Kritik yang dialami oleh karya besar

Harry Potter, sebuah karya masterpiece yang menjadi icon masa mudaku. Banyak kisah yang terinspirasi dari sana. Saya tidak pernah membaca Harry Potter dan hanya tahu sedikit-sedikit mengenainya dari komentar orang di internet. Namun satu hal yang saya simpulkan dari serial ini adalah : karakteristiknya yang luar biasa.


sumber : 9gags

Bagi saya, karakter yang berhasil adalah karakter yang mampu mempermainkan perasaan pembacanya, memberi inspirasi, atau mengubah hidup pembacanya. Saya baru temukan karakter seperti ini dari San Guo Yan Yi, Guan Yu dan Zhuge Liang, kemudian dari Berserk, Guts dan Griffith, dan terakhir One Piece, karakter minor bernama Doktor Hirluk (majikannya Tony Tony Chopper).

Sekalipun karya besar tidak akan luput dari kritik pedas dan sebuah peremehan. Tidak pelak juga, orang-orang yang mungkin populer ataupun punya nama besar dalam bidang dunia tulis menulis, kadang memberikan kritik antipati terhadap karya tersebut. Namun apakah hal itu mampu menghalangi Harry Potter untuk menjadi karya terbaik?

Rupanya yang membuat Harry Potter masih merupakan karya terbaik di dunia bukanlah para kritikus, tapi fans nya. Orang-orang yang menyukai Harry Potter, bukan orang-orang yang membenci Harry Potter.

Berikut ini adalah kritik-kritik yang dilontarkan untuk Harry Potter yang saya ambil dari goodreads.

notgettingenough rated it 1/5

Enough. I'm putting this one to bed. I so don't want to finish it.

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‘Not enough sex’ was my first thought, but then we do get to this part where boys are discussing the length and capacities of their wands and I perked up for a moment until I realised that they were actually talking about wands.

"Bugger the wizards, where the fuck are the social workers? I can't believe little children enjoy reading this tale of an abused child, half-starved, beaten, living in a cupboard. This isn't fun, it's HORRIBLE!"

Harold Bloom rated it 1/5
Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes.

Taking arms against Harry Potter, at this moment, is to emulate Hamlet taking arms against a sea of troubles. By opposing the sea, you won't end it. The Harry Potter epiphenomenon will go on, doubtless for some time, as J. R. R. Tolkien did, and then wane.

The official newspaper of our dominant counter-culture, The New York Times, has been startled by the Potter books into establishing a new policy for its not very literate book review. Rather than crowd out the Grishams, Clancys, Crichtons, Kings, and other vastly popular prose fictions on its fiction bestseller list, the Potter volumes will now lead a separate children's list. J. K. Rowling, the chronicler of Harry Potter, thus has an unusual distinction: She has changed the policy of the policy-maker.

Imaginative Vision

I read new children's literature, when I can find some of any value, but had not tried Rowling until now. I have just concluded the 300 pages of the first book in the series, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," purportedly the best of the lot. Though the book is not well written, that is not in itself a crucial liability. It is much better to see the movie, "The Wizard of Oz," than to read the book upon which it was based, but even the book possessed an authentic imaginative vision. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" does not, so that one needs to look elsewhere for the book's (and its sequels') remarkable success. Such speculation should follow an account of how and why Harry Potter asks to be read.

The ultimate model for Harry Potter is "Tom Brown's School Days" by Thomas Hughes, published in 1857. The book depicts the Rugby School presided over by the formidable Thomas Arnold, remembered now primarily as the father of Matthew Arnold, the Victorian critic-poet. But Hughes' book, still quite readable, was realism, not fantasy. Rowling has taken "Tom Brown's School Days" and re-seen it in the magical mirror of Tolkein. The resultant blend of a schoolboy ethos with a liberation from the constraints of reality-testing may read oddly to me, but is exactly what millions of children and their parents desire and welcome at this time.

In what follows, I may at times indicate some of the inadequacies of "Harry Potter." But I will keep in mind that a host are reading it who simply will not read superior fare, such as Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows" or the "Alice" books of Lewis Carroll. Is it better that they read Rowling than not read at all? Will they advance from Rowling to more difficult pleasures?

Rowling presents two Englands, mundane and magical, divided not by social classes, but by the distinction between the "perfectly normal" (mean and selfish) and the adherents of sorcery. The sorcerers indeed seem as middle-class as the Muggles, the name the witches and wizards give to the common sort, since those addicted to magic send their sons and daughters off to Hogwarts, a Rugby school where only witchcraft and wizardry are taught. Hogwarts is presided over by Albus Dumbeldore as Headmaster, he being Rowling's version of Tolkein's Gandalf. The young future sorcerers are just like any other budding Britons, only more so, sports and food being primary preoccupations. (Sex barely enters into Rowling's cosmos, at least in the first volume.)

Nikki rated it 3/5

It was then that I figured out that, yeah, there are things wrong with Harry Potter beyond just the hype that was irritating me so much and the feeling that Rowling in no way matched up to the giants of fantasy and sci-fi, like Tolkien. I studied it alongside Tom Brown's Schooldays, by Thomas Hughes. Do note that I didn't like that book either. But it's a well written, well shaped, well considered book -- and it doesn't use the same cheap tricks as Harry Potter does. I'm not going to say much about that, since it's not a book I liked: if I'm going to compare/contrast, I'll compare with my favourite book that is also supposed to be for younger readers, Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising.

There's also a very easy, blunt misdirection. You're supposed to hate Snape, supposed to believe he's the one to blame for everything, and at the end, you're supposed to be as surprised as Harry when it's Quirrel waiting there for him. At the age of eleven, I think I went right along with that, but when I reread it for A Level, I had to wince at how heavy-handed the misdirection was. I understand that later in the series Snape comes into it more, and I don't know whether the misdirection turns out to be not that misdirected when it comes down to the real truth: but in the first book, you're meant to believe it's Snape all along, and I don't think J. K. Rowling does a very good job of giving us clues that it's not actually Snape, because she's so busy blackening him to lead people astray.

That's why I don't like Rowling's writing. It's not particularly refined, it's unsubtle -- and that's okay, you know, I'm not saying you can't enjoy that, can't find it refreshing. I don't. I'm also not saying that 'novels' are bad -- they're good, they can provide valuable escapism, they can be incredibly rich fodder for the imagination, and I suspect Harry Potter is, for many children. But I don't call it literature, and I myself don't like it.

Note: the three star rating is because honestly, when I first read it, I did love it.