More of it

[malsperanza]

Skimming the comments on my flist this week, it looks like we are mostly agreed that HBP delivers on its promises (aside from those of us who are reading only for the ships). It throws into relief the serious flaws of vol 5. OOP is not only dour and plodding, but the lack of any real interaction among any of the characters leaves the book looking like a skeletal armature on which a long series of plot points are strung. The death of Sirius is about the only event in OOP that rises above the label of "mere clue," and does so not because it is so well-written but because in losing Sirius we lose the most vivid character in the books. And yes, I include Harry, who is a cipher, a closed door much of the time. No wonder we mourned Sirius.

HBP certainly does much better--it's a book with a shape, a plot, an arc, an underlying network of ideas, and -- gasp -- character development. Still, I have a feeling I will only reread the last 200 pages. Although this book is not a mere scaffold for clues, the first 2/3 are almost nonstop exposition: conversations, one after another, in which characters (generally poor Dumbledore, but also Slughorn and others--occasionally even Harry) explain to each other how they got there, what has been happening, and why. A relief, but once the info is in our hands, no need to reread -- except, perhaps, to savor some charming scenes. Rereading is a concept in literature that matters a lot to me: I most treasure those books whose rereading is always a new reading, with new discoveries, realignments of meaning, so that each completed reading leaves a changed book in its wake.

* * *
A Flash of Sparkledust from the Exposition Fairy
One reason Dumbledore is restored to our favor in HBP is that he is finally nice to Harry (us) and finally willing to tell Harry (us) some of the stuff he (we) has been waiting so patiently to hear. But in order to do that, JKR has to turn Dumbledore into a Narrative Device. Thus, much of HBP sounds like one of those long perorations at the end of a Sherlock Holmes story, in which Holmes explains to the astonished Watson (us) or Colonel Mustard, or the person who has hired him, or whomever (us) just how he came to his remarkable conclusions. We are astounded, of course, and the real pleasure of a Sherlock Holmes story is in this section, in which the voice of Holmes himself takes command of the telling. "How blind I have been!" the bemused interlocutor always exclaims, enjoying every minute of his own stupefaction and the revelation of Holmes's superior powers.

"You have got them!" we cried, all three.

"Well, at least I have got their identity. This so-called Blessington is, as I expected, well known at headquarters, and so are his assailants. Their names are Biddle, Hayward, and Moffat."

"The Worthingdon bank gang," cried the inspector.

"Precisely," said Holmes.

"Then Blessington must have been Sutton."

"Exactly," said Holmes.

"Why, that makes it as clear as crystal," said the inspector.

"Thus far, as I hope you will agree, I have shown you reasonably firm sources of fact for my deductions as to what Voldemort did until the age of seventeen?"

Harry nodded.

Explanations are very gratifying, and Rowling makes a nice, vivid job of many of the Pensieve flashbacks, but 400+ pages of it begins to wear.

From the cave chapter on, however, we get an actual novel -- and are reminded of how good JKR can be, when she is prepared to let rip the storytelling. Dumbledore and Harry adventuring together: who could have imagined that? (And since I am very fond of Gandalf, I did not mind the way he kept popping up and hijacking the scene; after all, he's been doing that to Dumbledore for years.)

The sudden entrance on the stage of 3-dimensional!Draco was thrilling, and provided one of the few (but intense) moments of emotional interaction in real time between Harry and another character: in the terrible moment of exposure in the bathroom, when handsome, callous Draco (Draco!) is caught weeping with fear. (Ah, the bathroom -- locus of all the most traumatic experiences of high school: refuge of the desolate, the lovelorn, the hungover; the place you go to check in the mirror for tearstains, hickeys, zits, and to make sure your pupils are not too noticeably contracted.)

More exciting still was the replacement of Conflicted!Dark!Sirius with Ambiguously!Heroic!Snape. These two may be the only characters in the entire HP with more than 2 personality facets (though Draco holds unexpected promise of , late in the day). OK, I am being cruel, but modernist, novelistic character nuance is not Rowling's point, any more than it is Tolkien's. So characters with Complexity (in the sense of the word used in physics) are rare and welcome visitors to HP world.

Snape, with his greasy hair and unattractive grudges, his vindictiveness and favoritism, is that one teacher we all hated in high school. To turn him into a hero -- and a physically brave one, at that -- is going to be interesting to watch. And it may offer the solution to a problem that has been looming in HP since the death of Sirius: how to keep Harry alive at the end, while still providing the great tragic sacrifice that this sort of quest story requires. I assume, now, that JKR killed off Sirius so early (which was my principle objection) so as not to have any competition for Snape's tragic, angsty heroism in the Grand Finale O'Doom.


Merope
Merope, in Greek mythology, is one of the seven sisters who form the star cluster called the Pleiades. She married a mortal, and JKR, I think, has drawn a parallel between the gods/mortals problem of Greek mythology and the wizards/muggles problem in her own mythology. I don't recall her having made that comparison before. Roberto Calasso remarks, in my favorite passage in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which is one of my favorite books, that the Greek gods have only two ways of interacting with mortals: They either invite them to dinner or they rape them.

The gods have great difficulty in seeing mortals--humans never quite look three-dimensional to gods (rather like the flat character in the children's story The Very Mischief); similarly wizards can never quite see Muggles properly--or rarely. So a witch who falls in love with a Muggle, as Merope Gaunt does, appears to be in love with a ghost or a puppet or some other foolish and useless thing. This is, of course, from the bigoted pov of racist pureblood wizards; but after all, the Greek gods were about as bigoted as it gets.

IIRC, witches with star names are often members of the Black family. (Though Bellatrix Lestrange is not.) I wonder if there is some family connection between the Gaunts and the Blacks -- if there is some family connection between Sirius and Voldemort, in short.

I pause to salute JKR's pitch-perfect ear for names. Gaunt is one of the oldest and most illustrious surnames in England (it is a form of Ghent, and the family was Flemish). It is one of those solid Dickensian English names whose meaning -- worn and starved -- scarcely registers until it appears attached to a lovelorn witch. Riddle, of course, is another.

More likely, of course, is that we will learn that Petunia and Lily Evans were related to the Gaunts or Riddles, but the late appearance of Merope makes the sound of a puzzle piece snapping into place, doesn't it?

Seeing
reenka said (but I gacked this from someone else and now I can't find the source):

If you asked anyone in love, Why do I love you? Wouldn't the answer always be, Because I see you?

I think this is in reference to how, in HBP, Harry is finally able to see Draco, really see him, and therefore to understand that he is human. Dumbledoordore is the seer par excellence of HP, and can always see people for what they are: Sees Snape's heroism and absolute commitment (sees that the time is right for Snape to become DADA master at last); sees Harry's power; sees that the only love Harry has, for now, is the love of friends (philia, in Greek), and therefore encourages him to confide in Ron and Hermione; sees the chinks in Voldemort's armor; sees who people are.

Now that Dumbledore is gone, we will all have to try to see for ourselves. We waited through 5 vols for him to tell us what he saw, and he did. Now we have to do our own looking. ( "How blind I have been!" the bemused interlocutor always exclaims.)

Comments

[ladyrelaynie.livejournal.com]

Interesting and thought provoking post. I have but one quibble.
Bellatrix was a Black before she married Rodolphus Lestrange. Though married to a Lestrange, she is in fact a member of the Black family.

Of course this only makes your Black-Gaunt-Riddle theory even more intriguing.

~Relaynie

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Thanks, edited to fix. So, are all the witches with star names from the Black family? That would be some Big Fat Clue, wouldn't it?

Rodolphus Lestrange is one of the young men in Slughorn's room in the Pensieve memory when Tom Riddle confronts Slughorn. It's mentioned twice, in both versions of the memory. No idea if this is a Clue or a Red Herring.