Why JKR wrote OoP the way she did IMO

[m.steinberger]

No: HPFGUIDX 70848

This is in response to those who asked to hear my theory for why JKR’s latest effort was so unsatisfactory. Of course, many people like the book, but I think we can agree that it has less universal appeal than any of her previous ones. Everyone has a least favorite book that they loved less, but still liked. OoP is the first HP that a large number of fans can’t stand. I don’t suppose there is any way to tell how widespread the dissatisfaction is, but my raw hunch sets it at more than 20% of fans who love HP otherwise. So when I write about OoP as less than a complete success, I hope that we can all agree that it has failed in some way to reach the success of its predecessors, and I would like to discuss why that might be.

 

I tend to take JKR at face value when she discusses her books, and she has said a number of things that I find significant, especially since they were offered on her own initiative in interviews, and not in response to questions. For example, she has repeatedly stated that her books are very moral. She has also stated that anyone who knows scripture will know how the books end. Furthermore, she has repeatedly hinted that Harry will die at the end, and from the look on her face when she said that on the Royal Albert Hall webcast, I believe her more than ever. Next: she keeps stressing the power of love, in interviews and in the dedication to OoP. As she said in that webcast, she doesn’t believe in magic, unless it’s the magical power of love.

 

I have noticed myself the firm moral hand under all the plotting and characterizations of HP. It is possible to chart all the times Harry and co. break rules, and to make a table of what his motive was, what the consequences were, and how he broke rules next as a result, and get a study in how to teach kids very patiently and precisely that rules can and sometimes must be broken for good cause, but you must be willing to take the consequences. The degree of care with which she manipulates the reader’s attitudes is incredible. For example, Harry’s first infringement, the Remembrall episode, leads to a heart-stopping chase after McGonagall which would stress to any young reader that good excuses don’t always help and might not be worth the fear afterwards. And then the happy ending prevents that lesson from being lost in righteous anger at the good excuse being ignored. Thus, the reader is left with the sense that good-cause rule-breaking might not pay.

 

I have at least fifty examples of this kind of close reading into JKR’s well-carved-in-plot moral education, and sometimes I wish I had nothing better to do than write them down for posterity (instead of just teaching them in my classes – one of my real-life hats), but we must move on, as they say.

 

In any case, I believe that all of HP serves foremost a moral purpose – not one but many – to *teach* (not just present) the value of life, the importance of friends and family, the importance of moral judgment (re rule-breaking, for one), the beauty of courage and humility, etc. etc. As far as I can tell, JKR tries to get her readers into Harry’s mindset so that they can learn with him how to be better people. When Neville got the winning points at the end of PS, she had the whole world (literally, not just Hogwarts) cheering for him – for a kid who stood up to “our heroes” and was knocked over like a patsy because he was too “out of it” to know that they were off to save the world. In the real world such a kid would be despised; in the hand of any other author, the readership would say, “Come on, give me a break. Neville’s just a loser and I’m not cheering for him.” But JKR was so successful at this lesson in the greatness of resisting peer pressure (a subject that has never been taught well before or since in the real world or fiction),  that it took HP4GU six years to finally get over that impression and start a thread about dissing the Slyths.

 

When Harry and Ron get that lecture from Lupin about Harry wasting his parents’ sacrifice on a bag of magic tricks, Harry buys it and *so does the reader*. Since when do people take moral lectures to heart in real life or fiction? Almost never. The normal reaction is like Harry’s reaction to Snape saying the same thing. Resentment, tuning out, etc. JKR set that scene up very carefully, IMO, with Snape’s lecture right before and many other elements in place besides (it takes me two hours to develop this in class, so forgive me not giving you twenty pages of text here), so that the reader will feel, together with Harry, “Yeah, maybe it was a stupid [face-saving word for “wrong”] thing to do.” (Of course, many adult readers will have felt like that from page one, but this is meant to have an effect on 13-yr-olds like Harry, who almost never feel that breaking rules is stupid/wrong.)

 

Onward to OoP: The moral lessons to be learned are obvious enough: Control your anger and don’t be too sure of yourself. Be aware that the universe won’t bail you out forever, so you have to be sensible and cautious. Love is always there even when you can’t feel it, but since you can’ t always feel it, you have to act decently even in its apparent absence. Caring about people is all that separates you from those who are evil. Anything else? That’s as far as I’ve gotten for now.

 

So I think JKR meant the reader to live through all of Harry’s mistakes in these respects together with him in order to come out 800 pages later having learned these lessons. She meant her readers to feel angry, hurt, confused, neglected and all that, so that they would feel his mistakes as their own and learn from Sirius’s unexpectable death (JKR stated at RA Hall that his death was meant to show the senselessness and unpredictability of death) that you can’t expect fairness to happen to you and your friends and loved ones. You have to do the work of being sensible, responsible, in control of your emotions and all the rest in order to prevent (to the extent possible) unfairness from happening to you and them.

 

But all this only works if your readers are ready to learn such a lesson. There are many reasons why they may not. For one, they may know these lessons already, in which case they will not be grateful for being dragged through the unpleasantness of Harry’s moral education. For a second, they may opt to enjoy Harry’s anger as onlookers and not take his situation to heart. They may find him cute, endearing, a role model for expressing oneself, a role model for getting back at an unjust society, or any of a dozen ways of relating to Harry other than feeling his pain and refusal to cooperate in a way that leads to self-revelation.

 

If the majority of the readership were writing posts about how they learned so much about life and emotions and responsibility from OoP, I would be writing posts about how well JKR had designed OoP to teach these lessons. I would be writing about how all the character flaws and plot weaknesses and the rest were necessary to further the moral lessons to be learned. The problem is that people have not been learning these lessons for themselves, in which case all the compromises JKR made to try to teach these lessons were wasted and unjustified.

 

It seems clear to me that the other function of OoP besides moral exercise is to set up the final confrontation between Voldemort and Harry, which will be the battle between love and hate. Harry will have to love Voldemort to death, and will probably have to die in the process, because killing is an act of hate, not love, and Harry has to use love, as we have been told by Dumbledore. I’m afraid there will be a death scene where Harry has to find it in his heart to forgive Voldemort before Harry dies, and this forgiveness will somehow be Voldemort’s undoing. Similar to the New Testament’s act of forgiving the sinners and dying for their sins. Perhaps Harry will persuade Voldemort to join him in crossing through the veil by promising to love Voldemort forever in the eternal afterlife.

 

In any case, no reader is going to buy such a saintly Harry unless we’ve seen he can be human first. So to the extent that JKR is determined to make Harry a saint later, to that extent she must make him an overly-flawed human being now. Ergo, the requirement that Harry be a miserable specimen of humanity is the starting point, and the rest of the plot is devised around how to justify his remaining flawed for a whole year. If you look at the plot from that angle, it makes lots of sense.

 

The only problem with this for me is that I am not interested in Saint Harry, nor forgiveness for Voldemort, and therefore I have nothing to gain from an overly-human Harry now.

 

So far, all of JKR’s moral themes have been pretty universal, promoted by all religions and creeds. The creed of love as JKR seems to be developing it is not universal at all, however, and I will be quite sorry to have it become the key to the books. Where I come from, love is primarily a way of treating each other that includes secondarily an emotional component. Love is the concern for and active promotion of another’s welfare to an extent matching one’s concern for and promotion of one’s own. Love produces no force or power; rather it takes a great deal of energy and effort to create and maintain. Anyway, that is another topic.

 

This is likely to be my last post, and I don’t expect to check the list anymore, not even for responses. I can’t afford all the time I’m taking away from promoting the welfare of the people whose welfare I can actually promote – meaning those in the RW. It’s been fun and very enlightening to compare my own analyses with the kind that others do, but there’s a time for everything, and this time is up for me. If any of you wish to continue with me any of the discussions I’ve been part of, you can post me offlist and I hope to respond.

 

The Admiring Skeptic

 


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