Re: Harry Potter Sentence Structure (long)

[Steve Crandell <scrandell@COTOPAXI.K12.EC>]

I am probably in a fairly small minority here, but I want to pass this
opinion along.

Sure, the entertainment value of most literature is far more important than
the grammar, but that's not a reason to dismiss grammatical considerations.
I think the grammatical structure of the first Harry Potter book is
important, and appropriate. The commas serve a purpose in dialog, to help
indicate the pace of the conversation. My guess is that the speaker (and
author) are suggesting that the individual ideas don't warrant a full stop,
no matter what grammatical rules might otherwise indicate. Each thought is
part of the same flow, and commas instead of periods reinforce that. Rowling
is using a valid literary/oral construct that doesn't happen to fit
traditional norms. The argument can be compared to yelling at e.e. cummings
for forgetting all those capital letters.

Then again I could be wrong. I like brevity and clarity in sentence
structure. I come from a professional background in journalism, and short
sentences usually make more sense to me. Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom is
certainly a classic, and the designators of "classic" labels know a lot more
about sentence structure than I do, but I'm having a hard time slogging my
way through it. Still trying, though.

Most important to me, I didn't think Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
was all that great a book. The general story structure seemed too
derivative, especially from The Hobbit. Too many magical twists seem to
occur simply as plot conveniences, as in "I need this to happen next, so
let's invent some otherwise inexplicable knot to tie it all together." Even
in the context of a wizard world, too many powers and plot twists are
treated as throwaways. Harry is at turns superhero, supersleuth, coward, and
school dunce, praised and reviled by his peers and teachers, without any
clear indication that there is any human or wizard constant in any of them.
The school administration and student body accept and institute incredibly
arbitrary accumulations of house points, punishments, and near-transparent
pranks and attacks against their own constituency, without any time to think
through believable resolutions to conflicts, riddles or differences of
opinions. There are times when it seems most appropriate to shake some
characters and yell at them, "You can't be this simple, can you? Especially
since you just acted in an opposite manner 50 pages ago." And for a sports
fan, Quidditch is a joke. It's hard to lend much credence to a contest in
which 95% of the action doesn't seem to matter. Harry's Quidditch talents
are presented as so great that this in itself should make the game boring.
The only solution appears to be to introduce increasingly unbelievable and
obvious violations which no one supervising or attending the contest is
willing to legislate against, or even recognize. Harry isn't allowed to win
fair, because that would be too easy. But he still has to win most of the
time, because he's so good. That's not a sport so much as a Biblical trial.

Time to save myself, if possible. I've read all three Harry Potter books,
and enjoyed them all. I like the third book best of all. The story lines are
a lot of fun a lot of the time, and I appreciate the fact that many students
can relate to the absurdities of a Hogwarts education, especially when those
absurdities don't make sense. Children don't have to have derivations
pointed out to them, and most readers want to find "another book like Harry
Potter" anyway. I want to encourage children to read, and I'm not going to
try to force "Under the Volcano" on them anytime soon. I wouldn't want them
to have to work their way through this email either, unless they wanted to.

All praise to J.K. Rowling for creating such a wonderful popular world. And
I'm definitely glad she didn't win the Whitbread Award. If only Louis Sachar
was eligible - I would have campaigned for Holes.

Steven Crandell
Library Media Center Specialist
Academia Cotopaxi American International School
Quito, Ecuador
scrandell@cotopaxi.k12.ec

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