“I don’t want to analyze a story. I don’t want to find hidden meaning. I just want to escape from the real world for a bit.”
I’m guessing you’ve either heard some variation of those words or said them yourself. Books are for “escaping.” Stories are for entertainment value. A page-turner is all we want – something that will help us to “veg out,” to leave the day behind.
I can’t begrudge someone entertainment. I like entertainment. I watch a few TV shows just for the mindlessness, and I watch others because they make me think. But a line often gets crossed in this type of thinking, which goes something like this: “It’s silly to think J.K. Rowling wrote the whole Harry Potter series on an alchemical framework, utilizing symbols and themes that are meant to transform one’s vision. She was just writing fun, entertaining books.” [click to continue…]
“It would have been a cop out to kill him,” J.K. Rowling says:
In many ways it would have been a neater ending to kill him. For sure, I knew that all along. felt that the books’ overriding message was that love is the most powerful force in this world. My model with Harry really was war veterans, who have seen horrors and are asked to go home and rebuild, and go back to ordinary life and care for a family, be a father – particularly be a father – [it is] a difficult job, in troubled times. I felt it would be a betrayal of my character if I did anything other than show him doing that. And I think it’s an absolutely heroic thing to do, to go home after that, not to become a mercenary, not to live forever frozen in a time of excitement and danger, but to be mentally strong enough, to an extent physically strong enough, to return from war and to raise a new generation with values that you hope will not lead to another war. That’s massive.
Of course you can say, yes, to an extent, as ever in life, that’s the eternal paradox. What’s is most worthwhile may well be seen as slightly dull, but God knows without those people who were prepared to come home and raise the family and rebuild, help rebuild… rebuilding is much more difficult than destroying. So, I felt it was almost a cop-out, morally, to kill him. I wanted to show a man who, yeah, he went back and got his hands dirty and tried to rebuild. I liked that. And again, it made a lot of people were livid, but God knows by that time I was used to that by then!
I’ve heard her explaining this before. Thoughts?
John Granger quotes a section of one of Melissa Anelli’s interviews with J.K. Rowling in which she talks about the veil and the afterlife:
But when they surround that veil [in Order of the Phoenix], I was trying to show that depending on their degree of skepticism or belief about what lay beyond – because Luna, of course, is [I believe this is meant to be ‘isn’t,’ but will check audio] a very skeptical character. Luna believes firmly in an afterlife. She’s very clear on that. And she feels them speaking or hears them speaking much more clearly than Harry does. This is the idea of faith. Harry thinks he can hear them; he’s drawn on. But Harry’s had a life that has been so imbued with death that he now has an uncharacteristically strong curiosity about the afterlife, especially for a boy of 15, as he is in Phoenix. Ron’s just scared, as I think Ron would be – he just knows this is something he doesn’t want to dabble with. Hermione, hyper-rational Hermione – ‘can’t hear anything, get away from the Veil.’ So if you walk through the veil, you’re dead.You’re dead. What you find on the other side, well, that’s the question.
If you’re inclined to think that what Rowling intended is the real meaning, then we’ve got some pretty clear evidence that she constructed her world with a real afterlife in mind. This would tend toward the interpretation (which I share) that at King’s Cross, Harry wasn’t having a conversation just with himself, and that his parents, Remus, and Sirius all really were called from the dead during the walk through the forest.
There will likely be a few more gems like that one in Anelli’s forthcoming book, Harry, A History, which can be pre-ordered.
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I’m going to poke my eye out with a pen…
July 3, 2006Multiple frustrating things have occurred as a result of J.K. Rowling’s (boring) statements from the interview that has everyone in a tizzy about Harry’s death. Check out this article, for example. The opening line:
Author J.K. Rowling recently announced that Harry Potter will die as an act of self-sacrifice in one last terrible battle [...]