The Hog's Head » Death

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

revgeorge — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:02:51 +0000

Just a quick shout out on one of my favorite poems. The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe was first published with his name attributed to it on this day in 1845. Very haunting and very Gothic. Anyway, if you’d like to read it, go here. If reading isn’t your thing, you can find a recording on Librivox here. If you want to see a video of Vincent Price reading The Raven, go down to the bottom of the wikipedia page on the poem and you’ll find it under external links/video. He does a dramatic reading of the poem, not literal, but hey it’s Vincent Price! And if you want to see the best adaptation of The Raven ever, go here for The Simpson’s Halloween special version. So, if you like really depressing, gothic poems, enjoy!!

Chapter 15: The Goblin’s Revenge

Dave the Longwinded — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:02:50 +0000

This chapter opens with an ominous moment: Harry searching for a place to bury Moody’s eye. He does so under “the oldest, most gnarled, and resilient-looking tree he could find.” Harry’s symbolism is clear, and the scene will be repeated later.

All-in-all, this chapter has an Empire Strikes Back feel to it. Our heroes are stuck in the wilderness, hunting for clues to puzzles they know are important, but coming up empty. As Rowling writes it, the scene reduces the three of them to “three teenagers in a tent whose only achievement was not, yet, to be dead.” The dark magic of the locket, now being passed among them to diffuse its effect on any one of them, is taking a severe toll. And it is most assuredly the prime cause of discord within the tent.

Hermione’s realization that this is so does little to assuage the Horcrux’s effect on all of them. Endless boredom and hunger in the midst of the stress of being hunted like animals isn’t helping the situation. It all creates a vicious psychological cycle within the trio, most notably Harry: “[He] was starting to fear that Hermione too was disappointed by his poor leadership. In desperation he tried to think of further Horcrux locations, but the only one that continued to occur to him was Hogwarts, and as neither of the others thought this at all likely, he stopped suggesting it.” In other words, out of fears over his lack of leadership, Harry quits being a leader. Any reader who has paid close attention to the series knows Harry has to be right, or at least on the right track. The importance Hogwarts holds for Voldemort and others is unmistakable. All of them are ignoring the evidence, from Ginny’s possession and Voldy’s other repeated attempts to penetrate the school, to what Harry learned in his Pensieve lessons in Half-Blood Prince.

But, what we do learn very clearly here is that the other Trio (Ginny, Neville, and Luna) are trying to wreak a bit of havoc at the school. More importantly, Harry, Hermione, and Ron learn from their eavesdropping exercise that the true Sword of Gryffindor has gone missing — hidden, perhaps by Dumbledore, to keep it from the hands of those who don’t deserve it. But, the most significant piece of information they learn while listening to Griphook and the others at the riverbank is that the sword can be used as a weapon against Horcruxes. Hermione realizes the sword has absorbed some of the effects of the basilisk’s venom. Harry feels that some answers are “tantalizingly close.” Yet, they’re just out of reach.

And the chapter ends in catastrophe. Ron’s emotional implosion pushes the group over the edge, leading to the Trio’s collapse. He storms out of the tent angry, misanthropic, and believing that Hermione has chosen Harry over him. We’ll learn later the true outcome, but I count this moment as one of Rowling’s most significant red herrings in the series. Upon my first read, I was convinced that this fracture doomed Ron. For a while, I waited nervously to see Harry and Hermione stumble across his body somewhere. Thus, the later moment when Ron rises to his real potential is all the more emphatic and powerful to me.

What makes this book so hard to read is the persistent pounding of death in every corner, upon every page. Chapter 15 opens with a burial, one that will be echoed painfully later. The Horcruxes presense, the pervasive fear and hunger, and final moment when it seems that the central friendship in the series is fully broken all make this one of the darker chapters in the entire HP saga.

Nosferatu: The Symphony of Horror

revgeorge — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:26:01 +0000

Nosferatu, The Symphony of Horror (How’s that for a catchy name?) was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It is, as far as I can tell from a brief research, one of the earliest adaptations of Dracula. Directed by F.W. Murnau and released in 1922, the film attempted to get around the problem of not having the rights to the Stoker story by changing the setting from London to the fictional German city of Wisborg and also changing all the names of the characters. Count Dracula becomes Count Orlok, Harker becomes Thomas Hutter, Renfield becomes Knock, and so on. Minus the ending, though, the story is essentially the same as Dracula.

Which is undoubtedly why, when Florence Stoker, Bram’s widow, sued Prana Film, the producers, for copyright infringement she won very handily. Prana Film declared bankruptcy in order to avoid paying a settlement to Florence. The court also declared that all prints of Nosferatu should be destroyed, but fortunately this was impossible since the film had already been distributed around the world. The film is not copyrighted in the USA and so various versions of it may be found, including online. Most versions nowadays restore the original names from Dracula to the film. You may find versions here and here.

Nosferatu comes out of the German Expressionism movement, which is itself a sub-genre of the Expressionism movement. Expressionism was a response to Positivism. Now, if all this sounds complicated, don’t worry…it is. Needless to say, my brief explanation won’t do justice to any of these movements, so I refer you to the applicable Wikipedia pages.

Positivism “…holds that the only authentic knowledge is that which is based on actual sense experience. Metaphysical speculation is avoided.” Expressionism “…sought to express the meaning of ‘being alive’ and emotional experience rather than physical reality. It is the tendency of an artist to distort reality for an emotional effect; it is a subjective art form.” As the Wikipedia article goes on to explain, Expressionism used very intense emotions to convey a sense of drama and horror. Thus, in film, the mood, the setting, the symbolism employed, and the emotive actions of the actors, both facially and in body language, drive this emotional depth.

Another interesting fact, the screenwriter of Nosferatu, Henrik Galeen, had specialized in Dark Romanticism, which took a very pessimistic view of human nature, once again in response to another genre that had gone before. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Emily Dickinson are considered to be exampes of Dark Romantic writers. Dark Romanticism also has some similarities to Gothic fiction, which we’ve discussed much on this site. This quote, though, I think sums up the differences between the two genres: “In general, with common elements of darkness and the supernatural, and featuring characters like maniacs and vampires, Gothic fiction is more about sheer terror than Dark Romanticism’s themes of dark mystery and skepticism regarding man. Still, the genre came to influence later Dark Romantic works, particularly some of those produced by Poe.”

I think it’s fascinating how all these various genres influence one another and how they play out for us throughout the centuries. We’ve talked on the Gothic elements of Harry Potter and how Rowling shapes them to her own effect. Nosferatu and the German Expressionism out of which it rose also drank heavily of Gothic and Dark Romantic influence, and German Expressionism also went on to influence future genres such as horror and film noir.

So, I encourage you to watch Nosferatu. It’s only about an hour and twenty-four minutes long. Certainly it will take a bit of mental readjusting to watch. It’s black and white and silent. Except for the music score that accompanies it, which is also all about setting the mood. Just thinking about a recent post Dave the Long-Winded did on Paranormal Activity, I can already see a few tie-ins with Nosferatu. So, watch the movie and post your thoughts here. Looking forward to them all!

Paranormal Activity and Fear

Dave the Longwinded — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:55:42 +0000

Like a lot of the general movie-going public, Jamie and I plunked down some change to check out Paranormal Activity Friday night. First, my quick review: very, very good. The story is simple, and the audience is really supposed to focus on the characters as they sink ever deeper into their fear over what is in their home. The film’s style is much like that of The Blair Witch Project from ten years ago. But, I didn’t find that movie at all engaging, much less frightening. Part of the issue for me was the migraine I left the theater with after enduring nearly an hour and a half of people who couldn’t hold a camera steady. Paranormal Activity solves both of those problems. In short, if you enjoy thrills and confronting your own fears, you need to go see this film.

Movies don’t frighten me very often. In fact, I’ve tried to remember the last film that really unnerved me when I saw it in the theater, but I came up empty.** Paranormal Activity actually left me rather shaken. It is frightening in a way I have never experienced with a film.

Most of what passes for modern horror isn’t interesting. Slasher films that rely on the “gotcha” moment were too effectively skewered by the first Scream for me to give them credit. The torture film phenomenon of the last six or seven years has only baffled me. Gore for the sake of gore isn’t frightening — it’s just disgusting. The first-person, documentary-style of The Blair Witch Project never seems to be done very well for some reason. And ghost films have come to depend on computer generated imagery that works fantastically well for large, space-alien robots. But it never seems to create convincing ghosts.

And the latter has often left me scratching my head. I love a good ghost story, which makes Halloween my favorite time of year. I love to curl up under a blanket with all the television programs about monsters, myths, legends, ghosts, and the general “paranormal” stuff that overtakes the History Channel and its kin throughout October. Whatever you or I may think about its legitimacy, it sure makes for a dang good story. So, why has Hollywood had such a dismal record with ghost-themed movies since, well, Poltergeist?

I think I found one answer in Paranormal Activity. In case you don’t know, the film was reportedly made a couple of years ago in one week for about $12,000 dollars. As far as I could tell, there is virtually no computer generated special effects, except for possibly the last 3 or 4 minutes. Buying into a film technique well documented with movies like Jaws, PA leaves its monster off-screen. Unlike Jaws, that monster never actually appears at all. We see a shadow where one shouldn’t be. A door moves for no reason. Lights flip on and off with no explanation. The action escalates nicely throughout, well paced and efficient. While details can be passed off as coincidence or electrical problems at first, the lead the audience to eventually confront details that can’t be explained conventionally.

To put it another way, Paranormal Activity allows the mundane and commonplace to not just build up to the extraordinary, it makes the viewer rethink the mundane as extraordinary — right up until one character is pulled by the foot from her bed while she is sleeping. Watching this movie, I had a stark realization. I knew where the film was going. I was conscious that it was a piece of fiction, although it was shot so as to breach my suspension of disbelief. But in the last 25 minutes of this movie, I was terrified of what I was watching. I began to understand that I was matrixing the visual and auditory contents of relatively explainable sounds and events with my own experiences in my own home. I’ve heard things in my house that made the hair stand up on my neck. But Jamie and I also live in a house that is 55 years old — we hear things all the time (especially with 4 cats running around!).

Look at the shadow on the door on the left side. Simple, yet effective.

Paranormal Activity’s real genius is that it relies on the audience to substitute their own fears into the void left by simple sounds and shadows. And does so so very effectively that I could just imagine the terror and horror that awaits once one of the characters is pulled by her foot from her bed in the middle of the night by an unseen force. It’s the first film I’ve seen in a long while that really relied on the audience’s imagination, and it does so in creative and tension-filled ways. It made me confront MY fears in my own emotions and psyche, not the spectacle on screen. That is what I think makes for not only a good horror film, but for a great film, period. It wasn’t frightening in an intellectual sense. It was terrifying in a visceral sense. I’ve never felt tension and adrenaline in a movie like I did Friday night.

What are your thoughts, either about Paranormal Activity or about quality scary movies in general? What makes some work and others only mildly interesting exercises?

**I saw Pan’s Labyrinth in the home theater of a friend over a year after it was released in the US, and not in theatrical release. Very good and very unnerving — but that’s something for a later discussion!

Immortality: On the Way?

revgeorge — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:48:11 +0000

Saw an interesting article from The Telegraph in the UK the other day wherein a scientist postulates that in about twenty years human beings could become immortal. This would come about through accelerating technology such as nanotechnology and a better understanding of how the human body works.

What do you think? In Harry Potter we discuss the desire of Voldemort to overcome and conquer death while the true master of death, Harry, realizes that death can’t be avoided. We’ve been discussing vampires this week on the site, and there is certainly undertones of human mortality and immortality going on in the vampire mythos.

Mull over the article and feel free to share your thoughts on the subject.

The White Tomb

Dave the Longwinded — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:30:43 +0000

Half-Blood Prince’s final chapter opens with a favorite device of Ernest Hemingway, the simple declarative sentence:

“All lessons were suspended, all examinations postponed.”

It really is one of Rowling’s finer moments as a writer, poignant and rich with subtlety. In this one statement, she wipes away all the carefree wonderment of childhood with pointed irony. Hogwarts shifts in symbolism from a place of comfort and safety where the worst worry was two parchments on werewolves for horrible Professor Snape, to a place in which parents are spiriting their children away as fast as possible because Snape has murdered the headmaster.

We see the Centaurs and Merfolk gather and pay their respects in ways I believe would have left Dumbledore deeply honored. His entombment is rich with symbolism, as Harry thinks “for one heart-stopping moment, that he [sees] a phoenix fly joyfully ino the blue.” Yet, the “next second the fire had vanished,” and a brilliant “white marble tomb” sits in its place.

In Dumbledore’s death, Voldemort has seemingly gained a devastating victory. Harry and Hogwarts no longer have their protector. The last bastion of paradise is now vulnerable — very vulnerable. Hogwarts has become, in one sense, a graveyard.

A palpable threat glares at us from the edges of this chapter, never clear and explicit, but there nonetheless. It peers at us from the Riddle mansion. The effect is amplified in the explicit declarations that our enchanting rhythm of nearly six long books has been broken. We’re no longer tied to time as it is dictated in school. Instead, everyone’s concerns take on much more urgent tones, emanating from a great emergency — war and death. Like the disjointed feeling new-minted graduates experience upon leaving school for “the real world,” so, too, with the Wizarding World as we’ve known it. Rowling is playing with an emotional realism like never before. Even as the Trio debate whether or not Hogwarts will be open in the next year, Harry makes it clear to readers that it doesn’t matter: “I’m not coming back even if it does reopen.” The chapter’s overriding emotion is not only sadness, but anxiety.

Harry understands his childhood is over. Yet, Rowling isn’t ready to declare him “ready.” To lift a line from another heroic opus, Harry must complete his training. In Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Yoda’s warning to Luke refers to a need to complete both a physical and mental training that prepares him to confront ultimate evil in the form of his father. The trope is a common one, and often serves as a way to remove our Hero’s wise mentor out from under him. In Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore is taken from Harry so that Harry has to complete his heroic quest on his own.

I’ve always argued that HBP’s central plot thread is Dumbledore’s intense efforts to educate Harry in a more hazardous, yet consequential, way of engaging Voldemort — the fine art of speculation and inferrential reasoning. The Pensieve lessons are always about piecing together incomplete pieces of Voldemort’s past so as to anticipate his plans.

Yet, there are sharp indications that Harry still has much to learn now that he has been thrust prematurely into his adulthood. Trying to decipher who might be R.A.B, his feelings betray him:

He did not fell the way he had so often felt before, excited, curious, burning to get to the bottom of a mystery, he simply knew that the task of discovering the truth about the real Horcruxes had to be completed before he could move a little farther along the dark and winding path stretching ahdead of him, the path he and Dumbledore had set out upon together, and which he now knew he would have to journey alone. There might still be as many as four Horcruxes out there somewhere. … He kept reciting their names to himself, as though by listing them he could bring them within reach.

This picture starkly contrasts what we’ve seen from Harry before. Whenever confronted with a problem, excitement and curiosity have coursed through him, often uncontrollably. Philosopher’s Stone describes his first use of the Invisibility Cloak in terms of pure adrenaline: “The whole of Hogwarts was open to him…” Yet, in two years Harry has watched both Sirius and Dumbledore die as his intelligence and heroism failed him. His rash dash into the Ministry’s aptly named Department of Mysteries ends in tragedy. One year later, he can do nothing whatsoever to fight off Dumbeldore’s killers. In two crucial moments, Harry believes that his greatest attributes have betray him completely.

Now, harry must rely on the kind of reasoning (incomplete as its bases may sometimes be) in order to think through the journey in front of him. And we see examples of incomplete thoughts seeping forth from Harry:

Neville and Luna alone of the D.A. had responded to Hermione’s summons the night that Dumbledore had died, and Harry knew why: They were the ones how had missed the D.A. the most… probably the ones who had checked their coins regularly in the hope that there would be another meeting.

The ellipsis points the reader to something omitted here. Harry attaches a kind of childish need-to-belong to their loyalty. Yet, I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to add that Neville and Luna missed the D.A. the most because they believed in its cause. It was surely one of the first places either had experienced social acceptance, but they also chose what was right over what was easy. And Neville will prove it in grim and terrifying fashion at the end of DH.

Harry’s breakup with Ginny is another pointer that Harry hasn’t quite thought his plan through. As Harry laments what might have been, Ginny’s response is both knife-edged and sympathetic: “‘But you’ve been too busy saving the Wizarding World,’ siad Ginny, half laughing. ‘Well…I can’t say I’m surprised. I knew this would happen in the end. I knew you wouldn’t be happy unless you were hunting Voldemort. Maybe that’s why I like you so much.’” Without question she resents his choice here, but accepts it without too much protest. There’s a sense in which she seems to say to him, “Do you really think my safety is what matters now? Don’t you see my importance to you in all of this?” Harry hasn’t quite recognized in his friends and true love what we as readers see in John Granger’s eloquently explicated alchemical narrative. All of them are absolutely important for Harry’s efforts to overcome Voldemort’s plan.

In addition, we witness the Trio speculate on Snape’s motives by looking at the past hinted at in Harry’s illicit Potions book. Snape’s lineage leads Harry to conclude quite simply that Snape is “just like Voldemort.” As determined as Harry needs to be, this reads alongside what we learn in Deathly Hallows, as a warning against thinking dismissively. Admittedly, Harry is thinking emotionally. But, if we learned anything from Dumbledore in the last three chapters, it’s that facing a crisis with a calm mind and steady courage is absolutely important. Harry has to relearn this now that his challenges have grown more sinister.

Other moments Harry takes notice of are just as compelling in light of Deathly Hallows. The appearance of an anonymous Elphias Doge foreshadows his role in DH. Harry dismisses the man’s eulogy because “It did not mean very much. It had little to do with Dumbledore as Harry had known him.” Immediately, Harry flashes to his first vision of Dumbledore and his wonderfully odd welcome to Hogwarts: “Nitwit! Oddment! Blubber! Tweak!” What Draco and the other Malfoys want to construe as Dumbledore’s senility, Harry recognizes as Dumbledore’s playfulness. In light of Doge’s highly romanticized view of Dumbledore in DH, the one Harry so desperately wants to cling to, his entire performance here reads as a bright warning to Harry not to read too much into Doge’s sentiments.

Harry declares he is “Dumbledore’s man through and through,” but this final chapter is full of flashing warnings of Harry’s biggest fight to come. He’s faced down Voldemort multiple times on pure instinct, and he’s felt the warmth of victory and chill of defeat. He’s even forced Voldemort from his mind and body. Along with that metaphor in Order of the Phoenix, “The White Tomb” shows us that one of Harry’s greatest foes yet to come is his own self. Dumbledore has armed for this battle more than perhaps any other.

Escape into the Perilous Realm

Travis Prinzi — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:28:00 +0000

“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.”

Authors: Mindless Entertainers, or Careful Artists?

Believe it or not, I still come across a lot of people who take exactly that approach to the Harry Potter stories. Despite what seems to me to be very careful, deliberate artistry on the part of J.K. Rowling in selecting her symbols and magical parameters (literary alchemy), some still scoff at the idea, calling it gnostic secret-knowledge-finding, or looking for a “Da Vinci Code.”

The reason I think this crosses a line is that the one who quickly dismisses, out-of-hand, the very possibility that Rowling crafted a very deliberate alchemical drama, citing that she’s just writing exciting books for the profit and fun of it all, is insulting the craft of writing. Why is it the default assumption that authors don’t have imaginative keys to their work? Why is the author, by default, put in the role of mindless entertainer, instead of careful artist?

Escape to More Permanent Things

The real “gnosticism” in this discussion is not the artist who builds a story on an imaginative key, but one who thinks that books provide some “escape” from the “real world,” and that this escape is a good thing. Tolkien wrote,

Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

For Tolkien, the pejorative use of “escapism” was married to the false belief that current trends define Real Life – the electric street lamp, for example, is nowhere near as permanent as Lightning. But most of us know more about the lamp, because it’s more relevant to our daily existence. The fairy-tale takes us to the lightning, the “more permanent thing.”

This also answers the person who thinks that escape is simply a mindless, page-turning getaway, a vacation in your own armchair. The Escape is most certainly a delight, a joy, and a “break” from the daily mundane activities of life, as well as the more prison-like aspects of our existence. But it is an Escape that puts us in contact with themes and symbols and a cohesive, magical world from which we should not return unchanged for the better.

And if this is what Escape is, why would the careful artist not deliberately choose her imaginative key? Despite my overall dislike for the first Twilight novel, I do not have a default position that Meyer can’t possibly have chosen to weave imaginative threads through her work which are resonating with the genuinely human desire to escape to something “more permanent.” Whether or not she’s done it well is a different question; dismissing, out-of-hand, the possibility, or even probability, that she attempted it and that it is working on some level with readers, is not a wise starting point.

Tolkien’s true Escape is important to Rowling’s work, which can be characterized very much as Tolkien’s – “about death.” Tolkien noted that the true escapist, or the “fugitive spirit,” will be drawn by the “oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death.” This “Escape from Death” is at the heart of Rowling’s use of literary alchemy. Without the imaginative key of literary alchemy, it’s highly likely Rowling’s fiction would not have been as powerful.

For brilliant analysis on Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” and its relationship to Harry Potter, stay tuned for Amy H. Sturgis’s forthcoming essay, “When Harry Met Faerie,” in Hog’s Head Conversations (Zossima Press, Spring 2009).

Harry, War Hero

Travis Prinzi — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:12:18 +0000

“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?

Rowling, the Veil, and the Afterlife

Travis Prinzi — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:42:52 +0000

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.

Family and Some Other Things…

Dave the Longwinded — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:16:35 +0000

by Dave

Last Wednesday, I found out my paternal grandfather passed away at the age of 88 at 7:30 that morning. My memories of him are sparse and fuzzy — tied to some history before my parents split. I have an odd affliction with memory; nothing serious mind you, just a strange dividing line between what I recall quite clearly after the age of 12 and what seems a starkly vague early childhood. I don’t know if there is a true condition for such a thing, but there it is. At this point, I’m not sure how I feel about my grandfather’s death. My family is not especially close, neither on my mother’s side nor my father’s side. I have aunts and uncles, from both parents, I’ve met only once — most of them, in fact. My mother’s parents passed long before I was born. And I was 11 or so the last time I was around my father’s parents. I’m 29 now.

Perhaps saying something about my character, I couldn’t make it to the funeral. I only had a very short notice and I couldn’t arrange for coverage of my classes or make it to Northern Indiana in time. I did send flowers to my grandmother, and my father thanked me for always “coming through” in times of need — what’s harder for me to swallow was his sincerity.

I’m asking myself what all this has to do with Harry, but these ruminations do lead to one of the things that always struck me about Harry’s character, something I’m fascinated with but can’t always identify with: his intense devotion, loyalty, and love for a family that he never really “knew” except in fragments of memories that are often presented more as nightmares. While I don’t have nightmares about my grandparents, I feel a sense of attachment that has not been nurtured since I was very young, either by me or anyone else involved. Why? Believe me, I’m not turning to Harry for answers. Perhaps, again, my nature says something about me as a person that is distasteful, but my inclination is to turn at least some of this question outward into what I read and observe.

The theme of love in HP is almost a substance in and of itself. It’s independent of the person — how often does Harry try and fail to distance himself from his feelings for Ginny? — yet, it is also tied quite intimately to certain characters. Take for instance this quote:

[Harry] simply acts on his instincts, knowing that Voldemort has killed his parents and is therefore also his enemy. Harry is determined to face danger, and possibly even death, to prevent Voldemort from coming back and causing injury, pain and death to many innocent people.

In acting on this instinct, Harry is showing his innate capacity for love. He is willing to risk his life so that his friends, their families, and the wizarding world in general may have a future. [...] That this child is capable of any kind of love or trust seems miraculous. J.K.Rowling has said that she believes children are naturally, innately good, and that this is one of the things she wanted to show in her portrayal of Harry and his friends. (Mary para. 5-6)

With all the privations inflicted at the hands of the Dursleys, Harry could be the posterboy for the disaffected Gen-X wizard — imagine Harry at college, played by Ethan Hawke in every movie he’s ever made. The closest version of this meme we get is a disaffected-but-brilliant goth kid with the bad attitude to match: Snape. As Mary’s quote above points out, though, Harry is born into love, protected by love, and often lashed to his emotions, at least early on. His memories are often frightening. But Harry gets another source from those who knew his family and pass on a “magic” tradition to him. Emotion and memory are, without question, physical entities in Harry’s world. They can be manipulated and understood from limited third-person perspectives in the Pensieve (I often wonder if they don’t represent at least subconsciously something about Rowling’s writing process).

“Maturity” in Rowling’s world reflects a very real concern: emotional control, in both an abstract and physical sense. Nearly every sage piece of wisdom Dumbledore offers to Harry is of this nature (and hints at why we generally dislike Gambon’s portrayal). It’s ultimate expression? Willingly facing death — maybe the ultimate brand of physical control of one’s emotions. Lily does it. James does it. Snape does it. Dumbledore does it. Dobby does it. Of course, Harry does, too. This notion of sacrificial love is not just an abstraction about the greatest good a person can do. It is the ultimate expression of connection to and control of one’s place and purpose in the world.

Thus, it is an ultimate irony, as well. There’s a something absurdly humorous from the scene in which Hagrid is forced to carry Harry’s “dead” body back to the Hogwarts threshold. Voldemort thinks the ultimate expression of maturity — “superiority” is a better term — is one of power. What more power can one wield than the power of life and death? In pretending to such grandeur, pronouncing his power, will, and mercy to the Hogwarts survivors, he misses the obvious; his decloaking is complete. How can he wield power over someone who loves life but chooses death? It’s the final nail stemming from Dumbledore’s assertion to a very young Harry, that death is just the next adventure. The absurdity of Voldemort’s impotence is so open in the final combat that Harry’s statement of pity for Voldemort is nearly condescending.

The Hog's Head » Death

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

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