Your greatest fear . . .

[Dan Feeney]

No: HPFGUIDX 121374


cubfanbudwoman wrote:
> And you're saying that you believe the ambiguity is intentional? Or 
that JKR just *is* ambiguous in this area?

Dan:
Gosh, I don't know how to separate intention from being, honestly. 
Our "way" is where we are, right? There are many responses to 
whatever Rowling is doing in terms of ethics and morality - the 
plethora of theories about character intention signals not only that 
the books can be read partially as detective fiction, but also that 
Rowling has created a scenario wherein folks can attribute 
("project") what motives they find reasonable unto the characters - 
Rowling doesn't relate these motivations to us directly. I think many 
novels are not only more explicit in describing motivation, but are 
almost solely about character motivation. Rowling describes/creates 
situations, and actions - and puts different characters in them. She 
does not talk about a character's "being," and she uses "soul" as if 
it were almost mundane, a structuralist kind of soul. Even when she 
talks about what's going on inside certain characters' heads, she 
does it as if parsing tremor data from underground faults, say. So 
the mental space of the characters is, well, something we gather from 
the data, their actions. Open to interpretation, yes, but no 
less "singular" or "real" for all that.

cubfanbudwoman:
> Can you explain more about what you meant by the "ethical immensity 
of Rowling's project," since you see her as "clear as day" and her 
opus as "in large part a cautionary tale."  Am I correct that you're 
referring to your belief that JKR abhors moral procedure, doesn't 
believe in true omniscience?  

Dan: 
Again, I don't know what Rowling "believes," but the central theme 
seems to be connected to knowledge and deception, to some kind of 
secular Calvanism (Harry at the Second Task, for example, where he 
acts without a lot of reflection or philosophy) and to systems of 
morality, or systems of value that can cloud, but also certainly 
provide a kind of rubric for such acts (pure blood politics, house 
separation, eg.). These systems become, well, irrelevant, a kind of 
noise, even.

Before the current mention of fate on the list, I had posted that 
fate, long a useful concept, has, by way of mainstream 
instrumentality, become a perfectly inane, banal concept. It is never 
a debate about external forces vs. internal forces, but about HOW the 
two come together, as it were, in any individual in any situation. 
They cannot be separated, IMHO. Now, if Harry is indeed in the 
closet, and is somehow enacting a kind of creative liberation from 
it, physically and/or mentally and/or spiritually, as it were, then 
what we see in the books might just be the mirror of what we can 
acheive ourselves, a kind of resonating liberation struggle, like the 
one Hans describes using his readings - hence the mirroring dynamic 
and the plethora of theories. I am coming from a more existential 
place, yunno? But I am talking essentially about the same thing.

After all, we need different things, are on different paths and all 
that, and there are, so I've read, many paths to freedom.

Dan