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.)

[padmoony.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.