To Conquer Death You Only Have to Die, You Only Have to Die . . .

Apr 25, 2018 22:51

Once, a long time ago, I wrote in a "twelve unpopular opinions" meme post:

The Harry Potter series is simple and conventional as literature goes. It is rich but not deep, elaborate but not particularly challenging. These are not faults.

I still think that the Harry Potter series is simple and conventional as literature goes, rich, elaborate, and not particularly challenging, and that these are not faults. However, ever since reading the seventh book, I have felt guilty about writing that "not deep" part. You guys know how I HATE to be wrong. So here, eleven years later, I am taking it back.





“Can’t You Find Something Useful to Occupy Yourself?” “What, Like Reading Kids’ Stories?”

Please don't think that I'm arguing that J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is literary. It is a delightful jumble of nonsense, humor, satire, nostalgia, cultural references, and improbable adventures, with a profusion of subplots, contradictions, and just plain foolishness. Rowling constantly goes for the joke over logic, and chooses an impactful scene over rational consistency. Her writing is immensely entertaining, but it completely lacks the kind of artful discipline we value in literary prose.

However, that doesn't mean her books are shallow, or that they lack emotional power and intellectual complexity. They move us (most of us) deeply and engage our intellectual curiosity to a marked degree. And though Rowling has repeatedly denied a specific intent to convey moral messages in her books, her moral values inevitably emerge. As she said way back in 1999:

Now, I don't set out thinking, "this is what they're going to learn in this book", ever. I have a real horror of preaching to anyone, or of trying to make, you know, enormous points. You know, I'm not driven by the need to "teach" children anything, although those things do come up naturally in the stories, which I think is quite moral. Because it's a battle between good and evil.

But I do think, that to pretend to children that life is sanitized and easy, when they already know - they don't need me to tell them - that life can be very difficult. If it hasn't happened in their own family, one of their friends' fathers will be... dying. Or some - you know, they're in contact with this from a very early age. And it's not a bad idea that they meet this in literature. It's not a bad idea that they can see a character who is - I mean, Harry is a human boy, he makes mistakes, but I think he came as a very noble character, he's a brave character and he strives to do the right thing. And to see a fictional character dealing with those sort of things, I think can be very very helpful.

It is widely agreed---by Rowling, her critics, and most readers---that the main theme of the Harry Potter series is death. A major impetus for her in writing the series was dealing with losing her own mother when she was only 25:

"If [my mother] hadn’t died, I don’t think it’s too strong to say that there wouldn’t be Harry Potter. The books are what they are because she died."

Of course, dealing with the unwelcome inevitable fact of death has been a major source of angst and a stimulus for creative, philosophical, and theological endeavor for the human race since our brains evolved to the point we became aware of it. The Harry Potter books are far from alone in dealing with death as their major theme; Rowling used excerpts from two other examples, a play by Aeschylus and a reflection by William Penn, at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. These epigraphs were a major cue to all of us that that particular volume at least was intended to be "deep."



“Your Failure to Understand That There Are Things Much Worse Than Death...”

The seventh book does indeed grapple seriously with "the next great adventure." References to death themes, already numerous in the previous six volumes, become almost constant:

"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."

"And then he greeted Death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and, equals, they departed this life."

"Three objects, or Hallows, which, if united, will make the possessor master of Death."

"You are the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying."

"Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love."

"Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive. His job was to walk calmly into Death’s welcoming arms."

This last, of course, is the moral climax of the book. Harry "conquers" death the same way Jesus Christ did, by voluntarily choosing to die. While Jesus died for all mankind, Harry dies primarily to protect the friends and supporters fighting for him in Hogwarts and secondarily to protect all the wizards and Muggles of Britain by ending Voldemort's reign of terror. And, like Jesus, Harry is resurrected, or, more accurately, he doesn't fully die because the protection he received from Lily's sacrifice still exists in the blood he shares with Voldemort (thus finally justifying the "gleam of something like triumph" in Dumbledore's eye at the end of Goblet of Fire).

Rowling has been criticized for making a "pro-suicide message" in her series, as I discussed here. People are concerned that young people, already unfortunately prone to suicide, might be further encouraged by Dumbledore's and Harry's examples. But of course neither Harry nor Dumbledore commits suicide, as it is defined as a sin in the Christian church. Taking your own life is a mortal sin, but sacrificing your life for others---the traditional soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save his unit---is a virtuous act, both in the Church and in our popular culture. We do not condemn Obi-wan Kenobi for lowering his light saber, or Steve Trevor for blowing up his airplane, or the crew of the Messiah for steering their craft into the comet in Deep Impact. We can quibble about whether or not Dumbledore's death in the service of his plan is direct enough to really count as a sacrifice to save others, but there is no doubt that Harry's action qualifies.

Not that I would argue that Deep Impact is, umm, deep. But the Harry Potter series is. It explores the theme of death in multiple ways, through plot, dialogue, character, symbolism, and---of course!---humor. I particularly enjoy the ongoing comic motif of Nearly-Headless Nick and Moaning Myrtle getting offended on the sensitive subject of their life-deficient status by Harry and, especially, Ron. The Harry Potter series is not simply taking a moral stance in favor of self-sacrifice but making an extended argument that death is a horrible, painful reality that we all must face and accept as a natural part of life. Everything in the books is arranged to transmit and reinforce this message, from Voldemort's pathological fear of death and the measures he takes to avoid it, to the loss of James and Lily Potter and the effect of this on Harry, Sirius, Pettigrew, Snape, etc., to the symbology of the phoenix, the basilisk, the Grim, the Philosopher's Stone, Dementors, the Deathly Hallows, ghosts and graveyards, unicorns and Thestrals, vampires and Inferi, trips to the Underworld, the maze and the Sphinx, Aragog and Fluffy, bezoars and the Draught of Living Death, to the entire plot of Book Seven.

Voldemort is not simply "evil"---he is a particular kind of evil that will not accept his own natural death and in his fight against it is willing to inflict death on any and every other living creature. Harry is not simply "good"---he is good because he comes to understand that there are much worse things than dying and he is willing to lay down his life for his friends. All of Harry's mentor figures teach him this same lesson. His parents demonstrate by dying for him. Dumbledore tells him, "to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure" and he gives up his chance to defend himself on the lightning-struck tower by freezing Harry to protect him. Sirius roars to Pettigrew, "THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED! DIED RATHER THAN BETRAY YOUR FRIENDS, AS WE WOULD HAVE DONE FOR YOU!" and then falls through the veil fighting to protect Harry. Remus says, "I am sorry too. Sorry I will never know him ... but he will know why I died and I hope he will understand. I was trying to make a world in which he could live a happier life." And Remus dies fighting to protect Harry and Hogwarts and Teddy as well.



The Torment Bred in the Race, the Grinding Scream of Death ... the Curse No Man Can Bear

Before she can offer her "solution" for death, Rowling must illustrate the problem. She does this very thoroughly---amazingly thoroughly for a children's book series. Death in the Harry Potter series is not just melancholy and sad, but almost unbearably painful. Perhaps when reading the first book we might have been able to see the deaths of James and Lily with a kind of misty gentle distance, but in the third book, Prisoner of Azkaban, she grinds the cruel details into our faces, repeatedly forcing Harry to experience his parents' screams of terror and despair.

In the fourth book, Goblet of Fire, Rowling reminds us of the shocking suddenness, unfairness, and arbitrariness of death: "Kill the spare." Cedric Diggory dies for nothing. He has done nothing wrong. He is not fighting for anything or anyone he loves. He accomplishes nothing with his death, and nothing good happens because of it (except, I suppose, the twins getting money to start their joke shop). Cedric is just unlucky. This is a very unusual kind of death in a book marketed to children. Sirius's death in Order of the Phoenix is sudden and arbitrary as well, and it is cruel---cruel to Harry, who loses the closest thing he has to a family so soon after finding him, and cruel to Sirius, who spends the last year of his life miserably confined to his house of bitter childhood memories after having spent twelve years unfairly imprisoned in Azkaban.

Death is undignified and vulnerable, like Dumbledore's body falling from the lightning-struck tower and landing awkwardly on the ground, like Inferi forced to serve the will of their puppet masters, like Mad-Eye Moody, his body disrespected and his magical eye taken to serve as a everyday tool of repression by his enemy. Charity Burbage is hanged upside-down, then casually murdered and her body thrown to the snake. Even animals lose their dignity in death: Aragog the spider has his body despoiled for commercial exploitation, and then there is this:

It was the unicorn all right, and it was dead. Harry had never seen anything so beautiful and sad. Its long, slender legs were stuck out at odd angles where it had fallen and its mane was spread pearly-white on the dark leaves.

Perhaps the worst indignity of all is inflicted on Bathilda Bagshot, her dead body stinking of rotten meat and violated by a giant snake.

Rowling turns the screw even tighter by having Harry be arguably responsible for many of these deaths. He feels responsible for inviting Cedric to touch the Triwizard Cup with him, for being fooled by Voldemort and requiring Sirius to come to his rescue, and for being the inadvertent cause of Dumbledore being disarmed by Draco Malfoy. Mad-Eye Moody dies protecting him and Dobby dies rescuing him. Even Hedwig takes a curse aimed at Harry.

Near the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Rowling makes Harry suffer even more on this account. Everyone fighting on Harry's side in the Battle of Hogwarts is there because of him. They are, first, protecting Harry so he has time to find and destroy the last Horcrux and, second, because they have refused Voldemort's demand for them to turn Harry over to him---and he is only attacking Hogwarts because Harry is there. Now Harry has 50 more dead bodies on his conscience and some of them---very important people to us and to Harry like Remus, Tonks, and Colin Creevey---we don't even get to find out how they died. Some of these deaths are so cruel. The deaths of Remus and Tonks, newly married and with an infant son, is a repeat of the tragedy of Harry's family. Underaged Colin Creevey, who sneaked back in to fight after being sent away with the other children, is "tiny in death." George loses his twin. Your heart breaks, reading all this.



“It Means ... You Know ... Living Beyond Death. Living After Death.”

We cannot accuse J.K. Rowling of minimizing the horrors of death. She portrays it extensively. But her thesis is that despite all this, we must accept death, even welcome it as an old friend when it comes for us. How does she make this argument? It seems to me that she has a three-fold approach.

First, we should acknowledge that she has accepted one of humanity's oldest defenses against our fear of death, the concept of immortal souls. J.K. Rowling is a Christian; she believes in life after death. Harry, and everyone else in the wizarding world, is in a slightly different position; he knows that souls are real and that there is life after death. He has strong evidence for both. He has seen a soul without a body (Voldemort in Albania) and bodies without souls (anyone who has been Kissed by a Dementor). He has talked to ghosts, heard voices beyond the Veil, resurrected the shades of his parents and their friends, and had a nice chat with the very dead Dumbledore. In Deathly Hallows, Lily tells Harry "you've been so brave," and Dumbledore clearly knows every detail of what Harry has seen and done since his own death. We can conclude that the dead are able to observe the deeds of the loved ones they have left behind.

Harry does receive some comfort from this knowledge, especially in his conversation with Luna at the end of Order of the Phoenix (bolds mine):

"Yes, it was rather horrible," said Luna conversationally. "I still feel very sad about it sometimes. But I've still got Dad. And anyway, it's not as though I'll never see Mum again, is it?"

"Er - isn't it?" said Harry uncertainly.

She shook her head in disbelief.

"Oh, come on. You heard them, just behind the veil, didn't you?"

"You mean..."

"In that room with the archway. They were just lurking out of sight, that's all. You heard them."

They looked at each other. Luna was smiling slightly. Harry did not know what to say, or to think; Luna believed so many extraordinary things... yet he had been sure he had heard voices behind the veil, too....

"Are you sure you don't want me to help you look for your stuff?" he said.

"Oh, no," said Luna. "No, I think I'll just go down and have some pudding and wait for it all to turn up... it always does in the end... well, have a nice holiday Harry."

"Yeah... yeah, you too."

She walked away from him and, as he watched her go, he found that the terrible weight in his stomach seemed to have lessened slightly.

But Rowling does not rely heavily on this factor in her "defense of death." She does not assert a Heaven or give Harry any significant information about what "the next great adventure" is like. Nearly-Headless Nick and the other ghosts do not know and Dumbledore is cagey about giving Harry any actual information.

Perhaps this is because such an argument will have little or no weight for people who aren't Christians, or theists of some kind, and who don't believe in eternal souls and life after death. Obviously, Rowling can make these things true in her fictional world by simple fiat, but she is not only trying to reconcile Harry to death; she is trying to reconcile us, her readers. Those of us who are atheists, like me, will obviously not find this argument very convincing.

One person who found it particularly unconvincing is the author of the fan fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The main impetus for this fic seems to be the desire to popularize and promote rationalist ideas, but the second most important factor seems to be a sort of outraged rejection of Rowling's acceptance of death, with an especially explicit denial of the existence of an afterlife. This denial makes the inclusion of Horcruxes, ghosts, and Dementors rather problematic, but the author does his best. His proposed solution to the problem of death is simply to use the methods of science (and the Philosopher's Stone) to eliminate it and make everyone (or at least all humans) live forever. As much as I share his atheism and sympathize with his desire to promote rationality, I don't find his solution convincing, either logically or narratively/emotionally. But that is neither here nor there.



Death Is But Crossing the World, As Friends Do the Seas; They Live In One Another Still

The second path that Rowling uses to reconcile us to death is the same one that William Penn used in the quote above, that, as Dumbledore puts it, "I will only truly have left this school when none here are loyal to me." The dead are not lost to us because we remember them, because we still love them, because they have taught us and influenced us and perhaps even given birth to us. This is expressed most clearly in Prisoner of Azkaban by (again) Dumbledore:

"You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him. How else could you produce that particular Patronus? Prongs rode again last night."

There are many examples in the Harry Potter series of people comforting themselves with remembrances and celebrations of their loved dead, with funerals, memorials, naming children to honor them, capturing their personalities in portraits, and changing their behavior in conformance with their loved ones' known wishes. Probably the best example of this is Snape:

“Her boy survives,” said Dumbledore.

With a tiny jerk of the head, Snape seemed to flick off an irksome fly.

“Her son lives. He has her eyes, precisely her eyes. You remember the shape and color of Lily Evans’s eyes, I am sure?”

“DON’T!” bellowed Snape. “Gone . . . dead . . .”

“Is this remorse, Severus?”

“I wish . . . I wish I were dead . . .”

“And what use would that be to anyone?” said Dumbledore coldly. “If you loved Lily Evans, if you truly loved her, then your way forward is clear.”

Snape seemed to peer through a haze of pain, and Dumbledore’s words appeared to take a long time to reach him.

“What-what do you mean?”

“You know how and why she died. Make sure it was not in vain. Help me protect Lily’s son.”

“He does not need protection. The Dark Lord has gone-”

“The Dark Lord will return, and Harry Potter will be in terrible danger when he does.”

There was a long pause, and slowly Snape regained control of himself, mastered his own breathing. At last he said, “Very well. Very well. But never-never tell, Dumbledore! This must be between us! Swear it! I cannot bear . . . especially Potter’s son . . . I want your word!”

Lily lives on not only in her son who has her eyes but in the heart (and the Patronus) of Severus Snape, who loved her. His every good deed is in honor of her. And Harry, in turn, honors Snape by naming his son after him and by making sure that his portrait is mounted in the Headmistress's Office at Hogwarts.

Obviously, Lily did not want to die at the age of twenty-one. But I think she would have been willing if she knew that it would save the life of her son, redeem the soul of her friend Severus, and make possible the defeat of the evil Lord Voldemort. Most people would be honored to leave such a legacy behind. And perhaps Anne Volant Rowling would be honored to know that she inspired her daughter's deeply-felt book series that has meant so much to so many people.



“You Will Have But a Half-Life, a Cursed Life, From the Moment the Blood Touches Your Lips.”

But Rowling's most compelling argument for the necessity of accepting death is that the alternative is even worse. As Dumbledore repeatedly points out, there are much worse things than dying.

One is becoming evil. Voldemort is the most obvious example of this. He tells his Death Eaters, "you know my goal---to conquer death." His desperate urgency to avoid death has deprived him of everything that makes life worthwhile---love, friendship, pleasure, honor, and joy. He lives in fear and hatred, mistrusting everyone and everything; he builds nothing constructive, keeps killing off his own followers and tools, and brings misery to everyone he comes in contact with. A boy who was once handsome, charming, intelligent, and magically powerful has been reduced to a hideous monster whose death (or presumed death) brings joy to the entire wizarding world---twice---simply because he is determined not to die.

Then there is Peter Pettigrew. He is afraid of dying and becomes a spy for Voldemort, leading to the death and imprisonment of his friends, and forcing him to live for twelve years as a rat. After he returns to Voldemort's service, his life seems to become even worse. He snivels and cringes. Voldemort is cruel to him. Snape is contemptuous and dismissive. He ends up strangling himself with his own silver hand and nobody mourns him.

If you cannot accept your own death, you cannot be courageous, because that would involve risking your precious life. You cannot really love, because you can't put someone else's life and well-being above your own. You really ought not to have a child, because childbirth can be dangerous. You can't commit yourself to a person or a cause, because what if that requires you to risk your life? And what if they die and you have to suffer the pain of their death? To love is to accept the risk of that pain. Voldemort could not bear it when he tried to possess Harry when he was in agony from Sirius's death. If you cannot accept that pain, that risk of pain, you cannot love. You become like one of Rowling's ghost characters, not really dead but not really alive either.

And the brutal fact is that (in the absence of magic) you can reject risks that might lead to death or pain all you want but you might die anyway. In fact, some day you will. Not accepting death doesn't keep you from dying, it just makes the life you do have less pleasurable, less useful, less meaningful. In "The Tale of the Three Brothers," both brothers who try to defeat death simply bring about their own deaths. Only the third brother, who greets Death as an old friend, lives a happy life and successfully passes his Hallow on to his heirs.



“Books! And Cleverness! There Are More Important Things--”

So that is my argument. The depth of the Harry Potter series was only fully revealed with the release of the seventh book, and that depth results from Rowling's attempt to tackle one of the most challenging questions of human existence, the Problem of Death. She explores this issue so thoroughly, so richly and figuratively, so evocatively, and with such moral seriousness that I think it is wrong to say, as I so foolishly did, that the books are not deep.

Rowling may have played fast and loose with calendar calculations, how Apparating works, how much a Galleon is worth, what happens when a Secret-Keeper dies, and whether Prefects can take points. But when it comes to what matters most to her---her thematic treatment of death, grief, and loss---she is careful, thoughtful and eloquent. She returns to her theme again and again, from the first page to the last, always advocating the same answer of love, courage, and sacrifice. From "it is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn" to "I’m putting the Elder Wand back where it came from," the message is consistent and convincing. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

Okay, that's done. Now, do I need to reconsider that "simple"...?

hp, dh

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