solitary_summer | (no subject) (Reply)

Might as well post it... :: shrugs :: I’m not in the mood today for any deeper & more personal reflections anyway.

[Where this came from… when I’m bored occasionally I lurk on fandom_wank, because it tends to be faintly amusing and just like those talks shows allows you the (most likely misguided) self-indulgent belief that your life is normal and sane by comparison.

No way I’m getting actively involved in this debate, but you can only read so much fangirlish whining about how JKR doesn’t properly appreciate the characters she herself created...]

It always seemed to me glaringly obvious that JKR more or less equals dark wizards/death eaters with nazis/fascists, or maybe rather modelled the former on the latter – about a hundred pages into book 1 we learn that Dumbledore was ”particularly famous for his defeat of the dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945”, and whatever the exact connection between events in the Muggle world and the wizarding world, JKR means for her readers to make this connection.

I found the analogy so self-evident that I never felt the need to question it; personally I believe it’s hard to escape, especially having grown up Austria with a minimum of historical awareness (*), but judging from the recent discussion quite a lot of people seem to never have seen this at all, even in book canon.

Fans will admit that the death eaters are racists (as if that were somehow better), but they mostly balk at the nazi comparison, which IMO is perfectly valid. Theirs is not some private creed: they aspire to overthrow their government by means of a violent revolution and in its place establish an anti-democratic, authoritarian, violent regime, ruled by one leader and his clique, that would deprive a good part of the population of their rights, if not their lives and sanction terror, torture and murder. If this isn’t fascism, what is? If their irrational, murderous obsession with purity of blood isn't Nazism, again, what is? It really doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see them introduce the wizard’s equivalent of the Ariernachweis. They are not just the people who would look away while someone is beaten up, they are the SA: they do the beating up. They are not the people who would perhaps like to see affirmative action revoked and would rather not live in a black neighbourhood, they are those who, given the opportunity, would put on the white hoods again and re-start the lynching. They are, in fact, actively striving for a world where they can do all that, unpunished, for fun. Take away the trappings of magic and their aim is a fascist society.

This, I think, explains JKR’s stance towards them, her lack of sympathy, unless a character has truly done something to redeem him/herself. It also explains why so far she hasn’t developed Draco further. Why she avoids the option of witty, attractive ‘interesting evil’ so prevalent in fandom.

Now of course the death eaters = nazis equation itself is still no reason why a character like Draco might not be more complex, might not be given a background or better characterisation. Obviously whatever horrible things people do or tolerate, they have reasons for it; they have a personal history: they’re human after all. Many of the biographies of the leaders of the Third Reich are full of personal frustration, disappointed hopes, thwarted ambitions. Nazism flourished on the disappointed hopes of a whole generation. They will not be monsters in every respect of their lives, and most certainly will not see themselves as such. For the most part they’re horribly normal. One of the most intriguing books I ever read was Gitta Serenyi's biography of Albert Speer.

Attempting to understand is generally more profitable than simply writing someone off as inherently evil, because I believe very few of us would be wholly safe from going down the same road, given the right, or rather, the wrong circumstances, and we can only count ourselves lucky if we’re never put to the test.

However, if it comes to writing, it’s a very tricky business to strike a balance here, so as not to (intentionally or accidentally) invite the wrong kind of sympathy from the wrong kind of people for the wrong kind of reasons. Difficult to find the right words, neither to give food to the apologists and mock the victims nor to assume a (perhaps unmerited) moral high ground. Understanding, in this case, must never even imply acceptance.

It’s an extremely touchy subject and if JKR chooses to avoid this in the context of a story that is already long and complex enough, can anyone really fault her for it? If she chooses to tell her audience, many of who are children, after all, in no uncertain words that some things are not acceptable, is she to be criticised for it? She could do worse.

I think the summary accusation of black and white painting is unwarranted, at least after OotP: She does, in fact shade her characters, employing such devices as Snape's pensieve in order to be able to do it even using only Harry's POV. Snape remains a disaster as a teacher, but hardly anyone will not have felt some sympathy for him; on the other hand the hitherto sainted James Potter and his friends are shown in a less than ideal light and Sirius dies for his (and Remus’s) inability to overcome their old school-grudges.

OotP as a whole is a highly politic book; it shows how easily a society can be manipulated, it describes the slow slide towards a less extreme kind of fascism in the attempt to prevent, or more likely ignore, the threat of Voldemort; and it addresses the problem of the more or less pronounced wide-spread racism in the wizarding world. And OotP, if anything, shows there’s no clear dividing line between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ guys. That ‘goodness’ isn’t self-understood.

There is no lack of grey shades in OotP at least, but JKR draws a line at those who blithely and unrepentantly embrace ideas of fascism and genocide. It’s only logical in her universe as she constructed and sees it.

Nothing Draco has said or done so far gives any indication that he even questions this ideology. Of course it's tragic that children are raised like this, never given a chance to reconsider, but on the other hand things like that do happen. Even canon Draco may change his views at one point, after all Snape did. But then again, he may not. History showed that for many it took a lost war to make them finally question and reject the ideology they followed, and for others not even that was enough.

Fan-fiction is everyone’s sandbox to play in and create their own interpretations of characters, but as for people not seeing or not wanting to see those implications and parallels in book canon I think it takes a certain lack of political awareness and wilful blindness that I’m not sure I’m comfortable with. And perhaps neither is JKR, which may well be the reason why she said what she said.

Art and morality, always a difficult subject. O. Wilde wrote in the preface to The Picture Of Dorian Gray, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."; yet despite the aestheticism Wilde’s writing is more often than not highly ethical, and rather blatantly so.

Personally I'm not so fond of art that is overly moralistic, if for no other reason that it bores me on an intellectual level when the message is being spelled out in letters so large it's impossible to miss it. But at the same time I appreciate an awareness on the authors side of the issues (s)he addresses, the possible consequences and implications. Not judgement, but awareness. I don’t necessarily need answers, but I’d like the questions to be there. I love complexity, but I'm not too fond of the total moral void, where nothing matters any longer except the pretty surface.

But again, the HP books started out as children’s books and still partly are, as far as the demography of their readership is concerned. It doesn’t hurt if they’re a little more explicit than a novel for adults would be.

(*) I asked my mother and my sister who know only book canon, where in the politic spectrum they’d sort the death eaters and both came up with the nazi comparison unprompted. My mother, who has no leftish political leanings whatsoever, went as far as to say that anyone fascinated with Draco would most likely be drawn to the nazi ideology, and would not go back upon that statement even when I told her how people effectively re-wrote Draco. I probably wouldn’t go as far, but it’s interesting to see a perspective untainted by fandom.

[Disclaimer: I've certainly read my share of HP fan-fiction dropping as I did into this whole HP... thing in the hiatus between books 4 & 5, but in certain respects in my mind there was always a firm distinction between canon and fanon.]

To conclude, even though I realise that art is always a highly emotional subject, I wish people would grow up and get over the notion that an artist owes them anything beyond whatever product they chose to pay for.