Potterverse Coherence

[dfrankiswork at netscape.net]

No: HPFGUIDX 38824

I have a question which has been on my mind for a long time, but was triggered by Dicentra's post on Rita Skeeter: drag artist extroardinaire.

The triggering is that #blushes to rain on Dicey's parade# I noticed those 'clues' the first time I read GOF, and was confidently expecting her to be unmasked as a man at the end of the book.  When it didn't happen, I later reviewed the Skeeter scenes, and decided I had merely been imagining it.  (The idea of a younger-looking Rita in the Pensieve made me think she had to be a woman after all, though that's probably some weird prejudice of mine showing through.)

The question I have, though, is, Does JKR *really* put clues in one book that will count as foreshadowing of revelations in a later book?  In the specific example of Rita, is she *meant* to have any mystery about her that survives GOF?

I hear the shouts of disbelief.  But, the whole of HPFGU's *existence* is based on the idea that she does this, I hear you cry.  The books are chock-full of foreshadowings, clues and red herrings.

My doubts concern the extent to which this is true *from book to book*.  They are, I admit, based on the way I read the first three books, in turn based on my experience of the types of literature out of which HP seems to have sprung.  If you read the Jennings series by Anthony Buckeridge (or any other school series), or the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett (or most other fantasy series: I except Tolkien, of course), it is obvious that you are reading a collection of episodes loosely linked together in the same fictional environment.  In the school series there is usually not even any attempt to pretend that the characters are getting any older.

So, to give some examples.  When I read COS, and Harry's Parseltongue turned out to be central to the solution of the mystery, my reaction was not: How clever of JKR to put that bit of foreshadowing in the zoo scene in PS; it was: How lucky for JKR that she had put that random bit of underage magic in PS to pick up on and use.  Even Hagrid's expulsion I saw in the same light.

In POA, I assumed that the idea that Scabbers was an animagus was something that JKR had only thought up when writing that book.  That McGonagall is an animagus was to me just part of the common currency of fantasy literature - what's the good of magic if you can't turn yourself into an animal?  Like magical flying, or spells to breathe underwater, it's bound to happen some time.  It's as inevitable as a microscopic Harry dodging a giant cat/rat/preying mantis (maybe in the country of the giants) will be.

In GOF, it never occurred to me that Polyjuice had been *foreshadowed* in COS, even after Crouch was revealed: I assumed that Crouch was not even a twinkle in JKR's eye when Hermione brewed Polyjuice for the first time.  She just picked up something not uncommon in stories of magic and ran with it, then picked it up again and used it a bit more.

Yes, there were clues *within* each book that pointed to (or deliberately sought to obscure) the resolution of that book - but that's a different thing.

In a similar vein, I had really hoped to see the centaurs again after PS, and Dobby after COS.  COS disappointed me by dropping the centaurs so comprehensively: POA did not disappoint in either respect, because by then I expected to be short-changed.

Of course I was not aware until after reading POA that JKR was giving interviews saying that she had conceived the whole as a series of seven, and hinting that a character was to die in GOF (I mean, who reads author interviews, in the normal course of things?).  It was really this last that started to make me view things differently.  I naturally wondered who the person could be, and reconsidered the books in that light: I started looking for clues to the *next* book.  And found that in fact that nothing in PS to POA would have helped: like many others I fingered Hagrid, wondered about Dumbledore, and thought Lupin unlikely for the simple reason that he would be dropped, not killed.  But Cedric? No.  So I still by and large felt that my fundamentally episodic conception of HP as a series was confirmed, and that only the broadest 'outline' questions - what is the link between Voldemort and Harry?  What are good and evil and how will the conflict between them be resolved? - could be addressed within the series as a whole.

So, in GOF, there might be a residual aura of mystery about Bagman or Skeeter - some questions that seem unanswered - but I have to say that my instinct was, and my deepest suspicions still are - that this is sloppy writing, not cunning foreshadowing.  Once you have got rid of anything that is either a clue to the surprise that Moody is Crouch, or a red herring to make you suspect Bagman, Crouch Sr, Skeeter, etc, is there anything left?  Any puzzle to be solved in a future book?  (OK, right at the end, we have some minor mysteries: where has Dumbledore sent Hagrid and Snape?  But these are openly presented as mysteries, they are not half-concealed clues that trip up the attentive reader.  The gleam is linked to the one mystery that *is* clearly set up for the entire series: what is the connection between Harry and Voldemort?)

It was only on joining HPFGU that I really began to consider that it was reasonable to consider that you could treat any part of the published series as being a sort of detective-story clue to anything that might be judged to be a mystery in the context of the series as a whole.

Here are some issues that look different if you regard the series as episodic: is there anything more to Snape, other than what JKR chooses to make up *after* the publication of GOF?  Was he an ex-DE in POA and before?  If the notorious Prank is alluded to again, will there just be another twist in a mystery that has no actual resolution in JKR's mind, in the spirit of X-Files?  Or is it forgotten now, as one suspects the singing Valentine is?  Are these backstories a gigantic bluff?

There is certainly some evidence that JKR's world is less stable than we might like to believe.  In COS, Dobby is presented as magically enslaved against his will, and his description of House-Elves generally implies that he is typical.  In GOF, the House-Elves are presented as psychologically enslaved, with clothes a symbol of sacking, not a magical means of setting free.  While we will doubtless be bending all our ingenuity to reconciling these two views when we look at Philip Nel's question, could it just be that the goalposts were quietly moved while we were busy reading POA?

More worrisomely, in PS, Harry's survival of Voldemort's attack as a baby is presented as a mystery; in COS Harry can assert it was the effect of his mother's love but that Voldemort's loss of power is (still) a mystery; in GOF, Voldemort, who one presumes ought to know (again, I find it hard to believe that an Evil Overlord can go against the genre convention of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in his moment of boasting) confirms that this also was the effect of mother-love.  Is this supposed to be a mystery or not?  One would like to suppose (from the detective story point of view) that the 'mother's love' explanation is an artfully constructed red herring [from the thematic point of view I would like it to be the truth] in which Harry misunderstands Dumbledore's original explanation about Quirrell and goes on to unconsciously bamboozle a deluded Voldemort: however, is JKR up to it?  Is any author?

So, is JKR a brilliant opportunist, or does she transcend the genres from which her stories spring?

I would like to be convinced it's the latter, but I confess I am pessimistic.

David


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