Dissin' the Slyths / Sacrificing Character to Cleverness

[lupinesque]

No: HPFGUIDX 38454

Marina wrote:

>I'm fairly sure JKR didn't intend to present
>Dumbledore's actions as anything more than an effective dramatic
>moment to highlight the end of the book. 

<snip>

>I also can't just discard my knowledge of the real world as 
irrelevant
>to my reading of the books.  Fantasy and science fiction writers do
>sometimes deliberately construct totally alien societies where 
nothing
>that we know applies, and readers must put aside all their human
>preconceptions in order to immerse themselves in the story.  But I
>don't think JKR intended that any more than she intended for us to
>condemn Dumbledore.

Marina, I've been catching up with this entire thread, and your 
patient determination has been touching.  I agree with you, and I 
would add this:  we cannot set aside our own morality as a lens 
through which to read without sacrificing the opportunity to learn 
about that morality, have it challenged, etc.--in short, without 
losing one of the main benefits of reading a work of fiction that has 
a moral intent.

I think it is most likely a case of sloppy writing, as even Slytherin 
Defender Supreme, Ms. Tandy, suggested.  JKR's writing improves 
through the series, and although she may commit her most egregious 
case of WARPDRIVE with the central plot of GF (and even the greatest 
mystery writers, even in their greatest mysteries, are occasionally 
guilty of creating overly creative plots--has anyone in the history of 
human greed tried to pull off a murder like the one in Death on the 
Nile?  Real people just get angry and shoot someone, but it makes for 
less interesting reading), she becomes less and less prone to making 
someone do something out-of-character for the sake of a dramatic 
moment.  It is too bad, though; she could have had it both ways by 
making the feast follow so quickly upon the climactic events that 
Dumbledore really *was* making a last-minute announcement . . . ah 
well.

(As an aside, I agree with Dicentra about Fred and George's hissing of 
Malcolm.  Whatever deeper meanings the House differences have, the 
dominant one for most students is "my house good, other houses bad," 
and the Gryffindor-Slytherin rivalry is particularly intense because 
those two houses have dominated the Quidditch and House Cup races in 
recent years.  They boo the way Red Sox fans would boo a 
Yankee-cap-wearing fellow student, and the deeper significance is 
likely to be lost on F&G though it is not on Harry.)

All of this has reminded me of another little moment where character 
is sacrificed to a clever line (or not so clever, depending on your 
POV).  My dh, who has read only PS, expressed a dissatisfaction with 
the final line that I had to admit I shared.  Or rather, he said Harry 
seemed rather vengeful and was about to spend the summer doing to 
Dudley what Dudley had done to him--which some people might embrace 
but my dh considered a bad thing.  I agreed, and wanting to defend 
Harry from charges of being insufficiently Christlike, I said I 
thought she was stretching a bit to end on a cute line (and assured 
him that when he reads CS, he'll see that Harry really does not do 
anything harmful to Dudley with his newfound power but is in the same 
position as he's always been).  The next two books bear out my belief, 
to the point that I cringe as we approach the final paragraph each 
time.  JKR has a bit of a penchant for ending her books with cute 
zingers.  I try to excuse each one--CS's ending has a sad undercurrent 
of true bitterness, as Harry really believes the Dursleys would 
happily attend his funeral, and PA's is charged with the anger and 
power of someone who finally has an adult backing him up--but I'm a 
lot happier when I get to the end of GF, where things are allowed to 
just end and not go "bang."  I wouldn't say the other three, even PS, 
are out of character for Harry in the way that Dumbledore's Cup Switch 
is out of character for him, but PS's ending does leave the reader 
with a final impression of Harry that is a bit out of whack with the 
characteristics that have been most important through the preceding 
pages.  It's a little twist for humor's sake and twists too far for me 
to find it all that funny.

Amy Z

P.S. I LOVED your Tangled Up in Floo filk, Marina, and look forward to 
showing it to said dh, who also loves Dylan, just as soon as he reads 
CS and can appreciate it.