Virtually all tragedians, one might say, use these formal elements; for in fact every drama alike has spectacle, character, plot, diction, song, and reasoning. But the most important of them is the structure of the events: [t]ragedy is not an imitation of persons, but of actions and of life….[T]he plot is the source and (as it were) the soul of tragedy; character is second.
–Aristotle, The Poetics
Boy meets girl.
Boy meets girl.
Boy meets girl.
Boy meets girl.
Boy meets girl.
Boy meets girl.
–William Faulkner, drunk and alone in Hollywood at the end of his career
The premise of this paper is that Aristotle has it more or less correct. In the creation of a work of narrative art, plot beats character by a nose in its importance, and the rest–diction, song, spectacle–is all secondary. And I’ve read a fair number of books by a fair number of people, and it’s my firm belief that speaking solely from this context, the inescapable here-and-now that we all live in, no one–no writer, through all the years and all the pages I’ve turned over, no one–stays truer to Aristotle’s teaching than J. K. Rowling has done in Harry Potter. What Aristotle doesn’t mention is the vast unfairness of time for storytellers, the ability of only the most contemporaneous works to really grip and hold our attention in a plot. Lizzie Bennet can be admired, loved, respected, and lusted after, and on the strength of her character and her gloriously simple trajectory she will be beloved for all time far more than is Ms. Rowling’s relatively convoluted, characterless affair. But again: we live in the here and now, and what Lizzie Bennet can’t do is strike up against our present day. It’s only when confronted with a magnificent piece of plotting that is very much of its moment–Presumed Innocent comes to mind, or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy–that we see what the hell Aristotle’s talking about, the way these tales grab us by the lapels and won’t let go. Lizzie’s corset won’t let her do that. And the scarcity of our chances to have such things happen to us, to be utterly consumed by a book, has much to do with how difficult it is to do: drink may have broken him, but it was the challenges of plot that made no less a writer than Faulkner despair above. And maybe Rowling’s primacy on this front is nothing but a condemnation of our luke-warm-water literary times, but I don’t think so. What follows is a discussion of a few of the things that to my way of thinking, Rowling does ludicrously, unerringly right. Fair warning, all of the examples that follow are taken from the final book, so if you haven’t read it, stop now.
I’m sure that those crazy Brits, who like to bet on outlandish things, had a very profitable line going on who would be the first meaningful character to die in the seventh book of Harry Potter. I’m sure Hagrid was near the top, likewise McGonagall, or maybe if Rowling was going to just ease in to the killing someone more minor, a Tonks or one of those Patils. But the character who DID end up dying first (in truly ignominious fashion) was simultaneously unexpected, to the degree that I’m not even sure she would have been listed on the betting lines, horrific (perhaps as a consequence), and in retrospect a past-perfect choice. I’m referring to Hedwig, Harry’s tireless, charismatic, aesthetically-pleasing, and previously indestructible owl. Fan fiction the world over trends towards sentimentality, focusing on the satisfactions of Ron and Hermione hooking up, or Harry winning more trophies, all of it equating with the wish fulfillment of the writer, the hope that in the author’s masturbation we might all find pleasure. Rowling, on the other hand, is a merciless surgeon in the face of the gangrene of sentiment: if it will save the whole, if it will achieve her goal, then she lops off the limb with a flourish. If the pain will be healing, then she does it without novocaine: she bundles Hedwig’s corpse into a trash can and blows it to smithereens. There’s something almost perverse, something sadistic about this construction, to build up a character so beloved, so pointlessly attractive and selflessly useful, only to commit such atrocities upon it, while simultaneously managing to distill the Michael-Vick-gets-two-years-in-the-big-house-for-killing-dogs nature of our times and throw that acid right in our faces. The talent it takes, after six books stuffed with material, to do something so ghastly is nearly unfathomable.
Rowling is, like most writers with truly gripping plots, pretty theme-averse. WYSIWYG is very much her aesthetic. And yet as a person in time, she’s said that the two events that were affecting her emotionally in beginning to construct her story were the death of her mother and the raising of her young daughter. It’s pretty easy to see these events broken in shards and seeded throughout the series. But two places where they reappear in the seventh book are instructive. The first occurs in a rousing, completely unexpected, fairly shattering argument between Lupin and Harry: in a book where he’s exiled, tortured, betrayed, and ultimately killed, nothing gets Harry madder than Lupin (another endlessly good character) and his suggestion that he’s going to fight for Harry’s cause rather than stay home and be with his family. It’s an argument that is unexpected–one would think Harry would want all the help he could get, especially from an old friend like Lupin–and the heat with which Harry pursues it is even more surprising, but in retrospect, again, makes perfect sense, and stays true to Rowling’s theme of the irreducible importance of loving family. And to invoke the betting line idea again: I don’t know who would have been the leading candidate to kill Bellatrix Lestrange, but I’m pretty sure it would not have been fussy, domestic, doting Molly Weasley, whose great achievement in spellcraft previously had been something in the cooking line. But here again, Rowling is bringing forth her personal theme of Mommy Superior–and like the PETA thing with Hedwig, a theme very much of our time–and bringing out an unexpected and yet perfectly reasonable side of a character we’ve known for ages. When one’s primary themes are kept consistent throughout, and yet their reiteration still manages to come in the form of genuine Aristotelean reversals…it’s a literary magic trick of jaw-dropping facility.
Finally, another literary construction that generally makes me tired: symbols. Symbols are like themes in that they’re of questionable benefit, but unquestionably have the potential to derail a good plot. I went to watch The Seagull the other day, and it’s a great story, no mistake, but every time that damn seagull showed up I gritted my teeth and just waited for it to be over. Scholars love that shit, but it’s generally work more intellectual than I want to bring to a drama, to involving myself in a story. So I’m not a big fan of symbols. But I do love Harry’s Invisibility Cloak, which is Rowling’s self-conscious entry into the world of symbology–so self-conscious, in fact, that the image associated with the triad of the Deathly Hallows is on the spine of the book. And Rowling’s assertion, through Dumbledore, that of the Hallows it’s not the all-powerful weapon nor the embodiment of memory that carries power, that relatively speaking the predominance goes to the Cloak and its humble, work-a-day utility at getting one into and out of scrapes, its well-understood and yet utterly fantastical ability to absent one’s physical self from the surrounding world, to drop out of the matrix for a time…well, that does turn out to be a fairly rich statement. And yet that damn Cloak figured in so many of Harry’s adventures, in his continuing survival, that sure, it seems reasonable after the fact to say that it’s the most valuable thing he owns, but in-place it’s merely a plot contrivance of Rowling’s that works for her from the first book onwards. Rowling never overdoes it on the intellectual side of literature, but what’s amazing is how much she can pack into her work while having her eye always, unfailingly on the ball.
One more quote to round this out, and then I promise I’ll stop with them. This is from the first speech of Shakespeare’s Henry V:
O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
…But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that hath dar’d
On this unworthly scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
Entertainment has changed forms a lot lately. Its rate of change only seems to be increasing. By most estimations, it’s late afternoon in the life of the novel: I get the sense that most chic, smart-glassesed latte-drinkers would just as soon put the thing out to pasture in favor of the blog. But let me paint you a picture I wish I had been able to take: I got to the bookstore selling the seventh book a little late, about half an hour after it had gone on sale. Right outside the store there were three young girls, all somewhere in their teens, sitting on a bench waiting for the bus. All three had big blue balloons tied to their wrists that they’d obviously received from the celebratory bookstore. But they floated there almost forlornly, the acme of afterthoughts, because all celebration was distinctly at an end. All three girls were positively ferocious in their intensity as they stared at the small books in their laps. They did not look like they were having a good time, particularly; their faces weren’t wreathed with happy smiles for this long-awaited day. Nor were they enchanted, reminiscing about happy days they spent in Harry’s golden realms when they were younger. What they were was rapt. For all the rantings about the Rowling money machine, and the implications of Chris Columbus’s slimy hands slithering their saccharine path over the body of this work, these girls were not riveted by the hand of Big Brother, or Big Money, or anyone else but the hand of this mousy little Pom, a craftswoman non pareil and an icy-hearted murderer, a woman with jaw-dropping talent for doing good work at a difficult task and having that work impart that peculiarly human and inimitable elixir of narrative pleasure. If ever in my life I get to see a scene like that again, I can only presume my heart will overflow at the beautiful humanity of it, and I will exhaust my superlatives once again singing the praises of the author. But I don’t think I will. Rowling is a one-off for my lifetime; I’m just glad to have been here.
|
rue on September 20th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
Does Ms Rowling’s adherence to Plot Uber Alles honestly make her at all influential? Another essay published here pointed out quite correctly that only the most fanatical of fanatics remembers each title and where it appears in the sequence, and I would add from personal experience and anecdotal evidence, this translates to an inability to remember what exactly the plot of each installment was. After all, each title does in fact pertain to the pages it represents, and I find it both telling and funny that an author so devoted to plot could create seven that were at the same time all-consuming and ultimately forgettable. It also says to me that it will not be her plots that exert influence over future generations of writers.
What, then, do we take away from these pillars of the publishing industry? The answer, surprisingly enough, is the characters. (It must be noted here that I consider Hogwarts itself to be a character because of how helpful and animate it was for an inanimate object) For the life of me, I cannot remember what happened in book 6 or what it was even called, but Harry, Hagrid, Dumbledore, Voldemort, Ron, Hermione, and Snape will linger for quite some time. Is even that enough to make their creator “influential”?
After all, some of the greatest novels are ones in which very little happens but the characters live on. “Crime and Punishment” springs to mind, as does “Anna Karenina”. These are both immortal works with enduring characters, and plots that move as quickly as molasses in a Siberian winter. In contrast with the Russians, we have the books of Rowling’s countryman Charles Dickens, in which things never stop happening, and yet, as with the Potter series, we are far more likely to remember Oliver and his request, or Miss Havisham and her house, rather than all of the myriad events surrounding and perpetrated by them.
What, then, separates these giants from the author in question? Regardless of each individual’s monetary success, their true legacy lies in that one word: influence. As each new generation examines the works of the past, it is works like these that leave a mark, and for good reason: their voices were new and unique, their characters and stories resonated profoundly with the age from which they were born, and maintained continuing relevance through their universal truths about human nature. The prose is elegant and complements the story - it doesn’t slavishly lurch after it like a three-legged dog behind a neglectful master.
Which brings me to the Kings Cross scene. Although future authors may try to imitate Rowling’s style (which is what, exactly? I can think of no particularly Rowlingish phrase or notion, and find myself instead longing for the style of Susanna Clarke) or borrow elements of the world she created and may do so with artistic merit, there would be no excuse for a replay of this Dumbledore-Ex-Machina. Say what you will about her characters and plotting; this horrifyingly trite scene was one massive and blatant device to tie up loose ends that the hands of a defter author could easily have woven seamlessly into the tapestry, rather than giving us these awkward bows. That these are works for children is no excuse. For such a pro-plot writer, she managed to mangle the plot and even a character rather than finding a way to reveal these plot points in a surprising and inevitable manner within the story as it stood, which is borderline amateurish and not something we should be teaching our children.
We will feel her presence for quite some time, I have no doubt, and only time will tell exactly how influential she truly will be, but I do hope that future artists draw from other sources first.
StupidHead on October 11th, 2007 at 11:22 am
I guess first of all I have to disagree with your assertion that the truest measure of a writer’s success is influence, or influence at least as you narrowly define it: you say both that “it will not be her plots that exert influence over future generations of writers” and that although “time will tell exactly how influential she truly will be…I do hope that future artists draw from other sources first.” Your definition of influence seems to focus exclusively on Rowling’s impact on future writers, which seems to me fundamentally flawed: Rowling isn’t writing for future writers, she’s writing for readers, both past and present. Monetary success, you’re right, is no measure of influence, although in Rowling’s case her tremendous success does point to both her tremendous number of readers, and the tremendous cultural influence she currently wields and will continue to wield. Rowling certainly might go the way of any number of other plot-driven novelists of the 18th and 19th centuries–see Samuel Richardson, who once set Britain on fire with now-mercifully-obscure novels like Pamela–but for the next 50 to 100 years, artists won’t be able to HELP but be influenced by Rowling because EVERYONE will be influenced by her. She has planted her thumb upon our collective consciousness but good, and the print will take a long, long time to disappear.
But the reason for the extreme impact that she’s had on the cultural present–the reason she was able to push her thumb so hard–has everything to do with the collision between plot and character. Elsewhere in the section of The Poetics that I quoted, Aristotle’s clear that the competition between plot and character is a very, very near thing, and both will go a great distance towards making a meaningful work. Your comparison with Dickens is an instructive one in this regard: certainly, Miss Havisham and Oliver are memorable (although “Please Sir, I want some more” is more plotty than character-y, in my highly unscientific estimation), as are Micawber, Uriah Heep, Gradgrind, Fagin and Sykes. But in my view (again, unscientific), the Dickens work that has the greatest lasting cultural impact is also one of his most plot-driven: A Christmas Carol. (And let me just say that there’s more to plot than a situation where “things never stop happening”: hockey players and fencers move breathtakingly fast, but ideally none of that motion is wasted, and it’s all focused on a goal that has nothing to do with the movement per se. Flailing around, throwing grenades to make things interesting, is the opposite of the plottist’s talents.) It’s not that Ebeneezer Scrooge is a forgettable character–he’s not at all, and that’s why when you have plot and character together you really win–but I think the enduring popularity of that work as opposed to novels like Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend that are better works by nearly any measure speaks to the correctness of what Aristotle is saying. We love character, and diction, and spectacle…but plot holds us like no other.
And the plottist for this day and age that held us like no other is Ms. Rowling, for my money. You’re perfectly right to say that you can’t remember the various events of book 5 versus book 6, but speaking for myself, I remember hauntingly well the scene at the end of one of them (or maybe it was book 4) where Harry, full of impotent anger and grieving for yet another friend or relative that had been killed, runs into Luna Lovegood putting up signs requesting that people give back all the things they’d stolen from her over the previous academic year. It was such a supremely odd moment–what a thing to pause Rowling’s narrative freight train for; I’m certain it won’t make it to the movie–but for me at least it was memorable because of that combination of superficial wrongness and its greater spiritual rightness. In a series with so much that was so huge in scope, that jewelbox moment of human ugliness and a graceful response to it was telling, and lovely, and a wonder few other literary artists I know are capable of. Another comparison: although there’s no doubt Jonathan Strange is a marvellous book, and there’s no doubt poor Rowling’s prose has nothing like the panache of Clarke’s, what Strange offers is a viewport into a richly crafted, distinctly alternative world, and a series of strange and unsettling events that fit together into a narrative whole. What Rowling offers is a world not so much alternative as accessory, one that’s so sensible and believable they can make a damn theme park out of it, but that world absolutely doesn’t dominate her story. Her story dominates her story, to a degree that just isn’t true for folks like Dick and Gaiman and Clarke. And I certainly hope that the reading masses of the future have room for these latter writers, as their worlds are exquisite. But just like Austen, just like Conan Doyle, the future will have time for J. K. Rowling.
|
|