back with Harry (part 7 [beta])

We are less than a week before the release of The Deathly Hallows, so I may as well commit to and throw in my predictions.

1) Harry won't kill Voldemort.
By the rules of the universe as laid out in The Lord of the Rings, good never defeats evil, it's always evil that defeats itself: Aragorn doesn't break Sauron, Gollum (inadvertantly) does; Gandolf doesn't kill Saruman, it's Wormtongue who knifes him in the back. In The Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore exclaims in this direction: "Voldemort himself created his own worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!"

Of all Voldemort's minions, I think the one most likely to finish him is Peter Pettigrew. Pettigrew is pathetic and sniveling, cutting off his own hand to ressurect the Dark Lord, and being rewarded with insults and Crucio curses. Also, at the end of the Prisoner of Azkaban, Dumbole says that Harry may one day be glad that he spared Peter's life. And it is worth remembering that Pettigrew's nickname is Wormtail, which is just one body part from Wormtongue. All that said, it would also fit Tolkien's model if Snape, Draco, or Narcissa Malfoy killed Voldemort instead.

2) Ron and Hermoine will hit it.
I've always wanted a love triangle between Harry, Ron, and Hermoine, but it ain't happening. I'll live.

3) Hermoine will return to Hogwarts as a teacher.
Don't know if Rowling will do a "Here's how everyone turned out!" chapter, but it'll somehow be implied that Hermoine is on track to be a Headmaster one day.

4) R.A.B. is Regulus Black.

5) The final Horcrux will be Harry himself, or his scar.
Harry may have to die to destroy this, or at least he will offer his death. I don't have an official prediction on whether Harry will croak.

6) Snape will redeem himself.
After rereading the series, I think it's obvious that Snape is with the good guys. He killed Dumbledore because of the Unbreakable Vow and because Dumbledore asked him to. Dumbledore died to save Draco, and Snape followed his Headmaster's orders. As mentioned above, I wouldn't be surprised if it was Snape who killed Voldemort; I also wouldn't be surprised if Snape somehow died to save Harry.


Note that many of these ideas weren't originally mine. My former coworker M. came up with the Harry-as-Horcrux theory the day after The Half-Blood Prince came out, and the Pettigrew-kills-Voldemort theory came from a random guy I met in Brooklyn Supreme Court.

back with Harry (part 6)

For an aspiring writer, a great workshop lesson from The Half-Blood Prince is that, with many and diverse supporting characters, an author can portray most inner conflicts externally, and can thereby render them more vividly and viscerally.

Harry is, in my opinion, a sophisticated and multi-layered character. At the same time he rarely has to torture out ideas or feelings from solitude. His frustrations surface through Draco, his loyalty through Dumbledore, his warmth and humor through the Weasleys...Luna carries his goofy moods, Hermione his better judgment...And Rowling takes this a step further, splitting even these supporting characters into sub-characters, rendering material those slippery, elusive, and abstract feelings, which lesser authors can describe only with fug.

Example: When Harry proclaims himself "Dumbledore's man through and through," Dumbledore is moved almost to tears, and "Fawkes the phoenix let[s] out a low, soft, musical cry." Here one character (yes, I'm counting the phoenix as a character) stands for and evokes the feelings of another, dramatizing an otherwise action-less scene along the way.

A problem with the novel as an art form is that it is susceptible to mires of rumination, to explanations and re-explanations that obsess over a character's soul or brains, and forget all about her guts. Rowling never does this. One of the thousand reasons to love her: she doesn't belabor thoughts and emotions, because her characters walk and talk them for her.

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.

back with Harry (part 4)

If The Prisoner of Azkaban is a portrayal of grief, The Goblet of Fire is a book about togetherness. How groups of people overlap, how they can enchant or frighten one another, and how they can fall into conflict--variations on the theme of community is the understructure for the fourth and most adventuresome Harry Potter book.

The opening chapters repeatedly show the wizard and Muggle worlds colliding. An old gardener stumbles into Voldemort's lair, where Wormtail promptly kills him; the Weasley and Dursely families have a very awkward, and very British, visit when Harry gets picked up; and at the Quidditch World Cup, the Muggles are by turns imitated, mocked, brainwashed, and tortured.

Rowling explores the frictions and interdependencies among wizard communities in still greater detail. The Quidditch World Cup is naturally an international event. At Hogwarts, characters from all four houses are prominently featured for the first time in the series--besides Harry & co. from Griffindor, and Draco et al. from Slytherin, we now have Cedric from Hufflepuff and Cho from Ravenclaw. The Goblet of Fire also introduces racism/speciesism, or the sub-theme of prejudice among communities, both through Hagrid's shame of being half-giant, and through Hermoine's efforts to free the house elves.

Communities may clash, but they also unite in unexpected ways. For the Yule Ball numerous couples cross house and school lines. In the Triwizard Tournament, more significantly, the representatives of different schools at first compete mercilessly, and then begin to help one another. This culminates after the third task, when Harry and Cedric both refuse to take the winner's cup individually, but agree to grab it together.

The symbolism here is not subtle, but Dumbledore spells it out all the same: "Differences of habit and language are nothing [...] if our aims are identical and our hearts are open." I don't fault Rowling here for announcing her message so loudly. Clarity is one of her great strengths, and besides--if you don't think the world needs to be reminded of the dangers of animosity between and intolerance within communities, open a newspaper.

back with Harry (part 1.1)

Last week I came across a line in Adorno which I think speaks to my first post on the Harry Potter series: "[T]he whole retroactively invigorates the elements that brought it about."

The shame is that it took Adorno many pages to come up with something so pithy.

back with Harry (part 3)

As my most loyal and attentive readers have already figured out, one of my goals in following Rowling's development as a writer is to raise broader questions about art, to nibble at the great "messy topics" that Sweatshirt, the Whale, and I enjoy discussing so much. (Usually these discussions go on past midnight; usually they occur while we munch through boxes of Men's Pocky.)

The question of the week is this: how does an artist outgrow mere entertainment, and learn to awaken profound feelings in her audience?

The Prisoner of Azkaban is the first emotionally resonant book in the Harry Potter series; it's the leap Woody Allen made from Love and Death to Annie Hall--how did Rowling accomplish it?

Necessary preconditions include a compelling plot (albeit far squeakier than that of The Chamber of Secrets), a likable cast of characters, healthy doses of sarcasm and slapstick, consistently dazzling wizardry, and then that same "unfailingly accessible" prose I commented on in my previous post. These qualities alone would have made for a worthy if boilerplate addition to the series; they don't create the book's emotional resonance, but they do facilitate it.

To the point, the emotional power of The Prisoner of Azkaban flows not from tricks or mysteries, but from the book's creative but recognizable portrait of grief.

From the second chapter, in which Harry inflates Aunt Marge after she insults his dead parents, to the final pages, when Harry shoots from his wand an animal representing his lost father, The Prisoner of Azkaban chronicles Harry's first serious attempt to understand and live with the death of his parents. Across the book a reader can follow Harry through all of Kübler-Ross's stages of grief: the scene with Aunt Marge shows anger, the dementors are of course depression, Harry's in denial when he believes that he's seen his father, bargaining is partly the reason Harry lets Peter Pettigrew live, and acceptance finally comes when Harry recognizes his Patronus as a stag and, the next day, when Dumbledore explains: "You father is alive in you... [I]n a way, you did see your father last night. ... You found him inside yourself."

This acceptance will prove fleeting, sadly, and in The Prisoner of Azkaban Rowling is already dropping hints that Harry's progression will not be wholly progressive. But to anyone who has mourned, the fragility of Harry's recovery cannot come as a shock. Kübler-Ross warns us that "stages" of grief are, in fact, indistinct and overlapping; most perniciously, as I have had to learn myself, they tend to recur long after you're supposed to have moved on.

back with Harry (part 2)

[Editor's note: Following the wild success of Howl's first post on this topic, he has generously agreed to take us deep into The Chamber of Secrets. Enjoy!]

When I started reading the Harry Potter books about five years ago, I had expected and even wanted to dismiss them. As an aspiring writer I generally prefer my idols to be dead: buried and rotted, the competition is far less threatening.

But while The Sorcerer's Stone seemed to justify some of my prejudices, The Chamber of Secrets stunned me into respect. This book is, in my opinion, a miracle of pace and plotting. It is the novel I most often recommend to other would-be novelists, and it is the single book in the Harry Potter series that I am likely to read a third time. (The only other full-length novels I've read three times are Anna Karenina and Emma.)

Beneath its action and humor, The Chamber of Secrets has the narrative skeleton of a mystery novel: nearly every chapter solves one riddle while introducing another, and most revelations manage at once to be surprising and logical. This book, I've argued, can serve writers as a compendium of effective storytelling techniques; and it was by these technical accomplishments that Rowling won me over, seducing me despite her own pulse.

But if The Chamber of Secrets is technically Rowling's most successful work, it still doesn't hint at the emotional power that will make her later books so formidable. This introduces a messy topic, though, one that will have to wait for later posts.

A question I will raise here, however, is how much the dominance of one art form, specifically film or television, can influence the creation and reception of works in another, specifically books.

For a while now I've toyed with the idea that many books, including some that I've written, are thinly-disguised novelizations of unmade movies or TV serials. I don't think this of the Harry Potter series, but I do suspect that its popularity owes something to how well Rowling's style, which is highly visual and unfailingly accessible, suits the sensibility of an audience weaned on film and television.

The Chamber of Secrets has plenty of cinematic moments, but the best one for this discussion occurs after Hermione has been Petrified, when Ron works up the nerve to sneak into the Forbidden Forest: he "looked sideways at the empty seat usually filled by Hermione. The sight seemed to stiffen his resolve, and he nodded." In Rowling, as in film and television, inner conflict usually plays out briefly and externally; in Bellow and Dostoevsky, by contrast, such moments of decision can last fifty pages, whole chapters in which characters rarely bother to move about the room.

It is worth remembering, though, that Dickens sticks to the tangible world as much as Rowling does. Film and television had no influence his writing, obviously, but the sensibility that they've fostered may partly dispose us to keeping him in print.

back with Harry (part 1)

In preparation for the release of the final volume of the Harry Potter series, I'm rereading the first six books sequentially and bracing myself for the sad and imminent goodbye.

Over the years the Whale, Sweatshirt, and I have repeatedly discussed whether art can be considered "good" or "bad," or whether it's a subjective mess--a question of taste--a debate in which the only truth you have is "I like this" or "I don't like that." I'm not going to extend that conversation here, except to acknowledge that the dialog is ongoing, and that people far smarter than us have also failed to resolve the matter convincingly.

That said, for me the Harry Potter books are among the most important to have been published in my lifetime; and I suspect that this is true for many others as well, especially for readers whose growing up has more or less coincided with Harry's. For us the seventh book has a lot to live up to: Rowling's characters have become our friends, and her imagined world serves varyingly (and sometimes simultaneously) as an escape from, a revelation into, and a critique of our real one.

The first Harry Potter installment, however, shows little of Rowling's achievement. It is a clever and breezy book, sometimes funny but never affecting. The six puzzles that Harry & co. solve to get the Sorcerer's Stone could have come from any Dungeonmaster's manual; the surprise unmasking in "The Man with Two Faces" is pure Scooby Doo.

The one scene that created a feeling other than amusement in me took place on the train to Hogwarts, when Harry and Ron become acquainted over Chocolate Frogs. This moment made me tear up: having read the other five Harry Potter books, I recognized it as the beginning of a friendship that will develop and strengthen over many hundreds of pages. My own loves, platonic or not, all started just this simply: from games and chatter came forces that would shape my life.

It is worth clarifying, though, that this scene meant something to me only as a prelude to better ones. I believe that, while charming by itself, The Sorcerer's Stone owes most of its significance to the other books Rowling has written; a mystic might say that this story has been retroactively improved.

Examples of this phenomenon abound, but I'll limit myself to these: The Hobbit steals weight from The Lord of the Rings, Hamburg-era Beatles are quaint only after hearing Rubber Soul, etc., Picasso's early, realistic paintings fascinate us largely in relation to his later, experimental work, and the "famous first lines," all of which are remembered because the books that followed them were worthy.