Comments on: Harry Potter as Complex Event

By: Doug

Doug — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 23:51:25 +0000

A Princess of Roumania and its sequels (two to date) try to avoid the English angle altogether.

I wonder if the popularity of Potter and other series don’t plot to some sort of power-order graph.

Would it spoil all the fun to posit that Rowling got lucky?

By: GavinRobinson

GavinRobinson — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:00:12 +0000

I can't add much except rapturous applause. We definitely need more historians who are interested in complexity. In this post I touched on the issue in relation to the causes of the English Civil War. I'm very interested in complex systems theory but don't know enough about it. What should I read?

By: David McDonald

David McDonald — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:18:14 +0000

I wandered over here from the History News Network and can’t resist kibitzing on this interesting post cum comments. First, isn’t complex causation a sub-set of what Basil Fawlty once termed the “bleeding obvious”? Second, our pals in lit-crit and English have spilled gallons of ink on narratology, conventions, plot-lines etc. Third, I agree that you have identified plausible “tributaries,” but am surprised at a certain lack of specificity. L’Engle, certainly, but no C. S. Lewis. Tom Brown, indeed, but Rowling appropriates conventions from English children’s literature–as you correctly note–but you might have identified such authors as Enid Blyton and E. Nisbet, classics in English and post-imperial Commonwealth households of a certain generation. You might also have incorporated in your mechanisms of dissemination an infrastructure developed for the marketing of mass culture–and particularly popular music–whose density or intensity/efficiency of operation and penetration underwent several “leaps”–with radio, TV, the web, etc–and evolution driven by tributary processes of their own.

As with any “complex” set of explanations, however, the interest seems to me to lie less in the inherently overdetermined nature of any historical moment or phenomenon than in the sources for a given observer’s choices on what to identify as more or less significant or persuasive at a given time.

By: William Benzon

William Benzon — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:34:31 +0000

Withywindle: Nor am I familiar with Aristotle. Still, narration tells a history. Evolution is a historical process, taking place over an extended period of time. The lives of organisms are filled with “accidents,” contingent particulars. These accidents are of many kinds, some of which bear strongly on the organism’s ability to survive, either helping it or hindering it. Over a long period of time, and in the population at large, that population will “adapt” itself to those accidents that are recurrent and affect the lives of individuals. The gene pool of the population, in effect, “learns” about the world around it.

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:16:57 +0000

Another form of faulty reasoning that may lead people to posit erroneous single-cause analyses: there is a tendency to attribute importance to one of a set of causes not because it is truly significant but simply because it is unusual or otherwise prominent in some way. For example, going after squeegee men probably had very little effect on the crime rate in New York City, however, squeegee men are a very distinctive feature of life in New York City, so they draw unwarranted explanatory attention. This error is particularly tempting if the prominent cause is ironic in some way.

I write this with the concept of mutual information I(X;Y) in mind. Loosely speaking, when attempting to find a causal explanation, people should be considering I(crime;squeegee) but instead they look at I(New York City;squeegee) because I(New York City;squeegee)>I(crime;squeegee). If you’ve done work in Information theory, this is a natural and illuminating way to think about things. Unfortunately, if you haven’t, this notation is even more dauntingly technical than terms like “complex-systems”, and there is no pre-digested idiom like “perfect storm” that already captures the idea.

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:45:11 +0000

If you’re looking for a concise, everyday-speech way of characterizing a complex-systems view of things, the phrase “a perfect storm” may fit the bill. For example, “A perfect storm of factors within the field of children’s literature led to the popularity of the Harry Potter books, among them…” would communicate your idea of confluence without having to haul out the technical language.

By: withywindle

withywindle — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 03:57:57 +0000

William Benzon: I don’t know enough Darwinian theory to respond intelligently on the subject, but I like the idea that one can align Aristotelian and Darwinian languages. A first stab at thought, though: I believe one is supposed to associate Aristotelian language, contingent particulars, with narration, rather than (scientific) exposition. To think of evolution as narrative in structure would–displace telos? Reinforce it? Speak to micro-evolution vs. macro-evolution, and the way to explain how one can lead to the other? I defer to people who know more.

By: The Constructivist

The Constructivist — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 03:18:33 +0000

Speaking of Gaiman, think how he, Alan Moore, Douglas Adams, and probably a million other English writers I can’t think of off the top of my head helped prepare parents for appreciating smart riffs on classic fantasy (and sf) themes.

By: kit

kit — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:07:28 +0000

I’m coming to this very late, but on the subject of fantasy books drawing on non-Anglo/Celtic roots, I think immediately of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. A crumb of a thought.

By: William Benzon

William Benzon — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 21:13:25 +0000

Withywindle: Isn’t the Darwinian (or neo-Darwinian) theory of biological evolution about how certain kinds of “contingent particulars” become “accumulated” in populations & lineages of living creatures? It would be nice to have a similar account with respect to culture. There’s lots of chatter about such, but it’s mostly chatter.

* * * * *

I’d think that the strong likelihood that these underlying conditions don’t mechanically ad up to the results (observed in retrospect) leaves room for individual and collective agency in accounting for history.