Pretentious Post on Plot and Personalities

[foudebassan]

There is much lamentation that a certain character doesn't behave in DH as one could have expected based on the previous books, hence some harsh criticism against JKR.

Leaving aside the fact that she provided us with an universe we all love to some extend even though she never said it was anything else than a children's series, I can't quite agree with that.

IMHO, there are two approaches to writing.

One is the Iliad. You dream up some situation, no matter how artificial, that brings characters together, and let it evolve by itself from there. They love, they fight, they live, they die, they grieve, all the panel of human emotion is etched out eventually in every single one of them, there are no good and bad people any more, just Humans Hector and Andromache's parting on the remparts of Troy in the end is the exact echo of Penelope and Ulysses' farewell in the beginning, for instance - and nothing really happens. It can be gut-wrenchingly beautiful and true, but since nothing happens it also can be pretty boring, like some angsty lyric poems I shan't name.

The second is the Odyssey. You pick out situations and force them against the characters. They won't have much space for human development save becoming tougher each time they've suffered another of the peripeties. They become archetypal - Penelope standing for faithful and quiet love, Circe for passionate and devastating love, Laerte for the Past, Anticlea for sorrow, Telemache for the Future, Nausicaa for Hope, the pretendants and the shipmates for Humanity in all its mediocrity, and Ulysses himself for Humanity in all its might. They don't matter that much, it's the situation that counts, the action, the rebounds, the danger, the crafty solutions. It keeps you awake and eager to know how it all ends, but it can turn out to be a bit shallow, like many whodunits.

I think HP is all about the second approach. The characters are nothing, they represent things. They don't live, they fulfill their destiny; they don't feel, they express a part of the bigger picture. Harry is the hero, The hero, there can only be one, he is at the centre of all the books, things can only happen through him, he is, like Ulysses, the link between the reader and the story. He managed to survive all six of the previous books, so he's become stronger and stronger. The other characters don't have to evolve that way; they don't have to change at all. They're the setting against which things take place; they represent something. Hermione and Ron are two facets of the same friendship (which is why they belong together); Ginny is love, the other Weasleys are the family substitute, etc. Sirius is a better man than Snape because his link to Harry is a good deal stronger, not because of their respective attributes (which don't matter all that much).

Now fanfiction does not belong to the same realm as the series. It is a hobby we share to please ourselves. We can write another epic if we so choose, but we can also allow the characters to wallow in emotion. We can make them feel and fuck and behave like real people, not like symbols. It's fun. But it doesn't make the books stupid or, God forbid, wrong.


ETA: spoilers in the comments

Comments

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

Yeah. As much as this sort of archetypal stuff is irritating, that's the framework she's using. (Note that Dumbledore thinks he's praising Snape when he tells him -- comparing his tremendous bravery and honor to Karkaroff's cowardice and treachery -- that "we sort too soon". In fact he's being patronizing; Gryffindor good, Slytherin bad, and nothing else is possible. But that's obviously Rowling's viewpoint as well, "good Slytherins" like Snape, Draco, Phineas and Slughorn aside.)

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

It's a bit irritating, but it's well done. The books are kind of symetric - opening 1 vs. closing 7; snakes and lions aren't quite opposites in 2 and 6; things get more complicated, with more characters in 3 and 5, and of course Voldemort appears for good in 4. All the symbols fall neatly in place, etc. We just keep forgetting it's a children's book - of course a grown-up series would be deeper, but would we have enjoyed the extra depth the way we enjoyed this?

[deeble.livejournal.com]

I think it's the sense that there is extra depth to the series -- that we can have both action and true emotion -- that makes Deathly Hallows such a letdown. (Well, at least to me.) If you're not expecting something you don't get, then you're not disappointed, you know?

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

Did you really expect something more? What exactly?

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

Spoilers here, so I'm white-fonting:

I think that for a lot of people, there's a bit of a contradiction -- or an apparent one -- between her use of that framework and then her having the characters within it behave in ways we don't associate with that framework. In the heroic framework, heroes usually behave -- or are depicted as -- without flaws such as bad tempers or petty jealousy or insecurity.

In DH, the characters behave about 90% of the time as people with massive feet of clay, especially those we've come to view as saintly, in the sort of hyper-realistic and grim fashion associated with certain types of gritty modern fiction. But they operate within the black-and-white heroic framework, where there is no character growth, only toughening. This sets up the contradiction, or rather the dissonance, that many people apparently feel.

And boy, do they feel it. And not just because Snape got zapped, either -- though really, the people who have the most problems with DH tend to be the ones who are the most fervent Snape fans. (Interesting, how few people clamor for Lupin's revival. Yet lots of folks -- myself included -- were hit hard by Snape's demise, to the point that we started writing fanfic to either give him a nice afterlife or keep him from dying in the first place.)

[deeble.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's it exactly. I was very dissatisfied with the way Rowling chose to resolve, for instance, the thematic issues of Slytherin House and of the Good Side using the tactics of Evil ("I see what Bellatrix meant, you need to really mean it"? WTF?).

Of course she couldn't resolve everything to everyone's satisfaction. But the morals these literary choices suggest leave a bad taste in my mouth.

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

She probably realised that and tried to correct it by having ASP worry about being sorted in Slytherin?

[deeble.livejournal.com]

I think that's where she was going with that, but she ruined it for me by having Harry finish up by saying, in essence, "But listen, you can always go to a BETTER house by asking the Hat nicely." I realize this might seem an unfair reading -- Harry is sharing with his son that he very nearly ended up in Slytherin -- but that's the way it immediately struck me.

I'm not bitter about the various deaths, I'm really not: They were largely expected. It's the thematic choices that trouble me.

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

I don't know if we wouldn't read this differently if we were children - aren't we too used to thinking of Slytherin in association with "sexy"?

[deeble.livejournal.com]

I'm sure we would read it differently. But I'm not in the "Slytherins are sexy" camp: I thought they were thematically interesting, and I was under the impression that Rowling saw them that way too.

Alas, the corrosive power of high expectations.

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

To make the magic white font, type the following, except replace use the chevrons instead of the [] keys:

[font color=white]text to be white-fonted[/font color]

Here's how it works:

I think that if Harry had said "Slytherin is a perfectly good House; I almost went there myself, and one of your godfathers is a Slytherin", it would have felt better to me. Instead, it was "they should be lucky to have you". (To which Portrait-Snape has, in this fanfic, the riposte we would expect.

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

Oh that's neat.

*tries*

Yeah, Harry stays a bit clueless until the very end. He's true to himself that way...

I don't know how to white-font, so here be spoilers in plain view

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

I didn't see it that way.

*thinks*

I actually like the epic story applied to normal characters. To me, it's part and parcel of the wizarding world - just like there is magic among us Muggles without our knowing it, there can be true heroism in a way that does not contradict our individual faults.

For the feet of clay - Albus might be dead, but his shadow is still taller than Harry's. To vanquish Voldemort where Dumbledore has failed, he needs to rise higher than his mentor; since she chose not to give him teh superpowahs, she had to make a lesser man of the Headmaster... can't that be read in a symbolic light?

[padmoony.livejournal.com]

Wow! Je n'avais jamais pensé à cette distinction Illiade/Odyssée, mais c'est vraiment super bien trouvé!

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

*fait la révérence*

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

As much as I hate to admit it, you probably have a point there.
However, JKR for a long time - six books, actually - left us in the dark about Severus' role in the cast. I think many of us used that uncertainty to imagine him the complex character he seemed rather than the symbol JKR had planned him to be, so it came as a shock.

And I must say, there was room for characters in the first six books. Only the last one was all about the action, the situations into which she forced the characters.

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

But Snape did get an entire book named after him. After being a horrid teacher to Harry, he becomes the teacher Harry looks up to most, via the book. As far as I'm concerned, the ambiguity is removed when Harry learns who is in fact the half-blood prince: Snape has to be good since he's taught him so much, and all appearances of the contrary are misleading on purpose. We learn that purpose in DH - Snape doesn't want to feel any sympathy for a living Horcrux and thus has to force himself to be mean, all the more so since that Horcrux has Lily's eyes. Simple motivation => complex attitude.

[shiv5468.livejournal.com]

Mmm, except no. I don't even think that they represent things either. Her thinking process as demonstrated by the leaky chat transcription is that she hasn't got a clue what she's doing, and her stories function at neither the symbolical / structural level nor the characterisation level.

If Harry is the Hero, then why does he resort to the Unforgivables? Why is Marrietta's treachery to be punished with Sneak forever, but Dumbledore's by nothing at all.

I think it's more accurate to say that she writes stories that verge on stereotype, occasionally managed to hit archetype, and that only with characters she doesn't really care about, and she hasn't got a bloody clue what she's doing.

She can't make up her mind whether Snape is a hero or not.

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

Know who Snape's always reminded me of? Sherlock Holmes.

Let's do the rundown, shall we?

Tall, thin, smart, waspish men, good with chemicals, aquiline noses, and far more admired by readers than their creator.

In fact (and I'll dispense with the white font since there are visible spoilers already), both were killed off by their creators -- but both have been resurrected by their fans. In fact, the fans of Holmes forced Conan Doyle to revive him by the simple expedient of refusing to buy anything he wrote that wasn't Holmes-related. Doyle was forced to do "past remininscences" of Dr. Watson's, predating the fall at Reichenbach, in order to get the fans to start buying his stuff again -- he was already a very rich man, but it just frosted him to think that by snuffing Holmes he'd snuffed his own career as a writer -- and finally gave up and brought back Holmes, alive, from Reichenbach.

One of the things that got him to revive Holmes was the competition from that era's fanfictioneers, who wrote what were called "pastiches" in which Holmes not only survived, but thrived. So don't be surprised if Rowling winds up being forced, after a few years, into a similar reappraisal of the hero whose merits were seen best by his readers.

[sylvanawood.livejournal.com]

Now that's something I'd love to see. Someone on my flist pointed that Holmes thing out to me, too, and now I have to read. I hope you are right.

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

Hee! We'll get her to write a series of "Severus Snape and...", and then wank about her not getting the characterisation right :D

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

Her leaky chat transcription shows that she has a good general idea of what she's doing, but fuzzy on the details. if she had every detail outlined, would she have been able to put this much creativity in the universe?

Erm hero here doesn't mean "has all qualities", it means "represents humanity in the way you wish it would be". Ulysses isn't perfect either, he cheats and lies all the time. His Homerean epithet is "polymetis" ("two-faced"). Harry uses the Unforgivables because with that sort of pressure on him, it would be a wonder if he didn't. When it really matters, in the final duel, he doesn't - isn't that what counts?

Marietta cheated to serve her own goals. She's punished because she's petty, and she's punished in a petty way, there are worse things in life than having an ugly face. Dumbledore served the greater good, what he did was to save everyone in the end, and like it or not, he succeeded. His fault was to succumb to temptation and take the stone. It is a huge mistake, and he gets hugely punished for it, by death no less.

It's a children's story, of course it flirts with stereotype. It does raise all sorts of points - racism, cultural differences, etc - that even we grown-ups do not always get, hence the DD kerfluffle. For complex characters we should point the little darlings to 19th century classics, but they'd get bored in two seconds flat, while HP got them to enjoy reading.

She can't make up her mind whether Snape is a hero or not.

She more likely can't make up her mind on the definition of a hero, but honestly I'd rather she didn't and went on writing than start wanking over theoretical analysis definitions - leave that for literary critics.

[shiv5468.livejournal.com]

No, she doesn't even have the basic framework of a moral structure. She assumes that someone she likes as a character is good, and that someone she dislikes as a character is bad. And that's how she decides who is a hero as well.

A bit more of a sense of things joining up would be nice. On the other hand, this way canon hasn't closed because no one can work out what the hell it is.

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

Well there are a lot more fanfic opportunities in an open canon (and can't we just disregard what she says in interviews?)

[sylvanawood.livejournal.com]

I'm not learned enough in the literary ways, peasant that I am, to contradict you intelligently. For me it's more 'feel', rather than analysis. DH feels wrong. The previous books promised a depth that wasn't delivered. Too many contradictions, too much deus ex machina.

And of course, worst of all, she tried to kill my poor, dear, struggling working class boy, and let the rich and posh live. Can't have that. I'm off to help him up and dust off his robes.

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

That's what fanfiction is for!