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I wrote, about Rowling's use of stock characters and conventions:
What makes this interesting, to my mind, is that the particular kinds of stocks which are being used are emblematic of a literary approach to social class that is strongly aligned with a certain set of values and mores and judgements, a certain way of viewing the world, and that it is a way of viewing the world that elsewhere in the text, JKR seems to be going very far out of her way to critique and even to deride.
Dicentra asked:
What choice does she have, though?
No choice at all if she wants to write in that particular nostalgic tradition, I agree. But does her decision to write in that nostalgic tradition in the first place insert a certain political bias into the text? I think that it does. I think that JKR tries to combat it, but I don't think that in the end she is completely successful, possibly because much of the appeal of that nostalgic tradition in the first place may well reside in just those values that are embedded within it, values which co-exist rather uneasily with the author's more explicitly-stated progressive bias.
That's where I see a lot of the ambivalence slipping in. I don't think that it's a problem only to be found in the Harry Potter books. I think of it as a problem inherent to many different manifestations of "nostalgia."
Dicentra:
She wants to critique social bias and unenlightened social values, but all she has to work with is a world that isn't ideal, even though the world is of her own creating.
The elements of the world that I was writing about, though, I don't really see as of Rowling's own creating at all. They're not elements that she herself invented. They're the conventions of a particular type of nostalgia, a nostalgia which to some extent I think may come with certain biases and values "hard-wired" in, so to speak.
I do think that Rowling has tried to reduce the bias inherent in the literary conventions that she has chosen to use. She not only emphasizes the theme of the primacy of choice in the affairs of men, but she also puts its articulation in the mouth of Dumbledore, the character most strongly marked as the voice of "Good" in the entire series. The entire SPEW plotline of Book Four is interesting not only for its modernity, but also for its complexity, its fascinating refusal to resolve by novel's end. And I also agree with Naama that Rowling pokes so much fun, and takes such pains to subvert, the "untrustworthy and/or funny foreigners" cliche that the fact that she also makes free use of this literary convention for comedic effect really does lose a lot of its punch.
In the end, though, I do not feel that Rowling completely succeeds in separating the nostalgic tradition to which her writing looks from the political bias which is embedded in that tradition. Others, it would seem, disagree on this point, but I see a great deal of tension in the text, tension between the values it explicitly promotes and those which it implicitly reflects.
As has been said, Harry has limited exposure to the people outside the world of Hogwarts, but he does bump into them occassionally. JKR could have decided to make Stan Shunpike an earnest poet something equally against type, but that's too much granularity for the role he plays.
Alternatively, she could just have refrained from giving him a stock accent.
She did not do so, of course, because such a great part of the series' appeal—for the author, I suspect, as well as for the reader—lies in the cheerful embrace of just that body of nostalgic genre conventions to which Stan Steerpike belongs.
Dicentra:
To make Stan et al. too different from the literary tradition she's plugged into would "feel wrong" in the wrong places.
Yes, precisely! That's just the point I was trying to make. She has chosen to reference a literary tradition that not only upholds, but even requires certain social values to be represented in the text.
If the books didn't have that touch of archaism, then they would lose a great deal of their appeal, IMO. Both Lilac and Darrin have, in the fairly recent past, cited the books' "old-fashioned" qualities as one of the very things that made them like them so much. I am personally convinced that the nostalgic qualities of JKR's writing are one of the main reasons for the series' tremendous popularity.
There is nothing wrong with that. Nostalgia is appealing. It also, however, tends to come complete with a whole lot of political baggage that sits somewhat less comfortably with contemporary progressive values, and that's precisely where I see the inconsistency, and even a certain degree of authorial ambivalence, slipping through the cracks of the text.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on July 24, 2002 1:32 PM
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