In essense divided (Was: Dead Men Do Not Speak At All?)

[Kirstini]

No: HPFGUIDX 72750

In yet another wonderful, thought-provoking post (I really want to 
know how he does it. Talent, I suppose.) Dan wrote:
> Yes, it makes perfect sense that once HP 
inhabits this isolation, he will, in a sense, "live" as he has not 
done yet. And I have figured, for myself, one way in which to parse 
the sense or feeling of the conflict.
 "in essense divided"
 <snip>
HP and LV are, in fact, the same person, or entity. The curse (the 
death of HP's parents, in a way) created this split. In literary 
terms LV is a conflicting (opposed)response to... uh... the world, 
I'll say, as are the so-called muggle and witch wizard worlds.> 

Me (Kirstini): This is particularly interesting when read in 
conjunction with the "Queer as Harry Potter" essay that was doing the 
rounds on OT Chat a couple of weeks ago, which compared the 
trajectory of the story to the process of coming out(of the closet?) 
or de-normalising oneself - ie, the process of becoming an individual 
(against society?). I think that your Freudian reading is perfectly 
valid - if Harry can be read as an Everyperson, then the magical 
world itself becomes an externalised presentation of individual 
development. Freudian readings tend to presume universal truths about 
people, which I think is why they're rather unfashionable just now. 
However, Harry is presented in the narrative as the point of 
identification for the reader, and the period of growth to adulthood 
also a universal experience, if not an absolute, singular truth.

Therefore, (puts on a psychoanalytic sort of hat), we could note that 
Harry first feels extreme rage in PoA, where we are presented with 
his latent childhood trauma, remembered when under the influence of a 
Dementor - flashes of green light and high-pitched laughter replace 
Kristevan pre-Oedipal drives. In Gof, the narrative mentions that 
Harry has no memory of having been hugged by a mother - suggesting a 
severed relationship from the maternal body as a source of trauma. 
It's from this point that he derives all his rage. The first 
manifestation of uncontrollable anger as a forsce, in PoA, is 
directed against Sirius when Harry believes him to be the source of 
this trauma.  What I noticed in OoP was that Harry's scar bothered 
him every time he experienced anger - I thought that someone was 
eventually going to point out that his anger made it easier for 
Voldemort to access him (I suppose this was sort of hinted at, 
inversely). Becoming more in touch with the id, the terrible power 
inside, at moments of emotion. 

Dan again:
>One of the things that got me on this line of thinking was the way 
in which Dolores Umbridge seemed to represent exactly what HP was 
doing to himself anyway, BEFORE she appeared on the scene. (That is, 
she was active before we knew her, but HP was already on his angsty 
path, and then, my goodness, there she is! DADA teacher! Wow. And in 
retrospect identifiably the cause of his troubles since the dementor 
attack.) If Dolores Umbridge didn't exist as DADA, HP would have had 
to invent her.>

Me again: This got me thinking along slightly different lines, to do 
with the earlier comment about an externalisation of experience, 
because take Umbridge away from the mix, and what you have is a self-
mutilating teenager, expressing rage upon the body as point of 
contact with the outside world. I had previously read that quill as a 
intertextual nod to Kafka's story "In the Penal Colony"; of course, 
the mutilation there is enacted by an external machine upon the body. 
But Harry has to write the lines himself...

 
And Dan:
> Okay, so, maybe HP isn't exactly a freudian I, or MoM the freudian 
they, or LV the freudian it, and so on, but to test the books as 
though this COULD be the case will be illuminating...>
Perhaps, perhaps not, but it still provides a fascinating few ways of 
thinking. Thankyou!

Kirstini
Spark-plugs humming...