maybe it's not just about getting the reader involved, because maybe what makes us involved is that she herself is. I think she genuinely feels what she's writing
All right. I buy that! :) Let me modify the argument just a little, then -- it's not so much that issues aren't felt, as that they aren't fully examined. The raw emotions and family dynamics, etc., are presented to the reader as discrete chunks of experience, and yes, they feel authentic, and yes, that takes some significant artistry on JKR's part. But I still think there's a difference between, on the one hand, sketching a character or a set of family members, however skillfully, to produce a familiar and recognizable emotional effect, and on the other hand shaping the material as a whole into something unified and meaningful, something that feels like it's been thought about with some rigor and some critical perspective.
You suggest, in part, that what ties together a series of disparate attitudes and effects is that they reflect ordinary experience, the unity of a single viewer looking at life in all its contradictions. I completely agree that actual experience is like that. And again, conveying how that feels, making it vivid and compelling, is no mean trick. JKR's families feel like families, and that part's brilliant.
But is that all that a story can or should do? And what criteria do we use for deciding how much to expect? I mean, honesty is important, but traditionally "art" has a selective and shaping component, that some people might see as idealizing, but that you could also think of as just making issues clearer and more rigorous so that they're easier to think hard about.
I think it's clear that JKR wants, at least part of the time, to do more than depict an ordinary muddle of lived experience -- she wants to provide a shape, a message, for her epic as a whole. As you point out, her tone rings false precisely when she's trying to do this most crudely, with her ex cathedra statements about love and sacrifice and various other virtues. She's more effective when she just juxtaposes ideals and examples, the way she does when she contrasts Harry's hunger for a happy family with the reality of the Weasleys, or with the evidence that refutes his imagined version of James. In both cases, she's clearly trying to make her examples say something, to give them their proper place as part of an over-arching message.
So I think it's certainly fair, it's not necessarily crabbed or petty (as some on that other post suggested) to consider whether she does this well or not. The books are often brilliantly funny, there is great character observation, and reading them is a lot of fun. I have no complaints about the money I spent on them! But if you are reading something that looks like a Bildungsroman, it's reasonable to expect a compelling vision of maturity, a wise and judicious sense of what components make up an integrated personality. And if you're reading a Quest novel, it's reasonable to expect the author to have a notion of what significant inner transformations happen along the way to the goal. You want something more than a muddle of sentiment and partial insight.
If you don't have that, then it's a plain old adventure story, with maybe a few bromidical life-lessons thrown in along the way. Not that there's anything wrong with adventure stories! But it's reasonable for a reader to adopt generic expectations, to expect a starry vs. a carved ceiling, as you put it, based on generic clues. If you've got Dark Forces! Ancient Magic! contrasting Archetypical Orphans! Good and Evil fighting to the death! not to mention, um, seven volumes of the stuff, then you expect a little more rigorous intention, a little more hard-earned insight, than you might look for in, say, The Adventure of Pirate Cove.
Examples. Um, yes. Gotta run! Seriously, I really do want to climb down from this level of abstraction and talk about some of your points about specific characters. Must. Return. Later.
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Re: Part II
Date: 2005-12-17 08:21 pm (UTC)All right. I buy that! :) Let me modify the argument just a little, then -- it's not so much that issues aren't felt, as that they aren't fully examined. The raw emotions and family dynamics, etc., are presented to the reader as discrete chunks of experience, and yes, they feel authentic, and yes, that takes some significant artistry on JKR's part. But I still think there's a difference between, on the one hand, sketching a character or a set of family members, however skillfully, to produce a familiar and recognizable emotional effect, and on the other hand shaping the material as a whole into something unified and meaningful, something that feels like it's been thought about with some rigor and some critical perspective.
You suggest, in part, that what ties together a series of disparate attitudes and effects is that they reflect ordinary experience, the unity of a single viewer looking at life in all its contradictions. I completely agree that actual experience is like that. And again, conveying how that feels, making it vivid and compelling, is no mean trick. JKR's families feel like families, and that part's brilliant.
But is that all that a story can or should do? And what criteria do we use for deciding how much to expect? I mean, honesty is important, but traditionally "art" has a selective and shaping component, that some people might see as idealizing, but that you could also think of as just making issues clearer and more rigorous so that they're easier to think hard about.
I think it's clear that JKR wants, at least part of the time, to do more than depict an ordinary muddle of lived experience -- she wants to provide a shape, a message, for her epic as a whole. As you point out, her tone rings false precisely when she's trying to do this most crudely, with her ex cathedra statements about love and sacrifice and various other virtues. She's more effective when she just juxtaposes ideals and examples, the way she does when she contrasts Harry's hunger for a happy family with the reality of the Weasleys, or with the evidence that refutes his imagined version of James. In both cases, she's clearly trying to make her examples say something, to give them their proper place as part of an over-arching message.
So I think it's certainly fair, it's not necessarily crabbed or petty (as some on that other post suggested) to consider whether she does this well or not. The books are often brilliantly funny, there is great character observation, and reading them is a lot of fun. I have no complaints about the money I spent on them! But if you are reading something that looks like a Bildungsroman, it's reasonable to expect a compelling vision of maturity, a wise and judicious sense of what components make up an integrated personality. And if you're reading a Quest novel, it's reasonable to expect the author to have a notion of what significant inner transformations happen along the way to the goal. You want something more than a muddle of sentiment and partial insight.
If you don't have that, then it's a plain old adventure story, with maybe a few bromidical life-lessons thrown in along the way. Not that there's anything wrong with adventure stories! But it's reasonable for a reader to adopt generic expectations, to expect a starry vs. a carved ceiling, as you put it, based on generic clues. If you've got Dark Forces! Ancient Magic! contrasting Archetypical Orphans! Good and Evil fighting to the death! not to mention, um, seven volumes of the stuff, then you expect a little more rigorous intention, a little more hard-earned insight, than you might look for in, say, The Adventure of Pirate Cove.
Examples. Um, yes. Gotta run! Seriously, I really do want to climb down from this level of abstraction and talk about some of your points about specific characters. Must. Return. Later.