Dumbledore's Plan/Deaths in DH/Catharsis

[lizzyben04]

No: HPFGUIDX 177493

> Pippin:
> The catharsis chapter for me was King's Cross. The death that's supposed
> to affect us, or that deeply affected me at least, was the death of hope
> for Voldemort's soul. That was  the overwhelming tragedy that Jo made
> me feel -- not the loss of so many lives, however deeply missed, but 
> the waste of  that one  soul.  


lizzyben:

Oh, that scene was powerful, no doubt. It deeply affected me as well,
& the imagery was haunting. But was it cathartic, in the sense of
offering a release of emotion & pain, and a sense of hope & healing?
No way. If anything, it was the total opposite - there is no hope,
there is no healing for LV, there is only eternal agony & pain. It's
the total opposite of an emotional catharsis. Normally, the author
takes the reader down into the depths of despair & then raises them up
to a sense of reconciliation & acceptance. DH takes the readers to the
very depths of despair, and ditches them there. 

King's Cross is, IMO, the spiritual linchpin of the series,
representing JKR's vision of the afterlife. And this is it - a flayed
baby crying under a chair. And it is horrible, as it is meant to be.
After this vision of the damned, Harry returns to life, beats LV &
sends him off to his damnation. Yay. But we never see the scene in
which Harry & his friends recover from this trauma, or honor the ones
who have died, or The last stage of grief is "acceptance and hope". DH
doesn't show us that & it doesn't actually show the stages of grief at
all. We get to see a lot of death, but we don't get to see how the
heros coped with death, accepted death, or found renewal & hope.
Instead we're left w/that last vision of a damned soul. 

How does that vision fit in with "don't pity the dead"? Shouldn't we
pity that damned soul? Shouldn't we pity Moaning Myrtle, who never
finds peace or consolation? Or the Bloody Baron, Nick & the other
ghosts wandering about in a restless state? Don't all these "unhappy"
souls contradict the happy, smiling Sirius' assurances that death is
easy & peaceful? JKR says one thing, but shows another - and in this
theme the pattern is most blatant. I get the sense she's trying to
convince herself as much as she's trying to convince us. 

Pippin:
> My understanding, and of course I don't know if this is what Jo had
> in mind, is that Voldemort's soul, being sovereign, can not be rescued 
> from the prison he  created of it. He, like the Albania in which he
once 
> took refuge, is a closed-border state. For me that's heart-breaking. 

lizzyben:

That's my understanding as well, but I don't believe that LV ever had
a choice - his soul was born in that prison & then punished for
eternity. He was predestined for damnation. It's a bleak, bleak vision.

Pippin:
> Harry and Dumbledore can do nothing more, not even sympathize. 
> There is no connection possible because he's rejected the ability to
feel 
> anything but hate and anger, emotions of which Harry and Dumbledore,
> in their more perfect state, are no longer capable.

lizzyben:

Here I will always disagree. And that's where I start to really wonder
what kind of message JKR is pushing. Cause it's truly one of the most
disturbing scenes I've ever read in terms of its implied message about
obedience to authority & the suppression of compassion. If you as a
reader could feel pity, compassion & sorrow for LV's state, why
couldn't Harry or Dumbledore? 

You know what that "King's Cross" scene reminded me of? The Milgram
experiment. The experiment measured the willingness of
study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to
perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. In that
experiment, the volunteer was put in a room with
an authority figure & another person. The authority figure then
ordered the volunteer to issue shocks of increasing severity to the
other person whenever he answered a question wrong. The other
volunteer eventually began to cry out with pain & agony, and insisted
that they stop and let him go. 

Volunteers would often try to stop the experiment & help the suffering
person, but the authority figure would calmly repeat over & over "you
cannot help him," "ignore him, don't look at him," "the experiment
must continue". Until eventually, the volunteers squelched their
natural empathy & obeyed the authority figure. In fact, 65% of
volunteers issued the highest shocks possible, even when the other
person became unconscious. These were people who would never dream of
ignoring a suffering person on their own, but they showed obedience to
the authority figure - even when it went against their own morals.
It's a chilling message about human nature & our ability to submit to
authority.


Sound familiar?  In King's Cross, Harry enters a room with
his ultimate authority figure (Dumbledore) and a suffering baby. Harry
at first wants to help the child, who is crying in agony & pain, but
Dumbledore keeps insisting that "you cannot help," & "there is no help
possible" for the baby. DD *orders* Harry not to help it & tells Harry
to ignore the baby's cries. The text says that eventually, Harry
learned to tune out the baby's cries and ignore its suffering. Harry
has obeyed his authority figure, even though DD's orders go against
Harry's own compassion & desire to save people. He displayed obedience
to authority - even when that authority ordered him to do something
immoral or cruel. It's the Milgram experiment all over again. And it's
horrible.

What's the moral here? If an authority figure tells you to do
something suicidal & stupid, a courageous Gryffindor should just do
it. If an authority figure orders you to do something immoral, repress
your compassion & obey. WTF? Was HP supposed to be a pro-authoritarian
series? 

Harry's apparently supposed to be a Christ-figure. Well, looking
at it from a Christian sense, what would Jesus do? He healed the
lepers & the blind & the outcasts of society. I like to think he'd try
to help LV too. And it's not because of who LV is, but because of who
Jesus is. If Harry's going to be a Christ-figure, the whole helping to
heal the suffering should be a part of that - but it wasn't. So Harry
is a Christ-figure who ignores a suffering child on his God's
orders. Ick! I don't think compassion is a feeling that should be
stifled & repressed on an authority figure's orders, & it disturbs me
that DH seems to say just that.

Pippin:
> I think it would be easy to mistake transcendence for coldness.
> Harry was so devastated by the death of Cedric, yet each 
> subsequent death seems to affect him less. But it isn't, IMO, that 
> Jo has forgotten to make him care about losing people, it's that 
> to him they're not really lost, or that he grows to understand
> Luna's serene confidence that nothing can truly be taken from 
> her. 

lizzyben:

I didn't feel a sense of serene transcendence from Harry. He was an
emotional mess at the end of OOTP, & then has suddenly forgotten about
Sirius in HBP. We don't see him accepting or finding peace w/Sirius'
fate, we just see him ignoring it. At the same time, his personality
changes - suddenly he's bullying people, cheating, using hexes &
near-fatal curses w/little to no regret. If Harry were real, that'd be
a classic sign of repression & denial. JKR never shows Harry *dealing*
w/death, or going through the grieving process. Deathly Hallows just
gets worse, w/the other characters almost shrugging as one after
another is killed off. Ron makes a quip right after his brother dies?
It's just weird. And the novel just ends w/o the traditional closing
chapter that honors the ones who have died & allows healing & hope for
the future. I don't get "serene confidence" from that - it's more like
grief was actually repressed or cut from the novel. Thus, no emotional
catharsis at the end.

Pippin:
> The quotation in the front of the book explains it better:
> "This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to
> die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever
> present, because immortal."
> 
> If you read the book as fairy tales are meant to be read, never
> finishing without starting again ( "Another story, sister! Another 
> story!") you will encounter that quote as a coda to the epilogue,
> along with the poem from Aeschylus which seems to lament
> Snape's death. 

lizzyben:

That's a good point, & I agree that the quote is probably meant to
evoke the sense that the dead never truly leave us, as the scene in
"The Forest Again" represents. And I'm sure that scene resonated with
many people. It just didn't work for me. Mostly because it felt
emotionally dishonest. Rather than dealing w/death in a realistic way,
the scene went for easy platitudes. "Dying is quick & easy!" Baloney.
JKR knows that isn't true, I don't know why she'd think readers will
believe that. All the smiling happy dead people freaked me out a
little. Them encouraging Harry to die freaked me out a lot. It's
another example of surface message/subtext split. The surface message
shouts out that Death Is Really OK! Don't Be Afraid of Death! Look how
happy Harry's dead loved ones are! etc. But, the subtext is all about
fear of death - LV is a damned soul who *should* fear death, Harry
sacrifices & "accepts" death, but yet escapes death. He takes the
Cloak, which allows the wearer to hide from death. And none of the
character deaths (Fred, Lupin, etc.) are really addressed or honored
at the end of the novel - it's almost like their deaths are hidden
away as well. So in place of catharsis, we have repression. 

I didn't feel inspired, emotionally cleansed, or renewed at the end of
DH. And that's because the novel never actually addressed tragedy &
death in an honest, truthful way. I felt like the story was lying to
me. And I really didn't like the lies it was telling, and I didn't
like that I was simply expected to accept them w/o question.


lizzyben