back with Harry (part 5)

How many orphans do you know?

In my childhood I was close with two, and in my adult life I've picked up two more. Undoubtedly the low percentage of orphans among my friends and close acquaintances has much to do with my "position of ignorance and privilege," in the words of one of my future wedding guests. But it could also suggest--and I have no statistics to back this up--that in the modern developed world, notwithstanding times of war, plague, or famine, most people through their childhood tend to have at least one surviving parent.

Why then do orphans so disproportionally people our most beloved stories? (Again I'm working with no statistics here.) A list of famous fictional orphans or veritable orphans is very nearly a list of our best child characters: it includes Huck, Dorothy, Peter Pan, Alice, Anne of Green Gables, Tom Sawyer, and James of the Giant Peach fame; it features countless leading characters from classic and supposedly classic literature, among them Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights's Heathcliffe, War & Peace's Pierre Bezukhov, Moby Dick's Ishmael, and Dickens's Pip, Esther, Oliver, and David; the list also comprises fairytale protagonists like Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and (in some versions) Hansel and Gretel, King Arthur, and Sir Lancelot; the list also boasts comic book heroes like Superman, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Batman, and all three Robins; and it includes contemporary mythic figures like Frodo Baggins, both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, the Baudelaire children, and of course Harry Potter.

This is, as I said, a selected list, but I think it's long enough to raise my question: why are orphans so attractive to storytellers and audiences?

Let's turn now to The Order of the Phoenix. It's my favorite book in the Harry Potter series, and any broad attempt I could make to discuss it would result in an embarrassment of superlatives. (The funniest! The most complex! The rootin'-tootin' bestest!...) So instead I'm going to use this post to propose a tentative answer to the orphan question; Harry will be my case study, and I'm confident that he'll survive my psychobabble.

My tentative answer: Little orphan Harry is the anomaly that represents the norm.

Aspects of my tentative answer:

1) Loneliness: Although most people I know aren't orphans, everyone at some point feels like one. This goes back to our oldest, most primal experiences, and continues even as we're tossed into our solitary graves. I remember visiting my friends the Bs a couple of years ago; when, at bedtime, baby M was put into his crib--his bedroom lights were turned off, his door was gently shut--he screamed as though he had been left in a ditch to die. He continued screaming for a full half hour, and I was startled to hear in his cry a portion of my own emotional makeup. M's feeling, though grotesquely distilled, to me was unmistakable: Come back, don't leave me...Harry Potter's lonely-orphan bit works the same way. It's an exaggeration, but through exaggeration we can recognize it as our own.

2) Family Romance: I first came upon this theory in Maynard Solomon's biography of Beethoven. Dig this: when rumors circulated that Beethoven was the illegitimate son of the king of Prussia, Beethoven didn't rush to refute them. This was because, Solomon argues, Beethoven himself partly wanted it to be true. His actual father was a "wastrel, second-rate musician, toady, possible police agent, drunkard, and hapless extortionist"; understandably, Beethoven thought he and his mother deserved better, and enjoyed the fantasy that he was some kind of fallen prince.

The gist of the Family Romance theory is that at some point in a child's life, he becomes disillusioned with his parents, and dreams that he came from someone worthier : "[T]he child’s imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting free from [his parents] and of replacing them by others, occupying, as a rule, a higher social station." (For an abridgment of Freud's essay, look here.)

A child may pretend, as Beethoven did, that he is a prince; a child may also half-convince himself, as I did when I was seventeen, that he is the long-lost great-grandchild of James Joyce; or a child can imagine that his true parents are not the fat, stuffy, foolish, shamelessly pedestrian Dursley people raising him, but once-powerful, now-dead wizards. This last fantasy is Harry's life. It's not ours, of course, but it's one we feel we're living.

unnatural selection

After a couple of biology classes and a visit last year to the American Museum of Natural History, my understanding of Darwin was roughly this: that he traveled on the Beagle around the world; that he quietly developed his "theory of evolution by natural selection" for decades; that he rushed to publish his ideas upon hearing that Alfred Russel Wallace was coming out with something similar; and that The Origin of Species changed the world.

This week I've learned that the theory everyone calls Darwin's was largely the result of a group effort. My source is Darwin himself: in the "Historical Sketch" that accompanies my edition of The Origin of Species, he cites 34 other naturalists and philosophers (among them Aristotle, Goethe, and his own father) who either had discussed evolution before him, or were thinking along these lines at the same time he was. In this same edition's foreword, Patricia G. Horan notes that "[w]hen The Origin of Species was written, the theory of evolution [...] was already old [...] 'Natural selection' had been in the air, waiting to be born."

My realization this week that Darwin did not invent evolutionary theory reminds me of my "discovery" last year that that Freud did not invent psychoanalysis. Popular history has propped up certain men and women as Founders and Great Thinkers, but they themselves often point to broader dialogues. I think the history of ideas shouldn't be taught as a succession of solo performances; it's much more like a singalong.

déjà whale

On April 19, 2004, someone blogged: "Yesterday I got spam from myself. Very depressing." Three years later the Whale wrote: "Yesterday I sent a message to myself as a reminder, and it was marked as spam. [...] At times like this, you just gotta say What the fuck."

Let's pretend for a second that these two authors are the same person; now we have an ingenius time loop, not to mention an elegant and symmetrical paradox. The author did and did not spam himself, which his email account did not and did allow; he spammed himself when he did not spam himself, but failed to spam himself when he spammed himself; he is unhappy because he did, but equally unhappy because he could not, spam himself; picture a Möbius strip bent like a smile.

A semantic observation: the hypothetical unified author begins both posts with "Yesterday." When will he live for Now?

Stale Spam

Most days I'm semi grateful for the spam filter on my yahoo email account. Instead of having to deal with the spam daily, I can deal with it periodically, making sure nothing real got stuck in the filter.
Yesterday I sent a message to myself as a reminder, and it was marked as spam. It was from the same email account that received it. Maybe it thought someone was trying to pass as me. At times like this, you just gotta say What the fuck.

God bless you, Meathead

Among the reigning generation of film critics, there seems to be some agreement that great American movies from the classical or golden age (1920s-1940s), movies like Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz, were technically groundbreaking in their day but are only quaint and rarely affecting to the modern audience; that great American movies from "new Hollywood" or silver or "post-classical" age (1960s-1970s), movies like Taxi Driver, The Graduate, and The Godfather, represent the best the art has to offer; and that, with the rise of the blockbuster (usually critics point to Jaws as the turning point), film in this country took a nosedive, and great American movies come only from independent studios, if ever.

While the predominance of this idea may have some connection to a real decline in the art, I suspect that it owes much to three effects of timing: first, most of the reigning film critics I'm referring to came of age during the 1960s-1970s, and it's natural that they would favor movies from those decades; second, the 1980s saw the rise of the home video, which may have demystified subsequent films; and third, "new Hollywood" roughly coincides with the movement of film theory into academia, where taste becomes canon, where thought goes to die. (For the record: I am talking about literary academia, not Sweatshirt's.)

Small wonder, then, that directors from the 1980s get shortchanged. Look at Rob Reiner. He never gets mentioned when people talk about great filmmakers, but in just four years he directed Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, and When Harry Met Sally. Never mind his abysmal recent projects: he produced three touchstones for my generation, and I think he deserves our love.