Did Harry Potter’s worldview help enforce good behavior during Event Covid? In The Harry Potter Generation: Essays on Growing Up with the Series, edited by Emily Lauer, Balaka Basu, the editors begin by pointing out how Harry Potter is different. If Narnia was fantasy world more real than our own, and Alice was a dreamscape, then Harry Potter brings reality and fantasy together.
That’s how Harry Potter readers see the books’ influence. Could it have influenced the enthusiasm for a "moral, civic and aesthetic" response to Covid? With little scientific testing but with strong appeals to community and authority, some of these measures had a significant aspect of symbolism and ritual: social distancing, mask wearing, new methods of greeting, fist bumps and head nods, new ways of walking, following invisible paths and observing unseen barriers.
All this in response to a viral enemy whose existence was validated only by fear and trust, by appeals to authority. Sold to a population that chose to err on the side of precaution, they treated the threat as fatal until proved otherwise.
Superficially Harry Potter raises a lot of flags. It’s a white world in which identity is created by ‘othering’ in the jargon of academics. These others are “Deatheaters, foreign students from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, magical races such as the house-elves and centaurs, Muggles and Squibs as well as, to a certain extent, girls and women” (Creating Magical Worlds: Otherness and Othering in Harry Potter by Marion Rana).
The orthodox reading of Harry Potter is a struggle of good and evil, writes Dina Kapaeva in The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture as good, young Harry is constantly attacked by wicked old Voldemort who wants to destroy him - strung out across seven books. Kapaeva wonders if the lack of originality and conformity is a secret of its success.
Harold Bloom says the Potter books’ success is symptomatic of a hunger for unreality… some say it creates an interest in the occult, others say it feeds it. Kapaeva concludes it is “nothing less than a manual on the art of death and dying, couched as a coming-of-age novel. As Rowling puts it, “My books are largely about death”.
Kapaeva sees the Gothic Aesthetic in Harry’s his occluded sight, frequent nightmares, repetition of meaningless Latin-sounding words, a fated life journey towards death, even while striving for immortality. Victory in death, Harry is a vampire before his time, who carries “the mark of a Dark Wizard”.
Psychologically, in terms of schizophrenia, Voldemort could be a figment of Harry’s imagination. The message of both characters is Do What Thou Wilt. This is not Satanism nor even about good and evil but about power for the sake of power. But this is not an injunction to the books’ young readers to seize power, rather to obey it, while ignoring the morality of their Muggle parents.
Do What Thou Wilt was the mantra of Aleister Crowley, an operative of British Intelligence. Miles Mathis argues that his was a fake Satanism. Like the Abrahamic religions, Satanism is a rival authority and both must be undermined in the eyes of the intelligence organs.
While the Prime Minister is the leader of the Muggles, to be obliviated when he gives up his post (mind wiped clean) the Minister for Magic is the leader of the wizarding world and the head of the Ministry of Magic. There is no evidence of elections, according to the »Harry Potter« Compendium but the Ministry does seem to have large number of employees relative to the population.
Makes you wonder if all those jobs as Contact Tracers and Journey Makers are being held open for Generation Harry Potter.
Criticizing ‘Garry Potter’ doesn’t go down well - he’s as well known in Russia as in Britain or the ‘States. The reaction is rougher still if you suggest the beloved author has, deliberately or otherwise, created an experiment in group think.
So back up a bit. It is well established that publishing has been always been controlled. Either by publishing barons with an agenda, like W.R. Hearst, or simply because it represents the prejudices of the upper middle class (the elite’s retainers) who determine public taste.
How is that controversial? He who pays the piper calls the tune. Everyone has a perspective that shows in their bias. You don’t need Chomsky to tell you that, or Critical Theory. Since practically every student has been drenched in Postmodernism, they know what I’m talking about.
There is, however, more than class interest and social bias to the publishing industry. As Chomsky pointed out: The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....” ― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
That’s achieved by deciding what gets published and what doesn’t, by promoting some writers and ignoring others. An amazing number of prominent writers came directly out of intelligence: Roald Dahl, A.A. Milne, Graham Greene and John le Carré. Publishing has been a key interest of the state, oh, since Shakespeare’s day.
How the hell as we approached the Millennium, did the publishing industry think an English boarding school saga was the zeitgeist? Had focus groups identified a market with a burning desire for wooden characters? No. Because the book is not about boarding schools. It’s about the Platonic ideal that parents are fools and their children are best raised by scientist-intellectuals. These technocratic wizards can see what the Muggles cannot: the common weal, statecraft, the best outcomes. And then they take those outcomes and impose them; just make them happen.
Does Potter “function as an anti-fascist manual” as Sy Castells claims – or does it normalize fascism as Julia Struck wrote? Why is it that Millennials can recognize a Voldemort as a fascist character but can’t see genuine State Corporatist fascism when it’s staring them in the face? (Those articles by Castells and Struck appeared on Medium in 2018).
I say it created the class loyalty (the Hogwarts class), tribalism, hostility to the family, loyalty to the state - all with the best of intentions, a desire for good outcomes but blind to the means, a common purpose. Which is fine and dandy until the wrong leader comes long with an evil purpose. This is behavioral psychology.
Potter creates a dualism in young minds where you obey an authoritarian so long as he is a good one. You may impose outcomes, deceive others, “obliviate” the minds of lower beings, all with good intent. This is only compatible with amorality.
What do the readers think? A blogger using the title ‘Anti-Racist: Violence for peace. Against fascism, racism and bigotry’ says
Hipster racism is the phenomenon of seemingly woke Millennials indulging in gross racism because ‘if I do it, it’s not racism’. The Guardian asked Is Lena Dunham's ‘hipster racism’ just old-fashioned prejudice?
As the blogger ’Anti-Racist’ goes on, “Harry Potter preserves the old-fashioned power structure where white, male Europeans are superior.”
Ultimately that’s it: Some read fantasies, science fiction and satirists - the anarcho syndicalists of Ursula Le Guin, the satirists forged by military experience like Vonnegut and Heller, raising a middle finger to authority, or the insights into mind control from conformists posing as rebels like Hunter S Thompson and Ken Kesey - these taught you to challenge those behind the curtain, to challenge power. In contrast, Harry Potter is the power structure.
Harry Potter is in part the white, technocratic power structure presented as righteous, clubby and desirable.
With credit to Miles Mathis, we must look at who published Harry Potter when it all began back in the 1990s, what was going on a the time of publication, and the choice of author in that context.
He tells a tale of influence. Figures like Anthony Salz , BBC board of governors, vice-chairman at Rothschild Inc, trustee of The Guardian, board member the UK Department for Education and a Chairman of Bloomsbury (though not all those positions at the time when Potter was launched).
Bloomsbury press, founded 1986, was floated 1994 raising the finance which it used in 1997 to publish and market the Harry Potter series. Thus an unknown company launched the best-selling book series in history.
The book’s launch coincided with the election of Tony Blair and the launch of Blairism and Cool Britannia, the staged rivalry between the pop bands Oasis and Blur, a dualism the Corporatist Media enthusiastically pressed on the public. Like Potter, they were launched in a blaze of propaganda from the start. Yet Oasis was the resurrection of the ultimate manipulated teen cult, The Beatles, the conformists. Blur was the indie-punk world, ironically laughing at themselves, the non-conformists.
Author J. Rowling had been working in Amnesty International where she has been called a researcher or biligual secretary. Rowling has stated her favorite writer as a child was Jessica Mitford, a decidedly classy choice for someone who repeatedly spins a saga of rags-to-riches, unhappy childhood and single motherhood.
This poverty supposedly informs the novel with its representation of parents as useless Muggles, the family as contemptible, and boarding school as a haven. No-one who’d been to boarding school or been raised by the state in an orphanage would agree. Almost all of them yearn for the childhood that Rowling enjoyed, marred only in later years by her mother’s illness.
In fact, Rowling was raised in an idyllic West Country cottage, with two parents connected to the scientific-military establishment. She was head girl at Wyedean School and College, read French and Classics at the University of Exeter. Then with no known radical life or activist experience, entered Amnesty International as a researcher.
She was still young, free and single, though with no means of support, when she moved to northern Portugal from 1991 to 1993 to begin writing and where she fell in love, married and had a child.
Rowling’s life story thus far seems pretty perfect, except that her one-year marriage turned sour, causing her to escape to live near her sister in Scotland to complete her first published book. She told the Independent in 2005 that “she had written a book, Rabbit, at the age of six, and had discarded two adult fiction novels before Harry Potter "simply fell into my head" during a tedious train journey from Manchester in 1990.”
Compared to J.K.’s childhood in England’s south western countryside, Harry Potter’s life is quite different. He is whisked off to an institution where children are divided into classes and raised to serve the Elders, looking down with distain on their former family life.
Potter is often compared to the fantasy world of Lord of The Rings but as Mathis points out, this is a reversal:
Potter and friends owe their elevation entirely to the Elders who provide their wands and special powers. If the plebs ever observe the magic, the Obliviators are sent to wipe their minds. As with the Prime Minister, when he leaves office, another Muggle who no longer needs to know about the Magical World.
How do leaders go so quickly doolally. I’ve often remarked on the rapid descent of Margaret Thatcher or Harold Wilson the moment they left office. Ronald Reagan was a different case, perhaps resulting from loss of blood during the execution attempt.
It is understatement to say that Harry Potter lacks depth, except in two respects: the mechanism of the security state, with its academy, grey cardinals and competing teams of young agents; the ideology that binds the young cadres to the state. Much else is poorly written, leading fans to criticize Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
JK Rowling herself has struggled to answer detailed questions from fans at PotterCon events. Rowling’s unwillingness or inability to share information about the Potterverse past and present has itself become a phenomenon: Fans are sharing memes of J.K. Rowling revealing information that no one asked for.
This leads to the grand proposition that she did not fully write the series herself. I will ignore the speed at which she wrote the novels. Some people are prolific, like Agatha Christie and L. Ron Hubbard, Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland.
Norweigan film director Nina Grünfeld was the first to raise questions about J.K.’s rapid rise. Grünfeld’s thesis is not about Rowling but the industry, which Grünfeld knows intimately. Rags-to-riches is a public relations construct. It is very rare in a elite-controlled industry where success is apportioned and the beneficiaries are identified, groomed and set up for success. https://web.archive.org/web/20060114110703/http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1169209.ece
Nina Grünfeld’s suspicions were dismissed by Tom Dahl of publishing firm Damm, which releases the books in Norway. The Dahl family is a big name in publishing and elite society in Norway and Britain, it’s most famous member being the spy and writer Roald. https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2010/11/20/great-dynasties-of-the-world-the-dahls/ Interestingly, in the wake of Event Covid, it is Roald's daughter Ophelia Dahl who is behind one of the contact tracing services, Partners in Health.
Returning to Bloombury, a new publisher with its first success, it is obvious that Anthony Salz’s connections (BBC, Guardian) would have helped to create such a blaze of publicity. That only raises the next question: what brought him and J.K. together in such propitious circumstances, with a rags-to-riches writer on hand, just as the Labour Party had stormed to power with a platform of selling a classless, cool Britannia?
Bloomsbury founder Nigel Newton keeps a low profile, according to The Independent in 2005. In a rare interview he credited Lady Luck with spotting Rowling, or rather his then eight year-old daughter, Alice who picked up the manuscript. On her website Rowling describes how her agent Christopher Little in August 1996, “telephoned me and told me that Bloomsbury had 'made an offer'. I could not quite believe my ears. 'You mean it's going to be published?' I asked rather stupidly. 'It's definitely going to be published?' After I had hung up, I screamed and jumped into the air." (Independent, 2005).
Be Here Now. You had to be there. No children’s book had ever been promoted like Harry Potter.
The books have faced their fair share of plagiarism accusations. So far J.K. Rowling has fought off copyright claims from N.K. Stouffer author of The Legend of Rah and the Muggles (1984) - N.K.’s muggles being short, hairless, quasihuman mutants, while J.K.’s are just regular people who lack magical powers (NYT) Oh, and Stouffer’s 1984 book has a character called Larry Potter.
Patchwork not plagiarism was the conclusion of Antonia Byatt she wrote an op-ed article calling Rowling's universe a "secondary, secondary world, made up of intelligently-patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature... written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror- worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip".
Mathis looks for hints of authorship in the prominence of King’s Cross railway station, which J.K. Rowling variously attributes to the site of Boudica’s last battle and her parents’ first meeting, which hardly gels with secret platforms which, again, are an artifact of the security state.
The transgender issue is not the first time that JK Rowling has been pilloried in the press. There have been articles attacking her for failing to answer questions, failing to follow up on promises to write a Potter encyclopedia, and for jeopardizing the goodwill of her fans.
The question to ask may be whether this backlash, like the launch of Harry Potter 35 years ago, is orchestrated.
Or to ask the question another way: according to the Financial Times, Harry Potter franchise is a $25 billion business. Is there still a chance to build that business or has it peaked?
https://www.mugglenet.com/2019/03/j-k-rowling-and-the-questions-from-no-one/
“The series encourages us to feel that a vibrant community is waiting in our own world to be discovered, embraced, enhanced and extended. For the Harry Potter generation, the books become a moral, civic and aesthetic guide for interactions in classrooms and political campaigns, on social media and public transportation… the Harry Potter generation recognizes its right alongside Rowling and other figures of authority to extend these stories both textually and in their own lives.”
That’s how Harry Potter readers see the books’ influence. Could it have influenced the enthusiasm for a "moral, civic and aesthetic" response to Covid? With little scientific testing but with strong appeals to community and authority, some of these measures had a significant aspect of symbolism and ritual: social distancing, mask wearing, new methods of greeting, fist bumps and head nods, new ways of walking, following invisible paths and observing unseen barriers.
All this in response to a viral enemy whose existence was validated only by fear and trust, by appeals to authority. Sold to a population that chose to err on the side of precaution, they treated the threat as fatal until proved otherwise.
Superficially Harry Potter raises a lot of flags. It’s a white world in which identity is created by ‘othering’ in the jargon of academics. These others are “Deatheaters, foreign students from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, magical races such as the house-elves and centaurs, Muggles and Squibs as well as, to a certain extent, girls and women” (Creating Magical Worlds: Otherness and Othering in Harry Potter by Marion Rana).
The orthodox reading of Harry Potter is a struggle of good and evil, writes Dina Kapaeva in The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture as good, young Harry is constantly attacked by wicked old Voldemort who wants to destroy him - strung out across seven books. Kapaeva wonders if the lack of originality and conformity is a secret of its success.
“The old genre of boarding school novels: their characters do not develop, their plots and puzzles are predictable.” That in turn demolishes another claim that the Potter books address the social and psychological preoccupations of our times. “The reader can hardly enjoy the books for their depictions of the finer movements of Harry’s soul. In fact, we mostly learn about Harry’s feelings on what is literally a gut level… Harry’s stomach “lurching”, “writhing” and “turning over”.
Harold Bloom says the Potter books’ success is symptomatic of a hunger for unreality… some say it creates an interest in the occult, others say it feeds it. Kapaeva concludes it is “nothing less than a manual on the art of death and dying, couched as a coming-of-age novel. As Rowling puts it, “My books are largely about death”.
Kapaeva sees the Gothic Aesthetic in Harry’s his occluded sight, frequent nightmares, repetition of meaningless Latin-sounding words, a fated life journey towards death, even while striving for immortality. Victory in death, Harry is a vampire before his time, who carries “the mark of a Dark Wizard”.
Psychologically, in terms of schizophrenia, Voldemort could be a figment of Harry’s imagination. The message of both characters is Do What Thou Wilt. This is not Satanism nor even about good and evil but about power for the sake of power. But this is not an injunction to the books’ young readers to seize power, rather to obey it, while ignoring the morality of their Muggle parents.
Do What Thou Wilt was the mantra of Aleister Crowley, an operative of British Intelligence. Miles Mathis argues that his was a fake Satanism. Like the Abrahamic religions, Satanism is a rival authority and both must be undermined in the eyes of the intelligence organs.
“Besides, unless what you wish to do is murder people and feast on their blood, Do What Thou Wilt isn't Satanic anyway. If you are evil, Do What Thou Wilt is evil; if not, not. An angel who does as he wishes will do angelic things, by definition. So even that morality is blurred. What I mean is, consider this possibility: maybe Crowley set up that tenet and labeled it Satanic just so that it would be shot down.”
While the Prime Minister is the leader of the Muggles, to be obliviated when he gives up his post (mind wiped clean) the Minister for Magic is the leader of the wizarding world and the head of the Ministry of Magic. There is no evidence of elections, according to the »Harry Potter« Compendium but the Ministry does seem to have large number of employees relative to the population.
Makes you wonder if all those jobs as Contact Tracers and Journey Makers are being held open for Generation Harry Potter.
***
So back up a bit. It is well established that publishing has been always been controlled. Either by publishing barons with an agenda, like W.R. Hearst, or simply because it represents the prejudices of the upper middle class (the elite’s retainers) who determine public taste.
How is that controversial? He who pays the piper calls the tune. Everyone has a perspective that shows in their bias. You don’t need Chomsky to tell you that, or Critical Theory. Since practically every student has been drenched in Postmodernism, they know what I’m talking about.
There is, however, more than class interest and social bias to the publishing industry. As Chomsky pointed out: The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....” ― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
That’s achieved by deciding what gets published and what doesn’t, by promoting some writers and ignoring others. An amazing number of prominent writers came directly out of intelligence: Roald Dahl, A.A. Milne, Graham Greene and John le Carré. Publishing has been a key interest of the state, oh, since Shakespeare’s day.
How the hell as we approached the Millennium, did the publishing industry think an English boarding school saga was the zeitgeist? Had focus groups identified a market with a burning desire for wooden characters? No. Because the book is not about boarding schools. It’s about the Platonic ideal that parents are fools and their children are best raised by scientist-intellectuals. These technocratic wizards can see what the Muggles cannot: the common weal, statecraft, the best outcomes. And then they take those outcomes and impose them; just make them happen.
"There is no good and evil, only power and those too weak to seek it" - Voldemort, the world's first postmodernist neo-Marxist.
Does Potter “function as an anti-fascist manual” as Sy Castells claims – or does it normalize fascism as Julia Struck wrote? Why is it that Millennials can recognize a Voldemort as a fascist character but can’t see genuine State Corporatist fascism when it’s staring them in the face? (Those articles by Castells and Struck appeared on Medium in 2018).
I say it created the class loyalty (the Hogwarts class), tribalism, hostility to the family, loyalty to the state - all with the best of intentions, a desire for good outcomes but blind to the means, a common purpose. Which is fine and dandy until the wrong leader comes long with an evil purpose. This is behavioral psychology.
Potter creates a dualism in young minds where you obey an authoritarian so long as he is a good one. You may impose outcomes, deceive others, “obliviate” the minds of lower beings, all with good intent. This is only compatible with amorality.
What do the readers think? A blogger using the title ‘Anti-Racist: Violence for peace. Against fascism, racism and bigotry’ says
“That is the main message of the Harry Potter books: there is a “good colonialism” – *puke* – and a bad colonialism. As long as you don’t act like a stereotypical Hollywood nazi, you can be as bigoted, racist, intolerant, misogynist and anti-Semitic as you want… you’re still a good person.”
Hipster racism is the phenomenon of seemingly woke Millennials indulging in gross racism because ‘if I do it, it’s not racism’. The Guardian asked Is Lena Dunham's ‘hipster racism’ just old-fashioned prejudice?
As the blogger ’Anti-Racist’ goes on, “Harry Potter preserves the old-fashioned power structure where white, male Europeans are superior.”
Ultimately that’s it: Some read fantasies, science fiction and satirists - the anarcho syndicalists of Ursula Le Guin, the satirists forged by military experience like Vonnegut and Heller, raising a middle finger to authority, or the insights into mind control from conformists posing as rebels like Hunter S Thompson and Ken Kesey - these taught you to challenge those behind the curtain, to challenge power. In contrast, Harry Potter is the power structure.
Harry Potter is in part the white, technocratic power structure presented as righteous, clubby and desirable.
“Whereas every action is unique and idiosyncratic, behavior falls into patterns that repeat themselves in a predictable fashion. Action, whether it is reckless and impulsive or deliberate and discriminating, is the product of judgement, choice and free will, whereas behavior is automatic and reflexive.” -- R. Christopher Lasch (1932–1994) American historian, moralist, and social critic.
***
He tells a tale of influence. Figures like Anthony Salz , BBC board of governors, vice-chairman at Rothschild Inc, trustee of The Guardian, board member the UK Department for Education and a Chairman of Bloomsbury (though not all those positions at the time when Potter was launched).
Bloomsbury press, founded 1986, was floated 1994 raising the finance which it used in 1997 to publish and market the Harry Potter series. Thus an unknown company launched the best-selling book series in history.
The book’s launch coincided with the election of Tony Blair and the launch of Blairism and Cool Britannia, the staged rivalry between the pop bands Oasis and Blur, a dualism the Corporatist Media enthusiastically pressed on the public. Like Potter, they were launched in a blaze of propaganda from the start. Yet Oasis was the resurrection of the ultimate manipulated teen cult, The Beatles, the conformists. Blur was the indie-punk world, ironically laughing at themselves, the non-conformists.
Author J. Rowling had been working in Amnesty International where she has been called a researcher or biligual secretary. Rowling has stated her favorite writer as a child was Jessica Mitford, a decidedly classy choice for someone who repeatedly spins a saga of rags-to-riches, unhappy childhood and single motherhood.
This poverty supposedly informs the novel with its representation of parents as useless Muggles, the family as contemptible, and boarding school as a haven. No-one who’d been to boarding school or been raised by the state in an orphanage would agree. Almost all of them yearn for the childhood that Rowling enjoyed, marred only in later years by her mother’s illness.
In fact, Rowling was raised in an idyllic West Country cottage, with two parents connected to the scientific-military establishment. She was head girl at Wyedean School and College, read French and Classics at the University of Exeter. Then with no known radical life or activist experience, entered Amnesty International as a researcher.
She was still young, free and single, though with no means of support, when she moved to northern Portugal from 1991 to 1993 to begin writing and where she fell in love, married and had a child.
Rowling’s life story thus far seems pretty perfect, except that her one-year marriage turned sour, causing her to escape to live near her sister in Scotland to complete her first published book. She told the Independent in 2005 that “she had written a book, Rabbit, at the age of six, and had discarded two adult fiction novels before Harry Potter "simply fell into my head" during a tedious train journey from Manchester in 1990.”
Compared to J.K.’s childhood in England’s south western countryside, Harry Potter’s life is quite different. He is whisked off to an institution where children are divided into classes and raised to serve the Elders, looking down with distain on their former family life.
Potter is often compared to the fantasy world of Lord of The Rings but as Mathis points out, this is a reversal:
“In LOTR, the heroes are hobbits—short and unattractive common folk living on the land. They are the muggles of their time and place. But Potter reverses this, making common folk less than useless. Without a few high-born wizards like Harry to fight for them, the muggles would soon be wiped out. But in Potter, it is hard to understand why this wouldn't be good riddance. Tolkien made the hobbits ignorant and provincial, but through the actions and explanations of both Gandalf and Frodo, we understand why they are worth saving from the Dark Lord. In Potter, we have none of that, the muggles as described being completely expendable.”
Potter and friends owe their elevation entirely to the Elders who provide their wands and special powers. If the plebs ever observe the magic, the Obliviators are sent to wipe their minds. As with the Prime Minister, when he leaves office, another Muggle who no longer needs to know about the Magical World.
How do leaders go so quickly doolally. I’ve often remarked on the rapid descent of Margaret Thatcher or Harold Wilson the moment they left office. Ronald Reagan was a different case, perhaps resulting from loss of blood during the execution attempt.
It is understatement to say that Harry Potter lacks depth, except in two respects: the mechanism of the security state, with its academy, grey cardinals and competing teams of young agents; the ideology that binds the young cadres to the state. Much else is poorly written, leading fans to criticize Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
JK Rowling herself has struggled to answer detailed questions from fans at PotterCon events. Rowling’s unwillingness or inability to share information about the Potterverse past and present has itself become a phenomenon: Fans are sharing memes of J.K. Rowling revealing information that no one asked for.
This leads to the grand proposition that she did not fully write the series herself. I will ignore the speed at which she wrote the novels. Some people are prolific, like Agatha Christie and L. Ron Hubbard, Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland.
Norweigan film director Nina Grünfeld was the first to raise questions about J.K.’s rapid rise. Grünfeld’s thesis is not about Rowling but the industry, which Grünfeld knows intimately. Rags-to-riches is a public relations construct. It is very rare in a elite-controlled industry where success is apportioned and the beneficiaries are identified, groomed and set up for success. https://web.archive.org/web/20060114110703/http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1169209.ece
Nina Grünfeld’s suspicions were dismissed by Tom Dahl of publishing firm Damm, which releases the books in Norway. The Dahl family is a big name in publishing and elite society in Norway and Britain, it’s most famous member being the spy and writer Roald. https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2010/11/20/great-dynasties-of-the-world-the-dahls/ Interestingly, in the wake of Event Covid, it is Roald's daughter Ophelia Dahl who is behind one of the contact tracing services, Partners in Health.
Returning to Bloombury, a new publisher with its first success, it is obvious that Anthony Salz’s connections (BBC, Guardian) would have helped to create such a blaze of publicity. That only raises the next question: what brought him and J.K. together in such propitious circumstances, with a rags-to-riches writer on hand, just as the Labour Party had stormed to power with a platform of selling a classless, cool Britannia?
Bloomsbury founder Nigel Newton keeps a low profile, according to The Independent in 2005. In a rare interview he credited Lady Luck with spotting Rowling, or rather his then eight year-old daughter, Alice who picked up the manuscript. On her website Rowling describes how her agent Christopher Little in August 1996, “telephoned me and told me that Bloomsbury had 'made an offer'. I could not quite believe my ears. 'You mean it's going to be published?' I asked rather stupidly. 'It's definitely going to be published?' After I had hung up, I screamed and jumped into the air." (Independent, 2005).
Be Here Now. You had to be there. No children’s book had ever been promoted like Harry Potter.
The books have faced their fair share of plagiarism accusations. So far J.K. Rowling has fought off copyright claims from N.K. Stouffer author of The Legend of Rah and the Muggles (1984) - N.K.’s muggles being short, hairless, quasihuman mutants, while J.K.’s are just regular people who lack magical powers (NYT) Oh, and Stouffer’s 1984 book has a character called Larry Potter.
Patchwork not plagiarism was the conclusion of Antonia Byatt she wrote an op-ed article calling Rowling's universe a "secondary, secondary world, made up of intelligently-patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature... written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror- worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip".
Mathis looks for hints of authorship in the prominence of King’s Cross railway station, which J.K. Rowling variously attributes to the site of Boudica’s last battle and her parents’ first meeting, which hardly gels with secret platforms which, again, are an artifact of the security state.
***
The question to ask may be whether this backlash, like the launch of Harry Potter 35 years ago, is orchestrated.
"I think the secret behind JK Rowling is guarded more strongly than the entrance to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory," Nina Grünfeld wrote. The truth, she believes, won't emerge until "the market for Harry Potter is saturated, until the actress behind JK Rowling gets tired of her role and not until the real authors behind the pseudonym feel an enormous need for recognition."
Or to ask the question another way: according to the Financial Times, Harry Potter franchise is a $25 billion business. Is there still a chance to build that business or has it peaked?
https://www.mugglenet.com/2019/03/j-k-rowling-and-the-questions-from-no-one/
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