~~ "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: 2003-07-11 11:19 am (UTC)But now here you just brought up something that suddenly seems really important: Does Draco have an inner life? In canon he seems deliberately drawn to not have one--sometimes it's hard to imagine he even exists when Harry's not there.
I agree with all you said about Draco and solitary pursuits, and flying and Harry sensing showmanship when he sees it. But that suggests another huge conflict inside Draco. He's so very social, often described as not only being with friends but with a crowd of students, the more the better. The one time he's alone he calls out to the Trio (despite being alone in the woods where it's 3 against 1). Yet I do still see him as essentially isolated and probably having had a lonely childhood. The times we see him with his parents Lucius is discouraging connection: in B&B Lucius shows displeasure at just about everything he says and in GoF we see Draco knows how to be seen and not heard in public. In CoS he's told to stay at school for Christmas, something he mocked as being a sign of being unwanted the year before, IIRC.
It's like he's the character who wants most desperately to connect with people, yet he's also the one who can't connect at all (whereas Harry can). When he tries it's both fake and real at the same time. He's not honestly offering to share himself with anyone (I don't think he knows how), but he desperately wants a connection. That's why, I guess, I can't help but find his attempts endearing: Coming into Harry's car on the train like a king offering an alliance, offering to put in a good word for Snape to get him a better job, laughing at every joke Snape makes in class (yes, I think that's as much for Snape's benefit as Draco's own joy at seeing Harry humiliated).
I don't think Draco's as shallow as JKR probably thinks he is. I think he is essentially aware of his own fakery, though he spends a lot of time running away from it. His "real" feelings probably trouble him and just seem like weaknesses he has to work harder to get rid of. So I think he's kind of aware there's more to him without knowing exactly who he really is.
I'm struck by the thought of Draco finding freedom. I agree it's not through flying--that is a show, something he worked hard at to show to his father and his instructors, I'd guess. When flying alone I imagine Harry freeing his mind and giving in to the sensation. Draco I think would be imagining some context in which he was flying that included other people and probably cheering. So where does he find freedom--if he even wants it? Perhaps what he wants is not freedom but connection. After all, isn't that what he's always boasting he has, despite all the evidence to the contrary? That he's so connected to the Malfoys, to Slytherin, to his father, to tradition? He's very sensitive to rejection, so it kind of makes sense he wants a huge crowd. And I do believe the crowd is drawn by something real in him. As I said to
In a way, I feel like it's in the moments he's putting on the biggest show that he's sharing himself the most because this is something he can actually offer other people that they seem to like and makes him momentarily preferred to Harry. It's funny...the books deals a lot with the cult of celebrity but this is part of that as well. Once again Harry and Draco make up two halves to a whole. Harry is a real person who feels totally disconnected to his public persona. He rejects anyone who only wants that fake version of him and insists on being true to his real self. Draco, otoh, is more at home onstage than off, which is just as much a part of being a celebrity.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-11 03:54 pm (UTC)i love the idea that what draco wants is not freedom but connection. there's just something so -right- about it. so yes, it also makes sense that he's most at home on stage and yet he's lonely and probably most of all because he doesn't admit things to himself and ends up never actually being able to -realize- what he actually -wants- in terms clear enough to help him, maybe.
and every time i think like that, i wish someone wrote a fic that was psychologically true to some sort of thesis about these characters, and not just trying to achieve "lift-off" so to speak, h/d in the flesh. i wouldn't even care if h/d didn't happen if you could have psychological growth and development happen, if these two could just grow up without breaking somehow, could realize their reality, or something, and hopefully realize each -other's- reality.
that would be harder than just getting them to shag, especially since neither of them seem the type for long heart-to-heart talks or anything, but....
sigh.
i think in a way, they would both have to change in strange directions for friendship and empathy to suddenly flower between them. even if harry realizes that slytherins aren't all that evil is cracked up to be, he still basically -dislikes- draco's affectations and cruel streak and sneering and they've got this -history- and neither of them are good at expressing their deepest selves or anything. in a way, they're so close, but in another, they're on different edges of a huge divide with no way to cross.
i think this is where canon harry ends, btw, and fanon harry begins. i think i can almost -see- it-- this is how far canon harry would go, and he would go no farther. it maybe be -good- to give people second chances, to get over your prejudices, but like with snape-- harry's just as stubborn, you know-- you only go so far. if you take away draco's annoying evilness and slytherinness, you're left with apathy, you know? you'd need some sort of -reason- for something more. something that isn't just a possibility, something that entices, something that -clicks-, that -helps- rather than just having a use. a positive quality that would -appeal- to harry.
this reminds me of the idea that ron harry and hermione became friends 'cause of fighting the troll together-- realizing they could help each other, realizing they had some sort of instrinctive loyalty to each other, something that told them, for no good reason, i -care- about this person even if i don't have a reason to yet.
and people say, but hate and love are flip-sides of the same coin, but that's just bullshit.
we hate passionately and then we realize we -don't-, never have, it's a mistaken emotion, so that's okay. but if you -seriously dislike- someone, can't stand their mannerisms, feel nothing but misery coming from their direction-- that's not secretly love, that's pain. there's passion there, yes, but passion doesn't translate to understanding or empathy, only sex and conflict and power games.
sigh.
in fanon, draco challenges harry-- draco is the truth-teller, he confronts harry on more than the level of stupid taunts and rhymes. and harry -needs- that, needs someone who will pay attention to him and call him on his bullshit and yet isn't his -friend-, won't sugar-coat things, won't take it easy on him but will -care- about him. i dunno. but canon draco isn't like that. he needs harry just as much as harry needs him, and neither of them can make the first move and harry is just getting deeper and deeper into his own little world of despair and war and struggle and draco's beginning to get lost in it too, and... in the end, this is harry's journey and he will be the hero because he will save himself, basically. sigh.