What JKR Finds Important

[antoshachekhonte]

No: HPFGUIDX 116033


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "delwynmarch" <delwynmarch at y...> wrote:
> 
> Syroun wrote :
> "I feel things, very deeply and that is my core. That does not mean
> that I am mentally unstable, but I am known to cry at movies or even
> when I am watching TV, or listening to the radio and see or hear
> something that is compelling."
> 
> Del replies :
> I'm like that too. That's probably even why I reacted so violently to
> Harry's anger : because it created an emotional response in me.
> 
> Syroun wrote : 
> "Harry feels very deeply the loss of his parents and more recently, 
> the loss of Sirius. His situation is simply overwhelming emotionally
> and his reaction to it, in the abscence of parental control or
> adequate supervision, is expected. His ability to feel emotion and his
> propensity to react to it, or perhaps over-react, is seminal to his
> character; he will not change fundamentally, but his behaviour
> hopefully will become more deliberate and planned....otherwise he may
> not survive physically or emotionally. Isn't that the process of
> maturation for us all?"
> 
> Del replies :
> I would agree, if Harry hadn't been so UN-emotional in the previous
> books. That's even why of the reasons I never really managed to be
> close to him : because up to OoP, he was so unemotional. It's not just
> that he was keeping his emotions inside ; I could have related very
> well to that. But it really seemed to me like he did not *have* strong
> emotions. He would flare up once in a while, but most of the time, he
> just went through the motions. In a word, he was very *reasonable*,
> which is totally unlike me.
> And then suddenly, in OoP, he becomes completely unreasonable and
> overly emotional. He's got reasons for that, for sure. But somehow the
> transition was not well done for me, and it all looked like a hiatus.
> It looked like we still had calm, self-controlled Harry at the end of
> GoF, and suddenly we had angry, irrational Harry at the beginning of
> OoP. It was too much of a jump for me. And the fact that nobody called
> Harry on that change didn't help, because it really made me feel like
> I was suddenly reading a story about a different Harry.
> 
> Syroun wrote : 
> " Harry is not a non-emotive tree stump!"
> 
> Del replies :
> Well, no, but he did act like one most of the time before OoP. Why did
> that change ? Why did he suddenly change his way of coping with
> things, and most importantly, why was nobody in the books bothered
> with that ?
> 
> Del

Antosha:

This strikes me as analogous to the standard high school English teacher line that Hamlet 
is 'incapapable of action' in spite of the fact that he plots, feigns madness, sets up traps, 
kills a man, leaps into his girlfriend's grave... But, of course, he doesn't kill the bad guy till 
the end. So he hasn't 'acted.' Sheesh.

Harry IS emotional in the first four books--very emotional. It's just that, like many kids, he 
has no language or awareness of what he's feeling until it forces him into action. Anger 
and fear have caused him to use magic without meaning to, from his escapes from Dudley 
to blowing up Aunt Marge. He feels enormous concern (read empathy or, if you feel like it, 
love) for Ginny when she is taken by Tom Riddle in CoS, risking his own life rather than let 
her die. Finding the Mirror of Erised so fills him with a bittersweet mix of joy and sorrow 
that he is immobilized for a while. When Ron refuses to believe him in GoF, he is so 
furious and his sense of injustice (always strong in adolescents) so inflamed that he snubs 
one of his best friends for months--he does the same to Seamus, sadly, in OotP. When 
Ron starts talking to him again after the first task, it is that, rather than surviving the 
dragon, that most elates him. Cho reduces him to mush. (That may be hormones rather 
than emotion, if you want to get picky.)

What's different in OotP? First of all, Harry is going through a really bad phase of the 
adolescent pricklies, when just about everything ticks him off; and second of all, some 
truly exciting, terrifying and devastating things happen to him. Here, his world has 
reached a relatively ordered place--magic and friends over here, Dursleys over there. But 
suddenly that wall is broken--Hermione and Ron aren't talking with him, in spite of the 
fact that, unlike CoS, he's receiving their letters; he's having terrifying dreams on a regular 
basis; Dementors attack in Little Whinging; Dumbledore's authority at Hogwarts is steadily 
eroded by Umbridge; many people at school think he's crazy, or worse, a liar; and 
whatever hormonal/emotional stuff has been going on with Cho comes to a crisis. He's 
maturing and, at the same time, his world is demanding a reaction from him NOW. 

My wife, who teaches teens, almost couldn't keep reading OotP after a few hundred pages: 
the teen angst got to her. The thing is, it is remarkable that JKR is following Harry (and his 
friends) as they make that transition into self-awareness that should be (but isn't always) 
adulthood.