JKR And Dante: Voldemort vs. Grindelwald

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 174413

Eric Oppen wrote:
>
> In some ways, the chapter "King's Cross" reminded me of Dante's
_Inferno <snip> the narrators are at first horrified at the fates of
the damned, and try to help them, but their guides (Virgil and Benito)
warn them that there's nothing they can do, and they eventually accept
that the damned have earned their punishments, and leave them to their
fates.
> 
> JKR's take on Voldemort-as-flayed-baby is a very Dantesque idea. 
The whole theme of _Inferno <snip> is "Let the punishment fit the
crime." Voldemort has torn his soul to pieces in a vain quest for
immortality; therefore, he must spend eternity as a flayed piece of a
soul.  He has misused the great power given to him in many, terrible
ways; he must spend eternity powerless and helpless and in pain.  He
threw away his handsome original form in his quest for power, so now
he's horrible to look upon. The Dante parallel would also explain why
Dumbledore, who is presented as a compassionate person who is big on
second chances, won't touch the flayed baby or let Harry do anything
about it.
> 
> Voldemort's damnation is doubly sad and ironic, or so it seems to
me, because he could have had what he thought he wanted through
strictly legitimate means.  Handsome, charismatic and almost
universally liked, he could have become Minister of Magic; an
extremely talented wizard, he could have been tapped to help Nicolas
Flamel and either been given the secret of the Philosopher's Stone, or
figured out how to reverse-engineer one. 
> Instead, he took stupid shortcuts, meddled with Things Man Was Not
Meant To Know, and literally damned himself. <snip>

Carol responds:
Excellent post and I think it would be worth following up on this idea
with parallel passages. I want to point out, though, that Voldemort,
or rather Tom Riddle, does have his second chance. Harry offers it to
him, and he turns it down:

"[B]efore you try and kill me, I'd advise you to think about what
you've done," says Harry. "Think, and try for some remorse, Riddle."

Voldemort appears shocked (does he recall his own out-of-body
experience as a feeble, tortured, untouchable, horrible, helpless
child wrapped in rags?). 

"It's your last chance," continues Harry. "It's all you've got left.
I've seen what you'll be otherwise. Be a man. [T]ry. Try for some
remorse. . . ." (DH Am. ed. 742, ellipses eliminated).

Naturally, Voldemort spurns this opportunity and, as you say, damns
himself.

I didn't think of Dante as I read the "King's Cross" scene, but I
agree that JKR must have had her reading of Dante in mind, consciously
or unconsciously, as she wrote the chapter. I thought of the horrible
fetus that Voldemort's fragmented soul inhabits for most of GoF, an
image that JKR says she consciously chose and viewed as so horrific
that she feared her editor would ask her to leave it out. It's clear
to me that she could not have done so because Fetal!mort foreshadowed
the form that Voldemort's shattered and unrepentant soul would take in
his own personal hell. (I'm not questioning your reading, just
responding to it. I think that the images work together. I would cite
parallel passages, but for now I just want to point out the
foreshadowing.)

As for Tom Riddls possibly becoming the Minister of Magic, I think he
might have done so if he had solely been pursuing power, in which
case, he might have become another Gellert Grindelwald, also handsome
and charming (even mischievous and merry, as Tom Riddle never was).
And Tom Riddle, hating his Muggle father, pursued the same pure-blood
agenda that Grindelwald, convinced of his own natural superiority,
pursued, but with a vengeance foreign to the coolly intellectual
Grindelwald. Both boys tortured people at a young age, Tom Riddle
secretly, not knowing the source of his power; Grindelwald openly,
glorying in his "superiority." (Expelled from *Durmstrang,* the
supposed Dark Arts school, Durmstrang, which produced Viktor Krum.
Have we been misled about Durmstrang, too?)

But there's a key difference. Tom Riddle's mother died after giving
birth to him, and he feared death in a way that Grindelwald (who would
have created an army of Inferi) did not. And that fear of death turned
Tom Riddle into Voldemort, the mangler of his own soul. Grindelwald,
for all his many and terrible crimes, seems never to have created a
Horcrux, never removed any part of his split soul in the unnatural act
of separating soul and body. (Another of Carol's prediction for DH
bites the dust.) And it seems that, unlike Voldemort, he did feel some
remorse.

Carol, wondering what Dantesque punishment Grindelwald is suffering in
JKR's version of eternity