WordPlay - Populism, Problems, and Solutions

Some Notes On The Play 'Othello'

Shakespeare's play 'Othello' is fascinating. For a long time, I had problems with the play. In the Chamber Scene at the end, when Othello smothers Desdemona, he cat-and-mouses her, bullies her, for a while. It's not pleasant. Also, Othello's gullibility is hard to endure, even though he shares that trait with just about every other character in the play (including Desdemona).  

Then, now over 30 years ago, I chanced to see Ronald Colman's movie 'A Double Life', for which he won the Academy Award in 1947, playing an actor so consumed by the roles he plays that he takes on those character traits. The character is cast as Othello, and ends up smothering a very young, very nubile Shelley Winters. The lines from the Chamber Scene haunt him, and occur several times in the movie - and I began to realize how powerful they really are. This happens a lot with Shakespeare - stuff that looks good on paper takes on even more resonance when spoken or dramatized. 

Othello enters Desdemona's bedchamber, dark, illuminated only by the swinging lamp he  carries. He's in an almost psychotic calm, imbued with the delusional belief the murder he's about to commit is required justice, completely unhinged by Iago's machinations. He is still deeply in love, but convinced the woman he loves is evil. He gazes down at her and contemplates the act of murder, with reference to the lamp he carries, whispering so as not to wake her, with genuine awe at the enormity of the act of taking life: 

Put out the light, and then [looking down at his sleeping wife] put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again. . .

Wow. The whole scene is imbued with language of this kind of intensity and lyricism, which does not make it any more pleasant to watch. But it does mean there is something there. So I decided to look deeply it. The more I became familiar with the play, the more fascinating it became. It also speaks with authority to the present age, through the mouth of one single character. But more of that anon. 

Let's talk about it.

(1) Race. Of course that's an issue these days. But let me put this in Shakespearean perspective,. Shakespeare wrote the play in 1604, three years before the Jamestown colony was founded. There was Portugese and Spanish slavery in the New World, but I am not sure that the importation of African slaves had begun yet. In any case, it was not an element of English culture. The root cause of the tragedy in Shakespeare's conception isn't the diverse racial background of Othello and Desdemona, but their near unfamiliarity with each other. Race figures into the action only as one more element of mutual ignorance. Othello is 40 or so, maybe a little older, having spent nearly all his years as a soldier, a mercenary in the field. Desdemona is 20 or so, maybe younger, a nobleman's daughter, and completely unfamiliar with soldiery, She's a virgin (of course), and he might as well be. Whatever experience he's had with women is limited to camp followers. They are deeply in love, but they don't know all that much about each other - not enough for either of them to have enough trust and knowledge to ask the questions that might save them. That's the fatal flaw Iago exploits. No one in the play comments negatively on Othello's Moorish background, except Iago, who is obviously a special case.  

That's not to say that the play doesn't have a memorable place in the history of racism and bigotry in Anglo-American culture. It surely does. But the place occurs in the performance history of the play, not in Big Bill's initial conception. Indications in the text is that he meant Othello not simply to be African, but an extremely dark African. I've always thought that the ideal 'look' for the character would be Lawrence Taylor, the former Giants linebacker, who was a huge man, very physical, very handsome, and very, very dark.  

But as time went on, British audiences became more and more soured on that conception. Othello in performance (always by English actors in blackface at that time) became lighter and lighter. By mid-Victorian times, Othello had become Italian for all practical purposes. Samuel Coleridge, the 'Ancient Mariner' author, and a first rate Shakespearean critic in most instances, disgraced himself by attributing the 'Blackness' of Shakespeare's conception to his ignorance of the actual state of Africans. He was not alone. Only in this century has a return to the original reading of the text occurred - and although I'll stick with my opinion that we live in a large post-racial society, it still unsettles audiences. 

2. Desdemona. Very quickly, because the play is not about her. She is too often played as a patsy, but she is actually a typical Shakespearean heroine, alert, intelligent, very feminine, and committed to being Othello's wife. She'd fit right in to one of his comedies. (BTW, you won't read it in most ciritcs, but it is striking that in almost every one of his plays the heroine is smarter than the hero, the one conspicuous exception being Hamlet. 'Othello' is in that pattern). She gets into trouble, not because she's passive, but because she finds Othello's increasingly difficult behavior impossible to understand in terms of what little she knows of him.  

3. Othello. Everyone agrees the role is the most challenging role in all Shakespeare, which is really saying something. Lawrence Olivier, who failed spectacularly in the part in the mid 60's, made up a joke, to the effect that Shakespeare and Burbage were out drinking one night. Burbage in his cups boasted that Shakespeare could not write a role that he, Burbage, could not play. Big Bill thought to himself, I'll show you, went home and wrote Othello.

The role is near impossible. At the beginning, Othello is stately, composed, so formidable that he can still a nightbrawl in his nightshirt simply by his presence alone ('Keep up your bright swords or the dew will rust them' - a famous line - meaning you guys aren't going to be using your weapons for any purpose, so put them away. He's dressed at most in nightshirt - this is his wedding night - and unarmed. But his stateliness is so powerful he can end a riot simply by speaking.) Under Iago's influence, he loses all composure and dignity, collapsing in an epileptic fit at the end of Act IV, then restoring himself to the psychotic calm mentioned above. At the end, he reverts to a measure of his former self, in the manner of a musical recapitulation, and commits suicide in a dignified, though hardly heroic, manner.

The saving grace for the actor taking on the role is that Othello's language in all his various states is unvaryingly magnificent. His composure might fail; his poetic imagination never does. Hamlet may be Shakespeare's character philosopher, but Othello is his poet. I've always liked one line, which I quote for people who think Shakespeare is played by guys in ruffled collars and black tights. Othello is spying on the man Cassio has tricked him into believing is his rival, and says, in a fury:

Oh, I see that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw it too!

Not bad. But for all of Othello's poetry and corrupted nobility of character, the reason why the play is a masterpiece, and why it has so much to say to contemporary society is . .

4. Iago. One of Big Bill's greatest creations. Absolutely rational, completely cold-blooded, without a neurotic bone in his body, and stone cold, uninhibitedly evil. He has no real motive for engineering the catastrophe - Coleridge, in much better form with him than Othello, describes his actions as stemming from 'motiveless malignity', a wonderful phrase and absolutely descriptive. He does give explanations from time to time - he's been passed over for promotion, he thinks Othello may have seduced his wife - but the critics are unanimous in seeing these as lipservice, i.e., they are not themes in the play and he drops them without comment as the action moves on. In this case, the critics are right. Iago acts solely out of a fascination with his own malice.

In theory, he hates Othello. But he goes out of his way to see to it that Desdemona, who has never done him any harm and who likes and trusts him, goes to her death. He could easily spare her, as Othello by the end of Act IV has so badly compromised himself as to make his fall from grace inevitable. But Iago does not spare anyone, Instead, he goads the murder forward.

OTHELLO: Get me some poison, Iago; this night: I'll not
expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty
unprovide my mind again: this night, Iago.

IAGO: Do it not with poison, strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated

(As he speaks, Iago knows perfectly well that Desdemona has never 'contaminated' any bed.) 

He's no mastermind, He's clearly improvising at times. He has no conscience of any kind - he also steals, lies without shame, and manipulates the murder of others. The only advantage he has over the other characters is that he is unrelentingly and unapologetically negative. Staged badly, which is the rule, he comes across as a witty villain in a crude melodrama. Staged properly, and the audience should hate him at the end. All he ever does is negate and destroy.

Iago is, in short, the quintessential sociopath, the first of his kind in English literature, and even now, likely the purest. He's the great grandfather of Goethe's Mephistopheles, the 'spirit that always denies'. That's Iago - he negates everything. It's only if the play is poorly presented that his endless, sterile cynicism sounds like wit. He is Shakespeare's rejoinder to all those sentimentalists who believe that some sort of mental illness must afflict serial killers, the Columbine shooters, the 9-11 terrorists. Nope - it is possible to do those things out of a morbid fascination in your power to accomplish those acts, if you are indifferent to human consequences - and Iago is, as are the others.

The final masterstroke in his characterization comes at the very end of the play. Othello, the truth revealed, unwilling now even to speak to the man he trusted without question, and now completely ruined, addresses one of the onlookers:

OTHELLO: Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?

Now, this was a playwright who could characterize anyone from, page boy to king, whore to empress, and often in a few short syllables. He could have given a speech to Iago. Instead . . . .

IAGO: Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:
From this time forth I never will speak word.

And that's all. No explanations. No protestations of righteousness.  No Lady Macbeth sleepwalking qualms of conscience. Nothing - the final negation, so to speak. As noted, Iago is the ultimate sociopath. I did what I did. As to you civilized fools who would ask me to account . . . . no. Nothing.   

This is the essence of pure malice. Ir sneers at you even when discovered. The explanations, the exuses, the apologetics you expect from persons within human norms . . .  ain't never gonna happen. That is possibly the most frustrating aspect of dealing with major crime. To this day, I don't think any writer has displayed it so well.  

It is the lesson drawn from this play that make me cynical about religious and political motives for abominable acts. Atta may discuss Islam, but ultimately he acts out of a fascination with flying a plane into a building. Nothing more. The Columbine kids, like Iago, gave the same ip service to motives for the deeds. But ultimately it was attraction to the power of a mass murderer that drew them in.That's all. There is nothing more to say. Iago, in saying nothing, has said it all. 

5. Performance.  Very frustrating - the play is super difficult. The Lawrence Fishburne/Kenneth Branagh movie is particularly unfortunate. Olivier's try in 1965 is embarrassing, as is Orson Wells truncated movie. There is a really good DVD with Willard White (an opera singer most noted for 'Porgy and Bess') as Othello, Ian Mckellen as Iago, and Imogen Stubbs nearly perfect as Desdemona - the balance is almost right. That's obtainable from Amazon.

But my own favorite is an audio recording of a performance with Chiewel Etiofor as Othello, Ewan McGregor as Iago, and a pretty good cast otherwise. Etiofor is perfect. McGregor has been criticized, but he is first rate, too in my opinion. You can find it on Audible.com if so minded. There are ludicrous objections that the play is abridged, but the evidence is compelling that Shakespeare expected his texts to be adapted in performance.

A Review of the Novel 'Admission', With Some Thoughts About College Admission Philosophy and Practice

    Recently I read a novel I really liked, 'Admission', by Jean Hanff Korelitz.  The title of the book is actually rather subtle. In the first instance, it seems to apply simply and directly to the quasi-vocation of the heroine, Portia Nathan, a Princeton admissions officer.But as the story unfolds, the title turns out to also refer to the legal meaning of admission (i.e., a confession of a sort) and finally, to one particular admission decision of one candidate to Princeton, on which the heroine stakes her career.

    The basic appeal of the book is obvious. Ms. Korelitz has published four novels, but her day job the last few years has been as a reader of Princeton admission applications.  So the book offers a peek behind the curtain from someone who knows, at the actual workaday process of Ivy League admissions, a subject of absorbing interest to anyone who's been through it (twice in the last seven years, undergrad and professional school, with oldest child). The novel spans roughly an academic year, September to April, during which Portia Nathan makes presentations to secondary schools in her assigned area, reads and evaluates admissions application - this being a novel, the essays of the applicants are of particular interest to her - discusses her job and Princeton admissions with all sorts of students and parents ar various stress levels, participates on the admission committee that makes the ultimate decision on these matters, and finally becomes so involved in one special application that she puts her job on the line for that young person. It's all fascinating stuff for an outsider, written by someone in a position to know who writes awfully well.

    (Some full disclosure here. My stepson graduated from Princeton in May of 2008, so the setting of the novel was of particular interest to me. I attended the graduation. If I can believe the novel - and on this point, I do - Princeton seeks to admit a class of brilliant kids who are not self conscious about either the brilliance or the Ivy League status. From what I saw, admissions does a great job on the brilliance. The absence of self-consciousness? I'm not so sure.

    Also, Portia Nathan makes the same point to just about every one she meets, that Princeton is looking for more than academic ability, that 'little extra something' that sets the applicant apart. That would be just wonderful if Princeton were the only elite institution with that criterion. But Stanford also looks for that little extra something, as does Harvard, as does Yale, as do all of them. The practical result is that an entire cottage industry exists, specializing in creating that little extra something on a mass produced basis. Obviously, when everybody has that special cachet, no one does.     

    The practical effect of all this is a strong statement to the youth of the land, that, if you want to join the establishment, you had better have done something noteworthy before you're 17. This is almost certainly an appalling thought to both the author and her alter ego. (One of the best short passages in the book is a little section where Portia speculates how many Princeton undergrads wrestle uneasily with some version of impostor syndrome.)  But I do believe that an insistence on some sort of labored, artificial precocity in applicants is one of the consequences, doubtless unintended, of this emphasis on 'something special'. Two generations ago, James Michener opined that nothing a man (sic) did before he was 40 was really of much value, that that time was all preparation. That's probably too emphatic the other way. But if I had to choose between the two, I'll take Michener.

        One other point. There's a big emphasis throughout the book on the importance of diversity, the end of the white male bastion of privilege. Well and good - I don't think any one really disagrees with this. But I was struck by one factoid I ran across while reading the second volume of Rick Atkinson's history of American troops in Europe, The Day of Battle. In commenting on the extraordinary demographic breadth of the US Army in World War II, he used Princeton as an example. (These days, Princeton and/or Stanford seem to be the universal stand-ins for elite universities.) Eighty-four percent of the graduating class of 1942 joined the armed forces. Both the valedictorian and salutatorian joined as enlisted men.

     So I don't know. Sixty years ago, Princeton may have been a fortress of privilege, but when push came to shove, the privileged joined the rank and file. Looking back at the brilliant young people of the class of 2008, I wondered how many of them would have the same sense of obligation in a true national crisis. For sure I couldn't envision too many of them doing KP. The thought crossed my mind that underlying all this diversity (with that 'little something special' yet) was the same old 'noblesse', but without the same old 'oblige'. I wondered whether that was really all that much of an improvement.

      The background was not the only thing I liked about 'Admission' - a slight, but well written, well executed little book. The book has other interesting aspects, and I am going to devote another post to them. But this one is long enough. 

   

Harry Potter and the Green-Eyed Critic

    A couple of days ago I ran across an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled 'Sex and the Single Wizard', a genuine exercise in superciliousness, conducted by someone named James Parker, who gives off all the vibrations of a committed twit. The article was of the 'bait and switch' type, in that it purported to be a discussion of the difficulty of transforming the Harry Potter novels into quality screenplays. However, the pudding proved in the tasting to be a snide attack on the books themselves. A little warning to Parker and others of his ilk – if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, snide is the most easily recognizable variety of envy.  Sorry, Parker, but your secret is not safe with me.

    J.K. Rowling hardly needs defense at this point in her career from a minor league blogger like yours truly. But I have long wanted to write a grace note on the Harry Potter novels, an exercise in uninhibited fandom, and  this seems to be the right occasion. Rowling did not succeed on the scale she did because of luck or good connections. She succeeded because she is a narrative genius.  I have to confess a failing here that in any case will shortly become obvious. I am a story addict, a quintessential 'tell-me-what-happened-next' reader. I often finish books and movies that are plainly terrible, just to find out how the story turns out. So with that sordid confession behind, let's proceed.
Leaving the question of literary value aside for a moment, and considering the Potter novels simply as storyteller's art, the series is one of the great achievements in Western literature. Using prose of elegant simplicity, Rowling succeeded in weaving a dazzling number of threads - plots, subplots, sub-sub-plots, extended themes, characterizations, nuances, thrones, principalities, etc. - into a seamless narrative by which the plot arc is (seemingly) effortlessly advanced – the art that conceals art, the finest kind. A loose comparison can be made to a passacaglia, a form of musical composition in which the progression of the piece occurs in the base line, while various melodies play in the upper register.  In the same way, the  plot arc (Harry vs. Voldemort) moves relentlessly through a series of harmonic progressions towards an inevitable resolution, while the minor plots play out in the upper staves.

    A few devices – the most obvious example being the enigma of Snape's loyalty and motivation – are almost as large and extended as the plot arch itself. Others, such as the extended account of the Weasley family's confrontation with their obnoxiously ambitious son Percy, have a multi-volume scope. Smaller riddles – Dumbledore's puzzling tolerance for the charlatan Madame Trelawney – are of lesser scope, but also run through more than one novel. Then there are the volume stories themselves – the first five books stand alone nicely. The smaller narrative mechanisms are too numerous to recite. All of them are integrated gracefully and naturally into the flow of story and  characterization.

    The 19th Century Viennese music critic Edward Hanslick despised Wagner's operas (and paid a price in consequence). But he was honest enough to note his admiration for the 'bee like industry' that informed every bar of Gotterdammerung. A nice phrase, 'bee-like industry', and one that applies equally to Rowling's attention to detail in Harry Potter. I do believe it's a quality that can be found in almost all successful  'large' works of art.  

    It won't do, of course, to bestow all this raving praise on the Potter books and stick to high concept. I do believe a trip to the nitty-gritty is required, a hard look at the worker bee in action.  By way of example. I'd like to take a hard look at  an episode at the end of the fourth book, the Goblet of Fire. I choose this particular scene because the nadir, the truly wretched bottom of Parker's supercility, is reached when he compares Tolkien's Sauron favorably to Voldemort. That's absolute nonsense, for reasons I'll address in a moment. But for now, to the nitty-gritty. A caution; there are Spoilers here. But I am making the natural assumption that any reader who is interested in these thoughts is already thoroughly familiar with the Potter novels.

    Near the end of Goblet of Fire, Harry wins a wizarding contest. But when he lays hands on the prize, it proves to be a trap, a magical device that transports Harry to a place where Voldemort lies in wait with his most faithful servant. As the action goes forward, Voldemort is restored to his full power, his acolytes arrive, Harry escapes miraculously, and returns to Hogwarts to give an unverifiable account of what happened. Doubts about Harry's veracity spring up like weeds, and the consequent cloud over him in the bureaucracy and elsewhere becomes a central theme in the books that follow

    Now, all this would work naturally and plausibly even if Harry alone fell into the trap. But that is not the way Rowling chose to tell the tale. Harry is accompanied by Cedric Diggery, a minor figure that Rowling has taken great pains to characterize and to include in final journey. Diggery is a sort of Hogwarts' Frank Merriwell, a boy popular with everyone and a heartthrob with the girls. His presence at the scene of Harry's confrontation with Voldemort adds nothing to the action, for he is murdered instantaneously with his arrival. 'Kill the spare', Voldemort directs, and so it happens. So why all this effort to inform the reader of Diggery's sweetness and popularity? And to see to it that he is present when Harry first confronts Voldemort?

    My own intuitive explanation?  Rowling has organized the story in the way she did precisely so she can introduce Voldemort with the line  - 'kill the spare'. In its ruthlessness, its murderous malice, and its complete indifference to the human qualities of Cedric Diggery, it demonstrates immediately all the evil with which Voldemort has been described by others. To Voldemort, to whom only his own needs matter, Diggery is the 'spare' – not even inquiry about his name or why he happens to be there - murdered for no other reason than he is redundant. From the involved preparation for this scene, it is apparent it was no 11th hour inspiration. Rowling had had this masterstroke in mind at least from the outset of the fourth novel (when Harry encounters Cedric and his father before the World Quidditch Match, at which time the boy's charm and effect on the schoolgirls is apparent ). In its directness, its efficiency and its effect, it is that – a masterstroke.

    Rowling goes on to present Voldemort in a tremendous series of scenes and encounters – the one that registers most vividly with me is a dinner during which a helpless captive twists upside down from the ceiling while the other 'guests' each wish they were anywhere else.  His influence becomes more and more a reality in the lives of the principals. In the last volume, the lights are going quietly out all over the magic kingdom. Harry and his allies are reduced to living in a mobile tent, as their friends are overwhelmed, one after another. Off hand, I can't think of another hero reduced to such desperation before the tide turns. Voldemort's evil has moved from the realm of the possible to a complete, devastating reality.

    The cliché that a monster or villain is always reduced in stature by the reveal has become a cliché because it is so very, very  true. Very few reveals succeed. But the reveal of Voldemort, conveyed in these ice cold scenes, are a brilliant success, and another triumphant example of the narrative skill the authoress demonstrates at so many other points.. (The only other one I can think of that is similarly accomplished is the 'reveal' of Norman Bates' mother at the end of Hitchock's movie Psycho.)

    And what of Sauron, whose brooding evil Parker contrasts favorably with Voldemort? In this respect, the Lord of the Rings is a version of the Emperor's New Clothes. Tolkien informs his readers endlessly (and didactically) that Sauron is Evil, that a Shadow is spreading over the Middle World, etc., etc., - but yet Sauron never wins a round. Not even one blessed inning.  Not even one light left jab. He does no significant damage to anyone. It's like watching a tennis match  (mixing the sports metaphors) in which the commentators keep touting one player who never hits a winner. Frodo goes through the entire narrative unscathed. He doesn't lose any friends. He doesn't lose any blood. He doesn't even miss any meals. Hell, he doesn't even miss the mustard for his ham sandwich.

    I remember being first bothered, then really annoyed with this when I first read the books, at approximately age 20.  EYou can't endlessly reiterate the fearsomeness of the villain/monster, and then set up a story in which he is unable to alter even one minor event.  My recollection is that Tolkien was aware of this, but fatuously believed that the basic narrative demand was satisfied by repeated 'cliffhanger' episodes (“And they were about to carry the day, and would have carried the day if not for . . . “). He could not have been more wrong, Sooner or later, no matter how great the risk, you have to deliver the goods, let Voldemort appear, show Norman's mother, let Dracula come out of hiding. Even mediocre storytellers know that. It is a shame that one of Tolkien's Inkling friends, say. C.S; Lewis in a mood of Screwtape realism, didn't sit the lad down and give him the bad news. JR, old chap, this is not working.

    Both Rowling and Tolkien use similar imagery – shadows spreading over the landscape, the silent growing power of the evil force – but where as Rowling gives the readers incidents, murders repulsive in their coldness, personalties changed, apparatchiks running wild (the scene of Umbridge interrogating a half-blood magician is infuriating to read) – Tolkien simply endlessly uses the background imagery, while giving nothing in the foreground. His story becomes frustrating, and then unintentionally comic. It is my own cynical thought that, had Tolkien not been a tweedy Oxford Don surrounded by famous friends, but an ordinary amateur scribbler, that his epic might not have seen the light of day. Even what is good and inventive in it owes a big debt to Wagner.

    Had Tolkien been entrusted with the Harry Potter/Voldemort scene in which Cecil Diggery meets his end, Harry and Diggery would have been menaced . . .  threatened from all sides . . .  come close to death . . .  BUT, at the last second, Dumbledore would arrive, having found the port key, or Cecil would discover a charm on the premises, or Voldemort's wand would break, or something. And Voldemort and his cohorts would slink away, muttering threats, having accomplished nothing. But he'll be back, boy . . . . he's REALLY mean, just wait and see . .  . . I'm tellin' you, that Sauron – er, Voldemort is EVIL . . . you'd better believe it. (Tolky, baby, it ain't happenin'.)

    The plain, ugly, unvarnished  truth is that, if Tolkien had been responsible for that scene, Cecil Diggery would be alive today!!!! But, scandal aside, and unluckily for him, the writer who did have the conn was far more gifted writer made of far sterner stuff. 

    I don't mean to imply that the Potter novels are a perfect, finished work of literature. There is no such thing. There are dozens of minor plot holes, and one major one. But what is good about the books is so very, very good. When considering the value of a work of art that, with no greater means than words on a printed page, managed to capture the attention of the world in a post literate age, it might be a good idea to focus on how the trick was done, not its supposed flaws. Too late for Parker, but good advice for other twit critics. 

    For what it's worth, even Parker's sniggling comments about the sex life (or lack thereof) of Harry Potter are beside the point.  The base storyline concerns Harry's maturation, magnificently told, from complete confusion about who he is, to a recognition of his own identity. Erotic subthemes don't fit well in that context. Besides, there is in the subtext some sly innuendo that one of Harry's principal antagonists, more glibly sophisticated in every way than the chronically confused Harry, may be doing quite well in that way. You would never write 'Harry Potter and the Harems of Hogwarts'. But you might try 'Draco Malfoi and the Sluts of Slytherin'. My sense is that Rowling does not particularly care for this fraternity boy style of loose womanizing. She has a lot of company.

    That's about it. My apologies to Parker, whose rather silly essay in truth was no more than a prompt for an appreciation I have meant to write for some time.  I have to beg the question I raised above, about the literary merit of these books. The question of whether the skill and care that has been lavished on what is ultimately a story of children's fantasy seems a real one to me. Although the entertainment value may be justification enough, the issue is still interesting. I think there is something there a bit more significant than entertainment. I'll take that up on another day, if anyone is interested.

    But this essay is long enough as it is. Thanks for the attention paid.