Hey, long comments are a blast! This one may be shorter, though, because I'm getting sleepy, but I really love your points here -- I think you're absolutely right, one of the most marked features of JKR's world is its severe and critical adult-deficit. Everybody in this world is so messed up and emotially stunted that you just want to scream and knock their heads together. (How's that for a mature, adult response?)
Honestly, though, I'm not sure what to make of your argument that we should evaluate Harry's behavior only by the standards that seem to prevail in this world. I could understand an argument that it explains his behavior, in terms of empathizing with him -- he has no examples of better behavior, so as a given character, in his own given situation, he can't be expected to know any better. But I don't see the point of ending the argument there. I mean, as a reader, reacting to the book, what do we make of that?
And the thing is, I honestly can't figure out what JKR's take on all this is. Really, she frustrates me sometimes so that I want to tear my hair out, one hair at a time. There are times I think she's a satirist and an ironist and she's three steps ahead of us and sees it all, and that the problems and messes and human damage in the books are her point, that she's trying to depict how this happens to people and how awful it is if they can't get out of their own personal traps. And yet, there are other times when I feel like she lets me down as a reader, when I look in vain for clues that she, herself, has any wider perspective than some of her characters. It really is the $64 million question with JKR -- is she in control of all of her effects, or is she what lunacy calls "an extraordinary talented mimetic writer," who seems more complex than she is because of how unconsciously she creates lifelike characters?
I don't know! I keep going back and forth on this!
But I do think that I would find it a very cramped kind of reading, to try to consciously suppress any sort of real-life insight that lets me, as a reader, have some wider perspective on these characters than they have on themselves. I have to believe that the point of the books is to explore what's wrong with all this, and not just to suggest that there's no other way to be, which after all is an empirically incorrect statement about people and their potential.
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Date: 2006-01-20 03:48 am (UTC)Honestly, though, I'm not sure what to make of your argument that we should evaluate Harry's behavior only by the standards that seem to prevail in this world. I could understand an argument that it explains his behavior, in terms of empathizing with him -- he has no examples of better behavior, so as a given character, in his own given situation, he can't be expected to know any better. But I don't see the point of ending the argument there. I mean, as a reader, reacting to the book, what do we make of that?
And the thing is, I honestly can't figure out what JKR's take on all this is. Really, she frustrates me sometimes so that I want to tear my hair out, one hair at a time. There are times I think she's a satirist and an ironist and she's three steps ahead of us and sees it all, and that the problems and messes and human damage in the books are her point, that she's trying to depict how this happens to people and how awful it is if they can't get out of their own personal traps. And yet, there are other times when I feel like she lets me down as a reader, when I look in vain for clues that she, herself, has any wider perspective than some of her characters. It really is the $64 million question with JKR -- is she in control of all of her effects, or is she what
I don't know! I keep going back and forth on this!
But I do think that I would find it a very cramped kind of reading, to try to consciously suppress any sort of real-life insight that lets me, as a reader, have some wider perspective on these characters than they have on themselves. I have to believe that the point of the books is to explore what's wrong with all this, and not just to suggest that there's no other way to be, which after all is an empirically incorrect statement about people and their potential.