Wands and Wizards...Again (Was: Epilogue ...)

[montavilla47]

No: HPFGUIDX 183587

> Pippin:
> I always wondered if Rowling, having identified herself as a
> Christian, meant to let the Unforgivable designation stand. IMO, she
> does not want us to condone what Harry did. She does want us to
> forgive him, either  as an adult who eventually would regret what he'd
> done, or as a child who knew not what he did.
> 
> Harry is a fictional construct. He has no emotions, no self-reflection
> or self-doubt, unless the reader imagines them. As a critical reader,
> you may distinguish between the feelings the author describes and the
> ones you attribute to Harry out of your own experience and
> imagination. But the naive reader doesn't do that. 
> 
> The naive reader is not going to discount her feelings about  what
> Harry did because they are not described in canon. She will assume
> that what she imagines Harry feeling is what Harry actually felt. If
> the reader imagines that any good person who did such a thing would
> regret it deeply afterwards, and as you say, that is the thrust of the
> books, then the reader who identifies with Harry will imagine that
> Harry regretted it too.

Montavilla47:
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your use of the word "naive."  It seems 
to me that a naive reader would assume that Harry is feeling what he 
is described as feeling on the page, and it would take a more
sophisticated reader to go beyond the text and infer that Harry 
will at some later time feel regret for his actions.  And then take
the further step of forgiving him for a regret we don't see him feel.
Wouldn't the naive reader go for the simple reading--that Harry
is justified in his casting the curse?


Pippin:
> Harry is admonished in canon for having performed a possibly foolish
> action, if not a wicked one. The naive reader is going to see that
> Harry lost his temper. Blood is described as thundering through his
> brain. And the reader already knows that when people lose their
> tempers they behave foolishly.

Montavilla47:
I agree that it's a small intuitive leap to know that Harry has lost
his temper.  However, I think--judging from how popular these
moments are when done in, say, movies, that the audience tends
to applaud the sentiment and cheer for the hero when he loses his 
temper.

Heh.  I'm reminded of the moment in Nicholas Nickleby when
Nicholas, forced to stand by as Squeers canes Smike in front of
the student body, finally snaps.  He seizes the cane and whips
Squeers soundly, triggering a riot among the abused students,
who attack Squeers and his family and destroy the school.

Squeers makes Amycus look like Dr. Spock.  He regularly beats
the students, insults them, starves them, and torments them
by letting them know how little their families think of them by
sending them to his school in the first place.  

When Nicholas whips him, it's a supremely satisfying moment.
In the stage production, the audience literally stood up and 
cheered.  

Of course, this being Dickens (who, like JKR, described his
hero as being far from a saint and hot-tempered), there
are consequences from Nicholas's actions, even if Squeers
richly deserved his treatment.  The Squeers family becomes
great enemies of Nicholas and pays him back later.  There
is also a passage about the countryside being "littered" with
the schoolboys for weeks afterwards, begging and stealing
as they try to make their various ways home.  One of them
is found dead.  So, although Nicholas's rage is justified and
the moment is satisfying, we are reminded that the outcome
of violence was more anger and suffering.

But, more usually, these kind of moments are there to 
give a short thrill to the audience and have no ill-effects.
The one I remember (because it came out of nowhere), 
was from A League of Their Own.  The story, about the
all-female baseball league, was set in WWII.  At one point,
a telegram arrives for one of the women on the team,
but the messenger can't find the addressee, and announces
that he will go back to the office to find out who it goes
to.  This means that several of the women (who are 
married) will have to wait to learn which of them is now
a widow.

Instead, the coach (Tom Hanks), grabs the messenger
and demands the telegram.  When the messenger refuses,
Hanks punches him, takes the note, reads it, and hands it
to the unfortunate player, letting her grieve and allowing
the rest of the team to go play the game.

While the moment nicely illustrates the emotional 
experience of learning that your husband has died in war,
the nastiness of the messenger was completely unnecessary
and struck me as being unrealistic.  (Would any telegram
messenger during WWII have treated a war widow so 
callously?)  The rudeness was there in order to provide
a moment when the hero (Hanks) can use fisticuffs
to invoke a sympathetic thrill in the audience.

I believe that JKR was going for a similar moment
in DH, when Harry gives in to his temper.  The problem
is that she set those Unforgivables up to require evil
intent in order to pull off--and she had both Snape
and Bellatrix telling Harry that he wasn't "dark" enough
to use them.  Bellatrix told him that "righteous anger"
wasn't enough to cast Cruciatus.  Snape told him
"No Unforgivables for you!"

We also have Minerva--in the very first chapter of the
first book--making a distinction between Dark Magic
and everything else, by saying that Dumbledore is 
"too noble" to use Dark Magic--like Voldemort, the
arch villain of the series, does.

Pippin:
> But Harry's remorse must be private. If he judged himself as an adult,
> it would be cruel to ask the young reader, who thinks of Harry as a
> better, more powerful version of himself, to suffer so. Judged as a
> child, which he is by the standards of our world, Harry does not need
> to understand the enormity of what he's done before he  can be forgiven. 

Montavilla47:
I don't believe it's cruel for a child to vicarious feel Harry's regret.  That's
one thing stories are for--so that the reader (child or adult) can 
understand the outcomes of actions without having to experience it
directly.

For example:  In Little Women, Jo becomes justifiably angry at Amy for
burning her manuscript.  Her anger leads her to ignore Amy the next
day while they are skating on a frozen river.  Because she doesn't
warn Amy about the thin ice, Amy falls through and nearly freezes
to death.  Afterwards, Jo confesses her guilt to Marmee and the 
reader is allowed to feel every pang of anguish she does as she 
watches over her sister.  

It's not cruel for a child to read that passage.  It's moving and 
intensely emotional.  It both shows the reader the dangers of 
holding anger against another person and power of love and
forgiveness.

We've seen Harry feel regret for past actions.  Not a lot, I'll
admit.  But I recall he feels very bad when Dumbledore asks
why he and Ron stole the flying car.  Was it cruel to ask children
to read that passage?

Pippin:
> Of course, more mature readers who might like to have a child's or a
> fictional hero's license to punish evil without worrying about the
> consequences can  indulge that pleasure. But it's difficult to look at
> the entire series and suppose that JKR thinks the  consequences of
> abuse can be safely ignored. 

Montavilla47:
Of course not.  The consequences of abuse are terrible throughout
the series.  Except when it comes to Harry.  His neglect and abuse
at the hands of the Dursleys only makes him more loving.  At least,
Dumbledore seems to think so (I'm not all that convinced, myself).

And, when it's Harry or his friends doing the abusing, the outcome
seems designed to be funny.  Here are a few examples of "abuse" 
that readers find humorous:  The pig's tail on Dudley that requires
surgery to remove; the hexing of Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle that 
leaves them helpless and "slug" like; the knocking of Snape's head
on the top of the tunnel by Sirius; the comeuppance of Delores
Umbridge at the hands and hooves of the centaurs.
 
Pippin:
> I think it's really reaching to present this episode as condoning
> torture in some way. Notice that this is not '24' -- torture, whether
> physical or magical, is *never* presented as an effective way of
> getting information. And if JKR wanted us to condone the cruciatus
> curse, she'd have called it something else, I'm sure.  I know that
> even growing up as a Jewish child, I was vaguely aware that
> crucifixion was a bad thing. Perhaps we can agree that the average
> British schoolchild is at least as vaguely aware as I was?

Montavilla47:
I think JKR does a truly effective job of setting up the Cruciatus
Curse as a bad thing.  What some of us are having difficulty with
is her then having Harry use it in a moment that is set up for
us to sympathize with its use.  

The moment is not necessary simply to prove that Harry is 
no saint.  I, for one, was quite aware of that much earlier.  Either
she did it for a cheap thrill, or she did it in order to explode 
the moral system she set up in the series.

I can see why she might do either.  DH is filled with exciting
moments like this, and it may have seemed to her like just
another one--not that different from Molly's "bitch" line.

Or, she may have felt it was needed in order to set up
the reader to overlook Snape's casting of Avada Kadavra, which
is also an Unforgivable.  I read many a post pre-DH in which
readers proclaimed that, even if we learned that Dumbledore
wanted Snape to kill him, the mere fact that he used AK is
enough to condemn him forever.  But, if that were her purpose,
then it was unnecessary.  Since DH came out, I've read very
few posts arguing that Snape's action on the tower was 
wrong.  I don't think that's because Harry cast Unforgivables.
I think it was because JKR adequately explained Snape's
reasons for his actions and readers realized that Snape had
carefully considered the options before using such a drastic
measure.

Harry, on the other hand, was simply being self-indulgent.