[A2k] Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times: Humility and Harry Potter

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/866b4288-0dac-11dd-b90a-0000779fd2ac.html

Humility and Harry Potter

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: April 19 2008 03:00 | Last updated: April 19 2008 03:00

"We all know I've made enough money," said J.K. Rowling, the author,
in a courtroom in New York City this week. "That's absolutely not why
I'm here."

It is not obvious, though, why she was there. Along with Warner
Brothers Entertainment, Ms Rowling is suing RDR Books, a small,
respected publisher in rural Muskegon, Michigan, to enjoin it from
selling an A-to-Z guide to Ms Rowling's seven Harry Potter books. This
"lexicon" would be based on an online guide compiled over the past
decade by Steven Vander Ark in the hours he could spare from his job
as a librarian at a Christian junior high school near Muskegon.

The case has become a battle over the limits of copyright law and a
window on the ties that bind celebrities to their more obsessive fans.

The gravamen of Ms Rowling's and Warner Brothers' argument is clear.
Mr Vander Ark's book "is not a reference book or scholarly critique",
they claim, and it lacks "any originality or invention". Ms Rowling
has praised Mr Vander Ark's website, but calls the book that will draw
from it "wholesale theft". Her attorneys note that "Ms Rowling has
allowed fans and scholars wide latitude to comment on, critique, and
even create 'fan fiction' and art based on her stories". But of
course, nobody in a free country requires authors' permission to
comment on or critique their work.

Lawyers at Stanford University Law School's Fair Use Project, who are
defending Mr Vander Ark pro bono, sought to show in three days of
testimony this week that the Lexicon constitutes "fair use" of Ms
Rowling's work. It is a reference guide, of the sort that is familiar
(and indispensable) to anyone who has taken a deeper interest in
Balzac, Proust, Faulkner or Star Trek . Ms Rowling "appears to claim a
monopoly on the right to publish literary reference guides and other
non-academic research relating to her own fiction", according to Mr
Vander Ark's lawyer. Joe Nocera, The New York Times business writer,
puts it even more bluntly. He has called Ms Rowling a "copyright hog".

Whether the lexicon violates "fair use" depends, according to US legal
experts, on whether it is "transformative" or whether it just cribs
from Ms Rowling's plot and prose. Much of the testimony missed this
issue. Ms Rowling dwelt on her own plans to publish a Potter
encyclopaedia, which is neither here nor there. Literary critics
cannot be kept from writing about, let us say, the novels of Philip
Roth on the grounds that Mr Roth swears he wants to publish a book
called What My Novels Mean . The fact that Mr Vander Ark would profit
from his lexicon is a red herring, too. Provided he is within the
boundaries of "fair use", there is nothing illegitimate about his
profiting from his work, any more than it is illegitimate that book
reviewers be paid if they cite the books they review. Ms Rowling also
demeaned the quality of Mr Vander Ark's book, which is legally
irrelevant. Apparently some puns she was particularly proud of,
including a "double allusion" in the name Remus Lupin, went over his
head. She came off as condescending ("It's very difficult for someone
who is not a writer to understand"), self-involved (the suit, she
said, "has really decimated the demands of my creative work for the
last month") and mean.

Meanwhile, Mr Vander Ark's admiration for Ms Rowling's "genius" (his
word) remains slavish. Although he refers to her as "Jo" on his
website, the two had never met before this week. He has read the
Potter books dozens of times and recently moved to England, where he
has written a book about the places that inspired the Potter series.
Even after Ms Rowling filed the suit against his publisher last
October, he signed his online postings "still Jo's man, through and
through". When asked in court this week if he still felt like a member
of the "Harry Potter community", he began to sob.

Whatever the court decides on legal grounds, one need only spend five
minutes at Mr Vander Ark's website ( hp-lexicon.org ) to see that, on
literary grounds, the idea that he is merely cribbing is nonsense. The
website is highly transformative. It is a leviathan effort of
research, criticism and interpretation. It is a concordance, index and
bibliographical essay all in one. If the eventual book bears the
slightest resemblance to it, it will be indispensable to scholars and
lay Potter addicts. It gives timelines of the novels and points up
inconsistencies in them. Its section on plants describes the uses and
behaviour of fluxweed, honking daffodils and whomping willows, and
reconstructs seven years of the "herbology" curriculum at Hogwarts. It
indexes everything Ms Rowling has ever said in published interviews
about her main characters. (At World Book Day in 2004, if you'd care
to know, she hinted that Harry might be a relative of Godric
Gryffindor, the wizard and Hogwarts founder.) It links to 137 literary
essays about the Potter series from around the English-speaking world,
some of them superb. It debunks hoaxes and rumours that have swirled
around the series and its author. It links to bookstores. Such a site
is not just a godsend to Potter addicts. It is thanks to readers such
as Mr Vander Ark that Harry Potter is taken as something more than
just a particularly good children's book.

Celebrities and their fans exist in an awkward mutual dependence.
Maybe Ms Rowling, paradoxically, is a victim of her relatively private
lifestyle and her unlikely road from single motherhood to fame. She
has a Hollywood star's relationship to her public, but less practice
than the average Hollywood star, perhaps, in hiding impatience. She
remains a writer with an admirable work ethic, a magnificent gift for
characterisation and plot, and a rich and inventive vocabulary - even
if the word "humility" does not figure in it.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

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Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
thiru@keionline.org


Tel: +41 22 791 6727
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