Potterverse Coherence

[alhewison]

No: HPFGUIDX 38832

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., dfrankiswork at n... wrote:

> 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
<snip>
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.

IMO, the fact that you just thought how lucky it was, points to how 
clever it was! 


> 
> 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.
> 

<snip>  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.
> 
<snip> 
> 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.


> 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?

Possibly, but in CoS we see the House-Elf situation through the eyes 
of Dobby - seen by his fellow House-Elves as an exception, in 
Hagrid's words a weirdo. In GoF, we learn a different perspective 
through Winky et al. I accept that this could be just JKR changing 
the situation to suit her story, but some how I doubt it. Given that 
Hermione is, at least in someways an embodiment of her teenage self, 
I feel that JKR would always have wanted to show Hermione tackling a 
difficult social issue. I believe it was pre-planned. IMO, the House-
Elves will play an important role in the coming battle. 
> 
> 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?

With regard to Harry's survival, I suppose I'm still hoping that it 
was MORE than Lily's sacrifice that saved him. The fact that 
Voldemort wanted to kill Harry at all must have some bearing on why 
Harry survived - mustn't it? Unless, it wasn't so much that Voldemort 
was desperate to kill Harry *specifically*, but had decided he was 
going to. Perhaps Voldemort was really *trying* to spare Lily. I 
don't think that works though. He may have been willingly to save 
Lily, but it didn't seem to take him more than a few seconds to 
change his mind and kill her.  Voldemort sometimes seems quite slow 
on the uptake, doesn't initially *know* what caused Harry to surive. 
Dumbledore only feeds Harry information on a "need to know" basis. I 
am still hoping that the survival will prove to be more complicated 
that it Harry currently believes.
> 
> So, is JKR a brilliant opportunist, or does she transcend the 
genres from which her stories spring?
> 
I suspect that she is a mixture of both. Given that she spent 5 years 
plannning the books before she started to write them, she must have 
had quite a structure on which to base the books. All those notebooks 
and backstories she has written to seem to point to more than just 
opportunism. I think that she has not found the structure to be 
foolproof though - hence deleting Rita Skeeter from the original 
Leaky Cauldron scene, and deleting the Weasley cousin from GoF. 

I do wonder though, if JKR spent so much time planning and 
structuring the series, why it is taking her so loooong to write OoP!

Ali