Voldemort and the Perversion of the Hero

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.