The hoopla over Year 7 has finally come to an end. Bookstore owners are gnashing their teeth that the publishing juggernaut of Harry Potter has finally rolled to a stop."What next, now that Harry Potter's done with?", they agonize.
Fans are jubilant at its arrival after the long, much hyped midnight launch parties, even stamps are being issued in honor of the release (Click on image for larger view.)
No, not so fast. We're still only at movie 5 in the screen version, that leaves a couple more years for the Pottermania,the backlog of already printed books and plastic paraphernalia to sell, before the book sets start to appear untouched in library used book sales.
J.K.Rowling assured her fans that she was in tears at the end of one of the chapters, and had a sense of weary completion at the end. As beneficiary of one of the most massive marketing campaigns ever launched for a book, she is entitled to highlight any little windows into the creative process, rather than leaving it to dusty academics in Hogwartian libraries, puzzling over the motives of the author in their ivory towers. But when all this is fed into a mass-marketing machine and spit out packaged in plastic and shrink-wrap * at the other end, it creates a curious spectacle for those removed from the frenzy.
Harry Potter has become a meme for our times. :
a unit of cultural information, cultural evolution or diffusion — propagates from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution. Multiple memes may propagate as cooperative groups called memeplexes (meme complexes).
It remains to be seen if the Potter meme has the staying power of other far older memes which have already survived the test of time (the Cinderella story, which echoes all the way through literature, with different variations in a hundred languages or more), or merely becomes the passing fad of a generation, to be superseded by the next marketing phenomenon. Or will it become the next Wizard of Oz, destined to live on in adaptations, satire, topsy turvy versions and parodies?
It's easy to imagine that the Oz franchise lives by the power of its own magic. However, the real wizards standing behind the curtain of Oz mania are the savvy marketers that conjure up fresh enthusiasm for Baum's creation using only the powers of promotion. The 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz was accompanied by radio and newspaper specials designed to capture the public's attention. Also, the film marked the first time a movie was promoted by the sales of promotional toys, games, dolls, Valentines, soaps, and clothing. Although the promotion didn't create an overnight box office success, the film later became a smash hit on television—Oz aired yearly from 1956 to 1988, grossing about 20 million.
As Susan Blackmore says, in this extract from her book The Meme Machine:
Take the song "Happy Birthday to You". Millions of people - probably thousands of millions of people the world over - know this tune. Indeed I only have to write down those four words to have a pretty good idea that you may soon start humming it to yourself. Those words affect you, probably quite without any conscious intention on your part, by stirring up a memory you already possess. And where did that come from? Like millions of other people you have acquired it by imitation. Something; some kind of information, some kind of instruction, has become lodged in all those brains so that now we all do the same thing at birthday parties. That something is what we call the meme.
Memes spread themselves around indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral or positively harmful to us. A brilliant new scientific idea, or a technological invention may spread because of its usefulness. A song like "Jingle Bells" may spread because it sounds OK, though it is not seriously useful and can definitely get on your nerves. But some memes are positively harmful - like chain letters and pyramid selling, new methods of fraud and false doctrines, ineffective slimming diets and dangerous medical `cures'. Of course the memes don't care; they are selfish like genes and will simply spread if they can.
Some memes are born and spread virally without a machinery to propagate it, beyond the propensity for imitation by humans. Some memes are created and have huge campaigns funded by those who benefit from its propagation in some form or the other, as the advertising world knows and uses the latest research into human psychology to devastating effect. My sense is that Pottermania is one of these artificial memes.
Will these books be checked out from libraries in droves a hundred years from now? Probably not. But there will still be the curious ones who will be examining it to determine what it was that drove the Pottermania meme to the blazing success that it enjoyed in its heyday.
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*Actually, an acknowledgement of the power of the 'green' meme: as in
"We try to produce the most beautiful books possible, and we are also extremely concerned about the impact of our manufacturing process on the forests of the world and the environment as a whole. Accordingly, we made sure that all of the paper we used contains 30% post-consumer recycled fiber, and that over 65% has been certified as coming from forests that are managed to insure the protection of the people and wildlife dependent upon them"
- disclaimer from copyright page of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"
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Because of the age of my children, I personally missed the Potter mania. But like everyone else, I have followed the amazing media hype surrounding the publication of the books. My book club decided to check out the magic behind the mania by reading one Harry Potter book a few years ago. We enjoyed it but couldn't really pin-point what was behind its enormous popularity.
Going by the media reports (for the last couple of years, I haven't really paid much attention), I was initially intrigued by the predictions that author J.K. Rowling had managed the impossible - she had put the old fashioned printed book in the joy-stick wielding hands of today's youngsters. The predictions were particularly breathless about the more restless boy readers who customarily read less than their female peers, but who too got caught up in the web of the pint sized prestidigitator. Parents, teachers and media mavens declared that Harry Potter had happily put reading back on the list of childhood hobbies. But seven hefty volumes later, it appears that the "magic meme" may indeed be a narrow one in its influence. Kids who didn't read before, are not reading any more voraciously; they are just reading Harry Potter.
Posted by: Ruchira Paul | July 22, 2007 at 07:11 PM
This 1999 review was my impression of Harry Potter at the start of the marketing monster's existence. For the last book of the series, Rowling does the same mix 'n' match, throwing every minor magical reference to be gleaned from literature over the Victorian era and later.
(*****SPOILERS AHOY ********************)
For example:
The Horcruxes (one of which is a locket similar in properties of confounding the wearer to the Ring of power's effect on Gollum and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings), one major part Albomesque, as in a scene that mimics the contents of Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven.
(****************END SPOILER*******************************)
It's not enthralling reading when you follow the story wondering which author's influence you are going to see popping up next in the story.
Most adult reviews are gushing over the 'fitting ending' to the series, but if you ask me, this was the book that brought it home most sharply that I was reading a book targeted primarily at the tween/teen crowd, with the same limitations in portrayals with a PG-13 rating. It's a good book series for kids, nothing more, nothing less. Perhaps eager parents and adult readers will gush over it and keep the mania going for a while in the next generation, till the next media driven mania comes along.
Arguably, JK Rowling was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time, with all the confluence of the publishing industry promoting her to the heights of dizzy fame. But I have a solid skepticism about the inner workings of the mass-market publishing industry, especially after the Kaavya Viswanathan debacle. ( She was after all being groomed to be the Jhumpa Lahiri of chicklit, before the whole campaign came crashing down after the plagiarism allegations.)
In the long run, I think that Harry Potter will have little influence on the reading patterns of generations who are conditioned to play into the fad of the day. It does speak to the power of industries that try to create these memes, but the question remains as to whether the meme has staying power.
Posted by: Sujatha | July 23, 2007 at 07:54 AM