Occlumency VERY VERY LONG

[sigurd at eclipse.net]

No: HPFGUIDX 191735

Dear Wilsonteam

"Trope" or "Archetype"- doesn't matter-  I view it as a simple ploy to get young readers interested in reading the book which a more general approach would not do, -- like if she had begun--  "All the world is divided into three parts, the wizzarding, the magic, and the muggle..." Appealing to adolescent fantasy, feeling sorry for ones self, and selfishness, may be crass, may be cynical, but it works.

As I said, all adolescents are self-absorbed and narcisstic. Can't blame them, that's all they have-- that's all they have, that's all they know-- their bodies and their immediate friends, and most of them have absolutely no resources or power.  Rowling is simply catering to their world view-- at 11 to 18. After 18 when they get jobs, grad school, real work and responsibilities "La Drole du Guerre" (the boredom of war and combat fatigue) takes over and they realize they are nothing special at all-- and the magic world dies.

The worth of something like Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings, or Nancy Drew, or Treasure island, or the Leatherstocking tales or any of the grand corpus of Western literature is not what people "read in" in the work, but what they read "OUT." That is having created archetypes and tropes within a story, what conclusions are made or pronounced in the story that the reader having read "in" the story, now reads "out" of the story and adopts as archetypes and tropes in their own life. (Which is where the dangers lay.) For example if one watches John Wayne Movies and resolves to adopt John Wayne as an archetype and be more like him and act in the heroic way, then he does and that is reading "OUT" of a story.

All stories (in exactly the same manner of games, the design of which I am heavily involved in) take a certain subset of the rules of reality and reduce them to archetypes and themes, characterizations, and tropes, and pits them against each other to make a point. They are pitted together as antagonist and protagonist, thesis and antithesis to achieve a synthesis and arrive at either comedy or tragedy. (Please note comedy here is as in comedia- journey, not a farce) Not much has changed since Aristotle. From this abstracted subset of reality we draw messages and lessons that may be life-changing or molding. The best example of this is science fiction- There really is no such thing as science fiction. There is only fiction  cast into the future to make a point or explore some issue of the present. The science in most science fiction is laughable, and really only Isaac Asimov paid much attention to real science.

The first thing is to get them to read.

Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, King Arthur-- they're all he same guy.

Otto