JRRT, JKR, UKLG, and the complexity of evil

Amy Z aiz24 at hotmail.com
Fri May 25 16:13:45 UTC 2001


No: HPFGUIDX 19478

Susan Hall's post on Lockhart put me in mind of something I just read 
last night.  If you will forgive my quoting a long passage, I found 
that it described very well one reason I love Rowling.  I'll get back 
to HP after the quote.

It is from an essay called "The Child and the Shadow," in _The 
Language of the Night_ (New York: Berkley, 1979), a collection of 
Ursula K. LeGuin's essays and speeches about fantasy and science 
fiction.  She is as good an essayist as a novelist, and I recommend 
this and all her essays very highly.

                    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

[Various fascinating observations about shadows and Jungian/fairy-tale 
ways of seeing precede this.]

   In many fantasy tales of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the 
tension between good and evil, light and dark, is drawn absolutely 
clearly, as a battle, the good guys on one side and the bad guys on 
the other, cops and robbers, Christians and heathens, heroes and 
villains.  In such fantasies I believe the author has tried to force 
reason to lead him where reason cannot go, and has abandoned the 
faithful and frightening guide he should have followed, the shadow.  
These are false fantasies, rationalized fantasies.  They are not the 
real thing.  Let me, by way of exhibiting the real thing, which is 
always much more interesting than the fake one, discuss _The Lord of 
the Rings_ for a minute.
   Critics have been hard on Tolkien for his "simplisticness," his 
division of the inhabitants of Middle Earth into the good people and 
the evil people.  And indeed he does this, and his good people tend to 
be entirely good, though with endearing frailties, while his Orcs and 
other villains are altogether nasty.  But all this is a judgment by 
daylight ethics, by conventional standards of virtue and vice.  When 
you look at the story as a psychic journey, you see something quite 
different, and very strange.  You see then a group of bright figures, 
each one with its black shadow.  Against the Elves, the Orcs.  Against 
Aragorn, the Black Rider.  Against Gandalf, Saruman.  And above all, 
against Frodo, Gollum.  Against him--and with him.
   It is truly complex, because both the figures are already 
doubled.  Sam is, in part, Frodo's shadow, his inferior part.  Gollum 
is two people, too, in a more direct, schizophrenic sense; he's always 
talking to himself, Slinker talking to Stinker, Sam calls it. . . . 
Frodo and Gollum are not only both hobbits; they are the same 
person--and Frodo knows it.  

                    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Someone posted recently that Draco is Ron's double, etc. (please take 
a bow--I couldn't find your post to give credit where credit is due). 
 Voldemort, in multiple ways that have been said many times here, is 
Harry's.  They share a history; they are similar enough to illustrate 
JKR's theme that we are shaped by our choices, not only by parentage, 
inborn attributes, and status.  If Voldemort is too bad to be quite a 
full-fledged character (which I do think he is) and Harry is too good 
to be one (which I don't think, but just for the sake of argument--), 
this simplicity is redeemed by their being paired; they are, in a 
sense, two sides of one person, just like Frodo and Gollum.  I tend to 
read the books novelistically rather than mythologically--looking for 
complete, rounded characters rather than archetypes--but I think you 
can do both.  I do it with Tolkien (Frodo is a rounder character than 
LeGuin makes out, even without his shadows Sam, Smeagol, and Gollum, 
e.g.) and it works for HP too.

Amy Z

--------------------------------------------------------
 "And now, before we go to bed, let us sing the school 
 song!" cried Dumbledore.  Harry noticed that the other 
 teachers' smiles had become rather fixed.
                     -HP and the Philosopher's Stone
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