Luna's Sight

[Dan Feeney]

No: HPFGUIDX 73502

Lori:
> A friend and I were discussing Luna, and well we agree. Luna is 
> going to be quite an important person in books 6 & 7. but there is 
> something else that is rather important to say. She can see (or so 
> she says, and I think she can) things that others can not see. She 
> talks about creatures that Hermoine says don't exist. What if when 
> Luna's mother died, she died right in front of Luna. Could her 
> mother have passed along powers to Luna and enables Luna to see 
> things that others can not see. I believe Luna, I think she can see 
> these things and I think she can see them because of her mother's 
> death. Anyone else want to comment about this? 

There is no doubt that Luna's mom's "accident" had some lasting 
effect on the girl - we need to know what spell her mom was doing, 
and what Luna saw. We need to know more about the publisher of the 
Quibbler, too. More centrally to my interest in Luna, however, is 
what the facts that are given to him mean to HP, in light of their 
last scene together. Whatever the effect on Luna her mother's demise, 
it is her relations with the DA and with individual members, 
Hermione, Ginny and Harry, that intrigues me. They all, like everyone 
else, think she's a bit odd, but seem to be reasonably friendly with 
her.

Now, as I mentioned to you, I see Luna as part of JKR that needs to 
be present in order to complete the liberation of HP from the closet. 
Luna is the other side of JKR, the anti-Hermione, as she stated, the 
alter ego, the openness to things other than logic or law or 
tradition. (I even claimed, in one post, that Luna didn't represent 
dream, but rather WAS dream, like dragons in Le Guin being magic, not 
having it.) In other words, the series so-called resolution requires 
Luna's presence, in some way - I place this significance in the 
writing itself, in the position that so-called knowledge or 
information occupies in Rowling. And where erised is the books 
themselves, for the readers, Luna is the capacity to dream. In 
conjunction with the plot-driven, Voldemort connected dreams of HP, 
there is dreaming itself. Take HP dreams out of the context. What 
would you do? You'd try to get down the hall, you'd try to open the 
door, you'd try to follow where the dream was leading. And, feeling, 
of course, that it's your dream, you'd stop at almost nothing to find 
the meaning of it. Was there a meaning to the dream aside from the 
big plot? If there was, it was connected to Luna, thematically. Why 
don't the let her say what "might be in there" regarding the locked 
room - which may or may not be "the room" of which AD speaks? Talk 
about irksome!

Anyway, the point is that everyone seems to be telling HP that even 
his dreams aren't his own. But the curiousity to find the end of the 
dream is very much his own.

On another Luna note, she's in Ravenclaw, and presumably loves 
studying, though the choice of study material is questionable, 
according to canon. Maybe she is also, even in the dream role, 
someone who can help HP focus, as it were, apply himself, by finding 
words, perhaps, for the motivations he has, which would be impossible 
to describe in a satisfying way in the books they way they have been 
written so far. In other words, Luna supplies a whole catagory of 
senses or ideas or thoughts or feelings that weren't accessible to 
JKR before. Or to HP. It's not so much what she can see, but what she 
can say.

danf