I recently started and finished the first Harry Potter book. This was right before J. K. Rowling started a new round of controversy surrounding TERFs on Twitter, and owing to this and various other circumstances, my experience with the book was a bit strange to say the least. It reminded me of this xkcd comic:

I started reading the book with high expectations, since the series was such a huge hit, it must be a masterpiece, right? Owning to that perception, I mostly enjoyed the first few chapters.

At some point still early in the book, I read Ursula Le Guin's thoughts on the book, and my expectation changed. For context, Ursuala Le Guin penned A Wizard from Earthsea, an acclaimed but little-known book from 1968 that created the Wizard School archetype (complete with the loyal friend and the hateful rival cast) that Harry Potter borrowed generally from. I read A Wizard from Earthsea last year and thought quite highly of it. Therefore, I found it surprising that Le Guin was pretty critical of the book – specifically having fairly ordinary style and creativity, and being “ethically rather mean-spirited”.

After learning of Le Guin's opinions, I started reading the next few chapters of HP with more of a critical lens – picking out places where it was mean or ordinary. A bit later, when the TERF controversy happened, I looked at the book even more critically, and did find a few more valid points of criticism.

But by this point, what interested me far more than the HP book were my significant shifts in attitude towards the book, in relation to external events that should in theory have nothing to do with the book's merits. It was as if the morals of the author must be tied up with the aesthetic merits of the book.

I think what hit me then was that to a certain extent, everyone has a hard time compartmentalizing personal character vs. artistic talent. Art, even in as static of a form of a written story, is by default a performance that people use to judge the wisdom of the artist, and we intrinsically believe that those who produce good art would produce good wisdom.

This is why we feel so uncomfortable when someone we admire gets embroiled in believable controversy.

The urge to connect the two is so strong that when the artist appears as morally disagreeable, we resort to interesting tactics to resolve that dissonance. Paraphrased from my Twitter feed:

• HP was actually discovered by someone (could be J. K. Rowling or someone else) in an attic in the early 2000s.
• HP books were actually not great at all. This other anime that came out later is much better.

Admittedly, these are a bit of a straw-man, but I think these express some cognitive dissonance what we universally feel regarding artists.

Since it feels difficult to stop our (unconscious) belief that good art = wise artist, sometimes it's easier to just say that the art was never good, or to imply that the authorship was false after all.

To a certain extent, I think artists and viewers are both best served by removing the links between good art and wise artist. For one thing, it prevents artists from identifying too much of themselves with their art, which I'm pretty sure is a significant cause of depression in artists. For another, it's probably just as often false as it is true.

However, from my own perceptions of controversial artists, I know this can be difficult to reconcile – as evidenced my very experienced outlined in this post.

When I got to the end of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Store, I thought it was fine. It wasn't as good as everyone said it was, but also not as bad as Le Guin made it to be, it had both good parts and bad parts – just like every person ever.

(On the other hand, the Harry Potter parody music video Dark Lord Funk is spotless perfection that shall never be surpassed in our lifetimes)

— Categorized under: #psychology, #sociology, #reading, #writing, #fiction