Void at the Heart of the Story

[dan]

No: HPFGUIDX 87696

It is refreshing to read Potter theory in which the personalities, 
boundaries, relationships of the central characters maintain a 
coherence with canon. There is a wide highway of the passive-
aggressive that running through the HP story, but it is self-
limiting. Rowling might suggest the psychiatric, but she neither 
inhabits nor parses it.

In part, the Potter story attacts fill, or, rather, there is a hole,
an absence at the core of the telling. In my reading, the emptiness,
like a flashing VACANCY sign, is the space between the boy in the
closet, the Real World Harry, and the telling, a negative space that
surrounds, for example, the Hogwarts Express and the School itself.
Thousands of readers peer into that space and attempt to fill it up,
but the vacancy remains, given shape by that failing, they way 
scientists identify black holes, for example. For us, it is a real 
space, and no matter our education, reading skills, personal vision, 
if we read the books, we become aware of that space. If we get 
hooked, it is perhaps partly because the narrative resonates in a 
similar space within ourselves, a salient, as it were, of the vacancy 
Rowling so carefully maintains. The space in Potter is a space in 
ourselves. To a large extent, this void, while many readings try
to fill it up with words or theories that come too easily to hand, or 
to bridge it blind, without understanding the nature of the story 
itself, echoes the desire that, at heart, accounts for the yearning 
at the heart of the story - which, in my reading, is the desire to be 
free of the closet's limitations, the desire for freedom, as it were.

Vanish into that absence. Many want to do it, and theory is
just such an attempt. I advocate a maintenance approach, which
preserves the space and that which constitutes it.

In a significant way, if Rowling trangresses at all, it is in loving
this stasis, this void at the heart of the story. That is why
attempts to fill it often seem so paltry, even tawdry. Rowling is 
radical, but by a careful exclusion that refuses adamantly pat 
answers, attempts to fill the void with emotional trinkets, with 
mystery for the sake of mystery, answer for the sake of closure.