Twins, Toons, Humor and Instinct

[abigailnus]

No: HPFGUIDX 43370


Right, well, first of all it seems obvious that I have lodged my foot so firmly in
 my mouth that it is a wonder I can still walk.  Let me try to fix that without 
doing any further damage.  When I characterised this thread as tedious, I truly 
only meant to say that I personally found it tedious, but it has been pointed 
out to me that people might take that to mean that I felt that anyone who 
didn't find the thread tedious was wrong or stupid.  In my defense I can only 
say that I never for a moment thought that anyone would care what I personally 
felt about a subject if they thought otherwise, but it seems that some people did.  
If anyone on the group was hurt by my words or felt uncomfortable contributing 
to the thread because of them, I offer my most heartfelt apologies.

I hope Elkins doesn't mind, but I'm going to move the pieces of her post around a bit, 
and start with the ending:
> But I just don't know what to do about that, honestly.  I really 
> don't.  I don't get it at all.  Why must characters be perfect to be 
> liked?  Why must people feel compelled to defend an action *morally* 
> just because they thought that it was funny?  Can't we acknowledge 
> that actions can still be funny even if they are not good actions?  
> After all, sometimes things that are downright *evil* can be funny 
> (especially to me, as I have a very black sense of humour).  Can't 
> people still enjoy characters even if they have been portrayed 
> with some negative dimensions?  

Cindy already wrote some very interesting stuff about why the group tends to 
take the characterisation of F&G as bullies so personally, and in general, I agree 
with her.  I had the exact same experience when Elkins first confronted me with 
the less pleasant aspects of the twins' behaviour, and I too wondered what the 
fact that I didn't spot those aspects myself said about me.  However, I think the 
problem lies even deeper, and I think Elkins touched on it when she talked about 
why we like and dislike characters in another message:

>Some time ago -- quite a long time ago now, in fact -- I wrote a post 
in which I asked people what precisely they meant when they said that 
they "liked" a character. I came to the conclusion that there are a 
number of different things that people can mean by that. Sometimes, 
we mean that we simply enjoy reading about them. Sometimes we mean 
that we appreciate the narrative function that they fulfill. We can 
like characters because we identify with them -- they remind us of 
ourselves -- or because we associate them with other people we have 
known and loved. Or, we can like them because we think that we would 
probably enjoy their company in real life.

One of the things that I hoped to point out in that message was that 
often, when we talk about "liking" or "disliking" a character, we are 
actually evaluating them by the same criteria that we apply to real 
people in real life -- and that if moral virtue is among those 
criteria at all, it is usually pretty far down on the list. >

See, I don't think the problem is whether we like or dislike a character, but whether 
JKR does, or rather whether she approves of that character's actions.  I think the 
main problem plaguing most of the F&G defenders out there is not the fact 
that they find F&G's antics funny, but that JKR seems to.  It is an author's job to 
pass moral judgement on the characters that he or she writes, to indicate to the 
readers in means of varying subtlety whether or not this character is doing a good 
thing or a bad thing.  (There are works of fiction in which it is acceptable for a 
character to wallow, uncriticised, in its own depravity, but they tend to be more along 
the lines of American Psycho or Fight Club.)

In the Harry Potter books, there are several ways in which Rowling indicates to us 
her criticism of a character's actions.  The most obvious one is to have Harry 
disapprove of said behaviour, another is to describe the character as unpleasant 
or disliked or physically unappealing, and a third is simply karma - bad things 
happen to bad people.  Now, I'm not suggesting that at every turn in the Harry 
Potter books, the bad are punished and the good are rewarded, because this is 
quite simply not the case.  What I am saying is that JKR very clearly indicates to 
us who the good guys and the bad guys are.

I like Snape, and I don't think I'm alone in that.  I like him in spite of the fact that I 
*know* that he is a bully, and I know that being a bully is hardly the worst thing 
about him.  Now, I hope that JKR likes Snape as well because she created him and 
like a good mother she should love all her children, even Voldemort.  But also like a 
good mother, she should point out his faults, if not to him (he is just a fictional 
character, after all) then to her readers.  And she does - Harry criticizes Snape 
non-stop, he is described as unpleasant and unattractive, and his desires are usually 
frustrated. 

But what about people that Harry does like?  Does this mean that JKR never 
criticizes them?  Not so.  Take Hagrid, whose drinking is displayed rather 
unpleasantly several times and shown to have negative results (such as being 
tricked into revealing how to pass Fluffy).  Take Sirius, whose actions during PoA 
are heavily criticized by Dumbledore, and who finds himself chastised by a 13 year 
old boy for his vengeful impulse to kill the man who wronged him.  Or, for that matter, 
take the house-elf liberation front, which is treated throughout GoF as a joke.  If 
Harry has any feelings about the state of house-elves, it is that their enslavement is 
probably not a terrible thing, and yet can there be any doubt that JKR disapproves 
of it?  She finds a thousand small ways of showing just how wrong it is without ever 
convincing Harry of it.

And yet, Fred and George are never criticized by the narrative.  They are hardly 
ever punished severely for their actions.  When their mother criticizes them, it is 
because she's concerned that they won't be able to hold down a job and support 
themselves.  When their father gets angry at them for the TTT incident, they are not 
punished.  Harry likes them and rarely passes any criticism of them.  They are 
described in favourable terms.  The only people who speak ill of them are the already 
acknowledged bad guys such as Draco.  Only once is any criticism of their characters 
leveled at them - when Ron calls them "obssessed with making money".  But rather 
than show that obssession leading to negative results, it is rewarded at the end of the 
book when Harry gives the twins 1000 galleons.

I don't think there's any escaping it.  JKR approves of the twins and what they do, 
and suggesting that they are bullies creates a problem for the reading community.  
It's not just that we aren't nice people if we accept that the twins are bullies, it's that 
JKR isn't either.  The way I see it, there have been several attempts to resolve this 
problem.

1.  "Subversive" Fred & George - hardly a resolution, this approach suggests that 
JKR simply isn't aware that she's written bullying characters as completely 
sympathetic.  I don't know about the rest of you, but I think that's just sad.

2. The Apologists - why doesn't JKR criticize the twins for being bullies?  Because 
they aren't bullies!  This approach has varying levels of success, and there are some 
cases, such TTT and the train stomp, where it doesn't work no matter what you do.

3. Their Day Will Come - JKR is actually going to give the twins their comeuppance in 
a future book.  Personally, I find the idea that, having set up F&G as good guys for four 
or more books (and it's not just that they are good guys.  Ron is a good guy, so are 
Percy and Sirius, but there are enough suggestions made about each of them to make 
us worry.  That just hasn't happened as far as the twins are concerned), JKR would 
pull the carpet under us by branding them bad guys rather mean-spirited.  It's not like 
with Crouch!Moody, who is set up as a good guy until new information about him is 
revealed.  This approach suggests that no new information will be revealed about the
twins except for a change in JKR's attitude towards them.  In other words, she would 
be saying to her audience "You know those characters that, through numerous textual 
clues, I have led you to believe are good guys?  Psych!" and thus criticizing her entire 
readership's moral standards for not working it out sooner.

One way this might work, however, is if the twins do something so terrible that Harry, 
and with him the readers, are forced to rethink their actions since the twins were first 
introduced.  It has been suggested that the twins will perform this generation's prank 
gone array.  I have problems with that.  I can't quite accept that the twins can carry 
on their cardboard shoulders the burden of being the generational parallels of James 
Potter and Sirius Black (and I will persist in my claim that the twins have no character 
depth whatsoever until someone points out a way of telling them apart.)  However, 
Elkins made some interesting points about the twins inheriting the role of moralle-raisers 
by using the Marauder's Map, so I guess it might be fair to suggest that they can inherit 
the role of the doomed pranksters as well. 

4. Who Framed Fred and George? - this is Dicentra's party, and I think she's explained it 
much better then I ever could.

5. But it's all a joke, man! - This is my party, although I think someone else could explain 
it better anyway.  I've ruffled some feathers by saying that we are not "meant" to look 
too deeply into the twins' actions in humorous scenes.  This entire post is based on the 
assumption that I am correctly reading JKR's cues by saying that she doesn't disapprove 
of the twins.  I think it's also a fair reading of the cues to say that most of the twins' 
scenes, including the most difficult ones to explain - TTT and the train stomp - are meant 
at least in part to be comic relief (can I just say as an aside that I love the idea of TTT 
being a parallel to the QWC incident?).  My original suggestion was that when she wrote 
these scenes, the main rationale that was going through JKR's head was "this is funny".  
Maybe later she added layers of meaning and foreshadowing, but her original intention 
was to write a comic aside.  There's a lot to say against this view, and I certainly can't 
prove it without picking JKR's brains.  The main problem, I suppose, would be the question 
of whether we should care about authorial intent, and I suspect that for many of the people 
who have sounded off on this thread the answer is no, but inasmuch as I am trying to excuse 
the lack of condemnation for F&G's bullying, I think it's as good an answer as any.

Each of these approaches have their problems, and I don't think any of them truly 
resolve the dissonance between the twins' actions and JKR's reactions to them.  I 
think we're just going to have to wait and see what she does with them.

A few odds and ends:

> Abigail wrote:
> 
> > Fred and George Weasly, as the chief suppliers of comic relief in 
> > the books, tend to be responsible for most of these actions, but I 
> > find it hard to believe that we are meant to read any insight from 
> > this into their character. 
> 
> But a good deal of the rest of your message was then taken up with 
> explaining, in quite a lot of detail, exactly what *you* think about 
> Fred and George!  You speculated as to their motivations, and you 
> analyzed their relationship with Percy, their feelings towards 
> Cedric, and their feelings towards Draco Malfoy.

Huh, I swear that when I was composing that message I planned to put a 
divider in it somewhere saying "this is why I don't think this is a fair question 
to ask, but if it is then I still think the anwer is no because:" but I guess I didn't.  
 
> No, of course not.  I rather imagine that what you did was to 
> extrapolate it from the gestalt impression that you have received of 
> the character of the twins from the sum of all of their canonical 
> appearances over the course of four novels -- very many of which 
> are indeed, as you yourself have pointed out, written as comedy.
> 
> Which is precisely what I did.  So I'm having a hard time 
> understanding in what way my interpretation is "over-analyzing," 
> while your own (I assume) is not.  What makes your reading less 
> analytical than mine?  
> 
> What is bothering me a bit here, I think, is what I am perceiving as 
> a decided tendency for people to believe that their own readings are 
> somehow more genuine -- more honest, more spontaneous, more natural, 
> more unself-conscious, more authorially sanctioned, more canonically
> supported -- than those of people who happen to have reached 
> different conclusions from precisely the same canonical evidence, or 
> than those of people who happen to have had somewhat different 
> emotional responses to the same things.

You're probably right there.  I did assume that a reading of the twins as bullies 
came from an analysis of the text because my original reaction to them was to 
laugh out loud.  I'm sorry, but in my defense it does seem that a reading of the 
twins as funny is the more common reaction.  I guess I shouldn't have assumed 
that the reaction applies to everyone.

Abigail