Salon had a piece about Harry Potter this week, A.S. Byatt and the Goblet of Ire. It was an attack on a recent opinion piece by Byatt in the New York Times that tries to analyze why the Potter books are so popular with adults.
What surprises me is the vehemence of the attack on Byatt. Why is it that the normal standards of literary criticism aren't allowed to apply to the Potter phenomenon? Standard book reviews are not allowed, only reports on the success of the cult. Criticism of the canon is especially forbidden and critics are singled out for merciless attack, as shown by the above piece by Charles Taylor.
Members of the HP cult can brook no criticism of their object of worship. I find this rather disturbing. Surely Byatt, a prominent novelist with several successful, well written and entertaining works to her credit, is entitled to her opinion, even if it's critical of HP?
The same thing happened in the Sixties when the Tolkien cult was beginning to take off. Now, I'm a fan of J.R. Tolkien, and have read the Lord of the Rings seven times so far. But when Edmund Wilson wrote an article criticizing LOTR ("Oooh, Those Awful Orcs!") he was excorciated by members of the Tolkien cult.
It's possible that some readers of genre literature such as HP and LOTR feel insecure about their taste and thus are unusually defensive of it. But to launch a personal attack on A.S. Byatt because she dared to express a negative opinion of HP strikes me as going too far.