Why are wizards so incompetent? (Was Face it, there is a reward for being nice (was Re: Sadistic Snape))

[Katherine Farmar]

No: HPFGUIDX 140421

Pippin:
> >
> > It distances us from the characters a little, yes. But that's
> > JKR being post-modern again. Just because something would make
> > the story more affecting doesn't mean it's true. Think of all the
> > little kids who were disappointed that Snape wasn't the villain in
> > SS/PS. Snape makes a much more satisfactory villain than
> > Quirrell or Voldemort, but it doesn't mean that's what he is.
> >

Lupinlore:
>Postmodern?  By some definitions of the term, yes.  Perhaps JKR even
>intends it that way.  But I think it (the distancing effect by which
>we often find ourselves unable to sympathize with the characters and
>feeling contempt for Hogwarts) is much more likely to just be poor
>writing and bad characterization.  Let's face it, JKR is often ham-
>fisted beyond belief and deeply enslaved to exhausted and boring
>formulas about heroes and their journeys.
<le snip>
In fact, I think what JKR is really trying to do is emphasize her
>moral story (concerning which I don't think she has a "postmodern"
>thought in her head by almost any common definition of the term) by
>doing everything in her power to emphasize how "heroic" Harry and his
>friends are.  That means surrounding them with incompetent and
>corrupt adults, or no adults at all.  And thus her writing is
>sometimes ham-fisted and her characterization so unbelievable as to
>jar you right out of the narrative.  Why has Harry lost all his
>father figures?  To emphasize how heroic he is.  Why is the wizarding
>world corrupt?  To emphasize how morally heroic Harry and his friends
>are.  Why does no one pay attention to Harry's emotional and, often,
>even his physical hurts?  To emphasize how heroic he is. Why is
>Hogwarts such a poorly run school filled with such poor and/or
>abusive teachers?  To emphasize how heroic Harry is.
<le snip, part deux>
>  if emphasizing the
>shining quality of that moral purity means making the Wizarding World
>look like a repellant and unbelievable cesspool, then so much the
>worse for the Wizarding World.
>
>It really is tiresome, boring, and often very poorly written.



Hey, don't hold back there, Lupinlore, tell us what you really feel. ;-)

Joking aside, the incompetence of many of the adults of the WW is a problem
in the series. The corruption I don't have a problem with; it strikes 
me as pretty
realistic, actually, especially given that the WW is a small, insular, inbred
community where everyone knows (or at least knows of) everyone else.
Cronyism and backhanders flourish in that kind of environment. When the
person you're supposed to fine or punish or fail at their exams is your
drinking buddy's son, your niece's boyfriend, *and* your boss's 
cousin, rather than
some randomite, it's much easier to look the other way and justify 
this to yourself --
cos, hey, you *know* this kid, and you *know* he's basically all 
right, right? It's
not going to do any harm this once, right? But that kind of 
exception-making can
become corrosive when everybody's doing it, and in a small enough community,
everyone *will* do it once the precedent's been set. You can't be too nasty to
people you depend on, or people you need to interact with every day. As a
result, certain restraints on antisocial behaviour are eroded. (For an extreme
real-life example of this kind of process, see Pitcairn Island. Whatever the
faults of the WW,  it's not as bad as *that*.)

The incompetence, though... yeah, that's a problem. To a certain extent you
can hand-wave it away; John Schilling remarked on rec.arts.sf.written that

"the Wizarding world is noticeably backwards in its approach to, well,
just about everything that isn't Wizardry.  Which is actually plausible,
given how useful Wizardry seems to be for lots of things the rest of us
have had to resort to Extreme Cleverness for."

In other words: they don't need to be smart, they can do magic! Cop-out, I
know, but it works if you don't push it too far. The Knight Bus doesn't
need to be driven by someone who actually knows the rules of the road,
since it magically avoids all obstacles. Wizards generally can afford to be a
bit sloppy with their concealment, because if a Muggle sees something
suspicious they can be memory-charmed.

But push it too far, and this explanation starts to crack. It doesn't explain
why Voldemort hasn't read the Evil Overlord List (*this* is the guy that
had the wizarding world living in utter terror for eleven years?). The ability
to understand and account for human motivations and the ability to plan
your way out of a wet paper bag are *not* things that magic can substitute
for. So as far as that's concerned, yes, I chalk it up to incompetent writing.

I think there's a specific reason why the writing falls down here, though;
it's the combination of several different genres of writing with aims that
are sometimes at cross-purposes and tend to interfere with each other.
It's a convention of children's adventure stories that adults are either
absent or irrelevant for most of the story, because otherwise the kids aren't
going to be having adventures. And that's fine if your story is *just* a
children's adventure story -- it's not necessarily believable in itself, but
it's the price of admission, and if the reader is willing to read a children's
adventure story, they'll be willing to suspend disbelief to that extent.

But HP is not just a children's adventure story. It's got elements of mystery,
supernatural horror, and didactic satire, each of which come along with
their own baggage, their own conventions and expectations, and their own
little admission-charges that we have to pay if our belief is to remain
suspended. With each extra generic convention, the likelihood that the
author's going to cut corners increases; and Rowling does cut corners,
chiefly by having people act like idiots.

I don't think it's *just* a matter of making Harry look good -- and, honestly,
if that's the object she's failing miserably; I'm re-reading OotP at the
moment and I want to smack Harry for being so nasty to Dudley -- granted,
it's *Dudley* he's being nasty to, and part of the nastiness is calling Dudley
out on the bullying he's been doing, but mostly Harry's just taking out his
frustrations on the nearest available target, which is not remotely fair and
isn't going to make things better for anyone, least of all Harry (and that was
a tangent, but it struck me quite forcibly when I was reading it). 
It's mostly a matter of
the difficult balancing act between didactic satire and children's adventure
story. The satire is aimed at adult institutions and prejudices, but the main
character is a child/adolescent; he has to be effective for the story 
to be satisfying,
but for him to be effective *at all* he's *bound* to make the adults look bad,
because they're *adults* and he's a *kid* and he's *running rings round them*.
And this is a problem, because the author is asking us to take the WW 
seriously
as a mirror of our society, so that we can draw lessons from it -- 
that's what satire
does -- but would a kid be able to do that in our society? Probably 
not, unless
the adults he was surrounded with were all idiots.

Maybe it's possible to balance these two sets of expectations and conventions
some other way; if so, Rowling hasn't figured it out and has 
defaulted to "Idiot
World".

And I believe that's where we came in...


Katherine