Who Needs Harry?

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 182341

Catlady (me) wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/182322>:
<< In the story, Harry is the only person who can take down Voldemort,
because that's how the story is written. The Author endowed him with
the needed abilities and gave him lucky breaks, and decreed that
everything everyone else tried, failed. >>

Betsy Hp replied in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/182330>:

<< Except JKR didn't allow anyone else of any skill to try anything
against Voldemort. That's part of the reason he looked so pathetic
as a big evil. We never got to see him being formidable. (snip) As far
as I could tell, Harry's special skill was his luck. Nothing he caused
or created, just the way things fell out around him. >>

Hey, Betsy, do you know that I agree with a lot of the things in a lot
of your posts lately? But it's hard to boil them down to a one or two
line snip to which I can reply: "This is a forbidden 'I agree' reply."

I don't object to Harry's special skill being luck, I object that
Rowling, having consciously or accidentally taken on a plot echoing
the archetype of the young boy who is the ONLY ONE who can do the
heroic task, 'went sloppy' (whose phrase what that? Alla's?) about the
reason that Harry is the 'only' one. 

In the folk tales and epics, it's always either luck (the young hero
has a magic ring or tinderbox or something that summons a giant black
dog or the Devil or something that does each impossible task for him)
or some unbelievable set-up, like the target can be killed 'neither
indoors nor outdoors, neither clothed nor naked, neither eating nor
fasting', so Clytemnestra threw a fishnet over Agamennon and stabbed
him as he was entering the doorway on his return from the bath, and
had just set an apple to his teeth but not yet bitten into it. In that
example, it's the position rather than the person -- one time it was
the person is when Macbeth could not be killed by man of woman born.
It can't just be that the hero is the strongest and cleverest - it
would be possible that someone else some time could be just as strong
and clever.

The problem with a novel requiring a ridiculous condition for being
able to kill the target is that a novel requires a certain superficial
plausibility. Poor Rowling couldn't just decree that Voldemort can be
killed only by, for example, a boy who was born with right and left
feet interchanged, because that's just the way it is, and Harry just
happened to be born with right and left feet interchanged, but his
wizard father switched them right ways around before anyone else
noticed. (Actually, Dumbledore would have had to notice if she wanted
him to be the puppet master, and Voldemort would have had to notice if
she wanted Voldemort to be continually attacking him.) If she wanted
to do the right-left foot switch, she would have had to make up a
superficially plausible reason WHY people born with their feet on
straight were ineffective against Voldemort. 

On top of that, she gave herself the added problem of setting it up
that the way Harry wins is by being killed. That usually requires some
gimmick (such as being Jesus Christ), something more than just being
the strongest and cleverest.

I suppose she tried to make up a plausible reason with the love-death
protection and the not-a-Horcrux and the Elder Wand's ownership and
maybe all that Basilisk venom stuff that Carol is going on about. I
think she failed because it is all too confusing. It must become
clearly and blindingly obvious to readers why the hero was the ONLY
ONE, otherwise the archetype gets broken.

And, y'know, with the archetype broken, I'm somewhere between hoping
that and having faith that some other people could have defeated
Voldemort if there had been no Harry, or he had failed. I couldn't
find a place to stick that fact into my previous post, but it's why I
went on about me personally believing that people have free will and
the future is not set in concrete until it actually happens. 

If I think of the characters as people rather than as symbols in
service of an archetype, I *HATE* the idea that if just one little
link in this complicated chain went wrong, they would all be
helplessly doomed to a Reign of Voldemort that might not end until our
Sun goes nova.