More on Albus Dumbledore_

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Hi, everyone. This will be quite short, but something sunnyskywalker said in a previous discussion rang bells with me. What if these books aren't quite what we think they are?


I am thinking of an interview with Rowling some years back, when she answered a question about her faith with words to this effect: "I struggle to keep believing". If anyone has the exact quote, I'd be grateful!

Because, you see, that is quite moving to me. It is hard to keep believing in God when you witness truly evil things happening to people you love. At least, you can't go on believing, like a child, in the wise old man with a beard who will make everything all right. That's so obviously not what God is.*

But, in these books, we have a wise old man with a beard. And he is very, very imperfect. Rowling's depiction of Dumbledore does, indeed, seem like an indictment of sorts.

But Dumbledore is obviously not God. He is just the headmaster of a wizarding school. Harry, despite some of the imagery surrounding him, is just as obviously not Jesus. Who is he? As I said on my blog some time back, he is an everyman character - specifically, he's Percival, the fool.

And - I think there is some kind of sense there, lurking deep down. I can't quite put my finger on it, but sometimes I think it's there.

Because, if there is a Christ figure at all in these books (but I don't think there is), that is definitely Severus Snape, in spite of his obvious imperfections. If Harry is Percival, Snape is the Fisher King; the wounded king of a wounded land. And what heals the Fisher King? Compassion and curiosity. Percival is supposed to ask a question. We all know that Harry never does that, don't we?

But, if Snape is the Fisher King and Harry Percival, who on earth is Dumbledore? Because he's not God. Not consciously, anyway. And - it's interesting that one of his names is Percival. What I'm getting at is that I sometimes think that the 'lost boys' of Hogwarts are all facets of him.

Rowling is playing with some very powerful archetypes in these stories, I think, and that's why we are still struggling to find meaning in them.

My two cents!

* As those who know me know, I'm a devout Catholic. To me, God is nothing like Dumbledore.

Comments

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I also have trouble imagining how an author could have so little understanding of her own characters. I don't know how you can write characters without understanding them. But maybe that's fairly common for authors.

I can only speak for myself, but I doubt that the majority of authors don't understand the characters that they create.

What I can say is that each character reflects aspects of the author's own psyche, their emotional makeup, their mentality and their personal psychology. This is true whether creating totally original characters, or borrowing characters from another author...IOW, even tho Severus Snape is a creation of Jo Rowling, the Severus Snape in my own fanfiction reflects my own psychological makeup, not Rowling's.

Over the many decades that I've written short stories, I've created characters that were pretty dark, psychologically damaged, or just outright confused! LOL

But I had a complete understanding of each dark/damaged/confused character; if a character was supposed to be unlikeable, and/or a "villian", then they were clearly so. My story may provide an explanation for why that character is the way he or she is, but I don't waffle about the character and their motivation(s).

Ditto the good guys; my good guys are rarely perfect, in fact I can say that they are almost always damaged in some way (I actually had a college professor criticize me on this). "Perfect" characters are boring, so I continue to write leading characters who are generally "good", but who have definite flaws, with resulting problems.

So if I was a creator of a character who, thru out the story, has ambiguous motives, who on the surface comes off as possibly a villain, but at the end if revealed to actually have been a hero who martyred himself, I as the creator of said character wouldn't have any problem in accepting that said character is really a hero. Period.

Heroes can have major flaws (indeed, that is the basis of most great literature); Rowling seems to have a problem in understanding that -- or more pointedly, in coming to terms with those aspects within herself.

Ditto her villains; the most frightening villains are the ones who are actually good-looking and have pleasing personalities, not cartoon caricatures.

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

Yes, your relationships with your characters sounds far more like what I would expect.from an author.

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

Yes, your relationships with your characters sounds far more like what I would expect.from an author.

They're my babies, and good, bad, or ugly, I love 'em all! LOL

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

That's about how I treat my characters too. I think that an author should be able to sympathize just as much with the villains, to an extent, since that seems to make for much more interesting, realistic ones.