Character descriptions (was OoP covers...)

[GulPlum]

No: HPFGUIDX 58426

Morgan D. wrote, regarding the OoP conversation:

>It was Gulplum who said that, not me. I don't mind the mistake so much.
>I agree with Gulplum's opinions more often than not (although I'm glad
>he does the job of stating those opinions, composing long emails to
>defend them and taking responsibility, while I can selfishly lurk and
>enjoy the "combats" from a safe distance). But maybe *he* minds having
>his thoughts credited to someone else, so... he said those. I didn't.

I don't really care whether people correctly attribute my musings or not, 
as long as people don't attribute what someone else says to me. So, not 
surprisingly, it was in Morgan's purview to correct the attributions of 
anti-GrandPre sentiments. :-)

As for "enjoying the combats from a safe distance", I should say that I got 
several emails last night from people who agree with my sentiments but 
don't feel up to admitting to it in public. (You know who you are, and I 
no, I'm not going to "out" you.) :-)

As for long emails,  I have at least three in the works but am extremely 
busy with other things right now but hope to post them soon.

(BTW the "P" in my screen-name is upper-case - for utterly unimportant 
reasons, it's important to me) :-)

<snip>


>I wonder why. JKR seldom (never?) offers us much detailing in her
>character descriptions. She picks five or six adjectives to each
>character and keeps repeating them over and over. And somehow it seems
>so easy to "forget" those and make up characters in our minds that have
>little or nothing to do with how the author portrayed them in canon.
>Some of it can be blamed on movie contamination; some can be blamed on
>arguable "gospel" (Sirius being "dead sexy", for example); and some...
>cannot.
>
>But oh well, I'm not good in starting discussions, and it's not like
>the topic hasn't been discussed before, so...  *shrugs*

I don't think it *has* been discussed in any depth before, actually.

I have very mixed feelings about this issue. On the one hand, JKR's style 
is remarkable in that she instantly creates characters with whom we can 
empathise (or not, as individual cases demand) with just a thumbnail 
sketch. Yet on the other, we actually know extremely little about 
characters' appearance.

On one level, something came up on the Movie list (at least, I think it was 
the Movie list rather than here) when people were speculating about 
Cedric's casting: it's not until late in GoF that we discover that he has 
dark hair (considering he pops up several times in PoA). No poll was taken, 
but it seems from the conversation that most people (myself included) saw 
him as light-coloured. This is just yet another way that JKR plays on our 
perceptions and pre-conceptions and constantly surprises us.

(She's not the only one who's used this writing ploy: one of Anthony 
Burgess's books doesn't reveal until the very last page that the main 
protagonist is Black - it puts a completely different slant on the whole 
story and one is immediately inspired to read the whole thing again. I'm 
deliberately not naming the book.)

On a different level, it's occasionally annoying not to get a good mental 
picture of the characters, and the reader is left filling a lot of holes. 
Adult characters' ages are a recurring source of debate in HP fandom and 
there are very few clues in the text. Only two adult characters are given 
any kind of age-related terminology in their descriptions, namely 
Dumbledore (whose advanced age is drummed into our heads again and again) 
and Lupin, who is simply described as "young" (which becomes a plot point 
because we have no other grounds on which to equate him age-wise with 
Snape, or indeed James).

Someone who intrigues me in this respect and whose description gives 
absolutely no clues, is Karkaroff: he could conceivably be in either 
Snape's age group or Dumbeldore's. He and Snape are on first-name terms 
(were they at school together?) but then he's particularly informal with 
Dumbledore as well (is it only because of his headmaster status?). His 
relationships and role in the unfolding plot can be perceived very 
differently, depending on who is his contemporary. I won't bother with 
explaining those differences, as I think it's pretty obvious. (As a movie 
fan, I have a separate, and OT, problem because I can't decide whether my 
ideal casting would be Jurgen Prochnow as a Snape contemporary, or Max Von 
Sydow as a Dumbledore one). :-)

It is in this respect more than perhaps any other that I think that JKR 
reveals the "children's book" nature of the HP canon: to a child, "adults" 
are one amorphous mass and anyone over the age of 20 is close to past their 
prime, and anyone over 40 is simply "old".

--
GulPlum AKA Richard, who really has more important things to be doing right 
now, and should have gone out over an hour ago - back this evening with 
more, with any luck!