Write Another Book, Then We’ll Talk
Study the apparent chaos of social media discussion for long enough, and certain cadences appear. The one that stands out the most might be familiar — someone will draw a comparison (often a simplistic stretch) between an ongoing news personality, hero or villain, and the events and characters of the Harry Potter novels. The running gag, often delivered in all-lower case by the sort of person who has discovered that getting into politics is a way to atone for bullying people at school, is to quote tweet this with “read another book” or some other formulation.
My irritation from this is partly reactive rejection of anything that smells too much of the cool kids picking on the dweeby fans (my school days not having been lost on me), but it strikes me as a particularly self-defeating way to engage with people who more often than not agree with you on broad principles. The left (and it’s usually the left that uses these uniquely Twitteresque codes of speech, the online right having its own jargon) loves the narcissism of small differences, of course, but it seems a missed trick not to take this low-level engagement with political events and build it into something more.
Firstly, let’s look at the numbers. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is the seventh-best selling novel of all time (and the top six mostly have the distinct advantage of being published decades earlier). Its sequels rank in the top 25. Tens of millions of people have read them, and hundreds of millions have watched the films, played the video games and bought the merchandise they spawned. Popularity is no guarantee of quality, of course — Dan Brown’s execrable The Da Vinci Code has sold 80 million copies — but as ubiquity as a cultural touchstone goes, they’re hard to beat.
Their relevance is enhanced by the fact that the target audience for the books as they were released is now in their mid-20s to late-30s and as a result is Twitter’s biggest demographic. It shouldn’t really surprise us that they find relevance in a series of books which for many of them defined their childhoods and made them into readers.
Moreover, Harry Potter’s central tenet, a good vs. evil story about intelligence and bravery triumphing over a racist, supremacist ideology, is relevant to our current problems as a society, blunt as it might be. It is not unreasonable to expect people to draw comparisons between that highly memorable tale, which has spawned several of its own contributions to the language far beyond the books, and their own lives. More nuanced comparison could be drawn with another book, yes, but it would be a reference most followers wouldn’t understand, and would serve only to demonstrate the tweeter’s smug literacy. I suppose that’s rather the point of Twitter.
There is something quite gendered in all this. While I haven’t found any definitive statistics, it does seem that the average Harry Potter fan is more likely to be a woman than a man, and it’s also quite noticeable that young men in their 20s who interact with politics entirely via The Simpsons memes (myself included) are not snarkily instructed to go and watch another TV show.
The Simpsons is another property which defined a generation of childhood, and one with a strong crossover with Harry Potter fans. But tweeting that Donald Trump is like Mr. Burns is a lot less likely to earn you a torrent of replies than pointing out the similarities between him and a certain immortal herpetologist. Harry Potter fandom, through its largely female fanbase, is treated as something lightweight and unworthy, somehow infantile, while Matt Groening’s four-fingered creations escape such judgement.
Some of the snark is derived from J.K. Rowling’s self-inflicted reputation for meddling needlessly in her own work, being overrun in some of her attempts at well-meaning liberalism by the march of time, and for her vocal criticism of the current Labour leadership. I would venture that someone who has given the party millions of pounds of her fortune and immeasurable PR support over the years is someone who has earned some airtime, but again, the nature of Twitter rules this out. But not liking the author doesn’t discredit the works, which are broadly speaking well-written and emotionally moving works of young adult literature, and certainly head and shoulders above anything Rowling has produced since.
Since Harry Potter’s publication, only two youth-oriented franchises have managed to come anywhere close to equalling it in sales — the Twilight series and The Hunger Games. But neither of these have anywhere near the cultural relevance that Harry Potter still retains (largely because they just aren’t as good or compelling), and so until the series is topped by another omnipresent reference point, I’m afraid to tell you that people are going to keep tweeting “Expelliarmus” at the President.
Game of Thrones shows some signs of obtaining a similar grade of omnipresence, but it’s not quite there yet. But consider this article a throwing down of the armoured gauntlet. If you want people to read another book, it’s your task to write it. I can’t wait to tweet about it.
