It’s probably a little late to be getting around to writing about the Harry Potter books, but I’m a little late in reading them. I did get out to see the movies adapted from the first 3 books before reading any of them – a sequence I imagine most Potter fans would find lamentable – but only cracked the cover of the first book last month.

One of the things that struck me about the films was the utter blankness of Harry’s character, and I was somewhat surprised to see that repeated in the novels as well.

Others have, rightly from my perspective, registered this in terms of the books’ disappointing representation of gender and class. (See for instance, Chris Suellentrop for Slate, Christine Schoefer for Salon, and Jane Elliott for Bitch).

An important passage for this kind of reading of the first book comes near the end as Harry leaves Hermione behind to confront Voldemort alone. The two address out loud the question many readers must have been pondering – why shouldn’t Hermione, the far more competent user of magic, be the one to tackle the dangerous enemy? Rowling’s solution to this really rather awkward culmination of plot and character development is one of the low points of the series writing-wise:

To which I think a fair set of reader responses is: “He is?” “Yeah, you’re not!” And “Huh?!”

It’s no coincidence that Hermione’s “Me! Books! ... ” is also the worst-delivered speech in the film, no doubt because no one – including the director and actress – could figure out how it could possibly be delivered. Should she deliver it in surprise at the evident falsity of the words coming out of her mouth? A sudden bout of irrational self-loathing? The only way it actually makes any sense is as bitter sarcasm, but the plot’s unfolding from this point pretty much rules that out as Harry does go on to save the day, reestablish his position of familial descent and inheritance etc., etc., etc.

As the critics above have noted, this sequence raises the question of why you’d bother to have a smart, competent girl character if she’s just going to faint, scold, cry and admire? At the base of this thinking, the eventual explanation is that Hermione’s a girl and Harry’s a boy and that makes the sad, usual sense of what is otherwise an insensible line.

This helps solve the mystery of Harry’s character. For an amazingly popular character it’s remarkable how little he’s developed compared with the secondary characters. It’s true that these characters are generally built out of ready stereotypes, but at least there’s something to distinguish one from the other. It would be hard, by the end of the first 2 or 3 books, to describe Harry beyond simply listing a series of events in which he has played some role.

If Harry’s class and gender help explain why such an otherwise empty character makes sense despite his apparent emptiness, it does leave open the question of why it made sense to leave the character so blank, and why such a character would be so popular. Would a fully fleshed-out wealthy, wizard-athletic boy be a worse choice?

Yes, I think so – at least in terms of popularity, and maybe in other ways as well. Having not read a lot of children’s fiction in recent years I don’t have much of a basis for comparison, but one of the things the Potter books seem to provide is a remarkably direct experience of identification. Because Harry’s character is spare to the point of being not much more than a device to organize plot events and present accounts of the fantastic setting, there is very little standing in the way between Harry’s experience of the wizarding world and the readers’ own experience of the same. Because readers don’t have to wonder why the particularity of Harry’s character leads to certain actions or how it shapes his experience of the world – an experience that the reader might decide is quite different from how they think they would have reacted – it is at times as if the novels could have just as well been written in the second person.

Well, what would you do? Close up the book because you’ve decided to play it safe? No you’d do just what Harry does and charge on into danger!

Here’s what I’m getting at – the Potter novels (at least the first few) are so heavy on setting and so slim on development of central character that they allow readers to mainline identification in a way that reminds me a lot of most video games.

What’s the marine in Doom like? What are the ins and outs of Gordon Freeman? Who cares? They exist to translate the player’s desires into the fictional space. Moreover, in the spirit of making wildly broad claims, they are brave in exactly the way Harry Potter is brave. Namely, from an outside perspective anyone would assume they’re brave based on their persistence in the face of a hostile environment, but there’s nothing that really offers an experience of bravery per se. Bravery = wanting to hear the end of the story.

I encountered this teaching the relationship between the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan and a level of the Medal of Honor video game that mimics the same events in the D-Day landing. While the film goes out of its way to show you moments of hesitation and fear that are the basis for the soldiers’ heroic bravery, the game has no capacity to convince you that your character/avatar in the game is “brave.” You keep going not out of loyalty or self-preservation or love of democracy or whatever – you just want to see what’s next.

It’s not quite right to say that the Harry Potter books recreate the game experience, but to call it a children’s book for the video game age might capture some things about the book’s place in a history of shifting ideas about identification, plot and self-understanding.