Harry Potter and the Endless Camping Trip (a new perspective)

melrosedarjeeling melrosedarjeeling at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 27 17:55:34 UTC 2007


No: HPFGUIDX 173309

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "verosomm" <verosomm at ...> wrote:
>
>  va32h:
> 
> I confess I was disappointed
> > with JKR - I thought this book had been planned for 17 years, why 
all
> > the filler? The trio are frustrated and bored, the readers are
> > frustrated and bored. In short - the camping trip is a metaphor 
for
> > our experience of reading DH.
> >
> > Now is that an interesting coincidence or utter brilliance on the
> > part of JKR or neither?
> >
> >
> 
> I think utter brilliance... we readers are getting listless
> with "nothing" happening, frustrated the trio is cold and hungry,
> annoyed with those things affecting Ron so readily, etc. etc.  We 
are
> really in the tent with them, imo.
> 
> Veronica
>

Now MelroseDarjeeling:
In the first creative writing class I ever took, we were given an 
assignment to write about a character who was excruciatingly bored. 
The catch was, you had to write about it in a way that was 
interesting for the reader. This was a real challenge, trying to come 
up with creative ways to inhabit that boredom, to make it feel real 
but not dull. But as our teacher explained, there is never an excuse 
for an author to bore her readers. So to me, this is a flaw in the 
book. I think it's there as part of Harry's spiritual journey, but 
it's up to the author to make it meaningful for the reader.

I'm trying to think of some great works of literature that are all 
about being bored... maybe Tales of the South Pacific, Mansfield 
Park, Heart of Darkness? Yes, how's this, from Heart of Darkness, 
just by way of comparison?:

"Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest 
beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the 
big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an 
impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There 
was no joy in the brilliance of the sunshine. The long stretches of 
the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of over-shadowed 
distances...you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, 
and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, 
till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from 
everything you had known once - somewhere - far away - in another 
existence perhaps." (p.55-56)

-MelroseDarjeeling





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