Originally Posted by
islandclimber
deus ex machina not a deficiency in Potter eh.. someone (I can't remember, was it you or someone else?) in this thread already said that cliches weren't bad in Rowling because children hadn't heard them before so therefore they were not cliches.. give me a break.. this is the same kind of argument.. JK Rowlings excessive dependence on Deus Ex Machina (to say nothing of cliches and her typical red herring plots) shows a writer who lacks the imagination to think of another way out of the corner she has written herself into... shows a writer that cannot keep her story's internal logic intact... maybe because it allows her to give a much more palatable ending however unlikely, however much it destroys "suspension of disbelief" which is what fantasy of course relies upon, does it not? but as long as she gives a half-assed explanation for the miracle afterwards it's okay, oh you have a pure heart so fate will always smile on you and miracles will rain down from the heavens to save you everytime you are put in peril? what thematic purposes does this satisfy? to show that the theme of Harry Potter is no hard work or skill required, miracles are a dime a dozen? don't worry, if you are a good guy, luck and fate will always be on your side?
This essay will seek to explicate the themes of Harry Potter, its important structural functions as a fantasy, and discuss where Harry Potter deviates from other fantasies. In order to do a proper essay and quote direct passages I would’ve had to re-read the books. In the future, I have plans to re-read Harry Potter as a series (probably far future) and will probably do a much more in depth analysis as I will be able to highlight what I want to quote as I read, but since that is impractical now I am merely going to refer to sections of story more broadly from memory.
Harry Potter functions in a fantastical sub-genre known as Wainscot, which is a subgenre of Urban fantasy. The power of fantasy is in its ability to restore objectivity by divorcing itself even further from reality than Realist fiction is capable of doing, and allowing us to see important issues of our everyday reality in a new direction, new angle, new slant. In an interview I did with up-and-coming fantasy writer, Kameron Hurley, on my blog, she stated these points more succinctly:
“As for the remove that takes place in epic, heroic, or just plain fantasy works, I’d argue that it’s the remove from the real world than comes closest to examining issues objectively. When you’re mired in your own world, familiar surroundings, you’re more numb to what you’d see as the everyday routines of life, the “normal,” the “expected,” the “natural.” When you remove these things from their settings you can often see the absurdities of them, the injustice. Fantasy – good fantasy – can do that without feeling didactic.”
Urban fantasy in particular allows for direct parallels between the real world and the fantastical milieu. In Epic fantasy or Sword-and-Sorcery the world is further divorced from modern reality.
The world of Harry Potter is our world, but transformed through the lens of magic. The two worlds exist alongside each other within the story, encouraging us to read into these parallels. In the hidden magical world we have shops, banks, sporting events, boarding schools, government, but twisted around into new forms through the magical milieu. The attraction at first for the reader is the whimsical charm this familiarity brings, a strange world that is both alien and familiar at the same time. Harry Potter, while possessing a serious story at times, is almost playful with its world and characters and in the actual prose itself. Even in its opening lines we get this sense of playful whimsy:
“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privert Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.” – Opening of HP and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Book 1).
One thing that most critics and proponents of the series can agree on is that the story on some level is about racism; disagreement, of course, exists over in what depth it deals with this issue. I also think this issue demonstrates how fantasy can let us see important problems that still infect our societies with fresh eyes. The racial theme centers on the inner-wizarding ideological conflict between mudbloods (wizards with human parents) and pure bloods (the term is self-explanatory). The ideology of wizarding “racism” for takes different forms throughout the novel: we have petty harassment, name-calling, and disdain (exemplified by Draco Malfoy and Slytherins), we have those who advocate for outright exclusion of mudbloods, along with torture and slavery of Muggles (the deatheaters), those with elitist racial attitudes who would rule over Muggles as benevolent philosopher-king/dictators for their own good (Dumbledore in his youth and the dark wizard Grindenwald), and even those who show a slight aversion towards Mudbloods if not verbalized hatred or actions of blatant discrimination (Slughorn who like the typical white person caught saying something stereotypically racist will deny that they are racist). The book doesn’t paint a simplistic portrait of racism, but shows it in its many different forms and expressions, some being more extreme than others, much like racism in real life. The story further complicates this reading through its parallels of the Muggle and Wizarding worlds; the real difference between these two worlds is that the members of one can do magic and the members of the other cannot. Nevertheless, a real difference of ability is presented through this binary based around genetics, and thus has an implicit racial component. Nevertheless, this very real difference between the inhabitants of the two worlds serves a sub-textual purpose that further exposes the arbitrariness of the mudblood/pure blood division so important to the racial politics of the Wizarding World since the real difference is between Muggles and Wizards, not mudbloods and purebloods. For the reader who knows there is no such thing as Wizards, this fictional logic and imaginary rules forces as to view racism in a new light; as far as we’re concerned all wizards are essentially the same, able to perform magic with equal ability whether they are mudblood or pure blood. The difference is between Muggles and Wizards. By divorcing it from the real world into an imaginary setting we see firsthand in an objective light just how arbitrary racism is as Rowling literally designs her own made-up form of racism in the Wizarding World. It allows children and young adults to think about this arbitrary quality to racism in a way that could never be achieved by just showing them a realistic story about it. It is precisely through the divorcing quality of fantasy, by creating an ideology that exists only in a different world, yet bearing similarities to our own ideologies, that allows us to see the extent of racism’s arbitrary nature. However, the opposite is not true in regards to the Muggle and Wizard divisions as possibly encouraging racist ideology.
It is important to remember that the Muggle and Wizarding worlds exist separately from each other much like two counties adjacent to one another, which is an inherent part of the Wainscott genre (the larger world needs to be ignorant of the magical sub-culture world living among or beside them). The Muggles live their everyday lives completely ignorant of the Wizarding World for the most part. The story never claims that Muggles are inferior to Wizards, at least not from the perspective of the heroes, only from the viewpoint of characters we are meant to despise. The Wizarding World and Muggles are merely different, not inferior or superior; this I think is the position of the story, and likewise, is present more for the sake of telling a fantasy story in the Wainscot tradition than serving as any effectual commentary on our society. After all, in real life there are no Wizards. These distinctions are merely conveniences of the genre, for the story’s sake, and most readers will recognize that instead of reading a particular theme of racial inferiority into it. After all, the readers of the books are all Muggles. It is ridiculous to think that readers will identify Muggles as inferior and bad when they themselves are Muggles. For this reason the real distinction between Muggles and Wizards doesn’t uncut the earlier anti-racial themes because readers will not identify this as any sort of real message that is applicable to their real lives, but merely as a genre trope, a convenience serving the nature of the story. The divorce between fantasy and reality is much greater in this instance. The racist belief that some races are superior to others in intelligence, physical prowess, and ability is too large of a metaphorical leap from the fantasy logic that some people can perform magic and others cannot for most people to read anything into this idea.
Even with all that said, Rowling paints the interrelations between these two dichotomous societies more complexly than just one having power over the other. Although most of the book shows the Wizarding World threatening to conquer the Muggle world, there are instances in the book when Muggles kill, torture, and harm wizards. The most obvious case being Dumbledore’s sister who is tortured by Muggles when they see her performing magic, but even Tom Riddle, the boy who would grow up to be Voldemort, lived also experienced a life being tortured by Muggles for being different in the orphanage. Harry Potter himself is verbally and psychologically abused by his adopted Muggle aunt and uncle. The Muggle world is just as much a threat to the Wizarding World as certain elements in the Wizarding World are a threat to the Muggle world. This explains why the Wizarding World needs to stay a secret. When Ministry officials tweak Muggle memories it is not out of some elitist joy of manipulating Muggles as rulers, but a general measure of preemptive self-defense.
Harry Potter is meant to be portrayed as a clever but mediocre Wizard who relies heavily on his friends for survival. Rowling continually emphasizes his average ability as a wizard. He cannot solve his problems merely by turning to his awesome powers, but needs help from outsiders, thus twisting the long tradition of fantasy archetypes and stereotypes of characters exemplified by characters such as Rand Al'Thor in The Wheel of Time of series where the Chosen One is super powerful and its through his immense power that he can save the world. Harry Potter subverts this trope numerous types by continually emphasizing Potter’s average ability as a wizard. As book 5 makes clear, I think with the prophecy (I think it was book 5), he was not Chosen because of his supreme ability in Wizarding, but Voldemort chose him because he believed the prophecy meant Potter (thus making it a self-fulfilling prophecy); the book says it could just as easily have been Neville Longbottom who the prophecy referred to, and had Voldemort read the prophecy that way he would’ve been the Chosen One and not Potter. What better way to show Harry Potter as unable to win by himself, then always forcing him to rely on something a friend provided him with in each and every book? This explains Rowling’s constant use of Deus ex Machina.
I would agree that generally Deus Ex Machina is a writing device that should be avoided. However, first rule of writing is that there are no rules of writing, only principles, and every rule can be broken if done for a purpose. Rowling’s Deus Ex Machina serve her aesthetic purposes by characterizing Potter a certain way, emphasizing her theme of Potter’s need to rely on his friends and trustworthy adults to the point where it stops being a plot device and starts functioning as a motif within the overall narrative structure. The same can be said for the so-called red herring elements in her plot. One of her themes in the book is adolescent misjudgment of people. The characters continually misjudged characters personalities and motivations. Not to mention Harry himself is naturally mistrustful of adults and friendship because of his upbringing with the Dursleys. A red herring shifting between possible villains makes perfect sense with a theme that centers on mistrusting adults, especially new ones to appear in your life, and misjudging people because of that mistrust, thus overturning expectations and assumptions of the characters. Harry doesn’t just misjudge Snape, but also Malfoy and a whole slew of characters—he even misjudges Dumbledore who it turns out has a darker side as revealed in the final book.
Larry from OF Blog at the Fallen adroitly links this theme of misjudgment with Harry’s maturity through the novels, “The HP of the first book is 11 years old, with the world-view of an 11 year-old boy. He cannot readily see the goodness that lurks within the tortured frame of a Snape or within the spoiled shaping of a Draco Malfoy. They are enemies to overcome - perhaps not capital E Evil like Voldemort, but still just that, "evil." But as the series progresses and we witness things through Harry's PoV, things subtly change, until we too are forced to change our preconceptions of a Snape or a Draco to see that they are not static characters, but that they too are as dynamic as Harry or any of his friends. We end up seeing Harry's world through the eyes of one who is ready to leave his childhood shell to become an adult who will be wise enough to remember the lessons learned during that childhood apprenticeship stage.”
Still, all the themes such as friendship, the power of love, learning to trust others after abuse and having no one to love you, learning to trust adults through an adolescent’s eyes in a world where adults lie and tell half-truths are all subservient to the larger moral theme of Harry Potter, the crux of the series so to speak: Choice. In Harry Potter it is the choices we make that define us.
The story’s true center is the connected background of Voldemort and Harry Potter. The longish looks into Voldemort's "origins," which play out throughout all the novels, but especially the middle ones, reveal that Voldemort and Harry Potter are mirror reflections of each other. Both orphans, both living among Muggles who mistreat them, and despite these similar backgrounds both choose to take different paths in their lives. Voldemort is terrified of dying, seeking immortality, while Harry is willing to sacrifice his life so that his friends might live. Voldemort inspires the loyalty of his followers through fear, torture, and his unmatched talent as a wizard, while Harry inspires his friends through his courage, even though he is a mediocre wizard as far as talent and skill go. In the earlier novels, the sorting hat suggests Harry would be a good fit in Slytherin before placing him in Gryffindor. Harry asks Dumbledore why the sorting head almost placed him in Slytherin. Dumbledore explains that the sorting hat looks at the qualities within us, but also pays attention to our own choices; Harry, of course, repeatedly told the hat that he didn't want to end up in Slytherin. We see here an important point made in this moment. Harry could've ended up in Slythern like Voldemort, but likewise Voldemort could've ended up in Griffindor had his choices been different. This theme and central parallel of the novel provides the main moral point of the novel: there is no such thing as immutable essences called good and evil, but it is our choices that make us good or evil. This is a world of difference from the million Tolkien copies where there are Lucifers, Devils, and Dark Ones who are evil Dark Lords in their core essence. Not only are Harry Potter and Voldemort linked by destiny to face each other and magical scars wounds that allow Harry to gain Voldemort’s abilities (ability to speak to snakes called Parsel tongue), but they really have many of the same experiences; however, they react to those experiences differently. Harry Potter chooses love and sacrifice, while Voldemort chooses fear and selfishness. Dumbledore continually tells his protégé that what separates Harry from voldemort is his loyalty to his friends and that most precious of emotions, love.
However, like most the themes in Harry Potter, even love is not an uncomplicated emotion. Like the anti-racial themes it too is treated in a fairly sophisticated way. As critic Karin Westman writes, “[w]hile the earlier books in the series depict love as a generative and protective force, Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows remind us that love can wound as well as shield. In these last two books Rowling locates love's damaging consequences not only within secondary characters like Voldemort's mother Merope and Bellatrix but also within the seemingly unassailable, all-powerful character of Dumbledore, thereby forging unlikely connections between disparate characters. Such parallels diminish easy distinctions between good and bad people and foreground the paradox of love's power. By the end of Rowling's series, love is indeed a weapon, as Dumbledore often explains to Harry, but that weapon is dangerously double-edged, placing the lover and the beloved at risk if it is improperly handled.” Even characters like Ron fall prey to this double-edged sword, temporarily abandoning Harry and Hermione in the final book because he thinks Potter is making moves on the woman he loves (Hermione) and jealousy over Harry’s fame (a personal character flaw that continually rears its ugly head from the earlier books). However, Ron does make the right moral choice and returns to his friends, winning the adoration of Hermione.
Individual moral choice is everywhere in the Potter books. Another obvious example is when Draco Malfoy cannot kill Dumbledore. He makes the wrong moral choices in the sixth book, Half-Blood Prince, by helping the Death Eaters to break into Hogwarts, while under duress over the threats to his father’s life. However, he too, must face a real moral choice. Dumbledore tells him he has a choice--he need not proceed down this path. Draco Malfoy in the final book makes the right choice, despite being inclined towards the path of pure-blooded racial politics of Slythern--we see a further complication of simplistic morality in that even racists, which the novel depicts Malfoy engaging in numerous times more than any other character--can sometimes make the right moral choices.
I advise everyone to go read Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen smart review for the final book of Harry Potter, which I already linked to, but will link to again here. I think very few people would argue that Harry Potter is brilliant literature on the grounds of aesthetics. However, it is fairly complicated literature for children's book, and I think it has earned its place in the history of Children's literature as both a popular phenomenon and for its own literary merits. Larry understands the appeal of Harry Potter as a child of abuse learning to negotiate a dark and sometimes cruel world that can be loveless and it can seem uncertain on whom you can trust, while not succumbing down the path of hatred, fear, and sadism, by not becoming a Voldemort. As Roni Natov puts it, “Harry embodies this state of injustice frequently experienced by children, often as inchoate fear and anger--and its other side, desire to possess extraordinary powers that will overcome such early and deep exile from the child's birthright of love and protection.” As Larry notes when he quotes G. K. Chesterton, Harry Potter teaches us that we all face dragons, but sometimes we can beat the dragons. I hope people treat this not so much as the next move in a debate, but rather a view into what I and others see when we read Harry Potter.
Work Cited
Beyond Assumptions Blog.
OF Blog of the Fallen.
Natov, Roni. “Harry Potter and the Extraordinariness of the Ordinary.” The Lion and the Unicorn. 25.1
Westman, Karen. “The Weapon we Have is Love.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. 33 (2).
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