Deathly Hallows and the Outing of Dumbledore

My original intent was to re-read Deathly Hallows before I put up the review. It's not going to happen.

So, I was ecstatic to get it, I read it in a day, I found the prospect of the series' end terribly bittersweet. And, I was disappointed. My complaints are largely the same as those you've probably already read. Large sections were directionless: it's hard to defend close to four-hundred pages of futile wandering around the English countryside. This is indicative of a larger problem with Book 7: it made the better Book 6 largely irrelevant. The horcrux hunt we all expected was non-existent: each was found and destroyed largely by contrivance, shucked for the convoluted story of the Hallows. After 6 books in which everything tied together so nicely, where each book was dependent on its formers in wonderful and surprising ways, we got tossed a story that was as unexplained as it was unnecessarily independent. This is especially frustrating in light of the alternate stories we might tell. Consider this scenario: Harry gets his hands on a Penseive, shows Ron and Hermione the pertinent details from his sessions with Dumbledore last year, and then they spend meaningful time figuring out the possible object and location of the horcruxes before going out after them. Exciting and purposeful, right? It seems like we really can tell stories better than the one we got, and I never thought we'd be able to do that.

Another problem: with the exception of Dobby's, which was achingly tragic, the deaths in the novel were horribly executed. Rowling tells us that Hedwig's demise was to show us the arbitrary evil of war. But she has this all wrong: it's fantasy, we know that Voldemort is bad and that war is horrible. Killing Hedwig isn't indicative the terribleness of war because fantasy necessarily isn't indicative of real war, that's part of the reason we read it. It can hint at it, can recall it, but never represent it. Further, and this was inexcusable, Moody, Collin Creevy, Lupin, Tonks, and Fred are all killed, literally, in a matter of sentences. This of course contradicts Rowling's assertion about the awfulness of war: we don't have time to appreciate their deaths. Also, I feel like there was a real responsibility to give us the opportunity to grieve over characters to whom we became very attached, and this was irredeemably neglected.

Finally, I thought that the ending was rather irritatingly Christian: Harry dies, and literally everyone is saved from Voldemort? I don't like it. If Rowling's overriding preoccupation is rejection of bigotry (my intuitions and her comments suggest that it is) than she should have avoided linking her protagonist to the figurehead of an institution that is in many ways inherently bigoted itself.

On to the hubub surrounding the Dumbledore's ousting. There are two fundamental questions here. The first is whether or not authors should ever engage in post-publication background-giving: is it better just to let the text live on its own? A lot of commentary says yes, and that's fine. The question, however, becomes moot the instant the author begins to talk about her characters beyond the books. It becomes then a question of who has ultimate ownership of a text: the reader or the author. I think that, in the case of background information, it is clearly the author. That is, if Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, he is. We have no license to say "no, I read him as straight, so he's straight." That statement is wrong. However, the author can not tell us how to interpret their work. She can tell us that Dumbledore is gay, but has no recourse to order us to read the series as a big Christian allegory. Even if that was her intent, it is our interpretive right to read the text differently.

A final note on this: if she had said "Dumbledore was straight, he had a girlfriend who broke his heart, and that's why he's single," there would be no extensive coverage, no blogging about it. I don't want to suggest that everyone writing about the issue is a homophobe, but rather wish to note the impact that social issue has on the way literary criticism runs. It's interesting, at least.

And that is all I will have to say for quite some time on a series that, in the end, I will remember with great fondness, and one to which I shall return. Many times.

Harry's Last

Briefly: First, I'll be posting my much belated review of Deathly Hallows in the next several days, stay tuned. Second, check this out: the lameity of the Catholic church is ubiquitous, it seems. Utterly ridiculous.

A Great Loss

This is horribly late, but I wish to add mine to the many respects being paid to the late Robert Jordan. A true genius and also by all accounts a wonderful man, he will be missed. "Like the wind he came, like the wind he touched everything, and like the wind he was gone."