~~ "his own little snivellus"...
Jul. 10th, 2003 05:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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sistermagpie's utterly brilliant post-ootp essay on draco, i was initially all impressed because it seemed to be so refreshingly objective and yet not in any way demeaning to harry. people usually either love harry or can't really dig him at all (he's a brat, he's self-absorbed and sulky and arrogant and so on), but as i went on, the greater insights (and the point of the essay) were about draco, who she obviously sees with a clarity borne of love.
and i guess it just makes me wonder, not for the first time, whether the greater clarity and originality of vision comes from love or from distancing oneself from it. i think it's only when you love a character that instead of saying, "he's sulky", for instance, you say he has a "disconnect between who he wants to be and who he is". it's love that lets you -imagine-, trace the reasons behind their behavior, makes you want to explain how -yes-, this is unacceptable, but it's a -sad- thing, it's a sign of a problem, a life gone astray, someone who's lost and unable to figure out how to help themselves. if you don't want to put in the effort to understand someone, that's when you say, "look, he's acting unreasonably". because in the end, no one -is- acting unreasonably, even in their complete lack of -rational- reason, are they. everyone is a person like any other, living a life that's made them into who they are just as inexorably as it's done for everyone else.
i think the best writing, the best understanding, does come from an acknowledgement of commonality, an attempt at empathy. i myself can easily identify with a draco who's the product of a frustrated, feverish imagination, a need to be more than he is-- more loved, more needed. i can empathize with someone's need for attention and approval, their need to reinvent themselves to fight the reality of their defeat, their resentment of their own ineffectualness, their need to shift the blame towards someone else. in the end, we've all got bits of these things, elements of all possible characters, especially archetypically heavy ones, within ourselves. i've always believed love to be a triumph of imagination, a partial recognition of oneself in the other, a sudden flush of understanding, conscious or not. it's this sense that i could be this person that makes people smile, relax around someone, feel close to them. and harry feels he could never be this person, around draco, which is where the antipathy comes from, doesn't it. sort of the anti-identification. you look at someone and you say, "but this is everything that i'm not". and if you feel insecure, if you feel like you're -missing- something, or that you're easily threatened, not settled into your place in the scheme of things-- then you would defend yourself, you would make an enemy and start marking territory, wouldn't you. there is only room for one and never both of you, then.
and what a weird twist it would be, then, to realize that you can share space not just out of some high-minded tolerance of differences but because of a kinship-- a realization that you're actually more alike than you are different. a necessary twist, even.
i agree withsistermagpie, of course, that draco is harry's jungian Shadow, the part of himself he most represses and tries to escape. but i think the most brilliant thing is to imagine draco -as just draco-. as an imaginative, social, emotionally stunted boy who over-compensates for everything and has no clear concept of reality, who has "parents nobody would want" (like the dursleys except not, because they're real, and in a way draco's living harry's nightmare). as much as i -want- draco to be harry's shadow, someone harry needs to acknowledge and accept in order to fully grow as a person himself, i want draco to be a person independently, someone who wouldn't have to be compared to harry. i think that's what one wants when one loves someone, a character or a person.
i'm so totally not like draco, and this makes it a leap of imagination every time i try to understand him. i -have- to understand him to love him, and i have to truly love him to really believe harry needs him, and i need to believe that for reasons i cannot fully fathom all the time (it's just instinctual somehow). a part of me just rebels at the idea of hating -anyone-, any character at all, and my dislike for lucius is rather petty and borne of me resenting him being such a crappy father, not making draco a -successful- cunning smooth dealer but rather an ineffectual, disenfranchised bully. it's easy to say i'm not at all like draco. everyone who even barely knows me would say i'd make a sucky slytherin, and draco's the personification of all things slytherin, supposedly. he's angry and mean-spirited and has flair for making a spectacle of himself and never seems to censor himself even when he really should-- and i'm mostly none of these things-- and yet. and yet it is only by thinking-- yes, i'm none of these things but i -could- be, that i seem to make my peace with what i've actually believed without understanding for long, long stretches of time.
on the one hand, if you ask me, half the time i'd say i've never thought "doomed" characters or unloved characters deserved my preferential treatment for just that reason... and yet... i think of harry as having strong aspects of this-- doomed, unloved, persecuted, and of course loved at the same time. i think it's a mistake to see draco and percy and even sirius' little brother as the ones in "real" pain, as the ones to worry about. even if you say that all these people love and show favoritism for harry-- harry doesn't know it, it's not enough.
if you grow up without love and attention, it's not very easy to suddenly realize you're lucky-- it's easy to place conditions on these things, to say, "you're okay but only if you stay like that". you could say that harry's insensitive and cruel by cutting off seamus, by so easily distrusting dumbledore, by feeling this resentment towards ron-- and yet, harry's a product of his life, too. people may love him but harry's got this shell around him where not everything gets through, where he barricades himself off from people's emotions to a certain extent. he's not going to empathize with someone else's pain unless it's laid out for him like a story, explained-- like sirius and to an extent, snape with the pensieve. everyone may be in pain and alike at the core, but that doesn't mean that people are going to understand each other any better. you can -realize- you're alike, but this realization is not really a sure thing, even if the blatant signs are there. they're ignored by people all the time, as a matter of course.
and yet i agree withsistermagpie (in this as in most things), when she said that unlike with snape, whom harry could get away with either understanding or not, if he leaves school without a better grasp on draco, who's much more parallel to him, everything remains the same, and even if voldemort's defeated, the cycle continues.
and, er... yes, i rather feel like i'm not saying anything useful because my impulse is to step away from the specifics and towards some sort of ideal, especially when that ideal is obvious and hokey like, "empathy is important". mostly, in this case, i feel thatsistermagpie had said everything i could possibly say, except better, so i'm reduced to going, "uh, yeah" and also, "wah, but harry needs wuv too". i get told i'm unusually sweet and naive when i insist that it's perhaps more valid (not that it's easy for me, but that i feel a certain satisfaction when i do try) to look at people as one would want to look at oneself-- that is, without turning away but with a sort of light mockery, with a need to learn to love for what's there instead of hate for what's not.
i think it's not that i'm so sweet and simple but that i simply want a happy ending. i want to be happy and i want everyone else to be happy too-- if anything, because we can't be happy alone or only in our own limited circle of people who never ever contradict us or make us feel like anything but the best. i think if you start off not liking someone and yet grow to understand them and have some affection for them, it's a different sort of relationship than where it was always easy. because then you -challenge- yourself in the process, and maybe realize you're not exactly who you'd always assumed you were. and anytime that happens, one achieves greater consciousness and acquires what is probably a deeper, more true capacity for love.
so yes, i wish for a world where we could love our enemies. who wouldn't? i think i wish that people realized that we are none of us -enemies- to start with, that we are all just people, that our actions aren't entirely borne of free will and are reflections of intent and basic character, and rather are also determined by our backgrounds, our circle of influences, our range of experiences with people and the basic understanding of possibilities. i certainly have people who piss me off, that i would want to lash out at or kick around some, but i don't have -enemies-, because that implies they aren't really -real-, that they're some 2-dimensional antithesis to something i "stand' for.
this is the problem with harry and draco, too. having them -stand- for something demeans their humanity and makes them into mere pawns for memes neither of them asked to be symbols of. and hate does this.
hate tells you that this isn't a -person-, it's a collection of distasteful traits you dislike intensely. hate minimizes, takes away, puts people into boxes that make them less than human, makes them "enemies" and "evil". this is why i have always tended to say evil doesn't exist in some sort of objective sense-- because it's an emotional bias (though obviously, pain and suffering and people hurting people is real). empathy, compassion, understanding, love, all those things, on the other hand-- they're connected in that they allow other people a fullness of existence comparable to ourselves. it's so natural to be stuck in your own head, to think you're the only real person and everything is make-believe. love opens up the world in a way nothing else could-- it expands it by allowing you to feel connected to other people than just yourself. it's sort of all tied up in saying, "this could be me-- but it's -not-". and within appreciating that is probably where love gets born.
and now that i sound like a complete new agey freak (the power of heart! let me just kill myself now), i'll stop.
~~
also... i'm starting to take things i read people saying about luna personally. this is kind of disturbing -.-
sistermagpie's utterly brilliant post-ootp essay on draco, i was initially all impressed because it seemed to be so refreshingly objective and yet not in any way demeaning to harry. people usually either love harry or can't really dig him at all (he's a brat, he's self-absorbed and sulky and arrogant and so on), but as i went on, the greater insights (and the point of the essay) were about draco, who she obviously sees with a clarity borne of love. and i guess it just makes me wonder, not for the first time, whether the greater clarity and originality of vision comes from love or from distancing oneself from it. i think it's only when you love a character that instead of saying, "he's sulky", for instance, you say he has a "disconnect between who he wants to be and who he is". it's love that lets you -imagine-, trace the reasons behind their behavior, makes you want to explain how -yes-, this is unacceptable, but it's a -sad- thing, it's a sign of a problem, a life gone astray, someone who's lost and unable to figure out how to help themselves. if you don't want to put in the effort to understand someone, that's when you say, "look, he's acting unreasonably". because in the end, no one -is- acting unreasonably, even in their complete lack of -rational- reason, are they. everyone is a person like any other, living a life that's made them into who they are just as inexorably as it's done for everyone else.
i think the best writing, the best understanding, does come from an acknowledgement of commonality, an attempt at empathy. i myself can easily identify with a draco who's the product of a frustrated, feverish imagination, a need to be more than he is-- more loved, more needed. i can empathize with someone's need for attention and approval, their need to reinvent themselves to fight the reality of their defeat, their resentment of their own ineffectualness, their need to shift the blame towards someone else. in the end, we've all got bits of these things, elements of all possible characters, especially archetypically heavy ones, within ourselves. i've always believed love to be a triumph of imagination, a partial recognition of oneself in the other, a sudden flush of understanding, conscious or not. it's this sense that i could be this person that makes people smile, relax around someone, feel close to them. and harry feels he could never be this person, around draco, which is where the antipathy comes from, doesn't it. sort of the anti-identification. you look at someone and you say, "but this is everything that i'm not". and if you feel insecure, if you feel like you're -missing- something, or that you're easily threatened, not settled into your place in the scheme of things-- then you would defend yourself, you would make an enemy and start marking territory, wouldn't you. there is only room for one and never both of you, then.
and what a weird twist it would be, then, to realize that you can share space not just out of some high-minded tolerance of differences but because of a kinship-- a realization that you're actually more alike than you are different. a necessary twist, even.
i agree with
sistermagpie, of course, that draco is harry's jungian Shadow, the part of himself he most represses and tries to escape. but i think the most brilliant thing is to imagine draco -as just draco-. as an imaginative, social, emotionally stunted boy who over-compensates for everything and has no clear concept of reality, who has "parents nobody would want" (like the dursleys except not, because they're real, and in a way draco's living harry's nightmare). as much as i -want- draco to be harry's shadow, someone harry needs to acknowledge and accept in order to fully grow as a person himself, i want draco to be a person independently, someone who wouldn't have to be compared to harry. i think that's what one wants when one loves someone, a character or a person. i'm so totally not like draco, and this makes it a leap of imagination every time i try to understand him. i -have- to understand him to love him, and i have to truly love him to really believe harry needs him, and i need to believe that for reasons i cannot fully fathom all the time (it's just instinctual somehow). a part of me just rebels at the idea of hating -anyone-, any character at all, and my dislike for lucius is rather petty and borne of me resenting him being such a crappy father, not making draco a -successful- cunning smooth dealer but rather an ineffectual, disenfranchised bully. it's easy to say i'm not at all like draco. everyone who even barely knows me would say i'd make a sucky slytherin, and draco's the personification of all things slytherin, supposedly. he's angry and mean-spirited and has flair for making a spectacle of himself and never seems to censor himself even when he really should-- and i'm mostly none of these things-- and yet. and yet it is only by thinking-- yes, i'm none of these things but i -could- be, that i seem to make my peace with what i've actually believed without understanding for long, long stretches of time.
on the one hand, if you ask me, half the time i'd say i've never thought "doomed" characters or unloved characters deserved my preferential treatment for just that reason... and yet... i think of harry as having strong aspects of this-- doomed, unloved, persecuted, and of course loved at the same time. i think it's a mistake to see draco and percy and even sirius' little brother as the ones in "real" pain, as the ones to worry about. even if you say that all these people love and show favoritism for harry-- harry doesn't know it, it's not enough.
if you grow up without love and attention, it's not very easy to suddenly realize you're lucky-- it's easy to place conditions on these things, to say, "you're okay but only if you stay like that". you could say that harry's insensitive and cruel by cutting off seamus, by so easily distrusting dumbledore, by feeling this resentment towards ron-- and yet, harry's a product of his life, too. people may love him but harry's got this shell around him where not everything gets through, where he barricades himself off from people's emotions to a certain extent. he's not going to empathize with someone else's pain unless it's laid out for him like a story, explained-- like sirius and to an extent, snape with the pensieve. everyone may be in pain and alike at the core, but that doesn't mean that people are going to understand each other any better. you can -realize- you're alike, but this realization is not really a sure thing, even if the blatant signs are there. they're ignored by people all the time, as a matter of course.
and yet i agree with
sistermagpie (in this as in most things), when she said that unlike with snape, whom harry could get away with either understanding or not, if he leaves school without a better grasp on draco, who's much more parallel to him, everything remains the same, and even if voldemort's defeated, the cycle continues.and, er... yes, i rather feel like i'm not saying anything useful because my impulse is to step away from the specifics and towards some sort of ideal, especially when that ideal is obvious and hokey like, "empathy is important". mostly, in this case, i feel that
sistermagpie had said everything i could possibly say, except better, so i'm reduced to going, "uh, yeah" and also, "wah, but harry needs wuv too". i get told i'm unusually sweet and naive when i insist that it's perhaps more valid (not that it's easy for me, but that i feel a certain satisfaction when i do try) to look at people as one would want to look at oneself-- that is, without turning away but with a sort of light mockery, with a need to learn to love for what's there instead of hate for what's not. i think it's not that i'm so sweet and simple but that i simply want a happy ending. i want to be happy and i want everyone else to be happy too-- if anything, because we can't be happy alone or only in our own limited circle of people who never ever contradict us or make us feel like anything but the best. i think if you start off not liking someone and yet grow to understand them and have some affection for them, it's a different sort of relationship than where it was always easy. because then you -challenge- yourself in the process, and maybe realize you're not exactly who you'd always assumed you were. and anytime that happens, one achieves greater consciousness and acquires what is probably a deeper, more true capacity for love.
so yes, i wish for a world where we could love our enemies. who wouldn't? i think i wish that people realized that we are none of us -enemies- to start with, that we are all just people, that our actions aren't entirely borne of free will and are reflections of intent and basic character, and rather are also determined by our backgrounds, our circle of influences, our range of experiences with people and the basic understanding of possibilities. i certainly have people who piss me off, that i would want to lash out at or kick around some, but i don't have -enemies-, because that implies they aren't really -real-, that they're some 2-dimensional antithesis to something i "stand' for.
this is the problem with harry and draco, too. having them -stand- for something demeans their humanity and makes them into mere pawns for memes neither of them asked to be symbols of. and hate does this.
hate tells you that this isn't a -person-, it's a collection of distasteful traits you dislike intensely. hate minimizes, takes away, puts people into boxes that make them less than human, makes them "enemies" and "evil". this is why i have always tended to say evil doesn't exist in some sort of objective sense-- because it's an emotional bias (though obviously, pain and suffering and people hurting people is real). empathy, compassion, understanding, love, all those things, on the other hand-- they're connected in that they allow other people a fullness of existence comparable to ourselves. it's so natural to be stuck in your own head, to think you're the only real person and everything is make-believe. love opens up the world in a way nothing else could-- it expands it by allowing you to feel connected to other people than just yourself. it's sort of all tied up in saying, "this could be me-- but it's -not-". and within appreciating that is probably where love gets born.
and now that i sound like a complete new agey freak (the power of heart! let me just kill myself now), i'll stop.
~~
also... i'm starting to take things i read people saying about luna personally. this is kind of disturbing -.-
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-10 08:29 am (UTC)Thank you so much, especially, for what you said about Harry because it's true I did tend to look at him through Draco's eyes a lot and didn't give as much thought to things from his pov, probably because I felt well, everybody is doing that anyway (resentful Draco sulk).
I think you've rather put your finger on exactly why I fear for Harry as well in this book. Not because I think he's a jackass by any means, because he's just as confused and in pain as Draco. Yes, he's got all these people who care about him but so far none of them appear able to really help him break out of his own vicious cycle. Harry has grown up in a situation where it was him against the world, with only the idealized memory of his parents to hold on to. It's natural for him to sort people--kids especially--into those like himself and those like Dudley. It's not, imo, that Harry is truly arrogant or bullying, it's that he's seen himself as the victim for so long (with good reason) he naturally hasn't acclimated the parts of him who have become more confident, the leader, the aggressor. (This is part of why I've never really supported Dumbledore's idea that Harry shouldn't have grown up as TBWL, as if this would have swollen his head.) Having never had real parents, how can Harry know what he means to these other people? Aren't they all drawn to him mostly because he's TBWL after all? Aren't they all still expecting him to save them where a parent should be the one doing the saving?
I feared for Harry in this book not because he didn't appreciate the people who loved him, because I think he basically does. I feared because I didn't see any adult who seemed able to give him the stability he really needed. It's like...one of the ways I find that Harry is very different from me is that he rails against who he is, has anger against things that can't be changed. But apart from Snape (who obviously brings his own problems!) most of the adults seemed to egg Harry on in this feeling. Except for Ginny (who just always seemed so artificial to me I felt like Harry should naturally disregard anything she said and do the opposite, no matter how reasonable she was!) everyone seemed to reflect back at Harry his own sense of injury. The adults all felt guilty about having to put this one him, about choices they made that led to the current situation. When Harry pushed them in anger they fell right over. That's what makes me worry that Harry's misguided impulses could take him over without him realizing it. Harry had good reason, in his mind, to believe he had to take care of things himself so he tried to do that.
Harry has essentially been a warrior all his life--this seems to have been his way of dealing with his situation, while imagination was Draco's, imo. While Draco could escape from himself by imagining the way things could be Harry very much needed a stable idea of the way things truly were: that he was the good guy, unjustly mistreated, who had perfect parents. But the adults around him don't seem to be dealing with that warrior, really. They don't quite want to accept the angry young man that they've helped to create. They seem to feel they should keep him out of the fight as long as possible, but Harry has always fought. He's just always been an army of one. Unfortunately in OotP I felt like he still was leading his own private army. Rather than taking his place in something bigger, something that might have given him more security, he was still the outlaw, though this time with followers.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-11 09:19 am (UTC)and i love draco as the Fool, the jester. he could be, he really could be, he's just... too caught up in being harry to be himself. wah.