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!

Related Posts

• History of the Vampire
• Dracula’s Guest
• Who’s Bitten You?
• Best in Class: Scary Movies
• PotterTeeVee is on the Air…With Travis Prinzi!

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!

Related Posts

• Best in Class: Scary Movies
• Scary Movies Week
• Nosferatu: The Symphony of Horror
• PotterTeeVee is on the Air…With Travis Prinzi!
• Books, Films, and You – Boo!

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.

Related Posts

• Hunger Games Discussion
• The Hog’s Head Half-Blood Prince Read-Through
• The Phoenix Lament
• The Flight of the Prince, by Lily Luna
• The Lightning-Struck Tower, by Red Rocker

Travis asked some of us to fill in on the HBP read-thr0ugh, since he’s busy, you know, editing a book!

It would be easy to skip through Chapter 20 thinking that the most important thing we learn is how Voldemort/Riddle came into possession of Hufflepuff’s Cup and Slytherin’s Locket.  We know that both end up becoming Horcruxes at some point later.  In addition, the connection between these devices, Hogwarts, and Horcruxes is foreshadowed both here and in the earlier Pensieve lesson.  Slughorn’s distorted memory points to a conversation about such things with young Riddle, but it’s clear that he’s gone to great pains to hide important elements of that conversation — the wizard’s version of “trying to forget.” 

It’s striking to look back on these Pensieve lessons after Deathly Hallows and realize just how much of the last book’s plot is set up within these chapters.

But, some interesting character details emerge from them, as well.  Dumbledore emphasizes this observation of Riddle’s actions:

“Now,” said Dumbledore, “if you don’t mind, Harry, I want to pausce once more to draw your attention to certain points of our story.  Voldemort had committed another murder; whether it was his first since he killed the Riddles, I do not know, but I think it was.  This time, as you will have seen, he killed not for revenge, but for gain.  He wanted the two fabulous trophies that poor, besotted old woman showed him.  Just as he had once robbed the other children at his orphanage, just he had stolen his Uncle Morfin’s ring, so he ran of now with Hepzibah’s cup and locket.”  (439-40, American edition; my emphasis)

I’m always struck by this observation.  It’s obvious now that Dumbledore was pointing Harry not only to what would become Horcruxes, but also how and where Voldemort might hide some of them: Hogwarts.  Dumbeldore is drawing a connection between a childhood behavior (packrat-like theft and hiding) and what would become Voldemort’s trademark.

I have ideas why the connection matters, especially given that Voldemort (or some symbol of him) appears as a whimpering infant in the King’s Cross chapter of DH.  The “child” metaphor is carried through by Voldemort’s desire to return to Hogwarts.  Dumbledore emphasizes the practical reasons, but do you think this reveals something of Voldemort’s psychology?

Related Posts

• The Hog’s Head Half-Blood Prince Read-Through
• The White Tomb
• The Phoenix Lament
• The Flight of the Prince, by Lily Luna
• The Lightning-Struck Tower, by Red Rocker

I wouldn’t normally cite anything from Entertainment Weekly as an especially interesting analysis of things literary, but the most recent issue (3 April 2009) has a piece by Jeff Jensen exploring modern America’s fascination with villains and significantly flawed heroes (“Heroes and Villains”).  This passage struck me:

The current state of heroism can be summed up in a word: Lost.  Lke the castaways of ABC’s mystery drama, today’s would-be heroes are so flawed or messed up, they need to be saved from themselves before they save anyone else.  Some succeed, like Iron Man’s ethically murky Tony Stark.  But many others — Anakin Skywalker; the meth-cooking cancer dad on Breaking Bad [an AMC drama]; almost anyone on HBO, Showtime, or FX — find it more empowering to embrace the dark side.  These characters reflect a culture that feels powerless and pissed: We desparately want good to triumph over evil, but we can’t staunch our doubts that good is up to the task. 

…

The decade’s plague of monolithic fantasy villains are just as tortured.  Voldemort and Magneto are timeless and timely embodiments of evil: intolerant, fanatic, corrupted.  Yet like so many morally iffy heroes, these scarred rogues have world-saving ambitions, albeit warped by hateful worldviews.  The Joker and Saw’s Jigsaw Killer are psychotic vigilantes persecuting society for failing to live up to their potential or ideals.  We need more from pop culture than just seeing good guys and bad guys in action — we need to see how they’re made.  Case in point: Harry Potter.  J.K. Rowling’s seven-book saga took us deep inside the boy wizard’s trial-and-error transformation from a world-wounded young boy to a young man who saves the world without compromising himself of his values.  We believed it, because Rowling — and Harry — did the hard work of proving it.

I sure don’t agree with it all.  For one thing, Harry seems about as far removed from their description of jaded, cynical heroes as a character could possibly be.  And the last couple of sentences paint a radically different picture than the ideas encapsulated in the first few sentences.  Harry has his flaws, for sure — but, unlike the examples mentioned by Jensen, I for one never bought into the idea that Harry could ever become Voldemort, a la Anakin Skywalker.  And I definitely don’t see anything especially world-saving in Voldemort’s motives (or Joker’s, for that matter).  To be sure, they operate with a kind philosophy or ideology, but their motives are purely about dissolving anything we would recognize as civilization.

A good example that I think counters Jensen’s point is Watchmen.  Huge, big-budget movie, sold to the public as a superhero action flick.  All the promotional materials showed a film full of action superheroes kicking butt.  Most of the trailers for the film showed technical gadgetry and lots of fight scenes; most prominent were those scenes set in a jail, when the “good guys” were kicking the crap out of prisoners.  But, anyone familiar with the story knows that such an impression has nothing at all to do with the actual story.

And how have people reacted? Rather poorly, for the most part.  Even my jaded students found it all too much to stomach, and not because they found it too hard to follow.  Their favorite criticism is that the good guys aren’t “bad ass,” or willing to kick butt and take names when the chips are down and the bad guys just need killin’.  Watchmen is very much anything but such a story.  Per BoxOfficeMojo.com, the film’s opening weekend American box office gross was just over $55 million.  It’s second weekend?  $17.8 million.  The next?  Just over $6million.  Last weekend it grossed $2.7 million.  By contrast, The Dark Knight grossed fully one third more in its first weekend than Watchmen has grossed in four weeks.  And that was in the middle of the summer blockbuster melee. (FYI, OotP made $77 million in its opening weekend.)

I know the comparison isn’t perfect — different time of year, different marketing campaigns, Heath Ledger, etc.  Still, Watchmen got the big-budget treatment and the proper marketing campaign, to boot.  And the reception of the film has been largely negative because people don’t know what to make of it.  The heroes aren’t heroic. And I think the box office gross demonstrates this.

I’ve mentioned the American monomythic superhero, before.  Think John Wayne, or perhaps John McClaine, from Die Hard.  I think that idea is still at work.  We like more complicated heroes, but I think we still like heroes — at least in the end.

Related Posts

• They’re Adapting Your Favorite Book or Comic!!
• Who’s the Hero? Harry or Dumbledore?
• Dr. Manhattan: “The Superman exists…”
• Watchmen at The Hog’s Head
• Rorschach: Watchmen’s Abyss

Figure 1. The film's take on Rorschach is nearly identical to the graphic novel's.

Rorschach (aka Walter Kovacs) is easily one of the more (in)famous characters from Alan Moore’s world.  And Dave Gibbons’s visual take on him has become iconic to many comic fans.  Figure 1 demonstrates the film’s desire to be as faithful to his character design as the medium allows.  The look clearly seems to draw from older comics characters like The Spirit and Dick Tracy.  He wears the uniform of the old fashioned detective, right down to the trenchcoat and fedora.  Of course, the suit is also the uniform of the well-spoken and well-connected man.  Wrapped into the visual of a pinstripe suit and trenchcoat is a feeling of respectability, even success. And Rorschach’s tactics are to be streetwise and fearless — he will confront his adversaries head-on without hesitation.

In short, much of the character’s visual symbolism is designed to harken towards the old-fashioned.  And his character reflects this old-fashioned appeal.  Alan Moore’s vision of 1985 is visceral and deeply troubling.  New York’s streets are dirty, and as Rorschach writes in his journal in Watchmen’s opening pages:  “This city is afraid of me.  I have seen its true face” (I.1).  He continues with a statement that immediately sets the mood for the story.  Referring to New York’s inhabitants as “vermin”, he states:

The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “SAVE US!” …

…And I’ll look down and whisper “no.”  (I.1)

Rorschach’s rhetoric is starkly political, blaming the moral corruption he perceives all around him on “lechers and communists,” “intellectuals and liberals” (I.1).

While it all seems a bit odd to an audience accustomed to characters who seem relatively a-political, it’s important to remember that so were many characters established in the era from which Rorschach’s costume draws its inspiration.  Captain America fought the Nazis (see Figure 2), and one of Dick Tracy’s primary villains was a Nazi spy, Pruneface.  Even though the comic book faced immense legal pressure during the 1950s (eventually leading to the establishment of the Comics Code Authority), the medium was used to great effect as pro-American propaganda, too.

Figure 2. Captain American says hello to Hitler.

And Moore’s book is, among many other things, a meditation on the fear and paranoia established during the Cold War, as children huddled under wooden desks to await “the bomb,” and the movies were overrun with the constant threat of a Soviet first-strike and/or American military technology run amok, a la Red Dawn or Wargames.  Even though I started grade school in the mid-1980s, I distinctly remember bomb drills.

Instead, Rorschach’s character suggests that anyone taking up the mantle of a “mask” (one of Watchmen’s several synonyms for “hero”) would almost certainly have a political bent of one sort or another.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, Jewett and Lawrence unpack the Americanized hero-type as a character willing to operate outside of the law when necessary.  But, his tactics betray an uncompromising personal will fashioned in a cultural and political context.

Rorschach becomes a metaphor in which Alan Moore unpacks this type, perhaps more severely than in any other character.  While Rorschach is efficient, his brutality is unflinching.

Figure 3. Three panels from I.16. Rorschach casually breaks an innocent man's hands.

Edward Blake is the name of another Watchman, The Comedian.  His murder sets off the novel’s plot, and becomes the primary crime occupying Rorschach’s attention, leading Rorschach to a theory about a “mask killer” systematically “picking off costumed heroes” (I.12).  Everyone Rorschach conveys his theory to finds it ridiculous.  Of course, in Moore’s “comic” twist, Rorschach is in fact relatively close to the mark concerning the conspiracy that undergirds the book.  What you see in the panels from Figure 3 is typical Rorschach.  His brutality is mind-boggling, yet he remains totally unaffected by it all.  The bar patron is simply a means to a larger end.  The romanticized American type is pulled from the constrained and idealized world of popular fiction and placed into a much more realistic world, facing real reactions from regular people.  In that idealized world, Rorschach would miraculously get the answer to his question because he infallibly picked the right place to ask it, alleviating him of the responsibility for actually harming anyone.  Moore’s world says, “No, that’s not the way this would work.”  Not only does Rorschach destroy the man’s hand, but Moore recognizes that any character willing to threaten such an action wouldn’t care about the bar patron’s welfare to begin with. Even his syntax betrays a kind of calm detachment; he often speaks only in monotone, clipped sentences.

Then, of course, the reader must confront Rorschach’s name.  His mask is a cloth filled with an amorphous fluid that can continuously reconfigure itself visually.  And Rorschach takes his name from this mask, what he calls his “true face.”  His origin story is appropriately placed in the novel’s central spot, Book VI, and it details the mask’s genesis.  After suffering under a mother whose prostitution career makes him a target for bullying, a ten year old Walter Kovacs defends himself from one of these bullies by “partially blinding him with a lighted cigarette” (VI.6-7).  He is removed from the home, placed into an orphanage.  Then:

Aged 16.  Left children’s home.  Became unskilled manual worker, garment industry.  Job bearable but unpleasant.  Had to handle female clothing.  (VI.10)

The short, chopped sentences overlay intensely emotional moments that destroyed Kovacs sense of the world’s purpose, ingraining a fixation on distinct barriers between right and wrong.  The mask is the remnant of a specially ordered dress that is rejected by the customer for being ugly:  “Wrong.  Not ugly at all.  Black and white.  Moving.  Changing shape … but not mixing.  No gray” (VI.10).  The mask forms “a face that I could bear to look at in the mirror” (VI.10).  The intensity of this last sentence is heightened because Kovacs/Rorschach briefly (but only briefly) sheds the staccato tone he maintains throughout the chapter.

All this is revealed while Rorschach is in police custody and under psychiatric examination.  But, instead of using Rorschach’s pathology to somehow cynically justify his crimes, Moore deconstructs this tendancy as well.  The examining psychiatrist (who enters the chapter as the eternal optimist) is emotionally and mentally shattered by his brief run-in with Rorschach.  The final story Rorschach tells, in which his full persona is shaped involves the brutal death of a young kidnapped girl, in which the kidnapper butchers her and feeds her to his dogs.  The overriding image of the chapter, framed around a Rorschach ink blot card, is of one of those dogs with its skull split open.  Rorschach does it as his initial act of revenge, then waits for the kidnapper, ambushes him and chains him to a woodburning stove.  Rorschach then soaks the man’s dilapidated home in gasoline and sets it ablaze.  The truly frightening aspect is that he hands the man a saw:  “Shouldn’t bother trying to saw through handcuffs.  Never make it in time”:

Stood in the street.  Watched it burn.  Imagined limbless felt torsos inside; breasts blackening; bellies smoldering; bursting into flame one by one.  Watched for an hour.

Nobody got out.  (VI.25)

The hero’s need to avenge an innocent fully turns him into a viscious predator of his own.  His mask reflects his overriding belief that “Existence is random…No meaning save what we choose” (VI.26).  As the psychiatrist notes of the inkblot near Book VI’s end:  “The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty black meaninglessness” (VI.28).  The heroic facade is peeled back, and reflected in Rorschach’s persona is that the superhero is only a cipher of the values of those who read it. Every section of the novel ends with an epigraph.  Book VI ends with Nietzsche’s infamous quote about staring into the abyss.  Moore seems to intend Rorschach as an empty well into which readers might poor their hopes, only to have their social and political frustrations revealed to them.

In the end, once the final plan is put into effect and the conspiracy Rorschach has been relentlessly tracking through the novel is fully revealed, he is (intriguingly) the one Watchman unwaveringly committed to fighting it:  “Back to America.  Evil must be punished.  People must be told” (XII.23).  But, forces beyond his control will not allow him to at least try to complete his mission:

Figure 4. From XII.24. Rorschach meets his end at the hands of another Watchman.

He peels off his mask and screams “DO IT!”  It’s the first real emotion from the character, frustration running over and finally catching up to his motives.

Perhaps most intriguing is that Rorschach, of all the Watchmen, is the only one intently focused on fighting crime.  He is the most famous, and probably most beloved, of all the book’s characters because underneath all the nihilism unveiled at the end of Book VI, Moore reveals the character to be the only character whose motives fit with the classical hero tradition.  His brutality strikes a raw nerve for the reader, but he is unwavering in his commitments to justice (or, more appropriately, his concept of it).  With his death, Moore unflinchingly kills the old-fashioned ethos associated with more traditional comic book heroes.

Related Posts

• They’re Adapting Your Favorite Book or Comic!!
• Heroes and Villains
• Dr. Manhattan: “The Superman exists…”
• Watchmen at The Hog’s Head
• Watchmen: Getting Started

“The Warlock’s Hairy Heart” is a tale of dehumanization because of unwillingness to love, for fear of being hurt.  Fear vs. Love the overriding theme of the Harry Potter stories.

I love it when I come across a comment written by someone decades or hundreds of years ago that perfectly describes a newer story I’ve recently read.  In this case, C.S. Lewis provides insightful commentary on this dark Beedle tale:

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. (The Four Loves)

This is not the first time Lewis has provided insight into our Potter stories.

Related Posts

• C.S. Lewis and The Doctor
• New Book: C.S. Lewis & Philosophy as a Way of Life
• New York C.S. Lewis Society: 40th Anniversary Weekend
• BBC Narnia Code with Michael Ward Online
• Mythos and Logos

by Dave

Part I of this series: Why Joker Succeeds and Voldemort Fails

“Behind the scenes” is a trope of long standing tradition in many forms of literature. In a recent essay on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Terry W. Thompson argues that the violent deaths occur off the page as a direct result of Shelley’s love of classical Greek drama in which decorum often dictated a strict sense of what drama could portray and what it couldn’t:

Over two millenia ago, when the plays of [Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles] were performed live for theater patrons in Athens, Corinth, Epidaurus, the many acts of murder and mayhem so integral to Greek tragedy were never carried out on the state proper. Only the gruesome aftermath could — within the bounds of good taste — be presented to the audience. Blood could be shown; indeed, it frequently was to the delight of many theatergoers; but the actual spilling of it was strictly forbidden. Thus, all the stabbing and slashing, hacking and hewing was done well out of sight — behind closed doors or drawn curtains. (58)

But, this convention is not purely a matter of decorum. It also hints back to one preoccupation of Greek drama, tragedy particularly: what matters are the consequences and their causes. One primary distinction between tragedy and comedy to the classical mind is that tragedy must have a discernible cause/effect relationship between plot elements, while comedy could rely on conveniences due to its more lighthearted nature. Aristotle states that “The most important” element (of the six he delineates) “is the structure of events, because tragedy is a representation not of people as such but of actions and life” (Halliwell trans. 37). Consequently, tragedy was taken more seriously by Aristotle and his peers — a theory that has drifted through the history of literary criticism, and still stands within the postmodern academy (though it is admittedly much more weak-kneed).

Thus, the gory details of death, the simple salaciousness of murder, is left only to the imagination due partly to the need to emphasize the cause of the murder and its after effects. The author did not want the audience distracted by the spectacle. At some level, artistic and moral unity were one and the same, and that perspective largely prevailed throughout all forms of Western art until the 19th century. It is true what needs to be depicted within a given story has evolved. By the time Hamlet is first staged, Shakespeare had already made a living staging some of the most brutal deathscenes ever devised.

The archetypes we’ve taken as a starting point for much of our discussion about Voldemort are tied to obscuring the obvious, as well. For a literature so entrenched in causal action (at least for its more serious matters), leaving what modern audiences would define as a pivotal plot moment “off screen” bespeaks a mindset that also develops characterization through associations among multiple characters, often archetypal ones. One must reveal the pertinent personality ticks of a character by pasting them into a canvas of connections with other characters — not by simply dumping them into the audience’s lap explicitly.

Of course, this is one reason why we read (or watch) the things we do. The dominant thought is that that some form of Aristotle’s catharsis persists within figurative expression. We want to experience the emotions the same way the characters supposedly do.

Thus, the relationships created between Harry and his narrative peers is of paramount importance, particularly the antagonal relationships. The Snape dilemma(s) posed after Half-Blood Prince highlighted this importance, and Deathly Hallows, in an odd twist, doesn’t seem to help matters. Without question, Snape is the most compelling of Harry’s antagonists, yet he is never given the primary position within Harry’s crosshairs. That role is always given to Voldemort, who is inexplicably reduced to a caricature by the time the final battle arrives. After Deathly Hallows, what are we to make of Voldemort? The book presents a major problem for us as readers interrogating the texts, positing the existence of real evil with real consequences, yet depositing its prime representation into a character that Rowling reduces to a very uni-dimensional entity. He comes across as an egotistical buffoon who succeeds more out of his enemies’ fear than his real skill — and Voldemort’s enemies include a whole host of characters we’re to regard as heroic and noble in their own right. My general problem can be summed up this way: Because of Voldemort’s deflation, the story seems to move inexorably toward an already determined ending. Voldemort will not repent and he will be defeated in some manner by Harry. And we end up with a character that deconstructs himself, and thus deconstructs something of the power of his relationship with Harry.  The trick is that Voldemort’s power depends on his narrative interconnectedness with other characters, like Snape, who are shunted to the background.  Voldemort depends on these other characters; once he is brought to the fore by Rowling, he starts to fall apart as a malevolent presence, and I do not think this was Rowling’s intention.

Consider something from the opening chapter of Deathly Hallows, “The Dark Lord Ascending”. After Snape delivers intelligence concerning how the Order will move Harry from the Dursley home, Voldemort is described in truly frightening terms:

His red eyes fastened upon Snape’s black ones with such intensity that some of the watchers looked away, apparently fearful that they themselves would be scorched by the ferocity of the gaze. Snape, however, looked calmly back into Voldemort’s face and, after a moment or two, Voldemort’s lipless mouth curved into something of a smile. (3-4)

It’s part of a horrifying scene as Voldemort holds court with the Death Eaters, Charity Burbage suspended above the table (yet to meet her rather gruesome end) and the moans of Ollivander locked away in the dungeon of the Malfoys’ manor. Opening the seventh volume in this way reaffirms Voldemort as the primary villain against which Harry is set, and establishes an astonishing degree of malevolence like nothing else in the series to this point. Burbage’s murder and disposal is savage. We’re meant to see here the depths of evil Voldemort represents, the very nature of the literal conflict Harry faces.

Voldemort should in some way come to represent the internal crisis that Harry faces throughout much of Deathly Hallows, then. Half-Blood Prince starts us down this road with the Pensieve lessons in Dumbledore’s office. Questioning whether or not Harry sympathizes with young Tom isn’t necessarily designed to humanize Riddle/Voldemort, but externalize Harry’s own feelings of loneliness and sometimes-self-imposed isolation. It’s this flaw that is Harry’s greatest, and is the one he tends to revert to at the end of Half-Blood Prince and that the camping scenes from Deathly Hallows are designed to force him to overcome. Burying Dobby and choosing the Horcrux Hunt over the Hallows Quest solidifies Harry’s recognition of this point and cloaks that recognition in the alchemical imagery John Granger has so thoroughly detailed.

Yet, there isn’t really a crisis depicted for Voldemort. He always assigns his defeats to the hands of “luck and chance, those wreckers of the best-laid plans” (7). At one level, I think this is supposed to be some foreshadowing of Voldemort’s downfall, pointing a to his arrogance and inability to accept his own faults. Except for one problem: Rowling’s reliance on deus ex machina plot details means he’s at least partially right (Goblet of Fire, anyone?).

And within this same idea, Voldemort’s narrative relationship with Harry pivots upon Snape:

“Yes, Dumbledore’s dead,” said Harry calmly, “but you didn’t have him killed. He chose his own manner of dying, chose it months before he died, arranged the whole thing with the man you thought was your servant.”

“What childish dream is this?” said Voldemort, but still he did not strike, and his red eyes did not waver from Harry’s.

“Severus Snape wasn’t yours,” said Harry. “Snape was Dumbledore’s, Dombledore’s from the moment you started hunting down my mother. And you never realized it, because of the thing you can’t understand.” (740)

This is the “Flaw in the Plan”, tying Snape into their relationship, and accounting for some of the power of Snape’s emergence from the HP story. Yet, Snape disappears into the background of Deathly Hallows, placed firmly behind the ascending Dark Lord. Rowling’s choice to force Snape into the background hurts both characters by also reducing how the reader understands the flaw, and thus reducing the catharsis of the final confrontation. Voldemort’s lack of dimension in Deathly Hallows makes him dependent on these other characters — they’re absence breaks his characterization, and leaves the last confrontation deflated — the end never in doubt.

Related Posts

• No Related Post

by Dave

A standard literary trope is to set characters against each other, playing one’s personna in relationship to another. Typically, we find the “arch”-nemesis, especially in adventure or heroic stories. The main character is opposed by a primary antagonist, and the juxtaposition of these characters reveals something about one or both to the reader. For Harry Potter, the primary juxtapositions are fairly obvious:

The nature of these juxtapositions often relies on the narrative distance between characters. Characters that don’t share much narrative space (i.e. rarely appear in the same scene) can reveal much about each other. But, the characters that often do share space create the more compelling narrative because the conflict is much richer and more immediate to the reader’s experience. The conflict most recognizable from these books is the eternal, perhaps transcendent, clash of good versus evil, and the characters listed above generally fall into some definition of those two categories.

As a postmodern writer, Rowling’s answers to the inherent problems of good versus evil are not simple; yet they reflect some classical tendencies. In his 1970 scathing critique of the emergence of “pop romance” signified primarily by comic books, Roger B. Rollin states that as readers of pop heroes “we experience at some level the defeat of Evil (as we imagine it) by the Good (as we have learned it). Even though we consciously are aware that such victories do not always occur in reality, there is a part of us that very much wants them to occur” (432). His assessment hinges on the belief that classic literature can accomplish something that “pop romance” cannot, at least not in full measure. The Aristotelian hierarchy in the Poetics must unfold in a manner where in the narrative’s twists and turns are consistent. Thus, they take time. Pop media tries to accomplish this inside of a small narrative space.

That many graphic narratives deploy simplistic stories and character-types is definitely true, yet there are examples proving Rollin’s concerns shortsighted. Later in 1970, Robert Barton points out the naivete with which Rollin had approaches comic book heroes, especially with respect to Batman (313). Nearly sixteen years later, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns fully recovered Batman and his Gotham City from the camp that had defined the series since the (in)famous 1960s TV series. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s seminal Watchmen takes on the hero topos and treats it with a thorough poststructural demolition. Graphic storytelling in the 1980s took on the stereotypes inhering in comic books and turned them upside down, redefining the “hero” concept in the process.

Watchmen may have accomplished more for graphic novels than any other text. Time famously named the book one of the best written in English since 1923. Of course, the list also includes The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as well as Lord of the Rings — with no mention of any of the Harry Potter books published at the time. Watchmen is one of the few examples that has garnered serious academic criticism, mostly noting its treatment of the superhero paradigm. Jamie Hughes identifies what might be considered a conceptual inversion of Rollin’s thesis concerning “pop romance”. In the narrative we see a “rousing question, ‘What would happen to our concept of the superhero if such crusaders were a real part of our world?’ Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons set their story in the real world of 1985, albeit in a slightly altered form [...] In many ways, the world of Watchmen is terribly close to our own” (548).

If anything, the world of Moore and Gibbons’s story is a blistering criticism of the world living under the domination of threatened nuclear annihilation. Any fantastic element of the setting is both effected and deconstructed under the use of a metafictive comic story called Tales of The Black Freighter that parallels the emotional turmoil pervading the 1980s setting. In this subtext, the main character is a sailor plagued by demonic pirates who destroy his ship and comrades, then set out toward his homeport. The sailor’s worries over his family’s fate prompt him to take measures so drastic that he sacrifices his sanity and humanity in the name of reaching homeport of Davidstown before the Black Freighter and its devilish crew can. Once reaching his destination (after building a raft from the bodies of his dead crewmates and lashing the carcass of a slain shark to it), the sailor happens across two lovers sneaking to the beach away from prying eyes. From mistakes clear to the reader, he kills both in fits of moralizing revenge: “Thumbs crossed, I closed her windpipe. A buccaneer’s whore deserves no pity” (X 13). His decisions lead to further tragedy: in a fit of revenge he accidentally murders his own wife, mistaking her for a pirate sentry (XI 6).

The moment serves as a commentary upon a simplistic, binary approach to good and evil. To further complicate the nature of the hero, most of the titular characters are anything but purely heroic. Their names are parodies of the heroic ideal: Dr. Manhattan, The Comedian, Hooded Justice, The Silk Spectre, Nite Owl, Ozymandias, Captain Metropolis, and Rorschach constitute the primary characters — or “extranormal operatives” in Dr. Manhattan’s terms (I 21) — the only of these to have “superhuman” powers. Manhattan’s name ironically invokes the accidental atomic testing in the late 1950s that lead to his state of being — again parodying the standard tropes attached most notably to Marvel Comics’s stable of characters. Both The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen play upon the definition of the superhero’s identity and its relation to the hero’s archnemesis. The Watchmen take back up their roles as “masked vigilantes” again in response to The Comedian’s murder, prompting questions about a potential conspiracy to murder former “masked avengers”.

But Moore and Gibbons thoroughly deconstruct this sense of purpose in the final chapter. It turns out that one of their own put the conspiracy into effect for the purpose of devaluing a larger menace: the threat of nuclear war so pervasive throughout the book. Ozymandias, real name Adrian Veidt, has created an appropriately absurd menace. A giant cloned monster whose “death would trigger mechanisms within its massive brain, cloned from a human sensitive…the resultant shockwave killing half [New York] city” (XI 26). Proceeding a longwinded explanation for both Nite Owl and Rorschach, the two heroes express their disbelief. With the reader on the precipice of expecting a final showdown, Moore and Gibbons let the air out of the narrative balloon:

Dan, I’m not a republic super villain. Do you seriously think I’d explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago. (XI 27)

The moral impetus for acting is removed. The villain is not purely a villain. He is, in fact, working to “better” mankind…

Perhaps in a fashion close to Grendelwald and Dumbledore’s boyhood plans…

By now, we’ve dispensed with simple concepts of good and evil — that Harry’s world is not a purely contrasted set of binaries is patent. The four characters listed above are perhaps the most recognizable personifications of good and evil in the books. Yet, consider four a minute just how little narrative space some of these pairs share.

Thus, it is Harry and Snape that I find the most compelling juxtaposition. We watch Harry grow into a brand of moral sophistication, aware of good and evil, and the trouble of simple binary moralisms. Harry refuses to fall for the false dilemma, recognizing that the dilemma is only obvious at the extremes. His moral education is not complete with the defeat of Voldemort, but only so once he recognizes Snape’s good amongst his vast array of flaws. Snape teaches Harry of dedication and forgiveness with a tinge of irony.

From a literary perspective, a nemesis draws from the classical Greek construction of retribution in symbolic form. That retribution manifests itself in a way that teaches a character something about his or her own pride. Snape is a nemesis, perhaps Harry’s most impressive and definitive nemesis — something of an emotionally abusive father figure who constantly berates with a combination of loathing jealousy and a hope to toughen up his son. Snape and Dumbledore are antipodes within Harry’s emotional and moral education — perhaps one reason why Snape’s attempts at formal academic education often fail miserably. Both are misdirected characters developed as deconstructions of the simple binaries mentioned above. Neither is Dumbledore perfectly good, nor is Snape a fortress of evil.

Deathly Hallows burns away much of the fog enveloping both of these pivotal characters, their motivations, and their actions. We learn that Snape is on Harry’s side, despite his clear sadism. In what is perhaps one of the most striking moments of the entire series, we are caught with the fitting Pensieve chapter in which Harry learns from Snape (a relationship Rowling has denied the pair up to this point). It is Snape’s memory that finally leads Harry from knowledge to transcendent intention:

Finally, the truth. Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood that he was not supposed to survive. His job was to walk calmly into Death’s welcoming arms. Along the way, he was to dispose of Voldemort’s remaining links to life, so that when at last he flung himself across Voldemort’s path, and did not raise a wand to defend himself, the end would be clean, and the job that ought to have been done in Godric’s Hollow would be finished: Neither would live, neither could survive. (691)

Of course, the irony is apparent. Harry has only succeeded through Snape’s clandestine help. The one man he has loathed, I think, perhaps as much or more than Voldemort is in fact one of his greatest allies. Once we are let into this revelation, the rest of the series is put into a different perspective, one more and more complicated. Readers’ fascination with Snape is predicated upon the fact that he is, perhaps, the most human of all characters in the book: deeply, deeply flawed, remorseful, and tragically unable to fully reveal himself except as a literal afterthought, or fully understand himself.

Dumbledore’s manipulation is put into full effect in this scene, as well:

“And you still aren’t going to tell me why it’s so important to give Potter the sword?” said Snape as he swung a traveling cloak over his robes.

“No I don’t think so,” said Dumbledore’s portrait. (690)

Read side-by-side, we see another interesting set of juxtapositions emerging among these characters. Harry learns from Snape’s memory; Snape is learning something from a memorial of Dumbledore. Snape’s memory leads to a disclosure necessary to Harry’s task. Dumbledore, even up to the end as only a narrative trace left in a painting, still obfuscates seemingly innocuous details. Instead, Dumbledore follows up the query with an obvious and dismissive warning about Snape’s role in “George Weasley’s mishap” (690). Deathly Hallows makes apparent Harry’s tutoring is in fact a matter of a symbiotic relationship between Dumbledore and Snape. Snape’s memory in the last book is an ironically straightforward account making plain Harry’s role, whereas the Pensieve episodes in Half Blood Prince are exercises in the fine art of inferential reasoning.

Snape’s antagonism of Harry is the ultimate misdirection. Rowling hides Snape’s true intentions by relying on his very real personality flaws — animosity toward Harry and the resulting sadism chief among them.

Works Cited

Barton, Robert. “A Response to Rollin’s ‘Beowulf to Batman…’” College English 32.3 (Dec. 1970): 313-15.

Hughes, Jamie A. “‘Who Watches the Watchmen?’: Ideology and ‘Real World’ Superheroes.” Journal of Popular Culture 39.4 (2006): 546-57.

Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1986-87.

Rollin, Roger B. “Beowulf to Batman: The Epic Hero and Pop Culture.” College English 31.5 (Feb. 1970): 431-49.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. New York: Scholastic, 2007.

—. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. New York: Scholastic, 2005.

Related Posts

• They’re Adapting Your Favorite Book or Comic!!
• Our Hero Harry, the Snaped Crusader (Issue #1)
• The Next Harry Potter?
• Live Potter Pundits Tonight!!
• Chicken … er, Pumpkin Soup for the Wizarding Soul

by Dave

Travis’s earlier post concerning what we’ve been reading made me think about some purely hypothetical questions. My philosophy major side is creeping out a bit here. I’m not sure of the greater merit of such a question, but I started wondering how an archvillain like Voldemort might find his end in some other literature. I’ve been teaching The Inferno for the last couple of days to my World Cultures freshmen. Oddly enough, they are rather enjoying lurid descriptions of torment and suffering endured by those Dante condemned to his version of Hell. He had a rather creative knack for developing and arranging punishments that seemed to poetically reflect the crimes committed by the damned. Before that, they were reading the “swashbuckling” adventures of Beowulf, and enjoying the blood and carnage of medieval combat.

Kids these days…(..and the adults…)!

Dante doesn’t seem to posit The Inferno as a literal idea of what Hell is like. Instead, he wrote it (at least partially) as a metaphor from which to satirize and prod the social, religious, and political issues of his day. So, condemning historical figures to various levels of his fictional version of Hell reflects political and moral convictions that Dante carried with him through much of his life. My hope/point is to get a handle on just how cosmically egregious Voldemort’s crimes might be. But, as our recent discussion of Dumbledore exposed, we do stratify both good and evil based on the qualities/intentions of certain actions, whether we want to or not, whether doing so is right or not.

It’s easy to call a guy evil. And it might be ideal to say “all evils are equal”, but this isn’t precisely true, even in Harry’s world. He does stuff all the time that is clearly “evil”, but we’re willing to excuse it because Harry is primarily “good”, and (I think) his “evil” actions clearly don’t measure up to Voldemort’s (one interesting side question: is anyone shown in the books to be clearly “better” than Harry as a person?). But what nature does that evil assume? How might Voldemort’s actions, wishes, desires, fears come back to haunt him in a Dantean style?

I’m not sure what this might generate, but I’m eager to see how vicious and damnable we think Voldemort’s crimes might be — or those of some of the other less savory characters in Harry Potter — at least in Dante’s terms. Here is a link to the Wikipedia entry on The Divine Comedy that provides a brief synopsis of Dante’s architecture for Hell.

Even though there isn’t much suggestion of any kind of hell in what theology Rowling hints at in the books, how Voldemort might meet some divine justice intrigues me. The question is hypothetical in one sense, but answering that question might also give us a more interesting place from which to look at Voldemort’s character as a depiction of evil. Or, better still, which characteristics are defined as evil in our own modern archetypes versus those of earlier eras/periods. How are they similar or different?

Related Posts

• No Related Post