Role of ESE in Hero's Quest (was:Re: Was HPB's ending BANG-y?...)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 147614

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "horridporrid03" 
<horridporrid03 at ...> wrote:

<snip>

> And second, JKR has stated many, many times, that she's not at all 
> interested in the fantasy genre.  So I doubt she's really going for 
> a fantasy story with her series.

Stated and done are not quite the same thing.  I think there's a lot 
about it which can be fit, at least partially, into some of the many 
subgenres within that larger label.  She's consciously twisting and 
playing with the folklore which is the fuel for many a work within 
the genre (love the wacky house-elves).  If you're thinking of the 
Time interview, that was a mess on so many levels about the fantasy 
stuff, IMO (and not just MO, either).

> Betsy Hp:
> Yes, Harry is going pro-active.  Instead of waiting for the action 
> to come to him (to Hogwarts) he's going after the action.  JKR has 
> given us the McGuffins that are the horcruxes, but I suspect that 
> they will be of secondary importance.  I also suspect that HBP is 
> not the last we'll see of Hogwarts.

Isn't the classic definition of McGuffin a plot element/item which 
everyone wants but has no significance in and of itself--like the 
suitcase that everyone is chasing but no one, including the audience, 
knows what's inside?  (One good example is in the movie Ronin.)  The 
Horcruxes seem anything BUT a McGuffin in that function of the word.  
They absolutely must be found and destroyed before Voldemort himself 
can be taken care of--hence my joke about Harry being able to unlock 
the final dungeon, a classic scenario for all players of video game 
quests.  And we've gotten a surprising amount of information about 
what they are and the symbolism surrounding each one, so they're 
meaningful in their own right.  Magical diary preserving a shadow 
Tom, ring of the treasured ancestors, Founders' items.  Very 
different from a classic Hitchcock setup where the reasons for being 
chased by a crop duster are less important than the chase itself.

> I mean, it's not really a video game where the reader is most 
> interested in seeing Harry use his massive wizards skills to go 
> head  to head against Voldemort.  It never has been.  And 
> Dumbledore rather underlined that fact in HBP by *not* improving 
> Harry's wizard skills.  He didn't teach Harry anything about magic 
> at all.

The structure's not the entire point, but the structure does dictate 
a lot of what can happen.  While it may not be Harry blowing his way 
through the dungeons with ridiculous power (that's how I play, 
hehehe), it may *well* be an illustration of the many and varied 
skills of Harry and Sidekicks.  After all, JKR does tell us that 
Harry knows more than he thinks that he does.  It could be a 
demonstration of their deductive and hunting skills and the power of 
teamwork, rather than their 1337 magical powerz.

> Agreed. (Though it's generally "thing" rather than a plural - 
> probably for clarity's sake.)

Many quests do involve more than one thing.  Classic plot trick is to 
reveal that the thing the seekers thought is what they needed is not 
what they thought it was.  But Rowling's already done that once...

> Well, no.  It rarely means that.  The heroic quest is not soley a 
> fantasy thing.  Marlow didn't run into any magical objects in the 
> Congo (unless Kurtz counts <eg>).  The old man didn't confront any 
> villains while at sea.  Gosh, the Harry Potter series doesn't 
> involve any "obtaining of magical objects" or points being racked 
> up.  Mostly, Harry's success has been measured in not being dead.  
> Which is why I'm reluctant to think JKR is going to collapse the 
> interesting story she's been telling into a mere scavenger hunt.  
> The hunt will be the structure, but not the point. 

The hunt does have a point in and of itself, though, if you consider 
finding all the Horsepuckies absolutely vital to being able to make 
it to the end.  I think that by giving us such an absolutely solid 
and material goal, and then reinforcing that yeah, that's it, she's 
already made it into a quest very different from that of Marlowe for 
Kurtz or the old man for his perfect fish, both of which are far more 
metaphysical.  I don't doubt it's going to involve a lot of self-
searching along the way, but JKR is prone to illustrate such through 
action as opposed to pages of describing how a character feels.

<snip>

> However, even if Harry does need to strike out to parts unknown to 
> collect the bits and pieces of Voldemort's soul, it's the 
> metaphorical journey that will be the most interesting, I believe.  
> Because that's what JKR has always been more interested in.

I agree that the metaphorical journey is important, but again, I 
think it's definitely going to be accomplished through the media of 
the actual quest itself and not through a more internal style of 
questing.  I doubt it's going to be something like Lem's _Fiasco_, an 
excellent but unbelievably disturbing novel, where it's really about 
the people on the ship and their atavism.  The strength of the HP 
books is that Harry Does Things, and when she wants to, the plot zips 
right along.

-Nora is a veteran dungeoncrawler, unsurprisingly