pro-immigration and therefore anti-community.

This individualistic view of society makes it hard for modern liberals to understand why people object to their communities being changed too rapidly by mass immigration – and what is not understood is easily painted as irrational or racist…If society is just a random collection of individuals, what is there to integrate into? In liberal societies, of course, immigrants do not have to completely abandon their own traditions, but there is such a thing as society, and if newcomers do not make some effort to join in it is harder for existing citizens to see them as part of the “imagined community”. When that happens it weakens the bonds of solidarity and in the long run erodes the “emotional citizenship” required to sustain welfare states.

According to Goodhart, the very presence of immigrants destabilizes allegedly harmonious British communities with resentment (a romanticized fallacy, especially when looking at Britain’s long history of class warfare), their bodies becoming symbols of chaos that disrupt a cohesive national identity. To be a racialized minority is to have people assume that you are unwilling to emotionally integrate into British identity and society. Some conservatives argue that under multiculturalism people will abdicate working together towards a common collective goal known as nation-building; however, the examples above show that Britain’s ideal form of multiculturalism has always been assimilationist.

Rowling is progressive, clearly pro-immigration, and the Harry Potter series illustrate a typical liberal approach to race blindness. Her works still presuppose that integration is synonymous with invisibility, but she also argues for the potential success of Britain’s multicultural model.  Their well-integrated and invisible races ensure that Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, and the Patel sisters can be British without disrupting British identity with their racialized bodies. While I appreciated that Cho Chang became a sobbing mess in Order of the Phoenix without her emotional deterioration being tied to her ethnicity, I can’t separate issues of representation from the larger systemic trend found within the fantasy genre. (Cho is the character of colour with the most screen time. One chapter is dedicated to her character in Order of the Phoenix, where she spends most of the time crying, and she receives a few sentences here and there from books 4 to 7. When we meet her, in book 3, she doesn’t say much of anything.)  That characters of colour are in the background allow the reader to know that Hogwarts is Very Diverse, but their importance to the plot is minimal. As the very worst possibility, they act as ornaments to Hogwarts’ status as a Very Progressive School.

This integration-as-invisibility approach is distinctly different from the movie adaptations, where the characters of colour wore clothing representative of their ethnic backgrounds to the Yule Ball, whereas the same characters in the books wore dress robes like everyone else. Except…children of immigrants don’t uniformly wear clothing from their parents’ home country. While the Potter books erase ethnic difference, the movies champion essentialism which, to her credit, Rowling can’t be accused of doing.

Rowling spends seven books opining about the importance of diversity, while replicating the systemic sidelining of characters of colour. The characters in the Harry Potters books are proof of multiculturalism’s success, but the structure of the books imitate systematic issues concerning racial representation. There’s tension in this approach: on one hand, it becomes exhausting to have one’s entire identity defined by ethnic background (something we can’t choose) and being able to choose one’s identity through acquired membership (identity markers we can choose, eg. being part of an SF/F fandom) can be a highly liberating experience. On the other hand, if Rowling believes in anti-otherizing, then why isn’t the quintessential British “other” given more screen time, not to discuss race, but to simply be? While a British progressive may envision a rainbow utopia of immigrants and new citizens, we know that their invisibility exists to comfort us while we pat ourselves on the back for being progressive. When it comes to screen time for characters of colour, their stories are still marginalized. The Harry Potter books are in no way the worst offenders in the genre—and I still remain a loyal fan—but there’s a serious cognitive dissonance that needs to be analyzed when a book series extolling the virtues of diversity are not particularly diverse themselves.

White: Not the New Black

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Whether in the American Revolution, Schindler’s List, or Star Wars, Americans have always had a deep and abiding love for tales of oppressed white people. In her new YA novel, Revealing Eden, Victoria Foyt takes that insight and runs with it as fast and as far as impressively insipid prose can take her. In the far future, solar radiation has become exponentially more dangerous, and those without the melanin to withstand it are second-class citizens. Our heroine, Eden, is white and, therefore, doomed to eugenic culling unless she can convince a black man to mate with her and give her dark-skinned babies. Soon she is embroiled with the fascinating Bramford, a black scientist who has had his DNA spliced with panther, eagle, and anaconda genes, turning him into an earthy, atavistic archetype. Luckily, in Foyt’s world, black people are in charge, so Bramford’s evolutionary descent has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with sexualized animalistic fantasies about black men. Shame on you for even thinking so.

Revealing Eden is unusually crass in its take on race, but its general methodology has a longstanding pedigree in sci-fi and fantasy. You need only think of that ham-fisted Star Trek episode in which the aliens with faces that are white on the right side are oppressed by aliens with faces that are white on the left side, or the ham-fisted Next Generation episode in which the crew finds a planet where women rule over men.

Or, for a more recent example, try the film In Time, a parable in which fungible time has replaced money as the currency of choice. Thus, the rich live forever on horded time and the poor have to beg, borrow, steal and run for every second. The movie is clearly intended to be a comment on our crappy economy and growing inequality — but it’s a comment shorn of any mention of the ways in which that inequality continues to be bound up with race. There is, as far as I can remember, only one black character in the film; a long-suffering wife whose (white) husband is an alcoholic. The unfair distribution of time serves as a metaphor for real-world injustice — but does the metaphor highlight those real-world injustices, or does it deny them? Is it possible that the sci-fi setting is just a way to do a story about economic oppression without the inconvenience of having to feature black leads?

Similar questions arise in the three most successful YA series of recent memory: Harry Potter, the Hunger Games and Twilight. All make extensive use of metaphor to discuss racial prejudice — or to avoid discussing racial prejudice, as the case may be. In Harry Potter, (bad) wizards are prejudiced against muggles; in the Hunger Games, the people of the Capitol are prejudiced against the people of the Districts; in Twilight, vampires and werewolves are prejudiced against each other.

All these series come down squarely against discrimination, which is nice as far as it goes. That isn’t very far, however. For example, wizards in Harry Potter really are superior to muggles; no one really denies that. The only point at issue is whether muggles should be killed outright (as Voldemart believes) or whether they should be kept in perpetual ignorance for their own benefit (as the “good guys” believe.) Rudyard Kipling might approve, I suppose, but, to put it kindly, it’s hard to see this as a particularly insightful take on contemporary race relations. And I will avoid discussing the lovable house elf servants, who adore their own enslavement — a fantasy underclass entirely composed of Gunga Dins.

Hunger Games and Twilight are arguably less clumsy, but not by much. Suzanne Collins avoids discussing race by the simple expedient of not discussing it. Her main character, Katniss is possibly biracial, but it’s so downplayed in the book that Hollywood had no problem casting a white actress in the part for the film. In Twilight, there are many Native American characters, and the books deal forthrightly with prejudice directed against those characters. But all that prejudice is because the Native Americans are werewolves; there’s barely a hint that Native Americans who are not werewolves might occasionally be discriminated against. And, of course, Meyer, like Foyt, cheerfully deploys the stereotype of the animalistic, emotional, virile lesser races. Just because discrimination is bad doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with it, right?

In all of these cases, the problem is that oppression is seen as a (simplistic) structure, rather than as a history. For Foyt, Rowling, et. al, you condemn racism by saying, “Hey! Racism is bad!” For none of them is there a sense of historical inequalities as a living and inescapable presence. Victoria Foyt’s main character, Eden, reads Emily Dickinson, but not Langston Hughes; nobody in Harry Potter compares Voldemort to Hitler; nobody in the Hunger Games has heard of Che. Oppression in all of these series has a now, but no yesterday. Sci-fi and fantasy, apparently, means a world without a past.

It doesn’t have to be that way. As just one counterexample, consider Octavia Butler’s Dawn, the first book of her Xenogenesis trilogy. The novel is set after a nuclear apocalypse. Most of the world has been destroyed, and earth’s few survivors have been rescued by a tentacled alien race known as the Oankali. The rescue is not entirely philanthropic, though. The Oankali are genetic manipulators; they want human beings for their genetic material. Or, to put it another way, they want to mate with our women — and also our men.

The main character in Dawn is an African-American woman named Lilith. You might think that in a future where most of humanity is dead and aliens have inherited the earth, race wouldn’t matter. But, as Butler shows, that would be naïve. Race matters a lot. It inflects other humans’ reactions to Lilith when they are asked to follow her leadership. It inflects the aliens themselves, who assume that Lilith will want to mate with one man because he is black. And it inflects Lilith’s reactions as well, both in her loyalty to her species against an imperial invader, and in her eventual acceptance of difference and, ultimately, of interspecies integration.

Butler doesn’t forswear analogy. The Oankali are in some ways very much like human imperialists — the European invaders conquering the New World. Similarly, mating with the Oankali is comparable to interracial relationships. But the metaphors don’t erase the past; instead they complicate it The imperialists are also saviors. Interracial marriage is both a betrayal of the race and the promise of a new and beautiful future. A future in which, not incidentally, the children of a black woman save humanity.

Dawn demonstrates that metaphor is not, or at least should not be, amnesia. Foyt wants to say that white is black without making any effort to think about either white or black. As a result, her world — and to a lesser extent, the worlds of Rowling, and Collins and Meyer — have an air of rather nervous blandness. Butler, alone in this company seems to realize that even in a different world, we can’t escape what has already happened in this one.

Great Haircuts of Future Past: Stop Telling Me to Pay Attention to You, You Omnipotent Whiner

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This is the second in a blog crossover event with Tucker Stone of the Factual Opinion focusing on Darko Macan and Igor Kordey’s run on Soldier X. Tucker’s first post on the last issues of Cable is here. After some preamble below, I talk about the first four issues of Soldier X.
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A little while back, Alyssa Rosenberg posted a piece in which she argued that neither Harry Potter nor Katniss Everdeen (of the Hunger Games) are particularly special in themselves. Instead, Alyssa argues, Harry and Katniss are important because they are used as mascots for a larger cause; they inspire others.

The reason Harry Potter is the main character in the series isn’t that he’s awesome — to the contrary, he’s a fairly average kid, and Snape’s assessment of his overall abilities as a wizard is probably correct. The idea that he’s extraordinary — and really, that extraordinary things can happen in the cause of righteousness — inspires other people to rise to and above their potential. The most interesting moment in the entire series is when he’s presented as dead to the people who have been fighting for him — and they keep fighting, in particular Neville Longbottom, who exists as an illustration of the arbitrariness of Harry’s prestige, and who rises to the occasion, killing the hell out of Nagini even when he’s been set on fire. Ron dashes down to the Chamber of Secrets and just pretends he knows Parseltongue, and it works: again, Harry’s not magically special, but the special things he does inspire people to try crazy and unusual things.

I think Alyssa is right diagetically. Harry isn’t a great wizard; he isn’t presented as being especially strong or smart. He’s a great Quidditch player, and he’s kind and brave, but he’s not a super-hero in the usual sense. He’s more important because of what he symbolizes than because of what he can do physically.

But that somewhat begs the question — why is Harry so important symbolically? Of course, the narrative answer to that question is that Voldemort tried to kill him as a baby and failed. But there’s an extra-diegetic answer as well. And that answer is — Harry Potter is the inspiring symbol because his name is on the cover of the books. He’s the hero not because Rowling’s world has chosen him as a hero, but because Rowling has. Harry’s real super-power, the reason he is special, is that he’s got a direct line to God. It’s more than mere fame; it’s the fact that the universe is about him. It’s like that scene in the Hitchhiker’s Guide where Zaphod Beeblebrox sits down in that machine and discovers that, yep, just as he always thought, the universe was in fact constructed expressly for him. In book after book, it’s Harry who runs across Voldemort, Harry who just happens to be in a place where courage and luck can hand him victory, Harry who, despite not really being all that, gains more and more status through more and more convoluted plotting as he triumphs again and again not because he’s especially smart or powerful or clever, but simply because he’s the star.

The point here is that, contrary to Alyssa, Harry’s specialness has little to do with the workings of political movements, and a lot to do with the workings of serial fiction. In The Hunger Games, for example, which Alyssa also discusses, Katniss Everdeen is skillful and brave and resourceful — but her real importance is that she’s the narrator and star, and so Suzanne Collins keeps putting her in situations where her decisions have world-historical implications, because that’s what you do with your narrator and star.

Now, in light-hearted fare like Tintin or the How to Train Your Dragon books, the fact that the unassuming main character keeps stumbling into Very Important Situations is part of the lark. Harry Potter and the Hunger Games, though, both have pretensions — and thus, inevitably, both series struggle more and more under the weight of their own preposterousness as they go along. Voldemort’s elaborate plan to enmesh Harry in the tri-wizard tournament, or President Snow’s elaborate plan to enmesh Katniss in the Hunger Games again…they both make little sense from the perspective of an actual villain who wants the protagonist dead. You want to kill someone, you kill them; you don’t construct an elaborate game which takes a whole novel to elucidate.

But elaborate games make a lot of sense from the perspective of the watching demiurge who wants the protagonist to have a chance to demonstrate his or her glorious bravery and wit and angsting. Along those lines, when Ron gets all pissed at Harry because Harry is always in the thick of everything and it’s not fair, you can’t help but feel that the kid has a legitimate grievance. It really isn’t fair — and the fact that it’s such flagrant special pleading incidentally makes it a lot less fun to read. Harry doesn’t need superpowers because he’s got the greatest power of all — that of a rolling Mary Sue ex machina.
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And, in case you were wondering, that finally brings me to what I’m in theory supposed to be talking about.

Soldier X opens with a slapstick post-9/11 panic moment as artist Igor Kordey draws a gaggle of cartoonishly bulbish American bodies straining against the narrow panels of an in-flight airline. The bovine panic has been inspired by what the copilot exasperatedly refers to as “Another false shoe alarm.” As the sea of human idiocy flexes and dilates, one young woman types intensely away on her computer, undeterred by ricocheting flight attendants. Said young woman is, it turns out, writing a story at the last minute for the Daily Bugle about a copyright conference…a story she failed to write earlier because she was pursuing leads on Nathan Summers, aka Cable, aka our protagonist.

Thus, writer Darko Macan starts off, first page, first issue, by presenting his hero as a distraction from a distraction from the main action. The result is that you feel strongly that Macan and Korday would rather be focusing on ugly Americans and their cowardice, or even about a copyright conference, but instead are stuck writing about some idiotic super-hero with an incomprehensible backstory in order to pay their bills.

And so it goes throughout the first four issues, more or less. Incompetent agents of SHIELD show up tossing out lame puns and incompetently impersonating ninjas, only to be dispatched by a sumo wrestler in a Sailor Moon suit — and then it’s all spoiled when you have to go back to the superhero title and hear Nathan nattering on and on about how he hasn’t killed a man in two years and blah blah blah, here, let me drop trou so I can dump a giant pile of who-gives-a-shit on your doorstep, hokay? Or, alternately, we get gratuitous dwarf porn and ass-shots of bodacious Eastern European prostitutes, and you say, okay, this is clearly what Mr. Kordey wants to be drawing — but then it’s over and we’re back to some dumb noir patter and watching Cable throw people around with one of those powers and endangering the fabric of our shirts from the repetitive shrugging of compulsive indifference.

At its best, the effect here is one of conscious parody. Nobody but nobody actually cares about Cable the way millions of people care about Harry Potter, and the only one not in on his own utter insignificance is the big dumb ox himself. Cable acts as if he’s the star of the book and even of the universe; he assumes that his main power isn’t telekinesis or big bad guns, but rather the reader’s, and especially the author’s, attention. He thinks he’s Harry Potter, or Katniss, or Superman — that People in Charge care deeply about his angst and his running internal monologue. And, again and again, the People in Charge laugh at him for being a boring dimwitted narcissist, so involved in the endlessly fascinating genre conventions of his own omnipotent navel that he’s unable to notice that the groundlings just want him to fuck off so they can get on with their own crappy lives.

The problem, though, is that the book can’t ever actually tip over into parody; Macan can write insouciant recap pages upon which Kordey can draw gratuitous T&A, but the rest of the book has to at least pretend to be a mainstream Marvel title. And what that means is that Cable’s attention-whoring has to be validated. He not only thinks he’s the most important person in the universe — he actually is that person. That reporter at the beginning of the series is obsessed with him; the SHIELD agents are obsessed with him; various bad guys follow him around as if there’s no other superhero in the world for them to pledge their undying animosity to.

By the fourth issue, the tension between the impulse to cut the star down to size and the genre demands to puff him up seem to give the series something like a creative breakdown. Cable turns into a Christ figure, actually healing the dead, as his internal text blocks achieve an apotheosis of banality (“And this exhilarated me. Scared me. Made me think….This makes you really, really think.”) Macan’s leaping up and down in his underwear screeching, “Pay no attention to that Yahweh in the corner!” while Kordey draws the Resurrection as conducted by a deity whose jockey-shorts have risen up abruptly and uncomfortably high. Both of them seem more than a little desperate, like zombies staggering about in the post-apocalypse searching clumsily but earnestly for their own spilled brains.

Alas, grey matter in comicdom is apportioned out only in precise amounts. The name on the cover is not just a title; it’s a command. Those letters are as big as your world can be, and while Soldier X may not be able to turn your appendix to butterscotch, he can, like Harry Potter on a much smaller scale, do what is worse — whine and make you read it.
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Update: Alyssa has a fun response to this post here.

Update the second: you can now read the complete blog back and forth. Here’s my part. Here’s Tucker’s part.