Harry Potter and the Textbook Case
Two weeks and two hours till the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the eleven year old in our house is racing to catch up with Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
He’s been "reading" it the way he read the first five books, by listening to the marvelous Jim Dale recording
Mainly, what re-visiting the Half Blood Prince has reminded me of is how much time Rowling wasted in Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix. The eleven year old and I have just passed the part where Dumbledore shows Harry the memory of Tom Riddle’s visit to Hogwarts to ask Dumbledore for a teaching job and it seems to me that the story has now advanced to the point where it will need two books to finish it off, not one.
Too much of Voldemort’s return to power has happened off stage already and Rowling is just now getting to the point where she can bring it front and center and unless I’m missing something that’s just not happening in Half Blood Prince. Means it all has to happen in the last book, in which too much already has to happen. I’m afraid Rowling’s going to have to rush her conclusion in the same way George Lucas had to rush the conclusion of Revenge of the Sith in which he had to compact the entire story he should have been telling in his first two prequels into the last half of the third one.
We’ll see soon enough.
Right now, I just want to know. Is anyone else as disappointed as I am that Tom Riddle/Voldemort has turned out to be just a run of the mill sociopath in his origins? He’s a textbook case, except that instead of using a knife or a gun he uses magic to kill people.
No Luciferian fall from grace.
No Vaderesque slide into corruption and evil.
Tom Riddle was just the bad seed planted by a loveless union who grew up isolated, abused, and unloved.
This ought to pull the rug out from under any speculation that Harry’s going to be tempted to go over to Voldemort’s side, not that there was ever much evidence that Rowling planned to go that route, but the temptation was always there to add some ambiguity and suspense to the development of Harry’s character.
Whatever parallels there are between the young Harry and the young Riddle—and there aren’t that many, it turns out. Harry has never been anybody’s golden boy but Dumbledore’s and he’s never been a star student or a particularly precocious young wizard only a very lucky one. Luck is one of his skills, apparently. But still there are a few potentially damaging parallels: Harry’s being an orphan, like Riddle; his having been raised by people who don’t love him and who abuse him, as was Riddle; his marked specialness since infancy—are waved away by the one too realistic fact of difference. Harry has good genes.
I think I and many other readers and some critics might have made too much of the possibility of Harry’s being at least tempted to join or take over from Voldemort because the books were making their way into the bookstores at the same time George Lucas was chronicling Anakin Skywalker’s fall and Peter Jackson was taking over the movie theaters and the popular imagination with his re-telling of the story of the power of power to corrupt even the best souls.
We may have been reading too much Anakin and Luke into Tom Riddle and Harry, too much Saruman into Voldemort.
Tolkien and Lucas are obvious influences on Rowling, but I suspect that one of Rowling’s challenges over the years has been in writing against those influences. She wants to tell her own story, not re-tell theirs. I wonder if as it became clear what was going to happen to Anakin Skywalker she said to herself, Well, I can’t go that route, and hit the delete key on her word processor hard.
And so now instead of Voldemort being a hero who gave into the temptations of power and vanity, or even a villain who learns to appreciate his own villainy, we have Tom Riddle, serial killer.
Voldemort is what he is because that’s what he is.
And that means Harry is what he is because that’s what he is.
Harry was born the child of a hero-prince and a hero-princess. Riddle’s parents weren’t peasants, at least, they were both well-born, but they weren’t graced, as were James and Lily Potter.
The myth of Harry Potter has never been a particularly democratic one. It’s not a superhero myth. The superhero myth is that each of us has within us the powers and abilities that will make us special and allow us to triumph in life, and those powers and abilities will show up when we need them, even if right now we feel as awkward and helpless as Peter Parker before the spider bit him. Harry Potter reaches back to fairy tales, the King Arthur story, and the Greeks, to tell us that we are born blessed, the children of gods or heroes, and some day the world will recognize us for the wonderfully superior creatures we are. The reason we feel like changelings is that we are!
The difference between the two myths is that while it’s possible to believe that everyone has a special power or ability, it’s obvious that everyone can’t be the child of a goddess or hero. Some people are just born ordinary and at a certain point you have to look at your parents, accept that they are your parents, you are their child, and so you are one of the ordinary ones.
It’s always been a little emotional landmine inside the Harry Potter stories for his youngest fans—in order to be like Harry, you have to have had parents like James and Lily.
Hermione’s been around to mitigate against this.
Until I read the Half Blood Prince I thought Voldemort was there to do the same thing.
It’s always been clear that Harry has been protected by angels since he was born. More and more as the books have progressed it’s become the case that Harry was looked out for as much because he was the child of everybody’s favorites, James and Lily, as because he was the Boy Who Lived. The two ideas are in fact intertwined. Harry was saved by his mother’s love, but it turns out his mother’s love was special because his mother was special.
Tom Riddle never stood a chance.
Now the idea that Harry was born lucky doesn’t bother me. I think that children need to be taught the facts about luck or they’ll grow up thinking they did it all themselves and turn out to be Republicans.
But although it doesn’t bother me, it doesn’t thrill me as a theme for a series of novels. And I really, really, really don’t like the notion that heroes, and villains, are born not self-made.
The key to Harry’s success is not who his parents were or his “bloodline” and you’re not the first to suggest this, but to who his friends are and to teamwork and community. This isn’t some hidden theme, its quite explicit. Sometimes, the villains are foiled because of the jealousy and refusal to work together. And often Harry is successful because of the help of Ron and Herminone (or the order of Phoenix and its many surrogate parents, including Sirius, Lupin, the Weasleys and Haggrad).
Look at Sirius. Unlike his biological brother who joins the dark side, he leaves his birth family to become James Potter’s brother. The real strength are the communities you build (through adventures together at school) not the community you are born into. Harry immediately rejects Malfoy and old wizarding (although he was invited in) because he sees in Malfoy a bully like his cousin Dudly. Instead, Harry hangs with Ron (not the right sort) and Hermione (born of Muggles). And by growing together and learning from the ‘good’ wizards, they become expert wizards. Although they do have natural talents, these often prove to be insufficient without the compliment of the natural talents of others.
Teamwork, community, helping others. Democratic values. Selfishness, Republican values. That’s why these books are so powerful.
Further, we know from the OOP that James was a bully too. Something made him grow up and become acceptable to Lilly. Harry’s ability to beat Voldemort I’m sure will come in part from learning the rest of this story.