The Possibilities of Grey Snape/Dumbledore/Harry/Good writing and bad writing

[Bart Lidofsky]

No: HPFGUIDX 143109

Kathryn Jones wrote:

>    To me it is more that she contrasts the effects of mother's love. 
> Harry's mother gave her life, Tom's mother fled her life, Narcissa 
> offered up Snape's life, and Neville's mother has only life. The 
> differences of these mothers have had a crucial affect on the lives of 
> their children. Again there is a contrast between Molly as a mother and 
> Petunia as a mother, and the resulting personalities of the children due 
> to the difference styles of child-rearing. I don't think that she is 
> making any statement, so much as considering concepts or asking us to 
> consider concepts. 


Bart 
(note that this is a discussion of possibilities, and I will be 
coming to no conclusion here):
One problem with discussing the Harry Potter novels is switching back 
and forth between treating the characters as real people, and treating 
them as products of JKR's writing. I'm going to step into the latter for 
a moment.

Often, especially when a writer is on a deadline, he or she will do 
something for which I do not know the technical term (and there may not 
be one); I generally call it writing AT a character rather than writing 
the character. This occurs when a writer has a character do actions 
which, when looked from outside the character, make superficial sense, 
but, looking from inside the character's body, so to speak, actually do 
not make sense at all (a MAJOR culprit of this was Dan Brown in THE DA 
VINCI CODE). JKR steps into this every now and then, and this may be the 
root cause of a lot of the behavior of the characters that has caused 
much contention in this group (note that I am not simply attributing it 
to general bad writing, as I am to a very specific form of bad writing). 
Dumbledore's speech to the Dursleys probably fits into this mold; it 
gives the reader satisfaction, but, when the reader attempts to look at 
the scene from Dumbledore's point of view, it raises questions.

This brings up another factor that I often see in writing. Once again, I 
am unaware of the technical term (and, once again, there may not be 
one), but I tend to call it the "bad writing clue." This is especially 
true in writings where there is a mystery: when you see an example of 
bad writing from an otherwise good writer (for the postmodernists out 
there, make that an internally consistent writer), that is often a clue 
to the mystery. Unfortunately, JKR's writing, while largely consistent, 
is not quite enough to count on this (although, alternatively, with her 
habit of giving readers subtle clues, I would not put this past her, 
either).
Bart