IN AN AGE when we are constantly told that the printed word is dying, J.K. Rowling defied the received wisdom.
I'm not the first critic to compare the midnight frenzies that have greeted every Harry Potter book since the fourth to the crowds waiting on the New York docks for the ships carrying the next installment of Charles Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop," frantically calling out to the sailors to ask if Little Nell had died.
Nor am I the first to note that the extraordinary level of excitement around the Harry Potter books was generated not by media saturation on the part of the publisher, Scholastic, but by the spontaneous enthusiasm of young readers, which was buoyed and expanded by the enthusiasm of a steadily increasing number of older readers.
That's right: Manufactured buzz alone cannot create or sustain the public's enthusiasm. You need only look at this summer's box-office returns, with the end-of-the-line grosses for the "Shrek," "Pirates of the Caribbean," and "Ocean's" franchises, to see that. Yet the excitement about Harry Potter has steadily grown over nine years, and for all the merchandise tie-ins, the movie franchise and all the other Potter folderol, we should remember that all those products came in \o7response\f7 to the public's enthusiasm and were not part of a campaign to \o7create\f7 that enthusiasm.
And that's why those who ascribe the popularity of the Potter books to nothing more than the bad taste of the masses are so off the mark. The most prominent of those naysayers, that drooping defender of the canon, Harold Bloom, has, in his attacks on Rowling, provided us with fine examples of another reason for the Potter books' popularity: the insularity of a literary culture that willfully ignores what it is that makes people readers in the first place.
In a July 2000 article in the Wall Street Journal, and in comments made in these pages three years later when the National Book Foundation announced it was awarding a prize to Stephen King, Bloom revealed a vision of literary culture in which only some people belong, where class is destiny and where the idiot rabble needs guidance by those elites who are better suited to making the decisions that will affect that rabble.
To be fair to Bloom, criticism is of necessity an elitist enterprise, and insisting on a hierarchy of good work over bad work is essential to the job. I wouldn't trust any critic who didn't despair of the garbage that finds an audience while good work languishes.
