Cheese and crackers?

[persephone_kore]

I realized last night that I don't feel I can argue effectively in fandom anymore, because... well, I'm not really a "lit person" or much of a debater; I tend to go by intuition or feeling about a book and then look for what produced that effect, and on both scores I ended up being wrong about what JKR was doing with the Riddle/Harry parallels. (It only complicates matters that I liked what she thought I was doing.) Of course, it's probably more accurate to say that I didn't argue very effectively in the first place. :P

I can, however, tell you about weird dreams. If you're expecting logic, by the way, my dream-posts are probably not the place.



So, last night, I dreamed I was reading the seventh Harry Potter book. Except, my dreams being what they are, the line between reading and participating was a little unsteady.

First of all, the book seemed to have gone on sale as a surprise. Way before JKR said it was likely to be finished, possibly before she expected to start writing it. No advance publicity, just turned up on the shelves. I found this entertaining and rather refreshing.

It had 42 chapters, and the last page was 74. Apparently they were very short chapters. I have the vague impression that I thought the story was absolutely fantastic, a great ride, if presumably rather fast-paced. I never quite got to the end, though. It was time to get up.

In the meantime, however, I somehow got into the story. Sort of. There was an interlude involving honeybees, in which I was very upset to find that two coffee cans in which I apparently expected to find honeycomb and busy bees instead held a single empty cell and a three-inch-long, brightly-colored wasp, who had apparently eaten up all the bees as a larva and then pupated until I opened the cans. There was also a lot of open-air honeycomb and very busy bee-activity on what appeared to be a piece of wooden playground equipment.

I'm not sure what the bees had to do with it, but we were plunging toward the climactic confrontation with Voldemort. For some reason, this was going to involve trapping him in a car, which I was helping to prepare for this function by arranging cheese and crackers in it. And then I think Harry Potter and my father were going to sing. This last part may have had something to do with recently reading Stasheff's The Witch Doctor, which is part of a series where magic functions through poetry (sometimes sung) and in which one foe was defeated by a spell that inflicted a conscience on him. But that really doesn't explain the cheese and crackers.

Comments

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

Oh, it seems clear to me that Harry has the potential to go bad; he won't end up doing so, because he cares about other people and it would mess up the plot, but I think he would be capable of it. And yes, it takes effort to be good -- although perhaps less for some people, in some ways, t han for others. It's Riddle whose depiction isn't really what I was expecting -- basically, if he were meant to have ignored or squelched his virtue or even doubts, I think we might have needed to see him before they were entirely gone.

There still are parallels. We even had one more introduced--we were very explicitly told that both Harry and Voldemort regarded Hogwarts as the first place they really felt at home. And I think that to some degree Harry is being led to pity Voldemort -- for, as you say, not ever being loved, among other things -- instead of just feeling uncomfortable about having things in common with his enemy. (Of course, pitying his enemy isn't exactly comfortable either.)

I suppose it's challenging to explain evil -- and lead your hero to show compassion -- without seeming to excuse it.