westernredcedar | DH meta: On Potter and Dickens and why I need a Big Point (SPOILERS) (Reply)

Oddly, this has a spoiler for Dicken’s “Bleak House”, in case anyone cares.

So, I was responding to

snegurochka_lee’s fascinating and glowing response to DH with my curmudgeonly issues, and getting really cheesed off at myself. Why do I need a Big Point to the books, anyway? Why is it so important to me that the deaths in it have a point? Can’t it just be that war is hell, and random people die, and it doesn’t all have meaning? Why can’t I just accept the tale as told and enjoy it? After all, I read it in ten straight hours. It can’t be a bad story, right?

Then I went to the place where I always get my best ideas- the shower- and it blinked on during the shampoo, the lightbulb I’ve been waiting for.

*lightbulb*

I want a Big Point and symbolic, meaningful character arcs, because that is the genre JKR has been writing in throughout the series. She has been writing in the genre perfected by my man Dickens.

In Dickens, characters, events, coincidences, fates are all tied up in the overarching web of social issues and morality. Nothing happens by chance, everything is imbued with meaning, so that if, as in “Bleak House”, Jo the street urchin dies, it is not just because “that’s what happens,” it is because of a complex set up of symbolic events that have lead to his death- in that case, his being ‘moved along’ by all of the other characters in the book, even as he offers help and tries to get help in return. Dickens is criticized for this type of writing all the time, but regardless of how one feels about him as an author, it is his genre and his way of communicating the Big Points in his novels.

Why do I think JKR was writing in Dickens’ genre? Many reasons. The coincidences, the minor characters that are actually very important later in the book, the symbols, such as Fawkes, the threads of mystery and mistaken identities and lost parents, the embedded social issues. Like Dickens, her characters are generally flat. So, you get Lockhart as arrogance and deceipt, and Hermione as book-learning, and Ron as friendship, and Lily as good, and Remus as the oppressed, and Voldemort as evil. I know this is not a unique point, and I have no doubt better minds than mine have outlined the similarities between Rowling and Dickens. I’ll just give a couple of examples to firm up my point.

In CoS, when Lockhart is obliviated while trying to obliviate the trio, that is a lovely Dickensian moment. That is a demise that means something, that is its own symbol, that tells us as readers what to think about arrogance and lying. Even the first major character death, of innocent Cedric, means something by being meaningless, and we learn about the cruelty of evil because of it. Then from Sirius’s death we learn that in war, nothing is certain, and that impulsivity has it's price. He was the symbolic character to teach us that.

If I am reading a book in the genre of Dickens, I expect that the events of the climax will bring together not only the symbolic character motifs, but also have a deeper meaning, based on what each event or character has come to symbolize throughout the book- as Lockhart’s demise did, as Jo the street urchin’s did.

Now I can start to see where my disappointment in DH comes from. In DH, the character arcs and symbols don’t resolve into any recognizable patterns. There was a reason many of us expected Snape to die saving Harry in some way. It was because, symbolically, that made sense, it gave the character arc closure in the way you would expect from this genre. (And I must add that I think it is possible to have satisfying symbolic conclusions and still write a surprising and original novel, not just a dull romp through what we all thought was going to happen.)

So if Remus is going to die, for example, and he is a symbolic character for the oppressed, then what happens to him should give us, as readers, some sort of message or meaning about the fate of the oppressed. Or if he is now the symbol of fatherhood, then we need an ending that embraces him as a father or informs us in some way about it. Killing him as yet another symbol of the tragedy of war misses the point of his character being part of this fictional symbolic world. If you set up Fred and George as the power of laughter over darkness, then you cannot kill them off, unless your message is that the power of laughter is meaningless.

It is not just that I want it that way, it is that the books have been written in a genre that demands that type of reading, and not getting it is very unsettling.

To put in concisely, I want a Big Point because JKR set me up to want a Big Point in the way she wrote the books, and I feel cheated.

This all came out much more clearly when I was talking to myself in the shower, but I wanted to write it down before I got into too much of a muddle again.

PS I love Dickens.
PPS I still love Harry Potter too.