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Harry Potter and the Doctrine of the Calvinists by Daniel Hemmens
Dan Hemmens refuses to just give up on the Potter articles already.
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And obviously you have the whole sacramental thing of Voldemort receiving Harry's blood, or rather refusing the salvation contained within it... euw.
I think you can also see attitudes towards predestination in her view of herself and her work. I was watching her original publisher on TV the other day talking about how he advised her to get a day job, because very very few people can actually make a living on children's books, and how she simply said she was very confident that HP would be successful. Which turned out to be right, of course, but there's no way anyone could have predicted exactly how much the HP books took off (and arguably they didn't become really massive until Prisoner of Azkaban). I know, I know, most authors probably harbour hopes that they'll be able to live off their soon-to-be-published novel and ditch the day job, it's human nature to be optimistic - but it's also human nature to harbour a deep-seated worry that your book might just flop. Rowling has never shown any evidence of the latter.
This is, I think, also evidence of Ms Rowling's deeply fucked up priorities. Having faith in yourself is one thing, but she had a fucking *kid* to support. You think she'd give some thought to how the poor bastard was going to eat.
Also: Fun exercise for your spare time. Re-read the chapter entitled "Horcruxes" in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It's as fucked up as all hell. It's where Dumbledore explains that Harry Potter hating Voldemort and wanting to kill him is evidence of his deep capacity for love.
Care to summarise? I don't have the Half-Blood Prince and don't intend to read it - as far as I can tell, it's the big waterslide that dumps the reader in the sewer of Deathly Hallows.
Lets see, choice quotes from that chapter include:
"If Voldemort had never murdered your father, would he have implanted in you a furious desire for revenge?"
And of course
"You have never been seduced by the Dark Arts, never, even for a second, shown the slightest desire to become one of Voldemort's followers!"
"Of course I haven't," said Harry indignantly. "He killed my mum and dad!"
"You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!" said Dumbledore loudly.
And
"Imagine, please just for a moment that you had never heard that prophecy! How would you feel about Voldemort now? Think!"
"I'd want him finished," said Harry quietly. "And I'd want to do it."
That's your shining beacon of love folks: an angry little man driven by pure hatred and the desire for personal vengeance.
That's hilarious. It's like Dumbledore is dozing his way through a speech and isn't actually listening to what Harry is saying.
"So, Harry, what will you do if you defeat Voldemort?" asked Dumbledore.
"I will become an Auror and turn the Ministry of Magic into a terrifying machine devoted to exterminating House Slytherin. I will use Unforgivable Curses like they were party tricks. I will break every single rule regulating magical law enforcement in my pursuit of the Slytherin menace."
"Oh Harry, you truly are a fountain of love and forgiveness!"
It's even worse than that: he's paying absolute attention to what Harry's saying, but deep down he's thinking "bwahahaha, see how I have manipulated this boy into believing that his childish desire to lash out at Lord Voldemort is a noble and selfless act! Now he is certain to do exactly as I wish while I arrange his death!"
Yeah. You know how I said how Harry walking to his own death in order to be the messiah was the act of a paranoid schizophrenic? I take that back. Orchestrating your own death and the death of your protege because you firmly believe that a) this will let you defeat the greatest evil in the world and b) this is how you think the Truest Love works is the act of a paranoid schizophrenic megalomaniac.
If only it were. It sounds more to me like the act of a man with no discernible personality traits whatsoever. I wonder how the books would read if you quietly ctrl-H'ed every instance of the word 'destiny' with the word 'plot'.
Hemmens, you've skewered the woman precisely and with brio, and you deserve applause, but how in the name of fuck was all this - except the ugly suicide cult business you mention in the previous piece - not visible from the downslope of book 3?
I think people still had some faith that Rowling would pull off some brilliant plot twist and the series wouldn't go in the direction that it was obviously going, and in fact did. To be fair, for the first four books she was able to surprise me with the endings - I didn't expect Bloke With Turban to have Lord Voldemort pasted to the back of his head, I didn't expect that Tom Riddle was anything other than a horrible sneak called Tom Riddle, I hadn't guessed that the Goblet of Fire would be a teleportation trap. The third book is the best example of this, where the climactic encounter with Sirius Black you're expecting is still fifty-odd pages away happens early, before our heroes are even slightly ready.
Book 5, conversely, is pretty much devoid of surprises. In books 1-4 the titular thing - the Philosopher's Stone, the Chamber of Secrets, the Prisoner of Azkaban, the Goblet of Fire - is a mysterious object, place or person which is the key to the mystery the book covers. The Order of the Phoenix, conversely, is carefully explained early on in book 5 and isn't really especially relevant or important.
Even her critics admit that Rowling does a good plot, but her creepy ideology and incoherent philosophy - her apparent belief that moral goodness is something you're born to, like the aristocracy, or that happens to you, like celebrity - has been visible for years.
True, but until now people could always console themselves with the possibility that the whole goodness-by-selection deal was meant to be a Big Lie which was going to be exposed in the last book. In fact, the bit in Deathly Hallows where Harry struggles with the new facts he knows about Dumbledore could have been an excellent opportunity for Harry's worldview to be seriously challenged, but Rowling squandered the opportunity by having Harry's worldview be the correct one all along.
There was plenty of reason for bile and invective to be thrown in Rowling's general direction after books 5 and 6, and several decent causes for complaint after 4. I think the reason the flood has happened now, as opposed to earlier, is that with the publication of book 7 there is now no opportunity for Rowling to redeem the series.
I'm not actually sure all this stuff *has* been visible; it's been *there* but that's not quite the same thing. A lot of people (self included, at least until 6) assumed it was all building up into something quite dark and interesting. And don't we feel like idiots now.
The more interesting question then is "what rendered it invisible?"
What surprises me is that everyone here dissing Rowling seems to have reached the same conclusions as I did, and articulated them rather better than I ever managed to, but inexplicably read all the way to the end before doing so. What dazzled you in the meantime? Was it just the plot, or were there promises of complexity in Harry and his gang that I overlooked?
I'd particularly like to know because I might then be able to reverse-engineer some kind of cure and inject it into the friend who told me last week '[book 7] is a fucking triumph and we're lucky to have her'. Or at least understand what the hell's going on with that.
For my part, I was assuming (until book 5) that Rowling was going to pull the same start with the overarching plot of the series that she did with books 1-4 - specifically, try her hardest to trick the reader into thinking that a particular thing was going to happen, and then pull the rug out from under them. Sure, it was pretty obvious that we were going to have a ludicrous final battle in Hogwarts between Harry and Voldemort, and that Harry would prove to be the Chosen One by virtue of his amazing feat of surviving to his first birthday, but in the early Potter books whenever something's that obvious it usually isn't true.
Rowling's a one-trick pony, but she's pretty good at the narrative misdirection trick. It's why you had fans suggesting with a straight face that Dumbledore was actually Ron from the future; people realise that Rowling often throws out sudden plot twists, especially when the plot seems to be fairly straightforward, and the fans had plenty of fun coming up with convoluted ideas of what would happen at the conclusion.
Rowling's biggest misdirection was tricking people into thinking that the things which were obviously going to transpire in the HP series would not, in fact, come to pass.
@lessofthat
I think that sometimes, you just don't *see* the bad points of a book for whatever reason. Everyone I know can speak to hating or at least disliking a book that they loved a while ago- it's the same sort of thing at work, or at least the same set of forces. For some reason, you may just want to enjoy a book so badly that you ignore its rough corners. Or you aren't yet adept at recognising those rough corners yet, so they pass you by. Or you weren't really paying much attention, and everything seems all right to your friends, and everything seems all right in (faulty) hindsight, so you jump at the next chance to read more from the same author.
All of that is far, far more pronounced when there is a lot of strong emotion sloshing around about a book or story or creative endeavour. You're either caught up in the hype to some extent, invest in it and suddenly realise it matters to you because your investment in it feels a lot sillier if it doesn't matter to you, or you're not and you wonder why the hell everyone's losing their heads over the whole thing.
Agreed, empink.
The first three books, at least, have advantages to balance their disadvantages. They're not great literature (but then, what is?) but they're reasonably well-written, tautly plotted, genuinely amusing and occasionally, as Arthur points out above, quite surprising. I remember being quite startled that Snape wasn't, in fact, the bad guy of book 1 and I was quite impressed at the rather morally complex position he occupied in what was obviously a children's a book: at that stage in the game, he's good but not nice which is interesting for a children's book.
Also, as empink observes, the problems aren't really pronounced enough to add up to anything coherently problematic. Dan could never have written this article based off the first few books. I remember Harry seemed rather bland but nobody cared - he was a hero and heroes are meant to Save The World not be interesting and they were plenty of nice secondary characters to shine well when set against Harry's lack of personality. And the fact that Snape *wasn't* the bad guy seemed to suggest that Slytherin - despite the bad press - weren't basically evil, again suggesting a potentially morally layered universe. As the books progresses the houses, for example, become more and more simplified. I always thought well of the potrayal of Cedric Diggory (from book VI). I mean, he's a Hufflepuff, but he's clever AND brave AND abmitious. I always thought that might be trying to say something worthwhile.
Of course it wasn't.
Also the later books are all about shutting down avenues of interpretation - the early books are a glorious free-for-all. Because they're not sprawling information dumps, the glimpses of the world they offer are subtle and intriguing - perhaps it's just evidence of how lame we are but we used to spend hours discussing Harry Potter in the pub, wondering what this and that meant, and what was going to happen, and who such and such a character was.
Slytherin is a particularly good example, actually. From the very beginning, Rowling has been adamant that the Slytherins aren't all evil. The internal evidence of the books seems to correspond with that, right up until the end when whoosh! Basically every Slytherin student and teacher turns Quisling and helps the Death Eaters stomp all over Hogwarts. The one exception is Snape, and it's notable that at the very end Harry names his kid after Snape because of Snape's courage - the Griffindor virtue, not traditionally anything to do with Slytherin.
Fair enough. Looking back, I can remember that sense that though the first three were flawed, there was something a bit different about them; the Slytherins had that aristocracy-of-hell feel that old guard Tories like Heseltine do (they may be scum, but they're engaging scum and you know where you are with them); Snape was, as Kyra says, not bad but not nice. I remember even being faintly impressed that Rowling knew what colour a philosopher's stone would be, but that she didn't feel the need to regurgitate all the matching alchemical background. It suggested she'd bothered to do the research but wore it lightly.
I wasn't that impressed though. I also remember reading a quote by some publishing type on the back of the first book way back in like '98, to the effect that future generations of children will talk about Diagon Alley the way past ones talked about the Hundred Acre Wood or, I don't know, Byker Grove or something. I thought that was ridiculous hyperbole. I suppose that's why he's a publishing type and I'm not, because how wrong was I.
@empink. The hype and social enthusiasm bypassed me, largely for reasons of grumpiness I suppose. So that's a powerful inoculating factor too.
Again, I guess that Harry's abject blandness was less apparent in his pre-teenage years. I don't really understand children, so absence of personality in them is less troublesome. I imagine that's true of other people too.
"the problems aren't really pronounced enough to add up to anything coherently problematic." I still disagree - I think the Choosing Hat alone is a particularly repellent embodiment of the English class system - but I think I have a better idea of why bright, sane people were distracted enough not to be bothered.
On Harry's personality: half the reason book 5 lost me was that Harry became a repugnant, grumpy teenager. He was a well-observed repugnant teen, and I can just about barely remember what it was like being one myself, but there's a reason most people don't want to hang out with such oiks once they get over puberty, and that's because they're completely awful to be around.
In the earlier books his main personality trait was utter confusion and occasional amazement and wonder when regarding the world he'd been thrust into, which worked nicely with his role as the character we see the world through. It's a good device for the first three-or-so books, but it couldn't have been maintained for the entire series - nobody would have bought it if Rowling had tried to have Harry still be completely bowled over by the awesomeness of the wizarding world when he's lived in it for over half a decade - but it's a crying shame she didn't have anything particularly good to replace it with.
Re: the Sorting Hat - in the early books, I could accept the Sorting Hat as being a nice pastiche of the apparently arbitrary nature kids get assigned to classes and houses in secondary school. I could convince myself that the Hat essentially took a quick look at the students' personalities and flung them into whichever House seemed to have the most suitable internal culture for them, and the different characters of the Houses were a result of a self-perpetuating internal culture that the Hat just reinforced. It eventually became brutally apparent that the Hat is essentially a living filter for the Elect, and that being chosen as Gryffindor by the Hat is essentially an absolute vote of confidence in your moral integrity, but it took a while; again, it wasn't until book 5 that I realised that we'd never seen one single person who didn't fit in perfectly in their House, and come on: just because you're hard-working or brave or ambitious at 11 doesn't mean that's still going to be the case when you're 15.
@lessofthat I don't really understand children, so absence of personality in them is less troublesome. I imagine that's true of other people too.
SO TRUE.
I still disagree - I think the Choosing Hat alone is a particularly repellent embodiment of the English class system
That's what I would have said after reading it. I can't remember how many times I wanted to point at JKR's treatment of the women in her book (married, had babies, or wanted to, or died, or died regardless, or were ugly, unsexy and old) and ask people what they thought was up with THAT. Then again, I remember how much less that would have pinged me a year or two ago, when I was still supposedly not a feminist. Snape's "I see no difference" feels particularly apt in this case. Until you *do* see the difference, or have it pointed out to you in a way you can't bring yourself to ignore, you...don't. And to others who do, you either look like a huge, defensive jackass, or like Stupid of the century. And to others who don't, you are Sane McGrateful for the author's bounty. And even that's simplifying the whole thing, but really, that's how it seems to have worked in my corner so far.
Sorry I haven't commented: No internet.
In short, the reason that it took me a while to realise that Rowling was espousing a repulsive moral philosophy is that the series went through a massive genre shift between (roughly) books four and five, and assumptions which are perfectly acceptable in a boarding school romp have no place in a serious story about love and death and choices.
I always saw the Sorting Hat as being a metaphor for the cliques you get at school. The Slytherins are the privileged popular kids, the Ravenclaw are the swots, Hufflepuff are everybody else. Gryffindor - in the early books - was essentially just "the hero and his mates". There's comparatively little evidence that Gryffindors are *objectively* superior in the early books - there's just Harry's natural tendency to side with his friends. Indeed in the early books there's a fair number of dodgy Gryffindors (like Peter Pettigrew) and admirable non-Gryffindors (like Cedric Diggory and, arguably, Snape). In book five we even discover that James Potter was a bullying little shit. By the start of book six, things actually looked reasonably complex, and rather grown up. The last two books, though, took all of that apart. The Slytherins all leave in the final battle, James Potter wasn't a bully at all, he was just mad at Snape because he called Lily Potter a bad name, and we are asked to take Harry's desire for vengeance as evidence of his moral superiority.
Essentially I didn't find the early books morally repulsive, because I didn't think they were trying to make any kind of moral statement beyond "it is good to stick by your friends" and possibly "believe in yourself". The whole business with Sorting and predestination was just a convenient plot device to give the hero a set of allies and enemies. Early Potter doesn't advocate predeterminism any more than the Lord of the Rings advocates genocide.