Harry Potter's Bookshelf (5 page)

The perspective of these books splits the difference between the first person and third person omniscient perspectives. What this split means in practical terms is that we see all the action in the books as if there were a house-elf sitting on Harry’s shoulder with a minicam. This obliging elf can also tell us everything Harry is thinking and feeling in addition to showing us what he sees around him. We don’t see any more than Harry sees (hence the “limited” in limited omniscient), but because we’re not restricted to Harry’s narration, it
seems
as if we’re seeing a larger bit of the story than if Harry just told it himself.

Emma
is told from the same perspective, if we less obviously identify with Emma. The house-elf in this story is always in the room or on the grounds with Emma but isn’t necessarily looking over her shoulder. (Sometimes we get to view the drama or conversation from the ceiling, for instance.) We do get to peer in her ear, however, and know her mind, so the effect on us is much the same, only even stronger than in Harry Potter. We think we’re seeing everything because Emma isn’t telling us the story, but what we’re not seeing—namely, what is happening outside of Emma’s view or of her understanding—is, alas, where the
real
story is happening.

This last bit of
seeming
is critical because it is our confusion on this point that allows for what literary geeks call “narrative misdirection.” All “narrative misdirection” amounts to really is our being suckered into believing—because the story is not being told by Harry himself—that we are seeing the story as God (or as the omniscient, plotting writer) sees it. Of course this isn’t the case, but over the course of the tale as we look down on Harry and friends (and enemies) from “on high”—even if “on high” means only from a few feet over Harry’s head—we begin to think we have a larger perspective than we do.

This trick works because we like Harry and sympathize with him and his struggles. In short, we begin to identify with how Harry thinks and feels, and, because Harry is not telling the story, we think we have arrived at this position of sympathy and identification with the hero because of our unprejudiced view.

When you’ve arrived at this position—and, we all do—Rowling has you wrapped up. She can take you anywhere she wants to take you and make you think almost anything she wants about any character because, by and large, what Harry thinks is at this point what we believe.

Did you think Professor Snape was a servant of the Dark Lord in
Sorcerer’s Stone
? I did. I swallowed Harry’s conviction that Snape was evil and made it my own belief. I had all the information that pointed to Professor Quirrell as the black hat—Ms. Rowling plays by the rules—but I shelved that information as I rushed through the underground obstacles with Ron and Hermione in support of Harry to get to the Mirror of Erised and Snape. Severus, of course, wasn’t there; and he turned out, in the world-turned-upside-down denouement (when Dumbledore tells us how God sees it . . . ), to have been a white hat, despite appearances.

This was possible because of our identification with the orphan boy living under the stairs who was horribly mistreated by his aunt and uncle. We sympathized with him and took his view as our own, though it wasn’t his view or an all-knowing one. Pretty embarrassing, but Ms. Rowling uses this same trick in every book—and nowhere more brilliantly than in
Half-Blood Prince
, which we will come back to shortly.

Reading
Emma
, the “best twist ever in literature,” we’re snookered the same way. Unless you’re much better than I am at this sort of thing, you believed that Frank Churchill was very much in pursuit of Emma and that Mr. Knightley had some kind of interest in Harriet Smith. When we learn about Frank and Jane’s secret wedding, because we’ve been wrapped in Emma’s musing while thinking we are seeing the scene as it really is, we’re floored.

Rowling uses this misdirection trick most brilliantly in her sixth novel because by the time
Half-Blood Prince
opens we’ve been fooled five times. How she did it is fascinating. First, she turned off the voice we’d become used to hearing. Instead of a house-elf with minicam on Harry’s shoulder, we had an elf on the Muggle Prime Minister’s shoulder reading his mind in chapter one and another on Bellatrix’s shoulder in chapter two. By the time we got to Harry in chapter three, we were ready to resume our comfortable position on our friend’s shoulder—a perspective from someone we like.

But for you hard-core readers determined not to identify with Harry, Ms. Rowling had another hook to suck you into delusion with the rest of us. For twenty-eight of the thirty chapters, everyone thought Harry a nutcase for believing Draco was the Death Eater and that Snape was helping him with his mission from the Dark Lord. If we were resistant to believing Harry to be right in these beliefs, we were in good company: Ron, Hermione, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, even Albus Dumbledore also thought Harry just as determined to believe the worst of Malfoy and Snape.

But then, of course, events confirm everything Harry thought since the book’s beginning! Malfoy was on a suicide mission from the Dark Lord! Snape was his willing comrade and a man capable of killing the beloved headmaster who appears more than a little Christlike! And everyone in a wave in the infirmary conclave around Bill’s broken body ends up apologizing to Harry for doubting him and for believing the best of others like Dumbledore when they should have been hating Snape and Malfoy. Harry is a prophet!

You’re a better reader than I am if the traction of this current didn’t pull you off your feet and send you downstream. This isn’t just “narrative misdirection.” This is literary judo, and Ms. Rowling has a black belt, third dan, in this martial art, I think.

If you don’t know anything about judo or its cousin aikido, let me explain what I mean. The point of these martial arts is to use the force or direction of the opponent to subdue him or her. If someone tries to punch or kick you, the judo response is to “encourage” him to continue in his unbalanced direction and lock him up. Ms. Rowling’s judo move is to get us leaning exactly the way we want and then push us over in that direction.

We began the sixth story as careful readers who had been duped by and large five times. We’d all taken oaths, publicly and privately, not to be fooled a sixth time. Everyone else in the book was on our side. “Sure, Harry,” pat on head, shared glance with Dumbledore and Hermione, “we know. Draco’s the youngest Death Eater ever and you know best about Snape—like all the other times you’ve been right about Snape. Which would be ‘never, ever, right about Snape.’” As much as we love Harry, we were not going to kick ourselves again at book’s end for buying into Harry’s jaundiced view. We leaned way back from Harry.

But he was right! And everybody that was with us in leaning away from Harry was on the floor apologizing for not trusting in his discernment. This is the crucial difference between the ending of
Half-Blood Prince
and every previous Harry Potter book. In every other book’s finale we swore we wouldn’t identify with Harry’s view again. We took solemn oaths that
next time
we’d be more like Hermione and we’d see this as one of Harry’s mistakes, his “saving people thing.”

At the end of
Half-Blood Prince
, though, we weren’t saying, “I was suckered again! Doggone it!” We were saying, “Wow. Harry was right. Snape killed Dumbledore as part of the plan that the Dark Lord had for Malfoy to do in the headmaster. Time to line up behind Harry and go Horcrux and Snape hunting on our white hippogriff and in our white cowboy hats.”

Ms. Rowling spun us around again. The funny thing, of course, is that after bruising our foreheads five times previously, we should have expected that the big twist would be coming in the seventh and last book. Dumbledore died, alas, and wasn’t available at the end of
Prince
to explain how stupid we were to believe Harry again.

To get to the stunning “twist” at the end of
Deathly Hallows
, though, we need to grasp what the surprise ending means.

The Austen books have a formula with which you may be familiar: Boy meets girl, adversity separates boy and girl (parents and family, differences in station, etc.), and boy and girl overcome adversity for storybook ending. The engines of the triumph over the obstacles put before love are devotion, emotion, and passion, more or less. Austen plays with the formula, mocks it really, by showing the disastrous results of these passionate first encounters and mistaken first impressions. Again and again, they lead to unhappy marriages and failed relationships. Just consider:

All the “happy endings” and positive courtships, in contrast, are the fruit of hard work to overcome the mistakes made on first sight and the characters’ deeply held prejudices or convictions.

Austen, in this consistent depiction of hurried judgment from first impressions as bad and of penetrating understanding born of reflection and experience as good, is writing a philosophical argument against David Hume’s empiricist position within her comic novels (and Rowling, in the tradition of English letters, is doing the same thing). Let’s take a look at what Hume said and how Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
is a response.

Hume’s position was, ultimately, that nothing could be known certainly (except, of course, the fact that “nothing could be known certainly,” which was certain). The first principle and consequence of what is even on the surface a contradiction is that only sensorial knowledge is even dependable because all of our ideas Hume assumed to be derived from sense impressions. The distance between this belief and the materialism of our times, in which only quantities of matter and energy are thought of as real, is a short walk; the breach made thereby with the Romantic and Platonic vision predominant in literature is correspondingly vast. Not very surprisingly, Austen and Rowling side with Coleridge and Wordsworth against Hume.

Jane Austen, the very widely read Parson’s daughter, takes aim at Hume’s dependence on sense impressions in the language and meaning of her
Pride and Prejudice
, the first title of which was
First Impressions.
³
Pride and Prejudice
, as an example, is an argument against trusting cold and sensorial “first impressions” versus sympathetic judgment based on experience and character. The former, as the story unfolds, are relatively worthless because first impressions are so malleable to the ideas we have from our personal pride and prejudice.

Darcy
seems
the worst of self-important snobs to Elizabeth Bennet, and the Bennets
seem
to Darcy to be beneath his attention. Wickham
seems
the long-suffering innocent to Elizabeth—and Darcy to be Wickham’s persecutor. His pride and her prejudice combine to blind them to their real characters, which, of course, circumstances and their ability both to rise above their sensorial impressions and trust their greater judgment beyond pride and prejudice reveal in time. Their nuptials (and sister Jane’s with Bingley) are a testament of love’s greater perception of truth and goodness than sense, subject as perceived ephemera are to human failings like conceit, class, and inherited beliefs.