"Let's You And Him Fight"

by Diane

Eric Berne describes the game in Games People Play: the title describes the dynamic well enough. Berne suggests that the game (in its relationship-based form) may be the source of a great deal of the world’s drama…real or fake.

Sometimes you get to see it played in the media mode, rather more obviously than usual. Today would be one of those times.

A journalist did an interview with J. K. Rowling for Time Magazine. The article is perhaps more interesting for the things that aren’t said than the things that are — some of which, are, frankly, pretty dumb…

It’s precisely Rowling’s lack of sentimentality, her earthy, salty realness, her refusal to buy into the basic clichés of fantasy, that make her such a great fantasy writer. The genre tends to be deeply conservative — politically, culturally, psychologically. It looks backward to an idealized, romanticized, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves…

Yeah, right. At any rate, Terry Pratchett — mild-mannered reporter for a great occasionally-metropolitan alternate universe, and former journalist in this one — happened upon the Time article, noticed that paragraph, and rolled his eyes. Then he did what people in the UK have done approximately since movable type was invented: he wrote a letter to the Times.

Not surprisingly, since one out of every hundred books published in the UK has Terry’s name on it, they published the letter. And lo, various people started having snits — claiming that Terry was attacking Rowling,or disrespecting her (the letter was published on her birthday! Of course Terry made them do that on purpose…), or was just jealous of her. And many of them got this idea because of the BBC’s move in the “Let’s You And Him…” (or in this case, “Her”) game: just look at that title.

…So it goes. Well…here’s what Terry has to say:

Let’s take it a bit at a time. You know what I wrote, because I think the entire text has been quoted here somewhere. No, in fact not the entire text — the original letter sent to the Sunday Times referred to JKR quite politely as Ms Rowling; a small courtesy, but deleting it makes the relevant sentence twice as harsh, which may be why it was done.

And the BBC website put a nice little spin on thing on things with a headline suggesting I’m directing a tirade at J K Rowling, rather than expressing annoyance at the habits of journalists and specifically one telling phrase clearly used by someone else.

As soon as the Harry Potter boom began, journalists who hadn’t read a children’s book in years went “Wow, a wizards’ school! Wow, broomstick lessons!” and so on, and generally acted as though the common property of the genre was the entire invention of JKR. This continues, sometimes quite ridiculously. And now we have Groomsman’s ‘knights and ladies Morris dancing to Greensleeves’. With such an easy wave we can dismiss, oh, Ursula leGuin, Diana Wynne Jones, Jane Yolen, Peter Dickinson, Alan Garner…fill in the list.

Pointing this out is, apparently, an attack on JKR. I don’t have any problem at all with her rise, only with such third-party silliness such as the above, which insults good authors who wrote great books at a time, not long ago, when advances were always low and hype was unknown.

No, I do not think these words originated with her. It’s self-evident in the article that they are the voice of the interviewer, who is very visible in the piece. The tone and presentation make it obvious. Read the paragraph beginning ‘It is precisely Rowling’s lack of sentimentality…’ He’s giving us his opinion, and the guy just had a nice line he wanted to use. Read the context and say I’m wrong.

And remember: what I was doing was apparently the right of every Englishman, which was to write a letter to The Times — for an audience that can be assumed to have read, with some intelligence, the article in question. Believe me, if the ST guys had read it as an attack on the lady herself, it would have been an article, not a letter.

But out there now, I believe, are various morphs of the BBC piece, with extra venom. You don’t have to think about it, just react. ‘Pratchett Attacks Journalist’ just would not be as much fun. Every story needs a villain, right?

And then there’s my question. Why didn’t the interviewer ask it? Here’s the world’s best-selling fantasy writer who has just said she hadn’t thought she was writing fantasy and also that she doesn’t really like the stuff. She goes on to say that she didn’t finish TLOTR or the Narnia series and has issues with Lewis. No problem there, but all this revelatory stuff just floated past, apparently unexamined. I’d like to know how an author can write in a genre she doesn’t like — really. I’d like to know what she thinks she is writing.

I’m jealous? Well, that saves having to have any discussion at all, right?

It will for some people, that’s for sure. They’ll continue to react to what they’re being told was said, without ever going to see for themselves whether it actually was or not.

Tsk tsk…

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