HP as escapist children's literature (was Harry's DADA skill)

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 182744

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Jerri/Dan Chase" <danjerri at ...>
wrote:
>
> 
> Jerri, struggling to remain a HP fan, or did I waste several years of 
> my life?
>

Ultimately only you can decide. I don't feel that I have done. Some of
the issues you and others mention were apparent to me long before DH
and I kept reading. If you once found delight in the stories then
surely they had value. If you found delight in discussing them here
and elsewhere then certainly they had value. It's sad for you that DH
let you down but maybe you should not let that negate the value of the
whole experience for you. Harry Potter was a unique cultural
phenomenon even for a relative latecomer like myself. I wouldn't have
missed that for the world.

I've done quite a bit of reading since I started commuting on the
train to work. There was a period of my life when I was exclusively a
SciFi reader but the enormity of the reading time I now have available
 quickly exhausted the stockpile of SciFi books I had left and
considered worth the read. As a result I've branched out considerably
and have started reading the works of historical figures on occasion.
Grant's memoirs for example give you an important perspective on the
US Civil War that you can get to an extent elsewhere but not like
reading the man himself. And so, while I always hesitate to mention it
in polite company, I recently got around to reading an (The?) English
translation of *Mein Kampf*. I found it quite different from the way
I've always heard it described and indeed from the translator's and
forward's description. I hasten to add that those differences do
nothing to make me sympathetic to Nazism, rather and as I hoped, they
go a great way towards explaining how and why a whole nation could
adopt such a hideous creed. It is a masterful piece of propaganda that
was aimed with exquisite precision at its target. Reading it leaves
one with the problem of what to read next because you feel a strong,
deep need to read something that expounds decent values.

There are many possible solutions, the one I adopted was a third
reading of *Deathly Hallows* and I have to say that it served quite
admirably. I think the similarities between Death Eaters and Brown
Shirts is more than mere coincidence. The one has to be the prototype
for the other. In our modern, liberal world many struggle with the
notion of evil and cannot bring themselves to believe that it lives in
the hearts of fellow humans. There is nothing like looking it straight
in the eyes for 600-some pages to disabuse you of this notion. It is
impossible to go from Hitler to Potter and not see that the decent
folk of the Potterverse, no matter their failings, are uncommonly kind
and forbearing and courageous when dealing with those who serve evil.
They are not perfect. They are good people doing the best that they
can contrive to do and their best is quite inspiring. And
realistically so. The human aspect of this story rings so very true
when you compare it to personal experience and to historical precedent.

I had trouble seeing that at first in DH. My experience of DH is
probably quite different from that of most of you here. I
intentionally sought out the spoiler sites in the final days before DH
Day. I didn't discuss anything I found here because I know that many
of you hate spoilers. And I stopped visiting altogether once I found
the motherlode of all spoilers, the leaked copy. I read a few pages
thinking it had to be a hoax and intending to stop after only a few.
But it drew me in because if it was a hoax it was a decent one. Before
long I had two thirds of it read and only about then decided that it
had to be legitimate, as it turned out to be. So my first reading was
an odd affair trapped for the most part between belief and disbelief
over the authenticity of what I was reading. A few days later I was
holding a physical copy of the book in my hands and reading it through
for the second time as most of you began your first. The thing that
impressed me most about the second read was how creaky the whole
Potterverse had become. So riddled with inconsistencies that it became
pretty distracting even though the underlying story about human nature
and the struggle to endure and finally overcome still impressed me as
well.

At the third reading all my objections fell away. To be sure they are
still there intellectually. This author is not good at building a
fantasy world in an entirely believable manner or at keeping the
details straight -- either the imagined elements or the elements
copied from the real world that are easily tracked using real world
resources. But she excels at characters. At the human level this story
just seems so real from the petty details of human interaction to the
big issues of human existence. Perhaps we would like to see the same
care lavished on all the characters as we see taken with those that
Harry interacts most closely with. But I think that would have been
rather impossible in a book of this scope and at least it is a device
that the author has used consistently from beginning to end. This is
very much a story told from Harry's viewpoint and nearly always
through Harry's eyes. We see Dudley as a flat caricature of a human
being through six novels and then in the seventh we have one brief
glimpse of him as something more, something decent, someone who might
actually amount to something. We see that because Harry finally sees
it. Isn't that exactly how certain people were for you when you grew up?

Some of Harry's exploits in the early books seem preposterous for
someone his age. That is in the nature of children's books. The last
two, three seem much more believable in that respect to me. Surely
they are young adult books by then, not children's books. The things
that Harry does in DH are things I can well believe of someone his
age. In the end the trio don't save the world alone. They have
significant help from all corners of the WW and from most of its
races. Without that help they fail and fail as laughably as a beer
hall putsch. Help comes from all quarters, all houses, the quick and
the dead, and in the end two of the horcruxes have been destroyed by
Death Eaters. Harry does no more than the young men his age did that
collided in the fields about Shiloh Church on an April's day in 1862.
Those in blue also faced a dark night of failure and had to decide
whether to follow their much older and somewhat disreputable leader
the following morn. Follow him they did from one day's defeat to the
eventual salvation of a nation and liberation of a people. Harry acts
with a courage and forbearance that only the best of us achieve but he
does not exceed that best. I can believe him and therefore I can draw
inspiration from his example, fictional though it is. I cannot say
that I wasted my time reading these books.

Maybe another reading, or two, could bring you to that point too. 

Ken