Last word about Dumbledore (I hope!)
Yesterday’s brief contact with the creatures who populate such places as f_w had one positive effect: it made me think again about the Dumbledore issue. And decide that I was wrong at least on one issue.
For a start, my views came out in dribs and drabs in three articles pretty much brought about by events, and not necessarily well thought out. To state my views as clearly as possible:
1. I do not care whether Dumbledore is homosexual or not. I never thought that JKR ever intended us to see him as flawless, and in fact she gave him, from the beginning, a couple of amusing minor vices - a habit of bragging and a childish passion for sweets. Consequently the matter of the moral status of homosexuality does not even come into it - Dumbledore is not, and has never been, perfect. And if you believe that there cannot be morally good homosexuals (I will qualify this statement below), you live on another planet from me.
2. I regard the statement that he is one as canonic. Any Dumbledore-loves-Minerva fics will from now on have to qualify as AU. (Luckily I never wrote any - I found the idea absurd - while I did write a lesbian Minerva tale. Which got Niffled.)
3. I also, however, regard it as part of an exercise by JKR to reposition her work, which had been acquiring conservative connotations she was bound to dislike. This view is based on her far too innocent attitude in the quotes I have been shown - “If I had known it would make you so happy, I would have said it before” - su-u-ur-r-re, lady, and you never read fanfic, are not aware of what is Politically Correct today, and never heard of slashers. Give me a break.
4. It is my view that it was not well done, mainly in that the whole subtext of the Grindelwald affair is wholly negative and destructive. Dumbledore’s adolescent infatuation for Grindelwald led directly to the murder of his sister and the collapse of what was left of his family. Mutatis mutandis, you might be reading a Victorian melodrama about unchastity, ending in Lady Dedlock (to quote the greatest of them) lying dead in a rotting cemetery.
I certainly reject the ridiculous Politically Correct notion that homosexual practice is equal to normal sexuality. I am also completely not interested in whether it is innate or acquired - it is probably both, and it means nothing either way. I happen to know that I have a violent and almost uncontrollable temper, which, from time to time, has hurt people who did not deserve it as well as people who did. To those who try to justify homosexuality as being “natural”, that is inborn, I would ask: does that justify the effects of my rage - to mention only one, the public insults I have sometimes flung at good friends and decent people? My rage is as inborn in me as same-sex lusts in others; does that mean that it is not a source of evil, or that it does not need to be suppressed? There is such a thing as inborn evil as well as acquired evil; indeed, evil could not be acquired if it did not answer to some previous disposition to receive it.
Every one of us carries some such horror in his or her soul. There is nothing special about homosexuality -that is the specific lie of our age. The amount of attention that we pay to this one sin makes all the others fade from sight; and so we have no time to really look at the moral horrors that underlie our whole life from beginning to end. The whole debate about homosexuality is a complete waste of time. Let those who cannot resist temptation go on as they please. They do not do any more damage than any other kind of sinner - which is not to say that sin does no damage, but that every sin does.
This is the real mystery: that we are all sinners, every one of us, and yet we all know people of whom we can say - that man is a saint; that woman is a heroine. Why is that? Have they, mysteriously, dropped the habit of sin somewhere along the way? They would be the first to tell you that they have not. And even at a slightly lower level, our lives are full of good, kind, decent, unselfish, affectionate people, people we cannot think of as other than good. Each of them has one or more such moral horrors within them; yet, each of them is good. Sometimes the horrors are almost grotesquely visible - and that against a glorious white background. G.K.Chesterton is probably overall the finest human being I ever experienced, a dazzling combination of stratospheric genius, incredible working power, wonderful personality, and amazing humility. And yet his work is sometimes, in the most unexpected places, disfigured by grotesque and profoundly stupid prejudice, most often against Jews, once at least against blacks. His fierce denunciation of Nazism in the last years of his life was one of the finest of many morally fine and just things he did; yet he still carried with him that strange bacillus. The strangest consequence of this is that he tended to lose his wit. He was not only a Jew-basher, but a dull Jew-basher. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, one of the funniest Englishmen of the twentieth century, could not even make a good anti-Semitic joke. The meanest rabble-rousing street comedian had funnier ones. And to make matters even more incomprehensible, he had several Jewish friends, most of them proud and quite aggressive where Jewish matters were concerned. How he could live with them, or they with him, when this was an attitude he kept all his life, is beyond rational understanding.
Yet here is the whole issue of goodness in the fallen human race in one astonishing image. A man can be both good, overwhelmingly and luminously good, and yet have the most mean and disgusting sin as an ineradicable and natural part of his or her make-up. In this homosexuality is no different from rage, other lusts, greed, vanity, envy, cowardice, mendacity, sloth - any of the places of squalor and filth that any honest human being will recognize in him or herself.
For this reason, I am not disposed to treat any homosexual any different than any other person whatsoever, much less to deny that he or she can be an exemplary person. I know at least one living homosexual who is a very attractive human being as well as a writer of genius with a powerful if strangely skewed moral vision. For that matter, I know plenty of dead ones, beginning with Virgil and Plato - names before which every civilized person ought to bow. Dumbledore being an old homosexual does not bother me in the least. It only would if he was, not an old homosexual, but “an old poof” (that’s a quotation) in the style of the execrable painter Francis Bacon and such-like self-degraded, pointlessly angry human ruins.
(As a matter of fact, I have been toying for years with a story idea to do with my Harry-is-gay strand, where a sixteen-year-old Harry would spend weeks nerving himself up, being scared and ashamed, to go up to Mrs.Weasley and say: “I think I may be gay” - only for her to reply something like: “Is that all?” or “Oh, that old thing!”)
I think that the way JKR went about bringing out Dumbledore’s homosexual side is typical of her ignorance of male behaviour, and I have said enough about this matter elsewhere. However, I admit now that I have changed my mind about one matter. JKR did present at least one clear hint that the relationship between Grindelwald and Dumbledore was something else than an ordinary friendship.
As Harry is arguing with Aberforth, he tells the old man that his brother had never got over the shock of Ariana’s death and Grindelwald’s betrayal. He quotes word from Dumbledore that only he, Harry, has ever heard - they were alone in the cave of the Inferi - and which prove that Dumbledore was still eaten by guilt, not only for his sister’s death, but also for Grindelwald’s assault on his brother, a century and more after it happened. Now, we shall assume that Harry has interpreted Dumbledore’s words correctly and that they refer to that; something which is, in any case, confirmed by Dumbledore himself in the King’s Cross chapter. Well, there is something very strange about that reaction. Ask yourselves: suppose that a man I thought a friend suddenly turned against my brother and my sister? I know what I would do. I would not waste time pleading with him: the first thing he would feel is my hands on his throat - or bashing his head against the wall - or whatever was the fastest and most brutal way to stop him. To most normal human beings, family comes first. I have known one or two people who have suffered so much at the hands of their families that they would probably allow them to be tortured without intervening, but that was hardly the situation of the Dumbledores, even at their pitch of lonely misfortune. And any normal person who found a friend, even a close friend, turning against his own brother or sister, would regard the “friend” as a traitor, and, whatever the circumstances, drop him or her without a second thought and place him or her, from henceforth, in their own black book.
There is only one situation where a different reaction is imaginable, and that is where the “friend” in question is considerably more than a friend. In that case, two opposing and equally fundamental loyalties may possibly check each other. It is, again, Victorian melodrama - the young man forced to choose between his family and his love - but at least it does do what I had wrongly denied: it gives a credible grounding to the notion that Dumbledore had a homosexual passion for Grindelwald. It is also typical of the rather lachrymose strand in Dumbledore’s character, that has been coming increasingly to the fore since the conclusion of book 5.
The rest of my criticism stands. The presentation of homosexual passion is astonishingly negative, somewhat inept, and Victorian in the worst sense. It shows that JKR has no ear for the way men speak and think. I have also said why I do not think that it works even as a moral picture. Homosexuality is a sin like another. Men live with it as with any other sin. To present it under this uniquely and melodramatically destructive light is inartistic and ill-thought-out: why should it be more destructive than Harry’s inborn rage, Hermione’s self-righteousness, or Ron’s intellectual sloth and envy, underlain by a deep lack of self-respect? These things are present in the protagonists’ lives; JKR shows them clearly at work; and she shows that they can be damaging. But they do not wreck lives and careers as the disastrous encounter with Grindelwald has permanently blighted Dumbledore’s; nor do they lead to permanent, lachrymose, crippling senses of guilt. We should notice that at the beginning and at the end of the sixth book, Dumbledore commits two suicidally foolish mistakes - putting on the cursed Horcrux, and drinking the water - that lead directly to his death, and that are both clearly connected with that sense of guilt. At the end of the day, we, in this psychological age of ours, can be sure that he is seeking death to escape it. At the very least, this is the same self-regarding attitude that leads him to refuse office which it is his obvious duty to accept. And once we have taken in the whole significance of his guilt, we have to ask: what makes it any worse than anything else? Yes, he has lost a sister. Harry saw Cedric killed in his stead, and knows that every other person who dies at Voldemort’s hands is in some sense a casualty in his war. That does not stop him. I feel that Dumbledore’s sense of guilt is exaggerated, morbid, self-regarding, irrational, and absurd. It may, perhaps, be life-like - I would not know. But it places on a teen-age same-sex pash a weight of meaning that it would not, in the eye of any sane person, bear. And I have to feel that this enormous and melodramatic burden of guilt could not have been conceived around any other sin than what would once have been called a guilty passion. That is why I insist: the negative attitude it shows to a rather ordinary teen-age pash is extraordinary and excessive.
Post-scriptum: to the lurkers and the wunkers
I do not expect honesty from your likes, especially honesty to yourselves. But if you had any real sense of humour, let alone any honesty, you would realize just how ridiculous your repeated references to stalking really are. Who, exactly, is stalking who? It has been over a year since I had some fun at the expense of PirateJenny and her beliefs; and for over a year this person must have regularly spent some of her time lurking on my blog, carefully blinding herself to anything she might find sympathetic or unobjectionable, until she could finally lay her hands on something she could somehow distort and denounce. Does she imagine that I have ever given her and her follies a second thought? If she has been wasting her time here for so long, she should know that I have never once mentioned her since. It has been nearly as long since I drove DreamerMarie to inarticulate rage by pointing out that parricide is not nice; and still she waits for some opportunity to do me some harm. It has been nearly two years since I bounced the vain Queen Pretty Arse from my blog, and more than two years since I gave Waltraute a lesson in invective - in an exchange of pleasantries started by her; and still those words evidently smart. Do you know, ladies, that until yesterday, I had forgotten that any of you was alive? You have, obviously, no honesty, no honour, and no common sense; the way you elaborately and deliberately distort what you read - which makes it perfectly useless to answer any of your lies - proves it beyond debate. But if you had, then the question - Who is stalking who? - would have to reach you where you live. And now some advice: get yourselves a life, the lot of you. One life between so many stalkers does not seem too much to ask. Start doing something interesting, like, I don’t know, watching raisins dry. Anything would be more profitable, more useful, less time-wasting, than to keep stalking someone who hardly notices you exist, and who would be, if anything, rather tempted to arrogance by knowing that you hate him so obsessively. For the hatred of your likes is easily taken as a compliment.
For a start, my views came out in dribs and drabs in three articles pretty much brought about by events, and not necessarily well thought out. To state my views as clearly as possible:
1. I do not care whether Dumbledore is homosexual or not. I never thought that JKR ever intended us to see him as flawless, and in fact she gave him, from the beginning, a couple of amusing minor vices - a habit of bragging and a childish passion for sweets. Consequently the matter of the moral status of homosexuality does not even come into it - Dumbledore is not, and has never been, perfect. And if you believe that there cannot be morally good homosexuals (I will qualify this statement below), you live on another planet from me.
2. I regard the statement that he is one as canonic. Any Dumbledore-loves-Minerva fics will from now on have to qualify as AU. (Luckily I never wrote any - I found the idea absurd - while I did write a lesbian Minerva tale. Which got Niffled.)
3. I also, however, regard it as part of an exercise by JKR to reposition her work, which had been acquiring conservative connotations she was bound to dislike. This view is based on her far too innocent attitude in the quotes I have been shown - “If I had known it would make you so happy, I would have said it before” - su-u-ur-r-re, lady, and you never read fanfic, are not aware of what is Politically Correct today, and never heard of slashers. Give me a break.
4. It is my view that it was not well done, mainly in that the whole subtext of the Grindelwald affair is wholly negative and destructive. Dumbledore’s adolescent infatuation for Grindelwald led directly to the murder of his sister and the collapse of what was left of his family. Mutatis mutandis, you might be reading a Victorian melodrama about unchastity, ending in Lady Dedlock (to quote the greatest of them) lying dead in a rotting cemetery.
I certainly reject the ridiculous Politically Correct notion that homosexual practice is equal to normal sexuality. I am also completely not interested in whether it is innate or acquired - it is probably both, and it means nothing either way. I happen to know that I have a violent and almost uncontrollable temper, which, from time to time, has hurt people who did not deserve it as well as people who did. To those who try to justify homosexuality as being “natural”, that is inborn, I would ask: does that justify the effects of my rage - to mention only one, the public insults I have sometimes flung at good friends and decent people? My rage is as inborn in me as same-sex lusts in others; does that mean that it is not a source of evil, or that it does not need to be suppressed? There is such a thing as inborn evil as well as acquired evil; indeed, evil could not be acquired if it did not answer to some previous disposition to receive it.
Every one of us carries some such horror in his or her soul. There is nothing special about homosexuality -that is the specific lie of our age. The amount of attention that we pay to this one sin makes all the others fade from sight; and so we have no time to really look at the moral horrors that underlie our whole life from beginning to end. The whole debate about homosexuality is a complete waste of time. Let those who cannot resist temptation go on as they please. They do not do any more damage than any other kind of sinner - which is not to say that sin does no damage, but that every sin does.
This is the real mystery: that we are all sinners, every one of us, and yet we all know people of whom we can say - that man is a saint; that woman is a heroine. Why is that? Have they, mysteriously, dropped the habit of sin somewhere along the way? They would be the first to tell you that they have not. And even at a slightly lower level, our lives are full of good, kind, decent, unselfish, affectionate people, people we cannot think of as other than good. Each of them has one or more such moral horrors within them; yet, each of them is good. Sometimes the horrors are almost grotesquely visible - and that against a glorious white background. G.K.Chesterton is probably overall the finest human being I ever experienced, a dazzling combination of stratospheric genius, incredible working power, wonderful personality, and amazing humility. And yet his work is sometimes, in the most unexpected places, disfigured by grotesque and profoundly stupid prejudice, most often against Jews, once at least against blacks. His fierce denunciation of Nazism in the last years of his life was one of the finest of many morally fine and just things he did; yet he still carried with him that strange bacillus. The strangest consequence of this is that he tended to lose his wit. He was not only a Jew-basher, but a dull Jew-basher. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, one of the funniest Englishmen of the twentieth century, could not even make a good anti-Semitic joke. The meanest rabble-rousing street comedian had funnier ones. And to make matters even more incomprehensible, he had several Jewish friends, most of them proud and quite aggressive where Jewish matters were concerned. How he could live with them, or they with him, when this was an attitude he kept all his life, is beyond rational understanding.
Yet here is the whole issue of goodness in the fallen human race in one astonishing image. A man can be both good, overwhelmingly and luminously good, and yet have the most mean and disgusting sin as an ineradicable and natural part of his or her make-up. In this homosexuality is no different from rage, other lusts, greed, vanity, envy, cowardice, mendacity, sloth - any of the places of squalor and filth that any honest human being will recognize in him or herself.
For this reason, I am not disposed to treat any homosexual any different than any other person whatsoever, much less to deny that he or she can be an exemplary person. I know at least one living homosexual who is a very attractive human being as well as a writer of genius with a powerful if strangely skewed moral vision. For that matter, I know plenty of dead ones, beginning with Virgil and Plato - names before which every civilized person ought to bow. Dumbledore being an old homosexual does not bother me in the least. It only would if he was, not an old homosexual, but “an old poof” (that’s a quotation) in the style of the execrable painter Francis Bacon and such-like self-degraded, pointlessly angry human ruins.
(As a matter of fact, I have been toying for years with a story idea to do with my Harry-is-gay strand, where a sixteen-year-old Harry would spend weeks nerving himself up, being scared and ashamed, to go up to Mrs.Weasley and say: “I think I may be gay” - only for her to reply something like: “Is that all?” or “Oh, that old thing!”)
I think that the way JKR went about bringing out Dumbledore’s homosexual side is typical of her ignorance of male behaviour, and I have said enough about this matter elsewhere. However, I admit now that I have changed my mind about one matter. JKR did present at least one clear hint that the relationship between Grindelwald and Dumbledore was something else than an ordinary friendship.
As Harry is arguing with Aberforth, he tells the old man that his brother had never got over the shock of Ariana’s death and Grindelwald’s betrayal. He quotes word from Dumbledore that only he, Harry, has ever heard - they were alone in the cave of the Inferi - and which prove that Dumbledore was still eaten by guilt, not only for his sister’s death, but also for Grindelwald’s assault on his brother, a century and more after it happened. Now, we shall assume that Harry has interpreted Dumbledore’s words correctly and that they refer to that; something which is, in any case, confirmed by Dumbledore himself in the King’s Cross chapter. Well, there is something very strange about that reaction. Ask yourselves: suppose that a man I thought a friend suddenly turned against my brother and my sister? I know what I would do. I would not waste time pleading with him: the first thing he would feel is my hands on his throat - or bashing his head against the wall - or whatever was the fastest and most brutal way to stop him. To most normal human beings, family comes first. I have known one or two people who have suffered so much at the hands of their families that they would probably allow them to be tortured without intervening, but that was hardly the situation of the Dumbledores, even at their pitch of lonely misfortune. And any normal person who found a friend, even a close friend, turning against his own brother or sister, would regard the “friend” as a traitor, and, whatever the circumstances, drop him or her without a second thought and place him or her, from henceforth, in their own black book.
There is only one situation where a different reaction is imaginable, and that is where the “friend” in question is considerably more than a friend. In that case, two opposing and equally fundamental loyalties may possibly check each other. It is, again, Victorian melodrama - the young man forced to choose between his family and his love - but at least it does do what I had wrongly denied: it gives a credible grounding to the notion that Dumbledore had a homosexual passion for Grindelwald. It is also typical of the rather lachrymose strand in Dumbledore’s character, that has been coming increasingly to the fore since the conclusion of book 5.
The rest of my criticism stands. The presentation of homosexual passion is astonishingly negative, somewhat inept, and Victorian in the worst sense. It shows that JKR has no ear for the way men speak and think. I have also said why I do not think that it works even as a moral picture. Homosexuality is a sin like another. Men live with it as with any other sin. To present it under this uniquely and melodramatically destructive light is inartistic and ill-thought-out: why should it be more destructive than Harry’s inborn rage, Hermione’s self-righteousness, or Ron’s intellectual sloth and envy, underlain by a deep lack of self-respect? These things are present in the protagonists’ lives; JKR shows them clearly at work; and she shows that they can be damaging. But they do not wreck lives and careers as the disastrous encounter with Grindelwald has permanently blighted Dumbledore’s; nor do they lead to permanent, lachrymose, crippling senses of guilt. We should notice that at the beginning and at the end of the sixth book, Dumbledore commits two suicidally foolish mistakes - putting on the cursed Horcrux, and drinking the water - that lead directly to his death, and that are both clearly connected with that sense of guilt. At the end of the day, we, in this psychological age of ours, can be sure that he is seeking death to escape it. At the very least, this is the same self-regarding attitude that leads him to refuse office which it is his obvious duty to accept. And once we have taken in the whole significance of his guilt, we have to ask: what makes it any worse than anything else? Yes, he has lost a sister. Harry saw Cedric killed in his stead, and knows that every other person who dies at Voldemort’s hands is in some sense a casualty in his war. That does not stop him. I feel that Dumbledore’s sense of guilt is exaggerated, morbid, self-regarding, irrational, and absurd. It may, perhaps, be life-like - I would not know. But it places on a teen-age same-sex pash a weight of meaning that it would not, in the eye of any sane person, bear. And I have to feel that this enormous and melodramatic burden of guilt could not have been conceived around any other sin than what would once have been called a guilty passion. That is why I insist: the negative attitude it shows to a rather ordinary teen-age pash is extraordinary and excessive.
Post-scriptum: to the lurkers and the wunkers
I do not expect honesty from your likes, especially honesty to yourselves. But if you had any real sense of humour, let alone any honesty, you would realize just how ridiculous your repeated references to stalking really are. Who, exactly, is stalking who? It has been over a year since I had some fun at the expense of PirateJenny and her beliefs; and for over a year this person must have regularly spent some of her time lurking on my blog, carefully blinding herself to anything she might find sympathetic or unobjectionable, until she could finally lay her hands on something she could somehow distort and denounce. Does she imagine that I have ever given her and her follies a second thought? If she has been wasting her time here for so long, she should know that I have never once mentioned her since. It has been nearly as long since I drove DreamerMarie to inarticulate rage by pointing out that parricide is not nice; and still she waits for some opportunity to do me some harm. It has been nearly two years since I bounced the vain Queen Pretty Arse from my blog, and more than two years since I gave Waltraute a lesson in invective - in an exchange of pleasantries started by her; and still those words evidently smart. Do you know, ladies, that until yesterday, I had forgotten that any of you was alive? You have, obviously, no honesty, no honour, and no common sense; the way you elaborately and deliberately distort what you read - which makes it perfectly useless to answer any of your lies - proves it beyond debate. But if you had, then the question - Who is stalking who? - would have to reach you where you live. And now some advice: get yourselves a life, the lot of you. One life between so many stalkers does not seem too much to ask. Start doing something interesting, like, I don’t know, watching raisins dry. Anything would be more profitable, more useful, less time-wasting, than to keep stalking someone who hardly notices you exist, and who would be, if anything, rather tempted to arrogance by knowing that you hate him so obsessively. For the hatred of your likes is easily taken as a compliment.