[HPforGrownups] Re: Morality and Harry Potter

[Bart Lidofsky]

No: HPFGUIDX 191844

On 2/27/2012 6:09 AM, kamion53 wrote:
> I wonder how long readers would follow the exploits of the main character is he really was a "...a nasty little boy....". One likes to relate in some way to the main character of a story and when this character only irritates because of his nastiness it is a tough job to get to the last chapter of the book and probably impossible to get to the next book let alone all seven of the serie.

Bart:
     Philosopher Jacques Derrida is most famous for a concept called 
"deconstruction." It is partially based on the fact that language is not 
exact, and open to interpretation, and even the interpretations 
themselves, since they are based in language, are open to 
interpretation. One aspect of this is that, in any given narrative, 
there is a major idea and a minor idea, and the major idea drives out 
the minor idea. Or, another way of putting it is, "the victor writes the 
histories."

     Switching the major and the minor ideas, however, allow us to look 
at things from an expanded perspective. For example:  A couple of 
vandals break into an old woman's house and start destroying it. She 
catches them and tries to punish them, but they kill her, instead. That 
is a simple deconstruction of "Hansel and Gretel".

     One of the aspects of a "Harry Potter for Grownups" group is that 
we have real-world experience which we use to take a closer look at the 
books, rather than take them on face value. Sometimes, we may do it 
comically (postulating, for example, that wizards and witches have 
extra-large bladders, as there are a couple of examples of them going on 
hours-long journeys apparently without having to relieve themselves, 
such as the flight to the Ministry in OOP). Some are more serious (such 
as discussing the existence and nature of Voldemort's mental illness).

     JKR sometimes sacrifices internal consistency for creating a bit of 
comic relief. A larger problem with this is that she tends to plant 
clues for the overstory in tiny details in the individual books, which, 
while the books were being published, caused intelligent readers to 
scrutinize them very carefully. This caused the inconsistencies to loom 
larger. This lead, as well, to various forms of deconstruction. A major 
one, of course, is the analysis of Dumbledore. He is portrayed as a 
major hero, but he can also be viewed as a secretive manipulator, who 
manipulates Harry while making Harry believe that he was making his own 
choices.

     It is a common and understandable moral failing that people judge 
actions not based on the action itself or the context, but on who is on 
the performing or receiving end of the action. In situation comedies, 
there is often a character who is unlikeable, present so that the 
audience can laugh when things happen to him or her which would be 
tragic if the audience wasn't predisposed to "s/he deserved that" type 
of thinking.

     Let's take, for example, the scene from COS where Harry and the 
gang spy on Draco to see if he is the "heir to Slytherin". They drug 
Crabbe and Goyle to take them out of action. That is glossed by, but 
these are 2nd years. Hermione had already screwed up with the Polyjuice 
Potion; and they put Crabbe and Goyle's lives in danger just to test out 
their suspicions. Drugging someone is, in the RW, generally considered 
to be a horrible thing to do, but the major idea, that the Trio are 
heroes, drive out the minor idea, that they sometimes go beyond just 
"breaking the rules" but we ignore it, because their victims are 
unlikeable.

     According to JKR, one of the major themes of the books is that our 
characters can be defined by the choices we make. Therefore, it makes 
sense to analyze the choices the characters make without having the 
major idea that, because they are who they are, their choices are 
automatically the right ones.

     Bart