Coherence II

[davewitley]

No: HPFGUIDX 39002

I got rather more replies to my coherence post than I expected - the 
reverse of the usual situation.

I just want to pick up on two points: to refine what I mean about 
coherence from book to book, and to discuss the mother's love thing 
in particular.

Much of what I wrote was merely autobiographical - I was trying to 
explain where I am coming from, particularly the type of books I read 
that might seem to be precursors to HP.  Quite simply, I have had in 
the past a very low expectation of authors' willingness to create a 
consistent universe.  Like Pippin, I expect my background to be 
distinctly impressionistic: perhaps there is a discussion to be had 
there about the tension between archetypal and detective-story, as 
well as novelistic, characters.  (J.I.M. Stewart, aka Michael Innes, 
has written on the problem that detective authors face with 
characterisation: the better drawn their characters, the less 
psychologically plausible it is to keep them all equally suspect up 
to the final denouement.)  Anyway, I am quite happy to concede that 
there is a clear developmental arc for the main characters that is 
intended to be present from the beginning (Finwitch's point), and 
that there are clearly signalled 'problems' (such as why Voldemort 
attacked Harry, why Snape flip-flopped into and out of DEism, what 
exactly was going on when James rescued Snape) awaiting a later book 
for resolution.  There are also blanks awaiting filling in, for 
example, did Lily have no friends at school?

What I remain to be convinced of is that there are *clues* which make 
no sense in terms of the book they are in, but do make sense in a 
later book.

The sort of thing I am thinking of would be if Scabbers had done 
something odd in COS or PS, for example hiding in a hurry from 
somebody who later turns out to have known Pettigrew well enough to 
recognise him.  I realise this is not a very good example as the 
whole animagi thing is supposed to be secret from all except the 
Marauders themselves, and Voldemort.  But you get the idea.  Things 
that we could look back on *from one book to another* and say "ah, 
*now* we realise what that was about!"  Another example for symposium 
attenders would be a mysterious absence of Neville (actually seeing 
his parents), or an overreaction by him to pain in another person, in 
POA or before.

I don't count simple foreshadowings such as Harry's Parseltongue, 
because they are not mysterious - we just assume in PS with Harry 
that it's a wizard thing to talk to snakes.  The trouble with these 
is that *any* apparently innocuous statement can be one of those.  
The name of a Sorted pupil, the fact that Mr Jordan is owed money by 
Bagman, that fact that the statue of Boris the Bewildered has his 
gloves on the wrong hands (one of my all time favourite lines), ad 
infinitum.

GOF is apparently full of such clues or puzzles: Skeeter's 
mannishness, her and Winky's assertions about Bagman, which seem to 
go beyond anything we know about him, the remarks the Weasleys make 
about the Voldemort era, the identity of the fourth man at Crouch's 
trial, Dumbledore's gleam, the missing three at the rebirthing 
party.  My worry is that they (apart from the gleam) will turn out to 
be either forgotten (eg the fourth man) or just overdone in-book red 
herrings (Rita and Winky on Bagman to make us think he is the 
faithful servant, the missing three to make us suspect Bagman or 
Snape also).  Luke has written on this several months ago.

So, a challenge for you all: find something in an early book which is 
a puzzle that is resolved in a later one.  I repeat, I am *not* 
talking about mere foreshadowings, I am talking about mysteries, and 
I am *not* talking about mysteries that have been clearly presented 
as such.  I mean clues that with some thought and luck might have 
given the reader help in cracking the puzzle in the later book.

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The Voldemort mysteries.  There are three of these: how Harry 
survived, how Voldemort lost his powers, and why he attacked Harry in 
the first place.

Mystery 1: how Harry survived.  At the end of PS, this is *not* 
explained.  All Dumbledore says is that *Quirrell* could not touch 
Harry safely because of Lily's love and/or sacrifice (I will say more 
about the distinction later).  At the end of COS, Harry asserts that 
it *was* because of Lilly's love.  This is a reasonable deduction, 
but Dumbledore nowhere endorses it.  Riddle does, of course, but we 
may choose to believe he is deluded or lying.

Mystery 2: how Voldemort lost his powers. At the end of PS this is 
not discussed.  At the end of COS, Harry says that nobody knows how 
it happened.  Again, one wonders why he is so sure.  Did he have an 
off-stage discussion with Dumbledore? That would seem deeply unfair 
to the reader.  Did he just assume it, even though Dumbledore did not 
discuss it, perhaps because it is plain that most of the WW is 
baffled by it?

However, at the end of GOF, Voldemort states fairly clearly that he 
lost his powers because his curse (assumed AK, as Crouch/Moody 
assumed) 'rebounded' off Harry's protection, still assumed to be 
Lily's love.  Again, we may consider that Voldemort is lying or 
deluded, and there are attractions to the 'deluded' theory, as it can 
be linked with the gleam.

There are two basic possibilities, IMO.

A.  Voldemort is right (and truthful), and in fact Lily's love is 
the 'solution' to mysteries 1 and 2.  If so, I feel slightly cheated 
that there are no authorial fanfares that say 'here's the answer'.  
Harry doesn't pause to say "Now I understand this mysery that nobody 
in the whole WW knows".  In his debrief, there is no mention of 
Sirius slapping his forehead and saying "Lily's love! How wonderful! 
How simple! And yet how it explains everything! Now I understand why 
Voldemort was crippled!"  As a purported explanation it may stack up, 
but if so it is just not given the prominence it deserves.

B. Voldemort is wrong, and there is more to Voldemort's defeat, and 
possibly Harry's survival, than Lily's love. (This has strong 
emotional appeal to all who feel that it is a slight on all other 
mothers who are presumed to have died protecting their offspring - 
again, I discuss further below.)  From the detective story point of 
view, this is also much better, and Harry's comments to Riddle, and 
Voldemort's rebirthing speech are then misdirection.  It is a 
commentary on Voldemort's dumb evil overlordness that he swallows 
this twice, once as Riddle, again at rebirthing.  One would hope that 
a really consummate villain would at least say "Hang on, that can't 
quite be right... Never mind, let's get on with the Aveda Keadvra-
ing, it's so much more fun than figuring out exactly what 
happened..." and it would, IMO, give the reader a little bit more 
chance to see that some misdirecting is going on.  (A parallel would 
be the Great Slytherin Misdirection, where Hagrid says "Everybody 
says Hufflepuff are a load of duffers but..." before being cut off.  
It signals that house prejudices *are* just that, which is all we 
need.  I feel that, to be fair, misdirection should clearly look like 
misdirection, once the reader looks at it closely with that 
possibility in mind.)

I think the problem with this is that, to be satisfactory, 
misdirection should be of the kind that on re-reading makes us say 
that we should have spotted the answer all along.  But there are no 
puzzles in the Lily's love explanation *as an explanation*.  It may 
be unsatisfying emotionally or thematically, but there is no actual 
logical obstacle.  And there are no other suspects waiting in the 
wings at the moment - all other explanations require a large dose of 
reader invention which makes a reverse memory charm look like solid 
canon: new anti-AK charms perfected by the Department of Mysteries; 
some intrinsic property to Harry (like Stonedness) that makes him a 
fundamentally different order of being; that he himself is the 
product of an experiment; the use of Time Turners on a scale of 
decades.  In short, the puzzles of the Mother Love theory are 
presentational, not substantive: why does JKR say what she does about 
it when she does?

I realise I am a little unclear about what I find unsatisfactory 
about all this: the best I can say is that Harry's COS comments and 
Voldemort's speech do not have the 'flavour' either of revelation, or 
of JKR's other misdirections.  Yet it seems they must be one or the 
other.  Can anyone help?

I promised above to comment on the Lily's love theory itself.  My 
understanding of this is that her sacrifice alone, even on Harry's 
behalf, was not the thing that actually provided the protection.  
That was provided by the depth and, in some sense, purity of her love 
for Harry.  The protection only came into force when she died, 
because her death demonstrated the nature of that love.  She 
specifically offered herself in Harry's place, so there was no self-
motivation, and she carried through on her promise.  So it's the 
combination of act and motive that counts.

As far as other mothers are concerned, my feeling is that 
thematically this is not a problem.  There must be some uniqueness 
somewhere around Harry - he is signalled out as unique from the 
start.  I am far more comfortable with the idea that it was his 
mother's love that was the unique thing in the whole situation, than 
that he is the heir of Gryffindor or is otherwise a special being.  
At least there is some chance of reconciling that with the theme of 
choice.  (Of course, I would be even more comfortable with a history 
that gives *no* unique roles - or everybody is unique in their own 
way - but that is not on offer in the Potterverse.)

David