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+Harry Potter and Aristotle
+##########################
+
+:date: 2018-10-07T19:54:50
+:status: draft
+:category: faith
+:tags: review, harryPotter
+
+Aristotle in the seventh and eighth chapter of his Poetics 
+writes:
+
+    Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of 
+    an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain 
+    magnitude … As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the 
+    imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the 
+    plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one 
+    action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts 
+    being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, 
+    the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose 
+    presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an 
+    organic part of the whole.
+
+Based on *Poetics* many literary critics of Renaissance and 
+Baroque developed theory of “`Classical Unities`_”, which then 
+governed most of the writing from the seventeenth century 
+onwards. Unfortunately, it rather quickly degraded into rather 
+silly discussions about unity of time and place (which were never 
+specifically mentioned by Aristotle as necessary, perhaps only as 
+commonly occurring), both of which were largely ignored not only 
+by the Greek writers of the classical Era, but by almost every 
+other writer outside of the tight confines of the seventeenth and 
+eighteenth century classical drama. 
+
+Sometimes the reviews of particular theatre play went 
+unbelievably silly like when Shakespeare (who either didn’t know 
+about the Classical Unities at all, or he didn’t care about them) 
+was criticized that only two less known plays of his actually 
+follow the rules and for example most of historical plays cover 
+length of tens of years.
+
+Perhaps because of the silliness of these discussions or perhaps 
+because of decline of the classical education, classical unities 
+were mostly abandoned in its original form, even more so with the 
+rise of the literary styles completely unsuited for them. There 
+is just no way how a standard length novel could fulfil unity of 
+time and place. Post-Joyceeian novels drove the last nail into 
+the coffin of the classical unities with many extremely 
+non-classical variants of structure of style.
+
+And yet …
+
+In the last couple of years I read many many fanfictions on the 
+Internet. While reading one cannot ignore how few of them achieve 
+at least resemblance of quality of the normal literary works. 
+Certainly, the Sturgeon’s Law, that ninety percent of 
+everything is crap, but there are some pieces of fanfiction which 
+are rather good. Therefore, when I will comment and criticize 
+some stories, they are usually only the best ones, where their 
+deficiencies makes me more disappointed, because they were so 
+close to be very very good.
+
+First problem is general to almost fanfictions longer than one 
+chapter, and that is their excessive length. If somebody claims 
+that with the Internet and its endless opportunities for 
+self-publishing, we don’t need old publishing houses any more, 
+most of these stories show how in need most authors are of the 
+second opinion of the experienced editor. It is said that half of 
+the success of the French author Jules Verne was in his publisher 
+and editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who forced Verne to cut his 
+novels sometimes up to the half in length and sometimes 
+completely rewrite the main plot of the novel. When Hetzel died 
+in 1886, the quality of Verne’s novels went noticeably down. Mrs. 
+Rowling herself complained that Harry Potter and the Order of the 
+Phoenix was published in too much haste and a way too long for 
+her taste. For the record, that’s 38 chapters (average length of 
+HP books is 28.43 chapters). What should one think about novels 
+like “The Accidental Animagus” (112 chapters and it covers only 
+the first four years of Harry’s school, another volumes have 
+8 chapters, and very much unfinished third volume another 12 
+chapters) or “The Arithmancer” series (84 and 82 chapters 
+covering the HP series time frame, and another 5 chapters of just 
+starting third volume)? Each of these books contains some 
+excellent parts, which are truly outstanding, but they contain 
+a lot of other parts.
+
+My deep suspicion is that this excessive length of fanfiction 
+novels are caused by the ease of writing in the computer age, 
+lack of editors, but also crazy idea, that novels can be 
+published one chapter at time. I know that many novels in history 
+were written in that style, when they were originally serialized, 
+but with existence of text editors, I believe readers expect 
+higher quality than what could be found in some originally 
+serialized novels (yes, Grimaud should be struck out of Three 
+Musketeers).
+
+----
+
+However, excessive length of so many novels is by far not the 
+biggest problem of many fanfiction stories.
+
+.. _`Classical Unities`:
+    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_unities