Of Sorting and Snape

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 175558


lizzyben: 

> Well, each individual person will have individual interpretations -
> especially of a chapter that seems so laden w/metaphors. I don't think
> that it's literally supposed to be Snape. It's supposed to be LV, I
> totally agree. But IMO, on a symbolic level, it's much more than that.
> Basically, I think the "baby" is the shadow, that has been rejected &
> purged. 

Sydney:

Jumping in here because I had the exact same reaction as Lizzyben, so
it's not just her.  The symbolism in that scene was all kinds of
weird-- two guys congratulating each other on their love and
compassion while ignoring a crying wounded baby?!  

If that baby is the soul-piece that Voldemort put in Harry, it gets
all kind of messed up. Because, okay, this is a crying wounded baby
that's been inside Harry since his parents were murdered. Inner child,
right? I mean on the symbolic level of course-- surely that was pretty
explicit in OoP that Harry's rages and connection to Voldemort are
symbolic of teen angst and hormones or whatever?  I mean, that's what
I thought it was.  I thought it was really clever.  Don't all
teenagers act like their possessed at some point?  So, even at that
point in the book when I was grasping at straws I was thinking.. okay,
here's the part where Harry comes to terms with the darkness inside
him, even if its.. uh.. nothing to do with him actually in plot
terms... because that piece randomly disappeared and this is a whole
other piece... whatever.  To me:  symbolic afterlife land, Harry,
crying wounded child bit like the bits that got put in Harry the night
his parents died.

So what should you do with your wounded inner child? IGNORE IT. Ignore
the crying and the pain! It's disgusting! It's not a part of you. Do
you hear me Harry? The flayed thing in agony that's been inside you
for 16 years has NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU. When the crying gets too
much, just beat the crap out of some Bad People. It'll make you feel
better!!

And that's when I thought, "This series is WHACKED."


houyhnhnm:
 
> > And Voldemort didn't have to end up as a helpless, 
> > suffering, moaning creature for eternity.  He could 
> > still have avoided his fate, even after the terrible 
> > things he'd done, even after shredding his soul into 
> > pieces, if he had been able to feel remorse.  

Sydney:

But Voldemort never could take Harry up on the offer to feel remorse--
he's a psychopath. We spent half the last book establishing that. 
That's why the offer was so easy to make. There's no suggestion that
Harry would ever have to do something about it, just like he never had
to have a normal conversation with Draco or come to terms with a Snape
who wasn't safetly dead. 

I really hated that 'remorse' bit in the Harry/Voldemort convo because
it actually came out like a taunt.. 'ha ha you're a psycopath and
can't feel remorse and you're going to hell. Die sucka!' I can roll
with that stuff in R-rated action movies (especially when the hero
kicks ass on account of his hard work and mad ass-kicking skills, not
through some random technicality). But in a children's book that's
back-slapping itself about how it's all about love and compassion it's
just revolting.

I totally wanted to fall into sentimental goo and instead I just found
myself in this big bucket of bile. "Aren't those people awful? Aren't
I great person for hating those awful people?  I'm soooo much better
than.... a cross between Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler!  Go Me!" 
*backslaps!*

Why did I not see it coming?! Didn't Dumbledore's big speech about
Harry's power of love specifically say that 'power' was that it would
drive him towards vengeance?

lizzyben:

> Description of the Jungian shadow: 
> "We will feel highly uncomfortable when we are around someone that is
> carrying a part of our Shadow. As I said before, and it bears
> repeating, there will often be a repulsive element to it. We will be
> repulsed by that person and whatever they stand for. To gain access
> and awareness of one's shadow, one should carefully consider those
> qualities in another that repulse or disgust oneself."
> 
> http://www.shadowdance.com/shadow/theshadow.html
> 
> Harry in King's Cross:
> 
> "He was afraid of it. Small & fragile & wounded though it was, he did
> not want to approach it... Soon he felt near enough to touch it, yet
> he could not bring himself to do so. He ought to comfort it, but it
> repulsed him."
> 
> Yeah, on one level it's LV, but in a Jungian interpretation, that's
> Harry's shadow - the part of his personality DD tells him to reject &
> ignore. And hey, it sort of sounds like DD telling Snape "you disgust
> me", doesn't it? Snape is DD's shadow, LV is Harry's shadow, and
> Slytherins in general are Gryfindors' shadow.

Sydney: 

Left this unsnipped because, yeah.  And reading that bit again, I'm
every kind of confused.  Because.. okay, it's reaaally hard to read
that as anything other than a conscious decision from a clued-up
writer about Shadow-imagery.  And then she kicks under a chair and
says 'that's what you should do with that awful Shadow thing!' 
Which.. okay... is that a school of psychological thought these days?
 *scans JK's bookshelf*  I see a lot of Freud.. I really don't like
Freud so I don't know what he thought about this sort of thing.  

 
> houyhnhnm
> > I, too, am made uncomfortable by the imagery of the 
> > small maimed, creature, trembling under the chair.  
> > It reminds me a little too much of the child in the 
> > closet in Ursula LeGuin's short story, "The Ones Who 
> > Walk Away From Omelas".

Sydney:

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Ursula LeGuin,
who muttered something in an interview a while back about being happy
about their success but thinking the HP series was a bit
mean-spirited.  I was like, 'No, no!  She's going to turn it around! 
Just wait!'.  Sorry Ursula.  You were right, I was wrong. 

lizzyben:

>On an individual level, if we don't recognize the
> shadow, if we don't integrate it into our personality, we'll project
> those qualities onto other people instead & hate them for it. 
But
> societies do that too. On a collective level, sometimes an entire
> society will project their shadow onto some "other" group, which
> becomes the recipient of all the flaws that society cannot admit to
> having - and the society will then seek to punish or purge that
> "other" group. That group becomes the society's appointed scapegoat
> that can safely hate & revile. In turn, the "other" group can project
> its own shadow onto the first group, creating a cycle of mutual
> destruction & hatred....DD is encouraging Harry to reject a part of
himself, &
> see it as an "other" instead - that's classic shadow projection. On
> both an individual & collective level, Harry & the Gryffindors are
> caught in a deep cycle of shadow projection that almost guarantees
> more hatred, scapegoating, dehumanization, violence & conflict. IMO,
> this is why so many people feel uneasy about this chapter & the
> ultimate ending of the novel.


Sydney:

Yeah, that's why it just seems so cracked to me, this whole series.
This is a world that's going to convulse in civil war like clockwork
every fifty years, because there's just no self-reflection or attempt
to say, 'hey, mistakes were made, we need to look at what we have in
common as human beings here'.  And now it seems yeah, there's no
turning around the child's version of Brave Perfect
Anachronistic-notions-of-human-rights Gryffindor and how he was
betrayed by that total loser Slytherin, and Our Side was totally right
and Their Side was totally wrong forever.  That was the one thing I
was ready to lay money on was going to get reversed.. "Little White
Horse" being the obvious reason why.  Oh, and all of human history. 
That too.

"Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown" is a message I can respect if I'm
settling down for a bleak, fatalistic look at the irretrievably
corrupt nature of humanity. From book about children I find it pretty
appalling, especially as it turns out only a quarter of humanity is
irretrievably corrupt and don't worry, it's Not You. It's fascinating
at the same time, because it's a wonderful portrait of one whopping
un-dealt-with Shadow issue but it seems to be entirely unconscious.
It's not like JK doesn't know about this Shadow thing-- she said
somewhere that , 'yeah, dehumanizing the Other is terrible! That's
what Voldemort does!' Ummmm... talk about missing the point!

It's like... it's a series where.. dehumanizing and projecting the
Shadow.. is something THOSE AWFUL PEOPLE DO.  Nothing to do with us! 
Let's congratulate ourselves on how we don't do that and that's why
it's cool when We beat people up with our Good magic and totally
different when They beat people up with their Dark Magic.

I keep going back to her list of favorite books.. they all GET this.
Pip has to cope with the fact that all his money came from Magwich,
making him not exactly as 'better than those people' as he had
thought-- why didn't she do something like this with Gryffindor?
Elizabeth has to go through a thing where, oh, yeah, that pride and
prejudice stuff turns out to not just be something other people do.
Frodo in the end ISN'T sufficiently pure of heart. He succumbed like
Gollum did and felt their kinship. And of course, "Little White
Horse", which somehow managed to read at a much younger level but come
out far more mature and realistic about our myths about other people
and how we use them to soothe our egos.    I still feel like I *have*
to have missed something.  

This is a series that answers the question "What would Jesus do?" not
with, love thy enemy, judge not, turn the other cheek, heal the sick,
 (and render unto Ceasar, one of the wisest ones IMO), but with 'allow
your enemies to kill you so you can come back to life and confer some
bizarre magical protection on your exclusive club of followers.'  It's
so weird. IT'S SO WEIRD.

-- Sydney, who swore she wouldn't get drawn back in, but who had to
support Lizzyben on this point