[HPforGrownups] Re: Ending the series (was Dept. of Mysteries, "Love" room.)

[Katherine Coble]

No: HPFGUIDX 130385


On Jun 9, 2005, at 12:10 PM, madorganization wrote:

>
>  Alisha:
>  Wow, that really got my defenses up, so I'll try to keep calm about
>  this.  I never said that happy endings made the difference between
>  fiction and literature.  I said that literature tells us what we
>  need to hear as opposed to what we want to hear. 

K:  I don't know that I agree on this point.   I don't think that 
"literature" always has to serve some artificially ennobled calling, 
like making us Aware Of The Plight Of Others.  I think that is an 
artificial construct papered together by universities and Serious 
Authors.    To my way of thinking, books are like trains; they are 
there to take the reader on a journey.   Sometimes you want to get on 
the train to go to a fun place, like the shore.   Other times you may 
want to get on to go to visit an elderly aunt or fulfill a court date 
in another town.   One train isn't better than the other.  They both 
serve a purpose.

My hope for this lifetime is to see the false snobbery about Literature 
vs. Novels abolished.   Not every damn book has to be Theodore Dreiser, 
and not every book that isn't about Man's Inhumanity To Man is trash.


>  Sometimes we need
>  to hear that Elizabeth Bennet, for all her poor upbringing and
>  uncouth family, wins the heart of Darcy and goes on to do great and
>  noble things with her new position.  Sometimes we need to know that
>  good people have good things happen to them.


K :  And sometimes we are adults who can figure out what we need on our 
own, without being preached at by an Author Who Knows Better.   So, we 
put down the electric bill and the phone bill and turn off the news of 
the latest explosions and pick up a book to take the train to the 
seaside for twenty minutes or so.

[This is my problem with Oprah's book club.  Every book is about 
someone being  raped or killed or dying of AIDS.  Now she's abandoned 
all pretense and embraced Faulkner.   Oprah may have an easy enough 
life to routinely depress herself when she reads.  I do not.]


>   And sometimes it's
>  true, that does happen.  However, a happy ending does not
>  necessarily make a good ending.

K:  Is this the castor oil school of reading?  "The boy dies, but it's 
GOOD for you, so read it and heal!!!!"

I'd compare this case to _The Sisterhood Of The Travelling Pants_. Both 
are books with young people, and both deal honestly and upfront with 
death.   Both books end happily, even though there is much grieving 
along the way.  I don't see why this is a bad thing.

>   Harry Potter's story is a
>  distinctly moral story (not religious, not allegorical, just
>  moral).  Therefore it is necessary that Good triumph over Evil in
>  the end.  It is not, however, necessary that Harry lives and
>  Voldemort dies. 

K:  It may not be necessary for the structure of the story, but I think 
it is necessary for the theme of the story, as I've mentioned 
previously.   These are stories about maturity and ad hoc families.   
They are not stories about Christology, and Harry Potter is NOT Sydney 
Carton.



> Think of Hamlet (depressing, I know).  Hamlet
>  doesn't survive the story, but he takes down his unscrupulous mother
>  and his villainous uncle before he goes. 

K:  Hamlet is a different story altogether.  It is a tragedy that is 
clearly played that way from beginning to end.   It is a populist play 
designed to offer the audience the Schadenfreude of seeing that the 
Royals in the Palace are even more snafu'd then they are.   When you 
were living in the dirt and crossing rivers of urine to buy spoiled 
meat, this kind of play had an odd sense of feelgood about it.    You 
went in _knowing_ that everyone was toast.

Harry Potter is not structured this way at all.



>  That's what's important. 
>  JKR may be able to tell her story without having Harry die.  That
>  would work.  It would also work to have Harry die to show that
>  sacrifice is sometimes necessary for victory. 


K:  I think she shows that in numerous ways, but also shows the hero 
still standing for a purpose.

>  I do think, however,
>  that even if Harry lives, it won't be the happy ending most children
>  are expecting.  If JKR is to make this story believable and real,
>  then Harry will never be the same again.  We won't ever see that
>  happy, healthy boy we met on the train to Hogwart's.

K:  What books are you reading?  On that first train to Hogwart's, 
Harry was newly happy, and not all that healthy.  He was undernourished 
and maladjusted.  Dumbledore even comments on it later.   Unlike Frodo, 
who lived for many decades in the somnolent peace of the Shire, Harry 
had a rough go from the beginning.   Unlike Frodo, who lazed around 
with his friends for months before starting on his journey, Harry is 
thrown right in.

Frodo is an allegorical character who embodies the lost hopes of all 
the young men who left Britain to fight a war they didn't understand 
against a tyrant they feared.   They came back to an island that had 
been despoiled by the tentacles of that war and realized that the realm 
for which they watched their friends die would never return.   That's 
the story Tolkein wrote from his own experiences, viewed through the 
lens of his Catholicsm; a religion that celebrates the sacrifice of 
Christ.

As I've opined previously, Rowling is writing phase 2 of what Tolkein 
wrote.   She grew up in that Britain, on whose empire the sun now 
routinely sets.   Think of the Harry Potter novels not as twins to the 
Tolkein works but as a protracted playing out of the Cleansing of the 
Shire.   Britain's problems are no longer with Mordor (Germany), but 
with its own outmoded class system.  The snobby Purebloods are Sharkey, 
and the Halfbloods, Muggleborns, etc. are the Hobbits.

So many people seem to be caught up in the Campbellized version of the 
Hero's  Journey that I think they will be disappointed if Harry 
_doesn't_ end up paying some grave psychic price and spending his 
twilight years in a dodgy tower block with a needle and cookspoon.


>   To bring in a
>  similar story, he'd have to be like Frodo, broken by his
>  experience. 
>
>  -Alisha
>
>  " 'But.' said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, 'I thought you
>  were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all
>  you have done.'
>  'So I thought too, once. But I have been deeply hurt, Sam. I tried
>  to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must
>  often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give
>  them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.'"
>
>  J.R.R. Tolkien
>  Return of the King
>
>

K:  As an aside, I think that there can be a small allegory made to the 
Hobbits thusly:

Sam=Harry
Merry=Hermione
Pippin=Ron
Frodo=Dumbledore

That is why I have always thought that Dumbledore will take the ship to 
the Grayhavens.  Er, die, I mean.

Katherine, who is of the Neil Stephenson/Stephen King school of 
Fictional Equivalences.


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