The editor was sobbing

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 166960

Carol earlier:
> > The Harry Potter books are not tragedy
> 
Eggplant responded:
> You can't know that, nobody can know that until July 21. <snip>

Carol again:
I'm not talking about a happy or unhappy ending, which you're quite
right we can only speculate about until July 21. I'm talking about
genres and genre conventions, which JKR is surely familiar with given
her background as a teacher. (Trigger McGonagall mode: I'll try not to
sound like Binns.)

Tragedy is primarily a dramatic, not a literary, genre, as your
examples ("Oedipus Rex," "Hamlet," "Titanic," "300") illustrate. It
can, however, be adopted to prose form but I can't think of any
clear-cut examples off the top of my head. Classical tragedy and
Shakespearean tragedy (your first two examples) involve a heroic
figure in a position of power (king and prince, respectively, in your
two examples, with a tragic flaw (hamartia) that brings about his own
destruction. Usually, the protagonist is essentially noble (Macbeth is
a notable exception), but his nobility doesn't prevent him from
bringing destruction on himself and often on those around him. (Modern
tragedy often debases both the position in society and the nobility of
the protagonist, giving us, say, Willie Loman in "Death of a Salesman.") 

If JKR had chosen to write a tragedy in novel form, she would probably
have chosen Sirius Black as her protagonist. His rashness and bad
judgment leads first to the deaths of the Potters, then, indirectly,
to the release of Wormtail, and finally, to his own death in battle
with Bellatrix. But, aside from being prose fiction rather than drama
(the individual books combine the school story and detective novel
conventions; the main plot is a heroic quest of sorts), the books
really don't involve the conventions necessary to a tragedy, in which
the death or downfall of the protagonist is a given from the outset
because of his hubris or his "vaulting ambition" or his inability to
make up his mind.

If Harry is a tragic hero doomed to bring death to himself and
devastation to those around him, what is the tragic flaw that will
lead to his fatal error? I don't think he's going to lose his temper
fighting Voldemort. He's not reckless like Sirius or (Snape to the
contrary) arrogant like James. He's not ruthlessly ambitious. He's not
tempted by the Dark Arts as young Snape seems to have been. (He's not
Anakin Skywalker.) Sure, he's flawed, but he's a sort of Everyman
(Everykid) character with a special destiny. He has to be flawed, or
readers wouldn't respond to him. We want him to be like us. But that
flaw (or those flaws) need not, and probably won't, have fatal
consequences. So even if he dies, it won't be a tragedy in the sense
of tragedy as a genre, because he would not have brought it about
himself. (Sirius Black, and Snape if he dies, and possibly Dumbledore,
can be read as tragic characters. But the HP books are telling Harry's
story, not theirs, and Harry does not have the makings of a tragic hero.)

I sense a different set of conventions operating in the main plot arc
(as opposed to the school story/detective story structure of the
individual books), those of the heroic quest (of which epic poetry is
one subtype). The hero of a quest narrative is often noble but flawed
(for example, Gawain in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"), but his
flaws are not always or even usually fatal. We expect him to triumph
over his primary antagonist, whether it's Voldemort of the Green
Knight, and return home having learned some valuable lesson about
himself or his society. (He's not going to be so damaged that he has
to live as a Muggle, I hope, and there's no equivalent of the Undying
Lands for him to go off to, but he will probably see the WW and the
people around him more clearly, as he's already beginning to do, with
the exception of Snape, in HBP.)

None of this is to say that Harry won't die or can't die. JKR is as
fond of bending and breaking genre conventions as Harry is of bending
and breaking rules, not to mention that the HP books are a blend of
genres (not including tragedy, as far as I can see), each of which has
its own set of conventions. But based on the variety of genres that I
see in the books, we can expect to see all of the mysteries (Snape,
RAB, Horcruxes, Godric's Hollow) solved, the hero completing his
education (even if it's postponed to the epilogue) and acquiring
wisdom or in some way coming to adulthood (a seventeenth birthday
doesn't count), and triumphing over the primary antagonist. 

I could be wrong, of course, but based on genre conventions, I
anticipate a happy ending (but not before several good guys have
died). Which does not mean I won't cry long and hard. I shed more
tears at weddings than at funerals, or at least, I sob openly instead
of quietly weeping into a tissue. Seriously, poignant, bittersweet
endings that evoke mixed emotions, especially happiness and sadness at
the same time, are at least as likely as the death of the protagonist
to make the reader sob, seemingly inconsolably, before he or she
manages to smile through the tears. (I'm talking about sensitive types
like Arthur Levine and sentimentalists like me--at least, I was once
given that label by an English professor who was incensed that he
couldn't find anything wrong with my defense of Shylock and had to
give me an A. I can't imagine certain members of this list sobbing
under any circumstances.)

Carol earlier:
> 
> > The genres I see are Bildungsroman (in the form of boarding school
story), mystery novel/detective story, and heroic quest, none of which
requires the protagonist to die 
> 
Eggplant:
> The genius of the Potter books is that they are original and
difficult to categorize.

Carol:
I could write a ten-page essay, complete with canon to support my
thesis, on the HP books in relation to any one of the genres I named.
Yes, to some extent the books are sui generis, but nevertheless they
contain identifiable elements from all those genres, just as we could
trace the mythological and folklore components and her adaptations of
them if we were so inclined.

Eggplant:
 They are supposed to be children's books but even book 1 was very
long for a children's book, and children's books are not
astronomically popular with adults but Potter is, and children's books
are not usually so grim, and not funny-grim but grim-grim.   

Carol:
Technically speaking, they're not so much children's books as young
adult fiction, and even that term isn't really a genre. (I know you'll
see it referred to in Wikipedia and elsewhere as a genre, but it's
really a category for books with themes that might be considered
inappropriate for children originated by librarians and picked up by
bookstores and publishing houses. No English professor of my
acquaintance would call children's literature or young adult fiction a
genre.) 

At any rate, I'm talking about the conventions of certain genres in
relation to the character, the  development, and the fate of the
protagonist, and their classification as children's books or young
adult fiction has nothing to do with those conventions. You're still
going to find actual genres, such as mystery or detective novel,
historical novel, even epistolary novel (a novel written entirely in
letters like "Up the Down Staircase") classified as young adult novels
or even children's books. ("Bobbsey Twins"? "Nancy Drew"?)

However, since you bring up the subject of "grimness," the folktales
and morality tales told to children before the Victorian era were a
lot grimmer than the Harry Potter books, as the real Grimm's Fairy
Tales (which aren't fairytales!) illustrate. And I heartily recommend
"A Series of Unfortunate Events" if grimness in young adult fiction is
your cup of tea.

Carol earlier: 
> > I would not be at all surprised if she rewards him [Harry] at the
end with the happy ending he himself would like best 
> 
Eggplant:
> And that's why the only man who's read the book and publicly
commented on it was sobbing. I don't think so.
>
Carol:
I do. We don't know that he was crying over the *ending.* He said that
it's a very emotional book. We know that several people, among them
characters that JKR expects most readers to care about, will die. He
could have been crying over Hagrid and the Weasley Twins (or *one*
Weasley Twin dying and the other surviving, an idea that gives me
shivers) rather than Harry's death. 

And, as I said above, readers don't cry *only* because someone has
died. Sometimes, the sheer beauty of a scene, the poignancy of the
moment, is more moving than a death scene. As I said in my earlier
post, the moment when Molly and Fleur reached an understanding and
Molly offered Fleur Auntie Muriel's tiara was one such moment for me.
Harry didn't understand it, nor did Ron, but as Hermione says, they
have the emotional depth of a teaspoon. That's what I mean by a
bittersweet moment. Bill is lying there horribly mutilated; Molly
expects Fleur to reject him; Fleur defiantly states her love for
Bill's courage (and her conviction that she's beautiful enough for
them both); and Molly understands and accepts Fleur's love for her
once-handsome son, whose lost looks she herself is mourning. My eyes
are blurring just thinking about it. Things will never be the same,
but love triumphs. If JKR can come up with an ending like that for
Harry and Ginny, hopefully without any horrible mutilation for Harry,
I'll cry buckets. And I don't even like Ginny.

Carol, still confident that the Trio will survive but not so sure
about Hagrid, Luna, Lupin, and various Weasleys other than Ron and Ginny