Del Rey Press, 2007, 448 pages.

L. M. Montgomery, in Rilla of Ingleside, refers to one of Walter Blythe’s poems as written with ‘goblin imagination.’ That term came to mind as I thought over this book. The storytelling caught hold of my fancy: playful names, inanimate objects with personalities, a man with pins and needles for hair and books for clothing, and a gutsy little protagonist all gave life and color to the tale.

Schoolgirl Deeba and her friend Zanna begin their adventure wondering why strange people and animals keep staring at blonde, beautiful Zanna and referring to her as ‘the Shwazzy’. Zanna’s investigation lands them in an alternative version of London known as UnLondon (Un Lun Dun), where they discover that a prophecy names Zanna as the Chosen (French choisi, approximately pronounced Shwazzy.) The book of prophecies says that Zanna will win her first encounter with the evil Smog. Confident, Zanna makes an attempt, but she is knocked unconscious in the battle, her memory of UnLondon is erased, and she and Deeba are sent home. Deeba, however, cannot stop thinking of UnLondon and its concerns that involve her own world… and if I write much more, it will mean spoilers.

The wordplay was one of my favorite things about the book. Consider this sentence, as Conductor Jones talks about Manifest Station (a naming principle which reminded me strongly of Rowling–Diagon Alley and Knockturn Alley, anyone?):

“If you’re brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn’t, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless… It’s a terminus.”

In further punning, there’s the Hex. Also, my new favorite word: arachnofenestranaut. You’ll have to read the book to find out what that means. Beyond the wordplay itself, the story takes some fascinating turns around the idea of what words mean and whether they can be controlled.

In another similarity to Potter: Both stories could be classified as urban fantasy, a genre that entails portrayal of an alternative world overlapping this one.  Miéville’s details–a half-ghost, a pet carton, buses with legs, a bridge that touches down in different places–reminded me, by virtue of their humorous creativity, of Floo Powder, the Knight Bus, the Marauder’s Map, and the like.

Comparing a book to Harry Potter is hardly the best or kindest method of reviewing, and I do so in this case only because I think Un Lun Dun stands up to some of the creative genius. There are also striking differences, perhaps the most notable being Miéville’s outright subversion of the Chosen One motif. Harry learns that prophecy works in conjunction with choice; Deeba learns that prophecy might be totally false. Further–and at this point the comparison starts to look like apples and oranges–Deeba’s quest is much more individualized. Her questions, her decisions about whom to trust all finally prove horizontal; there is no Dumbledore, no dependable authority. For this reason and others, the Un- theme seems decidedly anti-establishment, whether the establishment be political or religious. It’s even hard to imagine that some of the names and ideas aren’t doing a little finger-pointing in the direction of religion; the opposite tack from Rowling’s work, which despite many a subversive concept is pretty clearly pro-belief.

If Miéville has ever mentioned the Potter books, I’ve not heard of it. He does, however, speak of reading and enjoying another of this Pub’s favorite writers: H.P. Lovecraft, one of the primary authors of ‘weird fiction’–a genre label Miéville applies to his own work. Weird fiction blurs the lines between science fiction, fantasy and horror, and while Un Lun Dun comes across (to me at least) as mostly fantasy, the influence makes sense.

As a weird fiction fan and writer, Miéville loves monsters and monster-making. His Smog deserves mention, a horrifying, amorphous creature that consumes for the sake of knowledge, bloating on the understanding it gains from destroying everything it comes across. It’s an interesting concept. The monster must be fought, and Deeba’s weaponry includes her courage, compassion and sheer determination, as well as her friends and a symbolic tool that I’m still trying to wrap my mind around.

Miéville is a political writer and thinker, and with the villain being a sentient smog cloud, it was impossible that the book should not contain some politics. Though Miéville seems to be a very active activist, the ideas did not come across as agenda, which I appreciated.

As a novel by a writer whose primary ideas and formative influences are political rather than religious, the narrative worked well. Though my own usual preference in fantasy is for the spiritual dimensionality that has made other stories meaningful and life-changing for me, the read was entertaining and thought-provoking; which, as that seems to have been the author’s intent, is both a respectable goal and a success.

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Sorry for the bad Steppenwolf take-off but it just played into my thoughts as I was reading an article over at The Torchonline. The Torchonline has a regular feature called Ask the Oracle.  The latest one is a Harry Potter edition!  Several questions are asked, one about Shirley Henderson the actress who has played Moaning Myrtle & one on whether or not J.K. Rowling has ever done a cameo in any of the HP movies.  But it’s the last question they have that interested me the most.

“Q: In Rowling’s world-view, is one “destined” to be evil? It sure seems that way, since every single person that the Sorting Hat puts in Slytherine turns out to be evil…” The Oracle has a very extensive & thoughtful answer.  I encourage you to check it out.  Feel free to comment both at The Torchonline & also here.  Enjoy!  

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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.

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by Dave

Since Deathly Hallows release last year, I’ve been perpetually puzzled by Voldemort’s characterization in the last two novels. Half Blood Prince humanizes Voldemort in a way that lends HBP a sophistication most of the earlier novels lack — Voldemort’s backstory both enlightens and befuddles the reader, at once shedding light on his origins and potential reasons for Voldemort’s tenor, yet never oversimplifying and reducing Voldemort to simply a pathology. The book sometimes drifts toward the possibility that Voldemort is unaware of and incapable of changing his decisions. Yet, HBP pulls back from that precipice and instead offers only Voldemort’s refusal to care about such a possibility.

Deathly Hallows, on the other hand, turns Voldemort into a cartoon character — more malevolent due to the incompetence of the supposed authorities (the Ministry of Magic) than any great skill of Voldemort’s or his minions. Within two books, Rowling constructs him as a marriage of complex humanity and psychology, only to immediately open the door to reveal nothing more than a tormented psyche shacking up with a massive egotism.

This all begs a question to me: Is Voldemort a flawed character? I’m not asking if he is a flawed character in the sense that Rowling simply made him a bit inconsistent. Deathly Hallows reconcentrates the reader’s attention on the conflict between Harry and Voldemort, whereas previous books had built Snape as the more compelling of Harry’s antagonists. Yet, in DH Voldemort and Snape essentially switch narrative positions. Snape’s everpresent station in Harry’s life is removed. He fades into the shadowy murk occupied by Voldemort for six books, while Voldemort emerges into the consciousness of both the reader and the characters. Essentially, Rowling had built Voldemort’s great power upon a scaffold of shadows and deception. Once she brings him fully into the light, we’re struck with his arrogance and stupidity — the Death Eaters begin to look more like the Keystone Cops.

Interrogating Voldemort’s character, especially in light of some other well known literary antagonists, shows Voldemort to be not just a flawed character, but that his development deconstructs him as a compelling villain, essentially reducing him into nothing more than a mesh of types. He is, in effect, a failed character. Bringing him more fully into view in Deathly Hallows forces the narrative to establish elements of him that are more than Shadow — once this is done, characters must be more than archetypes, yet Rowling does not successfully develop him. Half-Blood Prince constructs Voldemort’s vulnerability only so that Deathly Hallows can tell us that it ultimately does not matter.

The Funhouse Mirror
Given all the broo-hah surrounding The Dark Knight and Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker, it seems a natural comparison to examine Voldemort’s character alongside Batman’s archnemesis. The narrative relationship binds Batman and Joker together in a kind of ontological dualism — one cannot exist without the other. Joker has evolved into a much more layered character in stories from the late 1980s onward, what one reviwer for The Dark Knight defines as “a mystifying squall of hatred and chaos”. Frank Miller’s two seminal graphic novels, The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Batman Year One (1987), and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1988) are largely responsible for establishing the tone and tenor of this portion of the DC Universe we’re all familiar with now — one that isn’t always well accepted by critics:

Miller’s legacy for comics has been ambivalent at best. Reflect on the fact that his rise coincides with the almost total failure of superhero comics to produce any new characters with mythic resonance.[2] The ‘maturity’ for which Miller has been celebrated corresponds with comics’ depressive and introspective adolescence, and for him, as for all adolescents, the worst sin is exuberance. Hence his trademark style is deflationary, taciturn: consider all those portentous pages stripped of dialogue in which barely anything happens and contrast them with the crazed effervescence of the typical Marvel page in the 60s. Miller’s pages have all the brooding silence of a moody fifteen-year old boy. We are left in no doubt: the silence signifies. (Fisher para 2)

This seems a reductionist reading of Miller’s ouevre, one predicated on some notion of Batman in these books as purely sadistic with no sense of self-reflexivity. For Fisher, it’s apparent that Batman never questions his motives or actions, despite the preponderance of textual evidence, especially in Year One. Bruce Wayne (before he concocts the Batman persona) takes a “twenty block walk to the enemy camp”, instigates a fight with a pimp even though he knows he “really shouldn’t”, and quickly realizes the error in his youthful hubris:

Idiot — never should have done this — have to get out of here before I draw attention — [...] Mess — made a mess of it — no excuse — didn’t control myself (Miller and Mazzucchelli 10-13)

Very quickly, in his fight against crime, Wayne realizes he has to negotiate a pretty vague distinction between Justice and Revenge, ethical twins whose differences aren’t always apparent. Batman Begins (2005) predicates the protagonist’s origin upon this very dilemma, embodied in figures of Bruce’s natural father, Thomas Wayne, and R’as al Ghul, a kind of father surrogate. The former is established in the film as the embodiment of patience, fortitude, and charity, building a railway system for all of Gotham, and constantly intoning an appropriate mantra: “Why do we fall? So we can get back up.” R’as al Ghul, on the otherhand, manifests as a demon in disguise, just as his name suggests. Think of al Ghul as a character akin to Grindelwald — seeking to remake the world in an image he sees as appropriate, developing a form of justice that is absolute and unwavering.

As Harry Potter readers, we’re used to seeing characters developed in these kinds of dualisms played out in juxtaposed characters. Harry’s consciousness is often a battlefield for difficult-to-rectify ethical systems and worldviews, some he recognizes as obviously flawed and others he desperately wants to be true. Bruce/Batman suffers the same psychological battle, one best mirrored in his most potent foe, Joker.

No matter which evolution of Joker one might consider (comics present a distinct problem with respect to establishing a canon), the character’s layering has taken on more and more sophistication in the last twenty years. Alan Moore stated in 2001 that “psychologically Batman and the joker are mirror images of each other” (para 12). Unpacking their relationship in light of this observation can lend some understanding to Joker as a villain — and more importantly, as a successful (broadly speaking) antagonist.

Joker’s psychology is debatable given the differing narratives established throughout the history of the series. In The Killing Joke, he’s the victim of circumstances stemming from a moribund middle-class life. Dissatisfied with his life, he quits a chemical engineering job, fails at stand-up comedy, and makes the desperate choice to help in the robbery of a chemical company out of the need to care for his family. The situation goes awry, and he ends up taking a spill into a chemical vat, leaving him physically scarred. This, combined with the murder of his wife, leaves him psychologically destroyed, choosing an alter ego within which he can submerge these problems. But this is only one version of the backstory — Moore’s book and Nolan’s new movie both reference the fact that Joker has told multiple versions of his origin story with no one version offered as definitive.

Whatever Joker’s pathology, it is initially easy to dismiss him as a raving lunatic. But doing so removes from him agency, and thus responsibility. The Dark Knight Returns toys with the idea that the Joker is perfectly aware of his actions and their consequences, and he’s willing to manipulate circumstances for his own advantage. Miller’s plot begins with Joker locked away in Arkham Asylum under the psychiatric care of Dr. Bartholomew Wolper. Wolper paints Joker’s pathology as a sympathetic one through a distorted psychiatric jingoism to turn the responsibility for Joker’s crimes toward Batman, simultaneously painting Joker as a victim created by Bats for the purpose of satisfying his own ego and painting Batman as an “aberrant psychotic force — morally bankrupt, politically hazardous, reactionary paranoid” (Miller et. al. 41). Wolper offers up his theory concerning why Batman is responsible for the actions of his nemeses:

Batman’s psychotic sublimative/psycho-etoric behavior pattern is like a net. Weak-egoed neurotics, like Harvey [aka Two-Face, another Batman villain], are drawn into corresponding intersticing patterns. You might say Batman commits the crimes…using his so-called villains as narcissistic proxies… (47)

Though directly addressing the pathology of Two-Face, Wolper’s analysis applies to Joker, as well. Wolper pursues his line of thinking to near polemical levels, laying the atrocities of an ultraviolent street gang called The Mutants at Batman’s feet, too: “Batman should be considered personally responsible for every human being murdered by this gang” (113). The irony is, of course, that Joker describes his relationship with Batman in exactly the same fashion, only from an inverse perspective. Joker derives meaning from his existence by locking himself into a struggle with Batman. Nolan toys with this them in The Dark Knight film — Joker states “You complete me” after informing Batman he has no desire to kill “The Batman”.

Wolper dies at Joker’s hands while Wolper is parading him before the audience of a late night talk show — a parody of David Letterman, no less. The whole audience dies, as well. Within the scene, David Endochrine (the talk show host) seems to represent the general social attitude toward Joker and his crimes and, by extension, indicating the cynicism with which Gotham City’s residents approach the decay and chaos of their urban universe. David teases Joker’s appearance by calling him “a man who’s brought a lot of smiles to the world” (117). The glib joke both alludes to Joker’s preferred method of killing (leaving his victims with smiles on their faces) and foreshadows the mass murder he’s engineered for his appearance on the show.

Joker’s self-positioning seems to indicate something of a rigorous personal philosophy, both emotive and cosmologically significant. Batman himself affirms the relationship, ironically using some of Wolper’s language to do so. After a downtown explosion masterminded by Joker destroys a major building, Batman’s internal monologue is indicative of this conceit:

I’ll help the emergency teams as best I can. I’ll count the dead one by one. I’ll add them to the list, Joker. To the list of all the people I’ve murdered — by letting you live. (117)

Miller extends the philosophical question here by hammering away at a larger discourse running throughout The Dark Knight Returns — a public debate arguing the benefits and consequences of Batman’s character for Gotham City. A television program, Issues Within Issues, is the stage for this debate, reducing a legitimate discussion of Batman’s utility and ethical position into the brand of culture war rhetoric we’ve discussed here at The Hog’s Head from time to time. Complicating the problem is that the street gang, The Mutants, defects to what they consider to be Batman’s sense of justice once he defeats their leader in a bloody confrontation at a landfill. Their constant refrain that “Gotham City belongs to the Batman” (113) indicates a larger need for for a personality around which to rally, echoed in their new name, “Sons of Batman”. The fascist reverberations are apparent, especially in a splinter faction of the gang that openly adopts Nazi symbolism for themselves.

When combined with the narcissism and cynicism presented in many everyday Gotham residents, the cityscape manifests itself as a representation of Batman’s internal struggle — the need to act versus the need to delineate between Justice and Revenge. Batman Begins establishes this through Thomas Wayne and R’as al Ghul, as the latter provokes pre-Batman Bruce by telling him that his parents’ murders were Thomas Wayne’s fault — the result of Wayne’s “failure to act”. Virtually every Batman origin story emphasizes this event as pivotal in Bruce’s psychological and moral development. Tim Burton’s 1989 film adaptation even went so far as to posit that Joker was the Waynes’ murderer, before he adopted his criminal alter ego.

Joker’s position in all this, at least in these contexts, is as an antagonist that forces Batman to persistently re-examine both his ethics and methodology. Within the superhero-versus-vigilante debate, Joker continuously tweaks circumstances to confront Bruce with this question. So far, this seems pretty well in keeping with the relationship between Harry and Voldemort. Deathly Hallows does explore this kind of territory. We’ve persistently debated the way Harry and others use the Forbidden Curses. I’ve come to agree with some of the criticism that the impact of the events is removed because there is virtually no reflection on them, at all. Combined with the fact that Voldemort essentially ends up killing himself — that Harry doesn’t resort to such violence to kill his main antagonist — whatever Rowling was after in these plot details seems lost.

However, Batman has to deal with the consequences, at least in Miller’s versions. Gotham City’s take on The Dark Knight is always left in doubt, only sometimes praising him as necessary for the sake of city (this praise is the attitude producers of Batman: the Animated Series chose to emphasize in the classic early 90s cartoon). This sense of consequence is apparent in the final confrontation between Batman and Joker at the end of The Dark Knight Returns:

We kill…too often…because we’ve made it easy…too easy…sparing ourselves…the mess…and the work… (149)

This internal monologue parallels the media report of “sheer pandemonium” given to the reader, that “sixteen cub scouts [are] found dead” (150). The confrontation isn’t just a physical battleground, but also a symbolic climax for Bruce/Batman’s internal question of his ethics. If he’d killed Joker years ago, all the death and mayhem could have been avoided, yet he would have violated a cardinal rule central to the Batman mythos — he must not kill his adversaries. The new DVD Batman Gotham Knight intones this same principle. In one of the shorts, Batman states “I’m willing to put my life on the line to do what I have to. But it has to be mine — no one else’s”.

Figure 1. Extended Trailer for Batman Gotham Knight (2008)

Joker chides this principle in the end of The Dark Knight Returns as they fight within a tunnel of love in an amusement park. Batman has the opportunity to kill his nemesis by breaking Joker’s neck. Instead, Bats opts to simply paralyze him, a seemingly “good” alternative. Yet, Joker is “disappointed”:

I’m really…very disappointed with you, my sweet…the moment was…perfect…and you…didn’t have the nerve… Paralysis…really… Just an ounce or two more…of pressure…and…do I hear sirens…?…yes…coming close…you won’t get far… But then…it doesn’t matter…if you do…they’ll kill you for this… And they’ll never know…that you didn’t have the nerve… (150-51)

Joker then completes the job, forcing his neck to the full breaking point so that “whatever’s in him rustles as it leaves” (151). At this point, Batman’s place as out-of-control vigilante is cemented, especially after the reporting of the media. He has to fight his way out of the aftermath, killing members of the police department’s SWAT team in the process, blatantly flaunting a rule he just held in place for his worst villain. Joker serves to highlight this ethical problem maybe more than any other antagonist Batman faces in the DC Universe. One grand irony is that Joker persistently points toward the masculine egotism driving Bruce Wayne/Batman’s purpose. Joker doesn’t seek to kill Batman, only to set him into a framework wherein the police see Joker as the victim and Batman as the criminal — effectively placing Batman’s work under erasure.

By splitting himself into dual personalities — ones that compete for the true nature of Bruce Wayne himself — the Batman/Bruce Wayne personae help hide the true person to begin with, aiding in Joker’s endgame. In virtually all incarnations of the Batman mythos, the audience is left unsure of which persona more accurately reflects the true character. The Batman persona is an attempted march toward an ideal that must lead through the darkest territory of humanity. Batman as a character is a walking personification of a hero’s journey that the hero may actually be unable to complete. While much of his motivation is personal, drawing from the exigence of Thomas and Martha Wayne’s murder, the pursuit is very much a public exercise, creating a tension between personal hope and public necessity. Bruce tells Alfred in Batman Begins that he wants to strike fear into his “enemies” with “something elemental”. The bat metaphor’s darkness and persistent link in cultures around the world to all things evil serves the purpose, but the guise is a personification of evil without logic. That this strikes fear into Gotham’s criminal underbelly serves to underscore the bad guys’ humanity and simultaneously point toward the flaws in Batman’s ethical code — a version of imposed order.

Joker becomes a laughing hyperbole always exposing the fact that Batman’s choices may actually be arbitrary, though Bats feels as though he can only make the choices he does. Batman’s sacrifice for Gotham is his own psyche, even at the expense that his narrative, the legend that writes his history, will record him as a villain like those he opposes. Joker knows this, and uses it for his own whims. The villain’s purpose isn’t purely about social disintegration, but a personal stake in a nihilistic epiphany for Bruce Wayne/Batman. The “something elemental” chosen by Bruce is also personified in Joker. He is a “squall of chaos” wrapped in the distorted imagery of innocense and happiness that at one level hides Joker’s physical and psychological scars; yet, that imagery also pushes to such an extreme symbolism that those scars are very much exposed. It’s a mirror image of the bat costume that both hides the identity of its wearer and serves as an outward manifestation of Bruce’s internal crises. Joker becomes compelling, not so much because of his own characterization, but because he remains a symbol, even for his most intimate “companion”. The result is that Joker’s personality is a hyperbolic mirror of Batman’s. He’s a symbol of evil because he’s a cipher for human flaws exagerated to expose their simplicity.

Next week, I’ll post a closer look at Harry’s antagonists and argue more closely why Voldemort is a failed character in my view — one that threatens the integrity of the whole HP narrative.

Until then, hope you enjoy The Dark Knight this weekend. I know I will!

Primary References
Batman Begins Warner Bros. 2005.
Batman Gotham Knight Warner Bros. 2008.
The Dark Knight Warner Bros. 2008.
Miller et. al. Batman Year One. 1987.
—. The Dark Knight Returns. 1986.
Moore, Alan et. al. The Killing Joke. 1988.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 2007.
—. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. 2005.

For Secondary References, follow the persistent links to the original sources.

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• Our Hero Harry, the Snaped Crusader (Issue #1)

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.

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by Dave

I’ve said before that Victorian Era novels (whether British or American) have always left me cold. It may be a failing on my part, but if you put passages from Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Henry James, or the Brontes in front of me, I’d have a difficult time distinguishing between them. Dickens has always been one exception to this rule. Hard Times was the one novel in my British Victorian Literature course as an undergraduate that I could truly lean into. Dickens was ahead of his time — nothing new in that statement. But he addressed the injustices of his day in a way that gives his readers hope, yet without falling into the mire and sap of sentimentality. His contemporaries and literary inheritors seem to me to always fall into one those traps. His ability to combine humor, pathos, and cutting observation are unequaled. His closest counterpart, I think, is obviously Mark Twain. I’ve always wondered a bit at the coincidence that these two most perfect satirists should find their audiences at roughly the same time, address very similar subject matter, and do so in remarkably similar fashion, but with their own distinct cultural and national flavors. I have no idea if Twain and Dickens ever met, but, if they did…can you imagine the conversation? especially if they knew they had an audience? I think the closest analogy I can imagine is putting Mel Brooks in the same room with Monty Python — Lone Star and the Holy Grail, with Dark Helmet as the Black Knight.

I’m not sure of the last time I read A Christmas Carol. It may even have been in high school. Thus, I never paid a ton of attention to the finer points of Dickens’ crafting of the story. Scrooge seems the classic, miserly Victorian villain in many ways. The natural symbolism tagging along behind him is something echoed in much Vicotrian literature, especially within poetry. One of my favorite Victorian poems is “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” by Robert Browning. In it is this passage:

So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
Into the path he pointed. All the day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray. (43-48)

The use of the natural symbolism here foreshadows the trials to follow Browning’s eponymous hero. The “one grim/Red leer” is a ray of the sun casting about, ironically invoking a symbol of warmth and heat to lay out some potential, unnamed dread — very similar to Sauron’s eye atop the Dark Tower of Mordor — I’ve always wondered if Tolkien took this image from Browning’s poem.

Dickens always follows Scrooge around with similar effect. Particularly, we might examine this passage (for a written version, try here):

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him.

The passage is one of many markers demonstrating Scrooge’s self-inflicted withdrawal from all that lives and breathes around him — a reiteration of the earlier observation that Scrooge has “never painted out Old Marley’s name” from the sign to the counting house, and that Scrooge will answer to Marley’s name as well as his own, and that “it was all the same to him”. Dickens frontloads his story with all kinds of clues to Marley’s coming part in the narrative. That the narrator feels compelled to open his narrative with “Marley was dead” might as well be a bright neon sign shining across London in an age of gas-fuelled streetlamps that Marley will return, that his death is important, and that the state of his “shade” will be impressed upon our dear Ebenezer.

But Scrooge’s insistence upon “humbug” gets to the point of Scrooge’s inward character. The word has morphed into a catchphrase in modern pop culture, along with Scrooge’s name. So much so that I doubt too many people consider its actual denotive meaning — something that is a fraud. And in Scrooge’s worldview, a “fraud” is the worst possible thing. As a money counter, Scrooge’s occupation hints at the materialism driving his character. Marley’s ghost calls him a “Man of the worldly mind” upon first confronting Scrooge’s skepticism. Dickens confronts his character with the most thoroughly materialized version of death and despair possible. Scrooge can hear and see the ghost, yet chooses to argue to himself that acknowledging it “would play [...] the very deuce with him.” Yet, before Marley vanishes, Scrooge is calling his dead “friend” by his first name and looking around his own feet for phantasmal chains like those burdening Jacob.

Dickens characterization of Scrooge is something that many of his contemporaries would have had difficulty fathoming. He allows for Scrooge to change. In many ways, and perhaps due to the fame of the story, it’s not the eventual change in Scrooge that catches my eye as a reader; but I’m enthralled with how Dickens maneuvers Scrooge through that change and makes it believable in the end. The “choice” idea comes back into play, but in a manner, so far, more consistently subtler than the one Rowling tends toward. It’ll be interesting to see how Dickens fleshes this idea out through the rest of the story.

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by Dave]

The heart of the classical Hero type drives towards some sacrifice — either in a quest for glory sometimes doomed from the start, or on the behalf of something judged “the greater good”. Classical epic heroes struggle against their humanity, often goaded by the self realization of their partial divinity. They hope to find something superhuman, or at least extrahuman, within themselves. Achilles is the son of a Myrmidon king, Peleus, and one of the fifty Greek sea nymphs, Thetis. Gilgamesh is born of the Sumerian goddes, Ninsun. Many most famous classical heroes concern themselves with their own mortality, wondering which side of their double nature will win out, human or divine. The human side generally wins, and the classic hero falls to his own imperfections, even if that means simply dying of old age. The Epic of Gilgamesh shows the creation of its title-character:

When the gods created Gilgamesh they gave him a perfect body. Shamash the glorious sun endowed him with beauty, Adad the god of the storm endowed him with courage, the greate gods made his beauty perfect, surpassing all others, terrifying like a great wild bull. Two thirds they made him god and one third man. (pg. 61)

Gilgamesh benefits from extraordinary physical gifts that make him arrogant without bounds (pg. 62). As his story unfolds, we learn that Gilgamesh’s arrogance fails him because his physical prowess is only an image of true divinity. He learns through the death of his companion Enkidu that he will die and nothing can stay his fate. Gilgamesh goes to extraordinary lengths to find immortality, seeking out Utnapishtim the Faraway to learn his secret, only to fail the quest for everlasting life and die venerated purely for his quest.

But literal immortality is always sought for its own sake. Once such a prize proves too illusive, the next best thing appears as everlasting glory brought on by a noble, honorable death found either in a quest or in combat. The Arthurian stories tend to combine elements of both and disperse their moral elements across a vast number of heroes, both noble and tragic (think of Rowling’s “totally bastard mythology” quip). Classical epic literature posits heroes as moral axioms — they are examples to emulate because they struggle against their fate, that thing which marks them as most unmistakably human: death. Yet, modern readers sometimes find classical heroes difficult to sympathize with. My students always like the epic story itself. It’s full of action and pyrotechnics. But the classical hero’s arrogance and uber-violent tendencies, their “argument of blood” to use scholar Dean Miller’s description, find expression more commonly in the shallowest of bloody Hollywood action films. The character traits of the classical type just don’t resonate as moral axioms in quite the same manner as the ancient Greeks and plenty of others hoped for.

Of course, Voldemort and his enterprise echo within these conceits. He relies on an ideology of privileged lineage, the truth of which remains largely hidden while he seeks a brand of apotheosis from his Slytherin bloodline first revealed to Harry and the reader in the form of his diary-horcrux, a diabolical assertion of his desired place within the Wizarding World. Voldemort attempts repeatedly to cast himself in a heroic role by aping and perverting some classical tropes by which he writes himself into the hero role. But where Gilgamesh, Achilles, and a legion of other examples have failed, Voldemort has taken pains to succeed by destroying his own soul, thus denying the part of him he believes human and weak. He will overcome his humanity.

But Deathly Hallows radically subverts Voldemort on this point. In a twist that shocked me as a reader, Rowling takes great pains to deflate her villain. First, we see him pontificating over past failures:

I have been careless, and so have been thwarted by luck and chance, those wreckers of all but the best laid plans. But I know better now. I understand those things that I did not understand before. I must be the one to kill Harry Potter, and I shall be. (pg. 7)

Voldemort cannot bring himself to believe that someone “lesser” than himself could defeat him, certainly not a dunder-headed teenage halfblood. Instead, he tries to rewrite the machinations of Dumbledore’s resistance supplemented with Harry’s pure moxy as “luck” and “chance”. The irony in the language here is ripe. He wants to control luck and chance, two concepts actually more closely linked with fatalism. Voldemort’s very language betrays his misunderstanding of the distinctions between choice and fate. Even later, he finds the thoughts of Harry penetrating his best laid plans to be unfathomable:

How was it possible the boy could have discovered his secret? [...] What if, what if, the boy knew about the others? Could he know, had he already acted, had he traced more of them? Was Dumbledore at the root of this? Dumbledore, who had always suspected him; Dumbledore, dead on his orders; Dumbledore, whose wand was his now, yet who reached out forom the ignominy of death through the boy, the boy–
But surely if the boy had destroyed any of his Horcruxes, he, Lord Voldemort, would have known, would have felt it? He, the greatest wizard of them all; he, the most powerful; he, the killer of Dumbledore and of how many other worthless, nameless men: How could Lord Voldemort not have known, if he, himself, most important and precious, had been attacked, mutilated? (pg. 549-49)

Of course, the irony deepens even further because this same chapter ends with Harry peaking into Voldemort’s reaction, having mastered the psychic connection shared by his nemesis. The materialist desire on Voldemort’s part to cheat death is driven by his most human of character traits: fear and reason.

Modern heroes in the Western tradition rely on an acceptance of their humanity and a different sort of inversion of many of these classical heroic traits. Harry wants nothing to do with the philosophies espoused by Voldemort, and he therefore rejects, at least implicitly, much of the classical hero type. His rejection of the Hallows, themselves symbols scaffolded on the classical quest for power and domination, is a symbolic rejection of the shallow materialism inherent in the classical type. Where Gilgamesh and Achilles are venerated purely for their struggles to overcome death, Harry is venerated because he greets it with open arms, accepts death as the right choice but survives. Gilgamesh’s reward is glory, while Harry’s is to live to defeat his enemy. Voldemort’s reward is the flailing, whimpering bundle lying under the bench at King’s Cross station, begging both our pity and our disgust.

As an English major, I’ve spent many hours in classroom settings discussing different heroes and working through a particularly intriguing concept: Christ as a literary hero. Some biblical exegesis has posited Jesus as a unique literary phenomenon, a culmination of different narrative conventions established from Genesis onward in which the tropes of classical literature from pagan cultures are turned over and rearranged. Whether Adam or Jesus, men created directly by the Judeo-Christian God must learn to accept their humanity, the nature of their weaknesses, and that they overcome those weaknesses through a close relationship with the divine who, for the first time in ancient literature, concerns itself almost exclusively with the workings of humankind and our problems. The Olympic Pantheon, for example, tends to only concern itself with humans in a purely self-serving fashion, and they certainly do so with no great design. Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and others are often only playthings for the gods to use as pawns in their own squabbles.

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I’ll say it again: Rowling likes M. Scott Peck.  No, she hasn’t confirmed it, and perhaps it’s mere coincidence, but read this quote from the illustration Peck uses in Chapter 1 of The People of the Lie.  Here, Peck is advising a client on the course he must take in order to get better:

Easy.  That’s a key word for you, George…. You’re always looking for an easy way out, George.  Not the right way.  The easy way.  When you’re faced with a choice between the right way and the easy way, you’ll take the easy way every time. (p. 33)

Now, Dumbledore:

Remember Cedric. Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory. (GF-37)

Now, Rowling:

What’s very important for me is when Dumbledore says that you have to choose between what is right and what is easy. This is the setup for the next three books. All of them are going to have to choose, because what is easy is often not right.

There’s a scene in Goblet where Cedric, who competes against Harry in the Triwizard Tournament, is killed by Voldemort, and at the end, Dumbledore must choose between informing the students of this evil, or keeping the knowledge from them. He chooses to tell them.

Dumbledore’s decision is 100 percent me.  (http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2000/0900-ew-jensen.htm)

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Note: This material will appear in an upcoming PubCast (along with further commentary and other related subjects) either midweek or this weekend.

Rowling has given us a paradox concerning evil in the Harry Potter series. At face value, the lesson is very simple, and it has been stated by Dumbledore in two ways:

“It is our choices Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” (CS18)

“You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow up to be!” (GF36)

But we have a problem with Merope Gaunt, and therefore a problem with Voldemort by association. Read carefully this dialogue between Harry and Dumbledore:

“So we know that, near the end of her pregnancy, Merope was alone in London and in desperate need of gold, desperate enough to sell her one and only valuable possession, the locket that was one of Marvolo’s treasured family heirlooms.”

“But she could do magic!” said Harry impatiently. “She could have got food and everything for herself by magic, couldn’t she?”

“Ah,” said Dumbledore, “perhaps she could. But it is my belief—I am guessing again, but I am sure I am right — that when her husband abandoned her, Merope stopped using magic. I do not think that she wanted to be a witch any longer. Of course, it is also possible that her unrequited love and the attendant despair sapped her of her powers; that can happen. In any case, as you are about to see, Merope refused to raise her wand even to save her own life.”

“She wouldn’t even stay alive for her son?”

Dumbledore raised his eyebrows. “Could you possibly be feeling sorry for Lord Voldemort?”

“No,” said Harry quickly, “but she had a choice, didn’t she, not like my mother —”

“Your mother had a choice too,” said Dumbledore gently. “Yes, Merope Riddle chose death in spite of a son who needed her, but do not judge her too harshly, Harry. She was greatly weakened by long suffering and she never had your mother’s courage. (HBP-13)

A few things are noteworthy here. Dumbledore’s question, “Could you possibly be feeling sorry for Lord Voldemort” poses a bit of a challenge to the “Voldemort as Symbol of Evil” theory that I have espoused here. In short, I believe Voldemort is not redeemable, because, for literary reasons, he serves as a symbol of all evil in the Wizarding World, and therefore must be defeated, not redeemed. He is sub-human and has placed himself beyond redemption.

But it’s almost as if Dumbledore is prodding Harry to find something in Voldemort to feel sorry for. I still stand by the “unredeemable Voldemort” theory, and I assume Rowling has to include some element of humanity into Voldemort’s story in order to maintain the literary use of Voldemort as Harry’s shadow. But perhaps the most important observation here is that this tension points to the great difficulty and paradox of the problems of evil and choice. Even though Rowling’s lessons through Dumbledore are rather simple concerning choice, the way they play out is vastly complex, and it appears Dumbledore knows this well. (The quotes above do not negate or contradict the complexity of the problem of evil and choice; they make sense in their own contexts.)

The problem is here: How culpable is Voldemort? How culpable is Merope? Harry is outraged that Merope, given the choice, would not stay alive for her son, while his own mother willingly gave her life for him. But Dumbledore’s response is instructive: “[D]o not judge her too harshly, Harry. She was greatly weakened by long suffering and she never had your mother’s courage.”

First, let’s address the point that has been astutely made by SoG commenter “Mrs. Weasley”: Merope was indeed courageous in a lot of ways. Merope certainly endured a trying and difficult pregnancy in order to give birth and life to her son, which demonstrates at least some level of love and courage. That said, I don’t think Dumbledore was being necessarily judgmental when he said that Merope’s courage was less than Lily’s. He’s really trying to stop Harry from judging her harshly based on Merope’s life circumstances. In short, he’s saying, “Merope did what she could given what she became as a result of her abusive past.”

And that leads to the key tension here: in essence, it is not as simple as making the right choices, regardless of what you were born; it is possible that someone else can make choices for you – choices that permanently damage your own ability to choose. Merope was unable to summon Lily’s courage, not because she had two equally available choices to her and made the wrong choice, but because she had been severely abused, and for that reason did not have the courage to use magic to stay alive.

We can even back this up further in the Slytherin line: we at least know that Marvolo and Morphin were mentally ill (and we can probably be certain that others in the line were such as well) due to inbreeding amongst Slytherin descendants; in other words, their ability to choose between right and wrong was affected by the choices their ancestors made which resulted in genetic distortions. That raises the same question: If past Slytherins made choices that resulted in a mentally ill prodigy (for physiological reasons), to what extent were Marvolo and Morphin culpable?

We do have evidence that Rowling herself sees a difference in the extent of moral culpability from one person to the next, depending on his or her personal history. Here is a very telling answer to a question from the oft-quoted Anelli/Spartz interview in 2005:

MA: Oh, here’s one [from our forums] that I’ve really got to ask you. Has Snape ever been loved by anyone?

JKR: Yes, he has, which in some ways makes him more culpable even than Voldemort, who never has.

At the very least, we learn here that some choices are morally more consequential than others, not based on the options themselves (good vs. evil), but based on the person’s own circumstances. The key to Rowling’s answer is this: Because Snape has been loved and Voldemort has not, the option to choose good is more available to Snape than it is to Voldemort.

It’s hard to know exactly where to go with this information, except to say this: Rowling is acutely aware that one person’s evil choices do not affect only that person. This gets at some of the worst aspects of evil: that the choices of one person can effectively debilitate another from having the same resources of love, compassion, and goodness that others have. Some people have less capacity for choosing the good and not the evil, because people before them have made evil choices.

It is an extremely difficult tension: Voldemort needs simultaneously to be morally culpable for his choices and so excessively evil that he is beyond redemption. The fact that he was deprived of the proper resources of love and goodness by his Slytherin ancestry complicates the matter significantly. Given Rowling’s views on the value and capability of children (she believes they’re underestimated by adults), it’s at least safe to say that Rowling would give more value to Tom’s choices before he was 11 than most of us.

But it would be hard to say that Rowling has any other reason for giving us Voldemort’s history pre-birth than to make us actually feel a little bit sorry for him – just a little! – at least his childhood circumstances. We surely feel sorry for Merope.

As far as Voldemort goes, horcrux-making is perhaps he best answer to the choice problem, how Voldemort can be simultaneously a morally culpable person and beyond redemption. His choice to make them – a choice that was not programmed in him by anything genetic – that sapped him of his humanity. In effect, he chose to become less than human, to give up his own humanity – and therefore hope of “redemption” – by creating horcruxes.

Rowling once again demonstrates that she is not dealing in over-simplified categories. The themes present in her magical world continue to be a parallel to our vasty complex Muggle world. There’s no simple, “This is good, this is evil; this person is good because of this choice, and this person is evil because of that choice.” Rather, evil, is all its absolute vileness, is presented as something that does not only destroy the person committing the evil, but the people around him or her as well.

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I’m presently taking an online Harry Potter class at a local community college, and I’m hoping it will give plenty of stuff to blog about. We are required to answer two questions per week, and I will begin posting the questions and my answers weekly. This first week centers on Book 1, and here is the first question and my answer. The caveat here is that we’re at a very, very basic level at this point, so this might be good introductory material for people just starting to think a bit more deeply about Harry.

Question: What is the single most important piece of wisdom that Dumbledore gives Harry? What is so important about it?

The quote about Lily’s love saving Harry already mentioned [by someone else in the class], I want to focus on another quote from the same conversation that is equally important and fills in the full meaning of Harry’s conversation at the end of Sorcerer’s Stone. Harry is baffled by the idea that Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel would be willing to give up the Stone and so give up their lives after they have lived more than 600 years. Dumbledore responds:

After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. You know, the Stone was really not such a wonderful thing. As much money and life as you could want! The two things most humans would choose above all — the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them. (Stone 297)

Dumbledore here introduces two of the most important themes of the series: death and choice. Clearly Harry has to deal with the death of his parents as well as deaths in the subsequent books. Rowling has said that death is “possibly the most important theme” of the series. (“Harry Potter and Me”) Likewise, choice is incredibly important, and Chamber of Secrets will establish choice as the fundamental difference between Harry and Voldemort.

This first end-of-the-book conversation with Dumbledore is absolutely brilliant, introducing three of the most important themes: love, death, and choice. Many of the future events of the books are centered around these three themes and the relationship they have to each other. They become crucial to understanding Harry and Voldemort as the series continues.

Works Cited
“Harry Potter and Me” (BBC Christmas Special, British Version), BBC, 28 December 2001.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. New York: Scholastic, Inc. 1997.

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