Harry Potter and
the Da Vinci code are not reducible to the MSS that J.K. Rowling and
Dan Brown submitted to their publisher. This is true even if the
published text was very close to those MSS and not, as sometimes happens, co-authored by their editors. At the
very least, several hundred people were involved in drawing covers
and typesetting and printing and physically manufacturing the object
that you bought in Waterstone. And someone else created the
marketing campaign; decided that it would be cool for bookshops to
open in the middle of the night to sell the first editions; carefully
honed the Rowling persona; spotted that a series of school based children's fantasy stories might be the sort of thing that kids would want to read. No-one but JK Rowling could have written Harry Potter but if JK Rowling
hadn't written Harry Potter, some other publisher might have identified some very similar author to place at the center of a very similar
maelstrom.
It is tempting for
a writer to think "It is my words that the Public wants, and all
the publisher does is put them in the hands of the reader."
It is equally tempting for a publisher to think "I make beautiful books, and
one small part of the process is the artisan who I hire to write the
words which go into them."
It is tempting for an actor to think: "I have a special talent: people
come to see me act, and the director's job is simply to decide where I should stand so that the audience can hear me declaiming.
It is equally
tempting for a director to think: "People have come to see my
version of a play, based on my knowledge of literature and stage
craft. An actor is simply a skilled individual whose job it is to
read the words and perform the gestures that I am tell him to."
Would it therefore be unreasonable for the theatre architect to say "I am in the business of
giving people an exquisite evening. You create a beautiful building,
and then you hire anyone to sell ice cream, pour drinks, and strut
about on the stage?"
XII
You can sometimes
get a very small child to eat his greens but arbitrarily declaring
that these are special Tellytubby greens. It works better if the
person performing the alchemy is Mr Sainsbury: the spinach that was
wrapped in official Tellytubby packaging really does taste better
than the kind which Mummy says came all the way from Tellytubbyland.
I am sometime told that Peter Jackson's parody of Lord of the Rings
has to be judged on it's own terms: it doesn't matter whether or not
it is an accurate translation of Prof. Tolkien's book.
It is certainly
true that Lord of the Rings works very well as a Hollywood pop corn
flick. I would place it almost precisely on a level with the Pirates of the Caribbean
series, full of sound and fury but signifying less and less as it
goes along.
This is not to deprecate Lord of the Rings. I like the Pirates
of the Caribbean series very much indeed. They provide a huge dollop
of cutlasses, cannons and eye patches, wrapped in the illusion of a
narrative, and enough macguffins and plot coupons to propel the ships from exotic location to exotic location. They are, in short, exactly what you want from a pirate movie.
I feel much the
same way about Lord of the Rings: it is the Goonies with dragons,
ill matched semi competent protagonists dropped into the middle of a
story in which far too many precipices collapse underneath them and
far to many dragons drop rocks on them for anyone to have any chance to work out what is actually meant to be happening.
Saying that the
Lord of the Rings is to be judged on its own merits is the same as
saying that Jackson, having made his big budget cartoon, used the
name Lord of the Rings to give it a quite spurious gravitas:
that the Lord of the Rings movie is only a Lord of the Rings movie in a manner of speaking, just at the Tellytubby spinach is only Tellytubby spinach in a manner of speaking.
If I say this, I am
accursed of snobbery by the meta geeks.