Harry and Achilles - prophecy, tragedy, and alternatives

[carin_in_oh]

No: HPFGUIDX 104807

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Jen Reese" <stevejjen at e...> wrote:
> That was fun, Carin! I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the 
> subject.
> 
> Jen R.

I genuinely didn't have any theories. I've just been mulling - apropos of the prophecy 
discussion - the behavior of characters from literature who are the subject of 
prophecies, and was tossing out names. Since I had blithely tossed out Achilles' name, 
and since I was sitting in my office surrounded by mythological dictionaries (for the 
project I'm _supposed_ to be working on and am not, since I'm spending all my time on 
HPfGU instead :), I thought I'd just see if Achilles had been a stupid person to mention. 
When I looked him up, I found I'd completely forgotten about the Phoenix/Centaur 
thing and the mother's protection thing. I don't think the comparison goes very far, 
except, as you say, that we might contemplate the mother's protection having a weak 
spot. It could be the eyes, as you say, but maybe Harry's Achilles heel is his scar. It 
seems that way in the case of Sirius's death. I wouldn't advocate any particular 
mythological or literary model as the pattern for Harry's story, but I think it's instructive 
to look at the way characters under similar pressure of doom/responsibility have acted, 
and see how JKR plays with those options or opens up others.

A few more thoughts about characters who live under prophecies:

The classic Greek model is that the parents of the prophecied-one go to great lengths 
to protect the child (or themselves) from the fulfillment of the prophecy, which 
inevitably leads to the prophecy coming true and disaster compounding itself. Think 
Oedipus.

Harry is an anti-type of this model if we see him from the perspective of his parents 
and protectors: he is preserved and hidden away by the one who has full knowledge of 
the prophecy _so that he will be able to fulfill it_, not so that he can avoid its 
fulfillment. Of course, from LV's point of view, the story is a little more orthodox: if LV 
were the protagonist in a Greek tragedy, he'd be well on his way to bringing about just 
what he was trying to avoid: with incomplete knowledge (like Oedipus, who learned 
that he was fated to kill his father but didn't know his own identity and so botched 
things up spectacularly), LV tried to preempt the working out of the prophecy and 
thereby strengthened his own nemesis.

Dumbledore, as the only one who until now has had knowledge of the full prophecy, 
has been working to preserve the conditions for its fulfillment, in the sense that he has 
been working to preserve Harry. How that situation will change now that more people 
know or will soon know the prophecy is going to be interesting to watch.

King Arthur/Merlin perhaps offers a closer parallel to Harry/DD: Merlin actually 
engineers the _conception_ of the boy who will be the prophecied leader of his people 
(I'm not saying DD did this...); Merlin places Arthur with a non-royal family to protect 
him and disguise his identity until he is ready to assume his rightful place. And here's 
the hopeful thing: when Arthur _does_ learn who he really is and that he has a 
prophecied role to step into, he rises to the occasion, spectacularly.  Arthur _does_ 
bring peace and order to his people, and the bittersweet part of the whole story is that 
everyone involved knows that that respite from the assault of evil forces can only be 
temporary. I'm sure the Harry-Arthur parallels have been treated ad nauseam, so I 
won't go on and on, but I like to think that JKR's model of how a burdensome prophecy 
will affect its subject owes more to the romance model than the Greek-tragic model.

Carin