Harry Potter Has Many Feelings

Harry Potter is an ordinary teenage boy, with one difference.  He feels things.  His scar hurts.  It hurts a lot.  And every time his scar hurts, his glasses get pinchy.  Because Harry Potter is the Boy Who Feels Two Things.

Spoiler-free examples:

p. 21:  . . . Harry, whose sadness mixed with a sense of humiliation . . .

p. 40:  Harry was embarrassed and astonished himself.

p. 41: . . . said Harry, torn between annoyance and a desire to laugh . . .

p. 181: . . . while inside him a kind of quiet eruption sent joy and grief thundering in equal measure through his veins.  [Ugh.]

p. 206: . . . their expressions reflected the mingled shock and gratitude he felt.

p.326:  He did not want his excited trepidation tainted with resentment.  [Without resentment, that's just one emotion, right?  No.  Excited trepidation.  Tricky!]

p. 327: . . . he felt a little lurch of apprehension and anticipation.

p. 362: . . . hardly knowing whether he was trying to hold in his anger or protect himself from the weight of his own disillusionment.

p. 368:  All the same, a little more fear leavened his exhilaration . . . [Shockingly, this takes place during Passover, when we feel only unleavened fear.]

p. 396:  "Fine," said Harry, half amused, half irritated.

p. 508:  Harry met her eyes with a mixture of defiance and shame.

 I mentioned in a previous post J.K. Rowling's prose style, which started out barely tolerable and got worse with each book, perhaps because she forced herself to knock them out so rapidly.  Consider this a simultaneous expression of annoyance mixed with more annoyance.  When characters feel two things simultaneously, neither emotion makes much impact on the reader.  Readers can figure out how a character feels in any given situation if you have well-defined characters acting realistically.  The English language doesn't have a lot of subtle words for emotions, but it has a lot of verbs, so let us use our brains a little and extrapolate motivation from action.  Or write in Russian, it has tons of emotions.  Japanese seems to have a lot, too, and I think at some point every single one of them has been displayed on a game show.  Japanese people have an emotion that encompasses saltiness, fear of lions and a desire to win.

 Or, if you want to exhaustively describe someone's inner life, create a timeline of emotion.  I've never been half amused, half irritated all in one go.  One feeling flows into another, following certain channels previously carved into my mind.  Henry James set most of his novels in other peoples' heads, but he created little stories out of their interior struggles, rather than just tagging a line of dialogue with two adjectives.  Daniel Radcliffe can figure out how to say this shit in the movie without Rowling beating us over the head with, "Harry is angry!  Also, he's sad!"

In conclusion and in summary, I feel conflicted about this subject.  On the one hand, this style of writing is insulting to the reader.  On the other hand, maybe the Harry Potter reader deserves to be insulted.  But if it were written less insultingly, no insult would be necessary.  Let's not head any further down that path.  Unlike J.K. Rowling's prose and Celine Dion's heart, I won't go on forever.

Technorati Tags: books, writing, J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, emotion, Daniel Radcliffe, potions, lotions, love

Comments

[Heather]

Thank you for being possibly the only person I know to support my trepidation and apprehension about ever reading these books, which I don't have much interest in doing. One might even say you're protecting me from the weight of my own disillusionment.

[¡Jeremy!]

You just have to hold out a little while longer. There are only two more movies to go, and then everyone will forget about Harry Potter. In fact, even after reading one of the books, you're unlikely to remember much of it. Most of each book is just waiting around for the next action set piece, and anything that happens in one book happens again in all the others. If anyone tries to convince you to read them, suggest that maybe you did and forgot.

[Heather]

Yeah, that's a good idea. I actually did get dragged against my will to one of the movies (something about a cauldron? a goblet?), and all I can remember was some kids flying around on broomsticks, and intense neck pain (it was a regular format movie projected onto a domed Imax theater).

[¡Jeremy!]

Oh, the one with the cauldron and the goblet? That's, um, that one is, I'm gonna say it's the sixth book. The one where Harry fights Voldemort.

[Heather]

Of all the words I've ever heard in my entire life, I think "Voldemort" has the lowest ratio of "I know what it means" to "times I've heard it."

[¡Jeremy!]

Roughtly translated, it means Dracula von Fangenbat.