Storytelling in Harry Potter (2 of 2) (long)

[or.phan_ann]

No: HPFGUIDX 170809

I thought I'd leave a few days' gap between parts 1 and 2 in case
anyone wanted to argue with part 1. But nobody seems to want to. Part
1 of this is message number 170719. You probably don't have to read it
first, but in it I defined what I believe a plot to be and argued that
none of the books so far has had a plot. This part is about what I
think this means for DH.

Although each book has a self-contained storyline, the series can also
be seen as one novel with a single Harry vs. Voldemort plotline
(arguably excluding CoS) and minor plotlines concerning, for instance,
shipping and the Wizarding World's politics. Rowling has even said
that she sees the whole series in this way:

http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2005/0705-tlc_mugglenet-anelli-3.htm

The quotation is almost halfway down, just above the question about
eye colour. I call this mega-plotline the "overplot", and the books
look rather different when analysed as a group rather than discrete
works. The plotlines that run from one book to another, such as
shipping or Harry's entering the Wizarding World, mean much more when
the books are read as one – Ron and Hermione's arguing in PoA being a
prime example. But if we treat the series as one novel, we agree that
it has to have the constituent parts of a novel: beginning, middle,
and climax and end. We're now six books of seven through, or by my
count about four-fifths of the total word count. Each book has cranked
up the tension in the overplot catapult, but when's it going to get fired?

Unsurprisingly, I think it has been. At the end of HBP, Harry plans to
leave school and spend DH actively hunting down Horcruxes. Another
novel cramped into Hogwarts and one or two other locations while
Voldemort plots is inconceivable; he's left school and routine behind,
and the plot can go anywhere, physically and metaphorically. Harry
doesn't know what he's going to do, and neither do we. We have both
been launched into the unknown, and we have no idea where we'll land,
which theory will be true, or what Rowling will add that we haven't
thought of. But it's safe to predict it'll have a plot. Harry is
taking the fight to Voldemort, and while he may not be the prime mover
of the novel in the end – Dumbledore the plotter is more likely to
fill this role – he'll almost certainly appear that way. He wants to
destroy Voldemort's Horcruxes and defeat him, and while scheduled
events will almost certainly still occur, their relative importance
will be much less. In short, I predict that all my criteria for a plot
will have been met.

But Rowling's in unknown territory, too. She knows what'll happen, but
she's got an entire book of Harry actively fighting Voldemort to
write. DH will be the climax of the series, but to sustain an entire
novel's worth of action, it'll need a plot, not just construction. You
may think she should have ditched Hogwarts' restrictive environment a
book back or more. But she's got plenty of experience writing to those
specifications, and she's writing the climax in a new and very
different style. DH is, in short, unguessable, and it may be wonderful
or something of a disappointment, new and exciting or a failed
experiment. The only thing we can really be certain about is that the
Horcrux hunt will be the most important narrative strand (though Harry
may disagree, and spend much of the book looking for Snape.) The book
might degenerate into a plot coupon quest:

http://www.ansible.co.uk/Ansible/plotdev.html

or might be amazing, even despite that. We just don't know. This may
sound overly pessimistic, but I'm a natural pessimist, and I'm not
going to let my dark suspicions spoil DH for me. I can't wait to see
what happens.

I have a couple of other notes about the shape of the series. Firstly,
the abrupt change from Harry-passive construction to Harry-active
plotting is hardly unprecedented. The HP books have always mixed
elements of boarding-school stories, childrens' fantasy, mysteries,
and recently added political and high-fantasy elements; given the
importance of the previous generations' actions, PoA resembles a later
instalment of a family epic. The first five books conducted themselves
mainly as mysteries, in my opinion, but HBP doesn't have an overriding
genre. It reads very much as if the last preparations are being made
during the calm before the storm. I think DH will be a fantasy novel
above other genres, just as the early books were childrens' adventures
above all. This abrupt change of genre is another massive difference
I'm expecting between DH and the preceding six books.

Finally, and kind of needlessly, while our knowledge of the Wizarding
World has expanded with each book, the possible directions the series
would take have been shrinking since GoF. Until then the series could
have done anything; from OotP on, a new phase of the series has been
in progress: the background has been filled out and the Second War has
been in place. There is less room for speculation: DH theories which
ignore the Department of Mysteries or Horcruxes are unlikely and
inconceivable, respectively. This isn't a bad thing. Theorists love
canon (unless it slays a beautiful theory, of course), but I suspect
there's an optimal ratio of knowledge to ignorance for theorising,
which we've long since passed. Anyway, a satisfying ending will almost
by definition destroy most of our theories by revealing the last
hidden pieces of canon.

Okay, I'm finished! Thanks for having got this far; I know it's
absurdly long, but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. If you haven't
or didn't, sorry for spamming your inbox. As for the catapult, well,
you may well be seeing in on the meadows just above Theory Bay in the
near future.

Ann