Of Sorting and Snape

[lizzyben04]

No: HPFGUIDX 175638

> 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. 
<snip>
> 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."

lizzyben:

Sydney, thanks for bringing up yet another level of symbolic
weirdness. Yeah, that's totally what DD seems to be saying - ignore
that pain! Stuff it under the chair! Don't cry! And this seems to also
connect w/the message that expressing emotions or sadness is just
wrong. Other people have brought up that Slytherins like Draco & Snape
cry and become emotional under stress, while Gryffindors tend to get
angry & explosive. Slytherin is the house of "water" & emotion, and
it's also the house of evil? Emotions are evil? And even though "love"
is supposed to be a central message, it's actually never handled in a
healthy way - and Slytherins also are assigned all the unhealthy
aspects of love. Love is evil? Empathy is evil?  If JKR just wanted to
make a house for bad guys, she should've just called it that. But when
she starts assigning elemental traits & emotions to a house of bad
guys, it starts associating certain normal human qualities with
something evil & wrong. And the worst part is, symbolically this means
that the Bad People *are also* the "wounded inner child" too - and the
best way to stop them from crying is to beat them up. It's so whacked
on so many levels. It's like an explosion of awful.


> 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. 

lizzyben:

Well, this also seems to tie into the way that the Shadow house was
simply purged from the narrative. It's almost like JKR was trying to
make sure Harry never really had to interact w/these characters or
actually integrate the Houses. This seemed to be very important, for
whatever reason. Sending the message that Slytherin=evil was more
important than character development or even plot.

Sydney:
> 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.
<snip>
> 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:

I didn't even think about it as a taunt, but you're right. Harry knows
as well as we do that LV is totally incapable of remorse. It was a
quip, sort of like "Bellatrix was right, you really have to mean it."
*shudders*

Where I think many of us went wrong was in seeing this as a
Bildungsroman or a traditional "coming of age" series, when it is not.
It's not a Jungian integration fairy tale, either. It's a straight-up
revenge narrative, set in a fantasy setting. Harry is a magical Count
of Monte Cristo - and his enemies all get karmic justice. Although
it's actually even worse than that book, because the Count eventually
learns that you can take revenge too far, regrets his actions, and
offers forgiveness to his enemies. Harry & co. never get a
similar heads-up. 

> 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.  

lizzyben:

I don't like Freud, either, so I don't what he'd make of it either -
maybe the baby as id, w/Harry as ego, & Dumbledore as superego? Though
I'd have a hard time buying DD as anyone's conscience. The shadow
imagery is so blatant and obvious to me that I can't believe it wasn't
intentional, but it has to be. JKR knows about "the other" - didn't it
ever once occur to her what she was doing here? 

And the Houses seemed to be built around the four Jungian temperaments
- w/Idealists (Gryffindors), Rationals (Ravenclaws), Guardians
(Hufflepuff), and Artisans (Slytherin). So it seems like JKR was
working w/Jungian concepts w/the Houses. Except I guess she thinks all
Artisan types are evil? Ah, I can't make sense of it.

> 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:

Yeah, seconded. 

> 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.

lizzyben:

Pretty much. I compared it to an alternate ending of Romeo & Juliet
where the Capulets just decided to blame the Montagues for the whole
thing. One reason I find this book fascinating is that it's actually a
brilliant examination of exactly how & why these types of feuds,
ethnic hatreds & civil wars perpetuate themselves. 

And how bigotry works. Like you've said, Harry is basically
indoctrinated into bigotry from an early age. He's sorted into a clear
"us & them", and constantly told by authority figures how awful "they"
are. So he looks over at the Slytherin table & thinks they do look
sort of mean & surly. And pretty soon Gryffindor society begins to
assign everything bad & evil onto the other group - until Harry
becomes unable to see these people as individuals & can just dismiss
as a mass of "them" who are all the same. Until eventually, he starts
to see them as almost inhuman - the adjectives get monstrous:
Slytherins are "troll-like", greedy, ugly, animalistic, evil. Until
the reader starts to think that maybe the best way to get rid of evil
is to get rid of this group of people. Readers are made to think like
a bigot, as well. Readers keep asking JKR why Slytherin House is
allowed to exist. This is a series where we're put into a mindset that
thinks that eradicating & purging a group of people just might be a
good idea, since they're all so evil & ugly & inhuman and not Like Us.

This figuratively puts readers at about stage three of the eight
stages of genocide. (classification, symbolization, dehumanization)
And it's never reversed, that message is never reversed. Readers are
left thinking that members of the "other" group are almost less human,
less deserving of salvation, than our group. And they just might be
more deserving of hatred & violence. OMG. I can't think of many other
books, less a children's series, that seem to endorse dehumanization
like that. 

Sydney:
> "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!

lizzyben:

It's a bit mind boggling. Dehumanizing the other is something the
other group does! Because they're less noble, less human! Talk about
shadow projection. I almost hate to go there, because it really isn't
our business to psychoanalyze the author, but it's the only way I can
see to really understand the direction that this book took. It's a
totally undealt-with Shadow issue that the author had to stuff out of
sight in various different ways - projecting the Shadow onto the
other, silencing the Shadow figure, kicking the Shadow under a chair,
insisting that the Shadow isn't a part of the whole, isn't a part of
who we are. But that's unnatural - and when the Shadow is repressed,
cut off, & projected outward, that's when things start to get weird. 

Sydney:
> 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.

lizzyben:

I've always wondered what makes "Dark Magic" so very awful in these
novels. It's never really defined or explained - it's just very very
bad. And it turns out, it's just Dark Magic because it's what "they"
do. When "we" do the same spells, it's not Dark at all! The whole
"it's Dark magic because the Shadow house does it" seems to go back to
the deep shadow projection that the Gryffindors engage in. 

Sydney:
> 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.  

lizzyben:

And Jane Austen is JKR's favorite novelist. She said once that Emma is
one of her favorite novels because of the "self-delusion" in it. And
she's right - Emma is totally self-deluded, which causes her to
misinterpret the actions of almost everyone around her, and herself.
She finally matures when she's forced to confront the truth about
herself - just like Elizabeth is forced to confront some unpleasant
truths about who she is. Elizabeth has projected her own faults of
pride & prejudice (her own shadow?) onto Darcy, and she has an
epiphany when she realizes that ("Till this moment, I never knew
myself!") That's why I kept patiently waiting for Harry to face a
similar internal crisis & maturation - and it never happened. 

You get the feeling that the myths about other people are allowed to
remain in place in order to sooth his ego - so Harry never has to be
really wrong ever. He never has to face his flaws or self-reflect. He
never has to *grow* or change. How can a book have a protagonist who
doesn't change? It seems to keep coming back to this Calvinist
conception of the "Elect", who are already superior & perfect, and so
don't need to change.

Sydney:
> 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.'  


lizzyben:

Well, actually that's a tenant of strict Calvinism, isn't it? "Limited
atonement" - Christ died for our sins, but his sacrifice only extends
to and protects "The Elect". All else are damned. The magical
protection & salvation only extends to an exclusive club. I'm starting
to wonder if JKR intentionally wrote this series as a Calvinist
allegory (w/the Jungian stuff sneaking in unconsciously).

Sydney:
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

lizzyben:

Thanks for the support & the insights! I keep trying these different
interpretations - is it a Calvinist allegory, revenge narrative,
failed Jungian integration? - but I also just keep coming back to that
same word. It's so WEIRD. I've been less disturbed by Stephen King
novels. 


lizzyben