Harry Potter crosses over and a partial translation of Mugglenet.com’s What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7? Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Falls in Love and How Will the Adventure Finally End?

Nancy Seghers

"I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story."

C.S. Lewis in Beckett, 1999

“All grown-ups were once children”.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I would like to start by giving you something to think about: what do the works on the following list have in common?

The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Lord of the Flies, Star Wars, E.T., Indiana Jones, Treasure Island, King Kong, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Le Petit Prince, Sophie’s World, Brave New World, 1984, Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Little House on the Prairie, Just So Stories, Jungle Book, Whinnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, His Dark Materials’ trilogy, the Discworld series, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, The War of the Worlds, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musqueteers, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Toy Story, Shrek, Stuart Little, The Simpsons, Southpark, Friends, Wallace and Gromit, The Lion King, …

I can go on like this for another few pages, but as deforestation is threatening our planet, I prefer to safe some paper and assume that you must have found the answer by now. Probably you have read or seen them all (maybe even more than once) but that is not the common feature I am aiming at: each and every book, movie, musical and series on this list has somehow successfully crossed the age boundaries, whether from child to adult or vice versa. The great variety and diversity of these works already proves that it is not always obvious what is to be understood by ‘crossover’. As the list contains school and family stories, science fiction novels, magic and epic fantasies, religious allegories, fairy tales, comedies, animal fables, etc, it certainly isn’t a generic matter. Roughly speaking, just like the Harry Potter series, they all appeal to both children and adults.

This list also proves that although ‘crosswriting’, ‘dual audience,’ or ‘crossover literature’ might all be rather new terms, the concept already exists for quite some time now. Just take into account a fairy tale. Everyone knows the fairy tales of, for example, Charles Perrault or the animal fables by Jean de La Fontaine: children enjoy them and love it when you read them before bedtime while parents often seem to believe that the latest Disney DVD collection can easily serve as a good babysitter. Meantime, they can read real Literature, with capital L, of course, because sometimes we seem to forget that those fairy tales were once told to us when we were only toddlers ourselves, and most of us aren’t even aware of the fact that they were originally written for adults. Only the few of us that question, for example, the fact that the wicked stepmother is actually maybe a bit too evil a character for children to cope with in these times of complex and alternate families, will wonder whether those nice fairy tales are as innocent as they look at first sight.

Robinson Crusoe, Huckleberry Fin, Tom Sawyer, Alice, … the list of classical examples, initially written for adults, that made it to the canon of children’s literature, is endless. In recent years the Harry Potter books also seem to have crossed the border between child and adult, but we should not generalise here, because there clearly are differences: these so-called ‘classics’ all have crossed from adult literature to children’s literature, often in an abridged version, while the Harry Potter series has crossed in the opposite direction, without any adaptation concerning content. Harry Potter does not only catch the attention of children but also appeals to adults. Since the beginning of the series in 1997 the term ‘crossover fiction’ became fashionable, although, according to Helen Kenward in The Challenge of Crossover (2005), its attraction was first recognised in other media who “have exploited the crossover appeal for years […] it is literature which has only recently caught on” (p. 72). She points out that many movies like Steven Spielberg’s E.T. or George Lucas’s Star Wars already had a dual audience long before Harry Potter came in the picture, while recently, movies such as Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and series like The Simpsons or South Park are watched by children, teenagers ánd adults.

Academic agreement on what crossover literature actually is or should be, is hard to find, primarily because the terms ‘childhood’ and ‘children’s literature’ are often ambiguous and very hard to define. Before the eighteenth century there was no such thing as what we now call ‘children’s literature’. According to Zohar Shavit (1999), the concept of childhood was less developed as it is now, so both adults and children read books like Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales (1697). As Kenward states in her study, “all fiction was crossover fiction” (p. 7). Throughout the eighteenth century, the development of books written specifically for children widened the gap between adults and children’s literature and several books originally written for an adult audience became known as children’s books. According to Peter Hunt (2001), children and adults’ books started to demonstrate different characteristics and some distinguishing features were established like the fact that children’s books were shorter, or, for instance, that adult books had multiple characters. Many scholars believe that this division gave children’s literature its ‘inferior’ status.

Hunt claims that children’s novels aren’t inferior, only different. In Translation and intertextuality: A descriptive study of contemporary British children’s fantasy literature in Spain (1970-2000), Belén González Cascallana cites him: “they should be treated as a separate group of texts, without reference (at least in principle) to ‘literature’ as it is known and misunderstood’ (Belén, 2003: 15). She also cites the Australian critic Barbara Wall who points out that “good writing for children does not necessarily appear to be for children” Wall further insists on the idea that different skills are used when writing for children: “All writers must, in a sense, be writing down” (Wall, 1991: 15). It is Wall who identified three different address categories in children’s literature: authors can write for children only (single address), they may write for adults as well as for children (double address), and they can address the child while simultaneously satisfy the adult reader (dual address) (Wall, 1991: 35-36). She suggests that the single address is most characteristic of the twentieth century children’s literature. Hunt, however, argues that dual address prevails.

Some authors and critics state that, even today, there is no such thing as ‘pure’ children’s literature at all, implying that what does not exist, cannot crossover. In Beckett’s Transcending Boundaries Zohar Shavit points out that children’s literature always has an additional (adult) addressee because children’s books are written, published, evaluated, interpreted and distributed by adults. In her essay “The Double Attribution of Texts for Children and How it Affects Writing for Children”, she says that “every book is first read by adults” and that adults “are the only ones in a position to decide whether a book will be published, how it will be published, and how it will be distributed to its official readership of children” (in Beckett, 1999: 84). Jack Zipes of the University of Minnesota even states that children haven’t got any finger in the children’s literature pie at all because “Everything we do to, with, and for our children is influenced by capitalist market conditions and the hegemonic interests of ruling corporate elites. In simple terms, we calculate what is best for our children by regarding them as investments and turning them into commodities” (2001: xi). To this end publishers reissue books originally written for adults with another cover. The Harry Potter books too, have gotten different covers for different audiences. Not only is there an adult and a child version available of the British edition, they have also designed a separate cover for the American version.

Although, as already demonstrated, it is not exactly a matter of genre, Rachel Falconer of the University of Sheffield points out that “the genre that is crossing age groups most frequently in western countries today is fantasy; and the most visible direction of crossover is from child to adult audiences” (“Crossover Literature” in Hunt’s International Companion Encyclopedia, p. 564). She states that Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) and Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972) have paved the way for contemporary fantasy like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, which “have had little difficulty in crossing between child and adult readerships”. Journalist S.F. Said agrees: according to him, Watership Down is “one of the original popular culture crossovers: a book that hooked adults and children on such a vast scale that it made publishing history” (cited in Hunt, 2004: 564).

What exactly triggered the recent popularity of crossover fiction? Falconer cites Chris Anderson (in Hunt, 2004: 569) who believes that, due to technological innovations on the workfloor, youngsters have become more dominant in recent years. They achieve technological skills a lot easier than older people do, this being one of the reasons for the major corporate restructurings of the last two decades, which enrolled a lot of younger employees. Furthermore, as Falconer puts it: “age is becoming a matter of choice. You can opt to be young, culturally if not chronologically, at thirty-five, you can dress and behave as a twenty-year-old, listen to the same music, play the same sports, lead the same social life”, buying, for example, Sony Playstations and scooters.

Meanwhile, in the opposite direction, “while adults regressed to 'kidults', 'chadults' and 'middlescents', children aged to 'tweenagers', using mobile phones, reading glossy magazines […] buying sexualised clothes, make-up and perfumes” (2004: 570). However, here too, the opinions are divided: a lot of people think children grow up too fast, while others believe that some adults refuse to grow up.

Beckett points out that “In the eyes of some authors and critics, children’s literature that is not read and enjoyed by adults is not worthy of the name. […] Some authors approach the border from the opposite direction, maintaining that good adult literature also can be read by children” (1999: 32). Falconer agrees: a text may activate an adult's 'inner child' or indeed any number of argumentative and mutually incompatible inner children. Equally, a text may activate a child's 'inner parent'. She also mentions that “many children are curious about adult perspectives, and one reason they read books and watch films is to gain insight into adult discourses and constructions of reality” (Falconer, 2004: 572).

Nikolajeva (2004: 167) states that it is a common prejudice that children’s literature is: a 'simple' literary form. In terms of narrativity, simplicity conceivably includes one clearly delineated plot without digressions or secondary plots; chronological order of events; a limited number of easy-to-remember characters - 'flat' characters with one typical feature, either 'good' or 'evil', or with simplistic external characterisation. It also includes a distinct narrative voice, a fixed point of view, preferably an authoritarian, didactic, omniscient narrator who can supply readers with comments, explanations and exhortations, without leaving anything unuttered or ambiguous; a narrator possessing greater knowledge and experience than both characters and readers. The idea of a 'simple' narrative excludes complex temporal and spatial constructions. The fictionality of the story, the reliability of the narrator or the sufficiency of language as the artistic expressive means cannot be interrogated. Obviously, the spectrum of children's literature is significantly broader than suggested by these features.

Falconer mentions that some critics like Jack Zipes and Neil Postman are worried that children’s literature is disappearing under the pressure of the consumerism boom of television, games, movies, pulp books and the pop culture. Nikolajeva, on the other hand, argues that children’s literature ‘has finally come of age’ (cited in Hunt, 2004: 571). Falconer herself states that it is only some kind of childhood that is disappearing, while she notices that Zipes final essay (Sticks and Stones) is flawed by inconsistency […] he argues on the one hand that Harry Potter is only being bought and read by adults […] and on the other hand that this kind of derivative, sexist and banal book is responsible for turning children into consumerist clones. […] It is hard to see how the Potter books could exert such influence on children, if they are not actually reading them.’ Furthermore she believes that his arguments ‘are hard to square with the fine introductory essay, which encourages academics to study not only classic children's literature but also what contemporary children are actually reading now. (Falconer, 2004:571)

I agree with Falconer that the best single-volume introduction to crossover literature is Sandra L. Beckett’s Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults (in Hunt, 2004: 558). In the same edition of Hunt’s International Companion Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer gives David Galef’s division of dual readership authors, who, in his essay Crossing Over: Authors Who Write Both Children’s and Adults’ Fiction, are divided into three categories: writers of adult literature who start writing children’s literature during their career (e.g. Roald Dahl, Toon Tellegen), authors who start off with children’s books to end up writing adult literature, and a third group of writers who appeal to both children and adults in the same book. A.A. Milne (Winnie- the-Pooh) is considered a famous example of this third category and C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series also appeals to both younger and older readers. Kenward points out that “in line with Galef’s third description of a crossover fiction author, the general concept underlying the term ‘crossover fiction’ is that of a single book appealing to a mixed age range” (Kenward, 2005: 73), which brings us to Harry Potter’s dual audience. 

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