Forbidden Forest, Enchanted Castle: Arthurian Spaces in the Harry Potter Novels (Essay) (Critical Essay‪)‬

The huge success of the Harry Potter novels has triggered a series of reactions, some of which are reasonably predictable, such as the mass-media machinery that has been built around each successive publication of a new volume, welcomed every time as an "event" rather than an ordinary book; others less so, and in this category I would include many critical reactions. Favorable reviewers have had little more to do than count sales, while even slightly unfavorable reviewers have been compelled to move very cautiously, since their mildest remark might suddenly draw them to the centre of the stage, asked to explain what seemed an inexplicable hostility to everybody's favorite. (1) Many commentators--and this, seen in perspective, is probably the strangest reaction--felt they had to account for the success of the novels, find the secret that made these novels memorable (or at least eminently saleable) and, presumably, hand down the formula of J. K. Rowling's success to future generations of children's novelists. This seems to me not a very profitable exercise, since we are, after all, dealing with a very much manufactured event: it would be probably more interesting to reckon with the success of the Harry Potter novels in, say, fifty years' time, to see if it could survive immediate furor and really become a children's classic. Whether criticism was favorable or not, however, it was generally agreed that the readers' enthusiasm found its main origin in the air of familiarity of these novels, in the lack of totally original, unheimlichen elements that might have confused and disoriented the younger readers in particular. Pioneering the movement was Wendy Doniger's extremely witty and informative article in the London Review of Books, "Can You Spot the Source?" Written as a review of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the article started by analyzing the novels hitherto published as a variant of the Family Romance, of the English boarding school story and of the jocular magic story, to continue thus: