Deathly Hallows, chapter 12

[anehan]

Magic is Might

* Yeah, yeah, the Death Eaters are observing 12 Grimmauld Place. Why don't you cut straight to the story, Rowling?

* I've got to say that it's stupid of the Death Eaters to expect anyone to appear there, not when they are so obvious about keeping an eye on it.

* The kitchen is now polished to perfection, all thanks to the mysteriously changed Kreacher. Even Kreacher's ordering Harry about isn't enough to make me reconciled to this new state of things.

* Well, Snape can't be a worse headmaster than the previous one.

* IIRC, this is the second time that "Merlin" is used as an expletive in this book, this time by Hermione.

* The other teachers won't accept Snape as a headmaster? Oh, come on, Ron, that's naïve even for you. The slightest reflection should make it clear that they have no choice.

* "The quality of Kreacher's cooking had improved dramatically since he had been given Regulus's locket." Nonononono! *whimpers*

* Exposition alert! An infodump about new Ministry policies. Stupid policies, if you ask me; there only so that the Trio can put their plan into action.

* Hermione is worried that the plan will go wrong, because so much relies on chance. Get used to it, Hermione, since that's what you'll be relying for the rest of the book.

* It's so very Harry to have a plan that's likely to go horribly wrong, only to be rescued by luck.

* Am I the only one who thinks that real reason for Ron's reluctance to have Hermione with them is misplaced chivalry?

* Master, Master, Master. Shut up, Kreacher!

* Harry's scar hurts again. It just doesn't make sense that Voldemort suddenly stopped using Occlumency after using it for the previous book. IMO it's there only so that we can get periodical updates about what he is doing. Oh dear, consistency.

* Hermione knows very well that Harry doesn't know how to use Occlumency, so what use is it telling him he shouldn't let Voldemort into his mind?

* Harry gets angry when Hermione suggests that the reason he never really tried to learn Occlumency is because he likes to have this special connection to Voldemort. Oh, I don't know, Harry, I think what she says has some merit.

* It's rather rich of Harry to tell Hermione to forget Dumbledore when he's himself been all about doing what Dumbledore wanted him to do.

* And off we go to the Ministry, armed with a plan with very little chance of succeeding.

* Frankly, the reason why they gave Mr Magical Maintenance Puking Pastilles instead of stunning him makes no sense. The Stunned bodies would be in the empty; they wouldn't be attracting anyone's attention.

* Stupid of them to have Harry impersonate someone who they know nothing about.

* The official entrance to the Ministry is quite stupid. I'm getting bored of these supposedly quirky habits the Wizarding World has, such as this and the moving staircases at Hogwarts. I'm sure they're meant to be funny, but they only make wizards look incredibly stupid.

* The Death Eaters have no subtlety. Magic is Might, indeed.

* Yaxley's face is brutish, and he's dressed opulently. No doubt his Polyjuice Potion would be mud-coloured. After all, blood will tell.

* A very short recap this time, for which I apologise. The chapter was boring as hell. We're only a third way in, and already I am heartily sick of this book.




Atomic Grenade:
Puking Pastilles. Guaranteed instant hurling.

Designated Hero:
Master, Master, Master, Master. Our Hero is so noble that lower life-forms can't help but worship him.

Informed Attributes:
The Trio's plan will word. Really.

Final score: 3.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

see this is where all those JKR improved as a writer arguments lose me

People ... make those arguments?

Are these people, by any chance the sorts of idiots who confuse "giving interviews about how dark your world is" with "actually being good at writing books"?

- Dan Hemmens

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Might want to go off to Mr Hemmens's column page on FerretBrain and read his latest entry. He's spotted a trend. Not a promising one, but one hat is certainly there.

http://ferretbrain.com/contributors/6.html

[(Anonymous)]

I have to say that while it is an interesting and well-written article, I largely disagree with it. And since I don't want to register there I'll briefly comment on it here:

In a nutshell, Mr. Hemmens seems to be saying that (urban ?) fantasy authors take their secondary worlds too seriously, while they should always stress that fantasy aspects are metaphorical and that true problems are in the Real World (tm) and that all those adventures only psychologically prepare the heroes to deal with those real problems.

IMHO, it is a completely valid fictional approach to take secondary worlds seriously... _if_ the respective authors go all the way with logical consequences.
The problem is that most authors are stuck in-between and provide their heroes with an arena where they can be special and significant without the responsibility and price that would have been attendant to such a position in RL. Because, hey, the magic can reverse (almost) everything and therefore the hero should be able to repeatedly save the world without watching a significant part of his friends and allies die and suffer in the process or making hard decisions that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. _That's_ where the whole deluded wish-fulfillment comes in.


An episode of Buffy usually opens with our heroine facing a Typical Teenage Problem, then getting drawn into a supernatural event which allowed her, at the end, to resolve her Real Life problem

But isn't that where the childishness comes in? Because in RL, being a war hero never helped anybody to deal with interpersonal or day-to-day problems and being brave on the battlefield seldom translated into civil or moral courage. A brief look at history, particularly that of the first part of the 20th century amply proves this.

A mythical journey in which the Hero leaves the real world and then never comes back is always going to seem, to me (and therefore to anybody who matters), to be fundamentally juvenile.

That' what most of the classical hero's journeys are, though, unless the hero was some kind of displaced "true heir" in the first place. Sorry, but the farmer's lucky third son never returns home and becomes a better farmer. For that matter, emigration is a valid RL choice, too, which many make.

you have to let go of the belief that your secret world is the most important one.

Yet our culture and science were in great part created by people who cared more about their "secret worlds" than their material gain or social success. It is entirely OK to spend one's life creating something that nobody is ever likely to appreciate. It carries its personal costs, yes, and those are steep - but we owe a lot to people who were stubborn enough to persist and talented enough to create something memorable.
Again, the point is not that "secret worlds" are unworthy and contemptible, but that the costs are glossed over.

Lord of the Rings loses a lot of its impact if the Hobbits don't go back to the shire.

Hobbits going back and being able to save and restore Shire to it's former glory, but even better, was a self-indulgent lie, though. After the wars, returning European soldiers found their countries irrevocably changed and often not for the better. And whatever they "learned" didn't help them to regain the society they left _nor_ did it help them in their subsequent lives, for the most part. Frodo is the realistic depiction of a returning war hero, not Pippin or Merry.

fantasy (even, or perhaps I should say especially children's fantasy) takes itself very seriously, and it's ludicrous to try to deal with "real" issues in something that's totally divorced from the real world.

What is "real world"? A lot of cultures, separated from us both by time and distance, are a lot more exotic and less comprehensible than most of the fantasy fodder. Did not a lot of cultures glorify suicide, for instance? And I bet that you'd find ideological fervor and fanaticism of Soviet Russia in the 20-ies - 30-ies far more bizarre and less "real" than any number of fantasy settings.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for reading.

I think we're actually working at cross purposes here, and I think we actually agree on the fundamentals: that the problem is with authors who fall down the uncanny valley by creating a secondary world that isn't real enough to be, well, real or abstract enough to be a metaphor.

To take the Buffy example, I felt that it fell apart in the later series because it went from being about a girl who "fights demons" as a metaphor for growing up to being about a girl who literally fights demons, which are a concrete part of her alternate reality, and who has essentially been prevented from growing up as a result, and it doesn't make the shift properly. Angel works a lot better as a series because it's a lot more explicitly "real world plus monsters" rather than "real world with monsters as placeholders for real life issues". There's also a really nice episode in (I think) series 2 where Angel runs into Anne (the recurring former Vampire groupie who started off in Buffy) and she gives him a rather nice speech about how, once you've lived in the bad parts of LA for a while, vampires don't seem so scary.

To address a couple of specific points:

Yet our culture and science were in great part created by people who cared more about their "secret worlds" than their material gain or social success.

I actually think that's factually inaccurate. Shakespeare wrote to pay the bills, Aristotle was hugely respected in his day and afterwards, Einstein published his work on relativity and quantum mechanics for review by his peers. Nobody ever did a lick of good for the world by retreating into a secret magic kingdom where they were the Queen of the Fairies.

What is "real world"?

Simply: it's stuff that actually exists (or has existed), actually your various examples (foreign cultures in the real world, the heights of ideological fanaticism in soviet Russia) only serve to highlight the point. There is nothing a Fantasy author can invent that is more alarming, more surprising, or more complex than something which already really exists, and real people have already experienced. Voldemort and the Death Eaters already look stupid and ineffectual, but they look even *more* stupid and ineffectual when you compare them to the actual Nazis.

- Dan Hemmens

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't seen either Buffy or Angel beyond maybe a couple of episodes each, but I have to say that I dislike the trope of battle in imaginary worlds somehow helping a person with RL problems. Yes, it is a time-honored trope, but IMHO it is very false and mainly exists due to fear of writers of a certain era to take imagination and fantasy seriously. It had to have a "practical" application to justify it's existence.

Nobody ever did a lick of good for the world by retreating into a secret magic kingdom where they were the Queen of the Fairies.

I am not sure what you mean by this, to be honest. If you mean that masses or establishment can't be wrong, then I disagree. Ergo if you infer that art that "doesn't pay bills" is somehow inferior. Van Gogh never sold a picture in his life and he was, IMHO, a genius. Nor did any but the most long-lived of the impressionists see any real return for their life's work.
Mendel's work was ignored and forgotten by scientific community only to be rediscovered a few decades later and shake the world.
Da Vinci's inventions were never appreciated beyond a couple of mechanical toys used in the pageants.
Even Einstein had his problems with finding work in academia for a few years after graduation.
Sure, all these people could have given up and done something more immediately profitable. Mendel eventually did and became an abbott instead. But they were right, damn it, and society that didn't appreciate their contributions in time, was wrong.
I won't even mention lots of talented creative people, who lived under opressive regimes and continued to create despite knowing that most likely their works would never reach a wide audience.

If you mean just imagining one's "specialness" without actually _doing_ something, putting in the actual work behind the possibly contraversual ideas, then sure. And of course one shouldn't forget that for one person who was right there may be hunderds or thousands who were wrong and sacrificed their time and effort for nothing. And that even being right doesn't guarantee any return during one's lifetime.

There is nothing a Fantasy author can invent that is more alarming, more surprising, or more complex than something which already really exists, and real people have already experienced.

I would like to point out that sf writers did invent some stuff that didn't yet exist and the attendant problems. Writer's imagination _can_ sometimes trump reality and fortell future developements.
I'd also point out that ironically enough RL and historical stuff that exists has too high an entrance threshold for many. Setting may be too incomprehensible, psychology too alien, movers and shakers too unsympathetic. OTOH, it is not a coincidence that among the adult fantasy readers many are also interested in historical fiction or even non-fiction. But there is that snag with historical fiction - the ending is set in stone, as are, to a great degree, personalities of important characters.

[(Anonymous)]

I am not sure what you mean by this, to be honest.

I mean that Van Gough painted stuff that actually existed, da Vinci studied actual anatomy, Mendel studied real plants that were really in front of him.

Modern fantasy, however, places primacy on this nebulously defined concept called "imagination" which all too frequency means "thinking you're awesome".

I would like to point out that sf writers did invent some stuff that didn't yet exist and the attendant problems.

No, SF writers extrapolated from present trends to produce ideas which wound up looking a bit like things that got invented in the future. People are pattern matching animals, and we're good at seeing the connections between real things and their fictional antecedents, but William Gibson did not invent the internet.

- Dan Hemmens

[(Anonymous)]

Modern fantasy, however, places primacy on this nebulously defined concept called "imagination" which all too frequency means "thinking you're awesome"

Yes, but it is imagination, in the sense of either looking on things from a different angle than everybody else and getting new insights or imagining things that don't yet exist and trying to create them in reality, that is the source of all progress. Delusions of awesomeness don't have much to do with imagination, really.

Most stuff around us wasn't real at some point in the past. People imagined it, then people (sometimes the same, sometimes different ones) built /discovered it.
You seem to stress the whole "reality" thing, forgetting that reality can change, sometimes very abruptly. When you read private journals of people just before the WW1 - well, they would have thought that future awaiting them in just 3-4 years was just some crazy, impossible mightmare. Unfortunately for everybody, it wasn't.
Which is why exploring "what if?" scenarios is actually a somewhat reasonable endeavor. And it isn't terribly important whether the "ifs" are justified by techno-babble or by unapologetically fantastical elements.

Urban fantasy actually touches a lot of themes that always interested and excited people - secret societies, life on the fringes of the law or by exotic laws of their own, as well as supernatural elements. I don't see what's so "inferior" about it.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

One consolation - things tend to go in cycles. The Romantic period of writing was replaced by a more gritty Victorian period, which was replaced by the Modern period, which is being supplanted by whatever this one will be called.

I like the way you followed this from the sixties to present. It is a disturbing societal trend to pretend that everything is good in some way or another - like the Devil's Advocate joke and stance: Sure, he's pure evil, but he's persistent! The relativism, since I can't think of the word I want here (it starts with an 'a'), is very disturbing. Our Hero can break laws and do what he wants, he gets Divine Guidance, he saves the world by leaving it exactly the way it was. It's a different twist, IMO, on the Romantic ideal of "going back to Nature/to the way things used to be."

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Yes. It is. It really is. Evidently the cyclic rotation of trends in literature doesn't quite match up to some of the other cyclic phenomena that have been observed. Which probably results in periodic phases where everything is a bit wrong-footed.

The critic up above has a point too. The trope of the heroic journey ultimately assisting the protagonist to deal with the real problem in (his) real life is a literary construct. It never really did extend that successfully to real people in the real world surviving a real crisis and having to deal with the aftermath. Things may just change too much in a crisis and sometimes you cannot "go home again".

But then the element that Hemmens is pointing out has been around a long time. Its escapism, in its purest form. I don't think you can have fiction without some of it creeping in, but the porportions tend to shift, and right now a lot of authors who just plain go overboard with it are getting published. And it *looks* all the more so because a lot of these authors are dabbling in fantasy and flinging about symbols which are out of scale with the underlying theme.

In Rowling's case the situation appears to have gone out of control and carried her along with it. Rather like Umbridge, when she started playing "fisherman's wife" without limits. Because, silly mistakes and missing pieces and all, the smaller scale of the first three books was *working*.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Is it more escapism, or wish fulfillment, or a bit of both? It seems to me that escapism would necessarily have wish fulfillment as at least an element if not a goal.

The thing that doesn't jibe with Rowling's writing, and this may just be me, is that it seems to have wish fulfillment as its underlying motivation. The hero can do whatever he wants and not be punished, as can his friends and supporters. The people the hero (and so presumably the author in a set-up like this) dislikes can't do anything right, even when they do everything right.

I know it's already been mentioned that the people who get short-shrifted in the series are modeled to some extent on people Rowling doesn't like so I'm just restating the obvious, but that ties in with what you're saying about the lack of scale of the symbols. The straight reading doesn't mesh with the cues we're given. The straight reading doesn't show such horribleness on the parts of the "bad guys" but it does show how close the "bad guys" and "good guys" are in behavior. The whole underlying theme did not seem to be what it turned out to be. All those cues led us astray.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know. "Wish fulfillment" just comes across as a rather Non-U way of describing the same thing.

But, yeah, we got badly misled by the alleged clues. Not least because a lot of them weren't clues at all, but interview statements. And some of those turned out to be bald-faced lies, whether they were intended to be at the time or not.

But then I'm not altogether convinced that Rowling did all of that misleading on purpose. Some of those clues I think originally really were clues, and may have been intended to go somewhere.

ETA: But once she got derailed in GoF she seems to have lost any sense of direction, and all sense of scale. And the whole project just got looser and less coherent, and less *grounded* as she went on.Until the whole thing might as well have been fueled by fairy dust and "happy thoughts".

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

She may not have done the misleading on purpose. An author has the right to change her mind as the series progresses. In fact, one of the things I've been most upset about is that she apparently went back to the original plan she had two decades ago when it was clear the story had moved beyond that and shoved everything that had outgrown the box back into it. I think she may have been bewitched by the publicity.

...fairy dust and "happy thoughts".

I got the absurd vision of Rowling flying.

[the-bitter-word.livejournal.com]

Regarding interviews, I personally think Rowling's thought processes are confused. Look at the latest interview (http://www.hpana.com/news.20613.html), for example. I wondered if I read the same books she wrote. I don't see evidence in the books for her assertions that Ginny and Harry share intellectual curiosity, or that Harry has an unnatural fascination with the afterlife, or that the veil meant anything at all. Her interviews were once coy, but now they show wish fulfillment where her characters are whatever she wants them to be at any given time. She seems to employ a continual and spontaneous creative process, without recall or continuity or editing.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I've been digesting the bits quoted there. The whole thing is odd, but this one statement, that "...Luna, of course, is a very skeptical character. Luna believes firmly in an afterlife." is contradictory. I can't see where she means that Luna is supposed to make readers skeptical in what she's saying, and I can't see how believing in an afterlife makes a character skeptical. All I can think is that she's mixing up the words "skeptical" and either "accepting" or "gullible" (depending on your point of view) and mis-speaking.

I'm feeling tired and therefore not energetic enough not to be charitable.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

No, I think she said that Luna was a very *spiritual* character. There may have been a typo that was fixed by the time I got to the page.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Just checked. It's "skeptical." I think you're right, though. "Spiritual" would work much better there and is probably what was meant (and even said - this may be a transcription error).

I just noticed. Both have confused Dan for Harry:

JKR: (snip) And lots of people, including Dan [Radcliffe], wanted to go through the veil. But then that shouldn't surprise me because teenagers are very interested.

MA: Dan sort of does get to go beyond the veil.

JKR: Yeah, he does, but not literally through the veil

[(Anonymous)]

She seems to employ a continual and spontaneous creative process, without recall or continuity or editing.

Personally, this is something I blame Fandom for. Not Potter Fandom specifically, but "fandom" in its most general and widest sense. Fandom has, I think, always tended to treat its many alternate worlds as having some kind of external reality which exists beyond the text. That's why people bothered to work out how Warp Drives "really" worked, it's why they try to explain why Qui Gon wasn't amongst the Force Ghosts in Return of the Jedi.

A lot of people are quite explicit about this, they view - say - the Star Wars films as little more than a source of documentary evidence about the events surrounding a particular period in the history of the galaxy Far Far Away. To these people the fact that we don't *see* something happen in the text is not important, the text is just a glimpse into that reality, and a flawed one at that, since it's constructed in the real world with actors portraying the main characters.

Once you go down that route, whatever Rowling wants to say about Harry and Ginny becomes the truth, because the characters "exist" in her head, and the books are just a document which records a version of the events that took place in the Wizarding World between 1992 and 1997.

- Dan Hemmens

[the-bitter-word.livejournal.com]

Fandom has, I think, always tended to treat its many alternate worlds as having some kind of external reality which exists beyond the text.

I suppose this is an impulse as old as humans' ability to recreate the world in abstract symbols and then rely on others to interpret them. The Bible is one example of a work upon which whole communities have been built, a work that fits many needs and is continually reconstructed according to social mores and the desires of its revisers, or our external world made to fit its supposed teachings (intelligent design). The creative impulse and urge to communicate have persisted, accelerated with technology as an enabler. I'm fine with that, for the most part. I'm not sure why science fiction and fantasy have such a hold on people's imaginations, though.

I became hooked on HP when I thought it went beyond an escapist fairytale to an intelligent look at modern society. I was sure wrong about that! It seems the author, as far as she knew what she was doing, had a completely different view of her characters and story than many who read her books. Failing to relate her viewpoint in the books, she now tells us what it is and insists her view is true. And yet, it seems her viewpoint is not well thought-out and changes interview-to-interview (check her progression of answers (http://asylums.insanejournal.com/snapedom/157876.html?thread=738996#t738996) on whether Snape is a hero, for example). I doubt her dictionary, if ever completed, will make the murky world of HP any clearer. Her use of language and ability to relate ideas are just too imprecise. Moreover, she probably still likes to play games with her readers.

[ellecain.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'd make a distinction between escapism and wish fulfillment - the latter seems to be the driving force for the majority of Mary-Sues in literature and fanfic. Escapism, to me suggests a desire to play around in the fictional world.

It's a little like the difference between fanfic and badfic - they're both about escapism to some extent but badfic is a more personalised, specific kind of wish fulfillment tailored to the writer's version of the ideal romance or whatever. Am I making sense?

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Well, back in the jurassic, when I was still sitting in classes "escapism" was a very nasty, pejoritive label to slap on something. One which could quite effectively keep the public libraries from stocking it. I suspect there has been a semantic shift since then, and the term has become comparitively respectable. Which is not exactly the way I meant it.

Of course fantasy has also become comparatively respectable since Tolkein, which it wasn't at all when I was a child. And the level of cheese which is being deployed in it nowadays suggests to me that it is likely to become faintly disreputable again Any Day Now. Like she said above, it's cyclic.

But there is nothing about either escapism, or, if you will, wish fulfillment that is limited to fantasy. Most of the very cheesiest examples are churned out by the ream in stories which pretend to be set in the everyday world. Only what everyday world have you ever lived in where a plain wallflower suddenly becomes the most popular girl in her class just by getting contact lenses or following her mother's advice on how to dress? Even the elf and dragon extravaganzas rarely go that overboard.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Only what everyday world have you ever lived in where a plain wallflower suddenly becomes the most popular girl in her class just by getting contact lenses or following her mother's advice on how to dress?

LOL! My mother firmly believes in that world.

[ellecain.livejournal.com]

Its escapism, in its purest form. I don't think you can have fiction without some of it creeping in, but the porportions tend to shift, and right now a lot of authors who just plain go overboard with it are getting published.

Because, silly mistakes and missing pieces and all, the smaller scale of the first three books was *working*.

This actually makes me think of the parallels between Harry Potter and the Twilight series*. Both started out with a supposedly average kid who discovers fantasy at the doorstep of the real world and turn out to be much more powerful and speshul in the fantasy world and (interestingly with reference to Dan Hemmens' article - I think he's on to something here) both choose to stay in the fantasy world at the end.

I find the backlash from the Twilight fans over Breaking Dawn very reminiscent of Harry Potter wank. Everyone who complains gets told "But why are you complaining now? This stuff was present from the beginning," and it's true. For the first parts of both series it seemed to work, when taken to a larger scale, fans reacted badly. IMO in both cases I think the authors put wish fulfillment over the desire to tell a good story.

*everything I know about Twilight I learnt from cleolinda

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Do you know? I'm suddenly flashing on one of my own essays (not one of the Potter ones).

I think it was written back before I even had a site and was run through an apa (Amateur Press Association) that I belonged to. It's up in the commentary area now. It's called 'Beauty Times 3' and is comparing what appeared to be something of a "fictional dialogue" between the work of various authors who were publishing retellings of Beauty and the Beast.

Retold fairy tales seem to have been very popular over the past 20-30 years. Basically ever since fantasy began to be marginally respectable. And Beauty and the Beast is certainly one of the most so. The essay touched upon about 5 modern iterations, and concentrated upon three.

But the relevant point is that in the last two, the authors chose to sidestep the traditional "happy ending" of breaking the enchantment and reverting the Beast to the Prince he originally had been. In these, the Beast remains a Beast.

Now, this particular happy ending was always rather problematic. Beauty is never represented as being particularly overjoyed when confronted with this handsome stranger. Her first words are always; "Where is my Beast?" But I rather doubt that anyone since Madame Whoever who wrote down the first version back in the 1700s has ever taken the tack that if Beauty has learned to love the Beast, then she ought to be allowed to keep him, until the late 20th century.