OOP: Questions for JKR

[m.steinberger]

No: HPFGUIDX 65961

----- Original Message -----
From: lee_lhs <lee_lhs at yahoo.com>
To: m.steinberger <steinber at zahav.net.il>
Sent: Monday, June 30, 2003 11:51 AM
Subject: Re: OOP: Questions for JKR


> >
> > Lee wrote: [Harry] starts out at the age of
> > 10, where he has been told all his life that he's nothing, that he
> is
> > responsible for all that goes wrong and that he has to be
> invisible.
> > As a ten year old, you buy into such things.
> > Then he arrived at Hogwarts and for the first time got some sense
> of
> > self value. He grew up realizing that he has worth, that he's not
> as
> > useless as his aunt and uncle tell him. He learns that he's wanted.
> > Best evidence for that is the things he hurls into Rons and
> > Hermoine's faces about what he had done.
> >
> > TAS: This is exactly the kind of anti-inspiration that I can't
> stand about OoP. If being told you're nothing makes you a nice
> person, and thinking you have some worth makes you obnoxious, then
> the self-esteem movement can keep itself far away from me. What's the
> use of "feeling good about yourself" if it makes you angry and
> hostile?
> >
>
> I'm familiar wth the type of family situation Harry stems from, and
> it has nothing to do with "being a nice person" if a kid behaves
> nicely.

TAS2: I agree that one can behave well on the outside and be horrid on the
inside, but I don't think Harry was portrayed that way in HP1-4. There were
dozens (hundreds?) of posts on this list commenting on what a nice kid Harry
was, and this included the attitude he was displaying. If he was meant to
have been seething on the inside and well-behaved on the outside, JKR would
have had no trouble writing him that way.

 You also misunderstand the concept about getting angry
> because of getting some self esteem. I'm not sure if you are familiar
> with the magnitute of bottled up emotions that exist in someone who
> has been "kept nice" for all their childhood.

TAS2: Actually, I've met some people like that. More than one. Some decide
that no matter what it costs them, they're not going to let it cost anyone
else. They go to therapy, or work it out exercising, or whatever, and though
it takes quite a few years, they resolve the anger without becoming nasty.

> In OOP, Harry is
> finally able to say "I've had it, not any longer, stop abusing me".
> Sure, he's no longer nice and behaved, but he hadn't the privilige of
> evjoying your good upbringing.

TAS2: That is true. However, as I commented above, JKR wrote Harry in HP1-4
(or at least HP1-3) as someone who was magically able to rise above his poor
upbringing. *How* he did so has been puzzling many on this list, but not
*whether* he did so. So if for three-four years she believed in the power of
"whatever" to help Harry be well-adjusted, why couldn't she identify that
"whatever" and keep it working now? Besides, in real life, there are always
the exceptions who do float above their upbringings, and Harry was doing
just fine as an exception till now. What happened in HP5 to justify Harry
losing his exceptional abilitiy to be well-adjusted? It would be one thing
if he had never been well-adjusted and was slowly improving, and his anger
in HP5 was as far as he had gotten. But that's not the case.

> He's a deeply troubled young man who
> has to deal with too much in a too short time. Put yourself into his
> (fictional) shoes for a while. You are at an age where you start
> thinking for yourself. You already feel responsible for the death of
> a fellow student. No one tells you what's really going on,
> your 'brother' gets almost killed because of you, then your godfather
> dies because you made mistakes. How would you react?

I don't agree that he has been a deeply troubled young man, and I do not
admire JKR's having made him one retroactively. Also, I think Harry's been
thinking for himself since HP1. (I was thinking for myself from a much
earlier age.) How would I react? I'd have written Dumbledore a letter in
chapter 1 explaining why it was very important to my emotional stability to
get a bit more information and attention than I was receiving, and I'd keep
trying to reach him until I got some answers. This sounds less preposterous
if you imagine the letter: "Dear Professor D., Hermione and Ron tell me that
the reason no one is telling me what is going on with "him" is that you told
them not to. I'm sure that you've got lots of very important reasons for
this, but please understand that my nerves are about to split from the idea
that "he" might be showing up on Privet Drive any moment. If you don't find
some way to clue me in, you might have a St. Mungo's patient instead of a
student next year. Please answer quick. Yours, Harry."

I would have preemted the anger and the problems in the first place. JKR
decided not to do that, which is a big shame, becuase she could have
demonstrated to millions of kids how it can be done.

> > Lee also wrote: [Harry's] blind trust that adults do the right
> things and know what's right
> > for him is shattered.
> >
> > TAS: Actually, Harry entered Hogwarts with zero trust in adults,
> and has been building it ever since. At the end of CoS, he finally
> dared ask Dumbledore a few personal questions. In PoA, he asked Lupin
> even more personal questions. Then he started trusting Sirius and
> writing him for advice. Now in OoP he's even learning to trust Snape
> a bit. This has nothing to do with the subject you were responding
> to, it's just an aside.
> >
>
> There's a difference between trusting an adult and trusting an adult
> to do the right thing. A HUGE difference.

TAS2: Yes. Harry's trusted Dumbledore from Book1 to do the right thing, and
now that's gone. What he's going to gain from this is not clear, and why he
had to learn it this way is beyond me. Dumbledore could have told Harry any
time in HP1-5 that he was clueless about what to do next, and could have
messed up without Harry being involved, and it would have accomplished the
same thing.

> > Lee again: Why would it have helped Harry to know why he was kept
> in the dark?
> > Because he would have known that he wasn't avoided by Dumbledore
> for
> > something he did (remember his guilt trip about DD being expelled
> > from various wizard organizations? How he thought that DD would not
> > talk to him because of that?), he would've been able to keep Voldie
> > out of his brain because he'd actually tried... He would've kept
> his
> > trust intact. There would've been no reason to become so angry,
> > because he would've understood why he was sent back to the Dursley
> > hell. Knowledge makes a lot of things more bearable, you know?
> > There's nothing worse than feeling you are not wanted, that you are
> > tossed out even though you asked to stay. There are a lot of things
> > you can do about HArry's situation and Dumbledore plain and simply
> > failed.
> >
> > TAS: You are misreading my question. If Harry were a real person,
> perhaps Dumbledore acting differently would have made a difference.
> But Harry is a construct whom JKR decided to write as an angry
> teenager. Given that JKR wants Harry angry for his sixteenth year,
> given that she feels it is necessary for his development for him to
> go through an angry year, he can only be supposed as the kind of kid
> who is going to be angry no matter what happens to him - there are
> kids like that. Without knowledge of the prophecy, Harry was angry at
> Dumbledore. With knowledge, he would have been angry at fate, or
> whatever. In any case, my question was not what good being told the
> prophecy might have done Harry. I want to know what the *author*
> wants of *parents and authority figures* (as expressed through
> Dumbeldore's regret) given that she feels that anger is a good thing
> for a teenager's development. If anger is a worthwhile given, in her
> book, then what does she want of Dumbledore?
> >
>
> Uh... I'm not sure that you and I have read the same book. Apart from
> the cases where Voldemort directly accessed Harry, the times when
> Harry reacted angry where all very well justified.

TAS2: Getting angry is *never* justified. It's just understandable. However,
in any given case, there is a way to deal with the stress and situation
without getting angry.

> There was a reason
> for him to become angry (and that he blew off like that with all the
> stress of learning (homework until past midnight) and the owls coming
> up... sorry, but the other kids in his year reacted similar. He *did*
> apologize for that, too.) Then, Harry suffers from nightmares and his
> scar is constantly aching. I know for sure that nightmares and a
> headache make me grumpy. Having to suffer that in a constant row, day
> after day... I don't know how I would handle that.

TAS2: I'd apologise to people in advance and work very hard to be pleasant
to people, that's all. Maybe take extra naps, or walks in the fresh air, or
ask Madam Pomfrey for some headache potion. Again, this would have been more
interesting and useful to readers than watching him step on everyone's toes.

> There are some thing that you can only learn through interaction,
> through experience. Maybe you were aware of all the thing right away,
> but a lot of people don't receive your privilegded upbringing
> strategies. They are not raised in patient families and they don't
> get the master formulae.

TAS2: So why didn't JKR show it to people? I suspect she knows them.

> What JKR wants of the parents? How about understanding that you have
> to trust your teenager to AVOID such reactions? That sometimes,
> sitting down and talk, that care and being there is so much more
> worth than the best intentions? That you have to give your teenager a
> chance to pin down their anger and deal with it? From your post I
> understand that you raise your kids in such a fashion, and that's a
> good thing. I wished that everyone would do. Unfortunately, not
> everyone does, and not all teenager have the advantage of having a
> strong hand helping them standing up again after their inexperience
> and feelings make them stumble.

TAS2: Yes- all this exists in real life. The question is what good it's
doing in HP.

> What happened in book 5 is kicking the heroes off the podests. And
> personally, I'm going to wait for book 7 until I make up my mind
> whether or not the PotterVerse is afailed experiment or not. In
> comparision, try Babylon 5. A great show, but it only all made sense
> in the end. And Harry Potter was never a kid's book.

Agreed.

>
> Lee
>
The Admiring (the list-members) Skeptic

P.S. I much appreciate everyone who sends me offlist copies of their replies. It may be a week before I get near the list itself, and this way I can keep replying to you. Thanks.



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