Why JK Rowling Couldn t Write Voldemort

Consciousness is a curse-blessed thing. It helps us to live, figure out how to find food and lodging, but it also keeps us constantly haunted by death. We have a word for death, so we have to deal with death. Animals can unconsciously simply live by instinct. They might see death, and we do observe that some animals will mourn the deaths of others. They don't have a concept of death, like death as a thing, a thing that awaits everyone and everything, including themselves. They aren't conscious, and they don't have language that puts consciousness into form, but we do. And so, we can't simply live by instinct. We have to come up with reasons. We have to come up with why we should continue the often tedious work of staying alive, despite the fact that we know it will all come to an end sometime. We have to convince ourselves, because death does make everything kind of meaningless, in a way. In at least one sense of the word meaning, meaning as almost a synonym for permanence, this doesn't matter. It will all be gone tomorrow. That's not the only possible sense of meaning, meaningfulness. You could very well find meaning that has nothing to do with permanence. But that would be hard, and that would be hard to stomach, because that would be a meaning that was completely contingent. I find meaning in writing, but what happens when I lose the knack for it? Friends, family, doing things for them, tossing my nephew up and down until you have to stop because he's too shaky from giggling. Then I have to keep doing that forever. My friends and family could abandon me, yeah, but worse, I could fail in my love for them. I might someday find myself unmoved by the prospect of throwing nephews. Finding an impermanent meaning, well, that's just not a permanent solution to the problem. It would be really nice if we could find an answer that we could trust, something that would last. There are things that we build to protect ourselves, to shore ourselves against danger and death. The city, the state, civilization, business, the corporation, and those things aren't really mortal. Some of those things are legally immortal. It's in those things that some of us, many people, make their bids for permanence. But the city, the state, certainly business and corporations, require us to repress so much, so much of our instincts, so much of ourselves. We have to commit to this ongoing emotional breath-holding that's next to non-existence. The irony is that the things that we go to for permanence require us to enact this approximation of death. Everything that we build to protect ourselves against death will come to resemble death. Anything that's designed against death is just going to end up molded to it. The city that's designed as a shelter against death becomes an unreal city. Its bridges thronged by hordes of people impersonating the dead. The unreal city, the wasteland. I had not thought death had undone so many. The city built as a shelter against death becomes an acropolis. So to stay within the city, or any of the other wards against death, the state, civilization, business, is to stay within a death mask. To spend our lives shrouded by death, and to waste our lives on death. Because of course the wards against death aren't successful. They might protect us from danger and death for a while, but they don't keep us from dying. They only keep us from living. I'm not here to say, like, J.K. Rowling is Voldemort, or anything like that. But there is something about how she wrote Harry Potter that has bothered me since I read the books in college. The two parts of Voldemort, the Immortality Project and the anti-muggle racism, they didn't really come together. Rowling almost treats them like separate hobbies of his. They arise from different parts of his backstory, totally separate moments in his backstory. Death anxiety and racism actually fit together really well. If J.K. Rowling had understood that, she could have written Voldemort a lot more successfully than the whole Harry Potter story. But I don't think she will come to understand that, because there are limits to how far she will interrogate hate, death, conflict and insecurity, power, politics, and life. There's a sumptuousness to life. Life is movement and fluidity. Life is intermixing with people and things. Shimmering into each other, shimmering out. A constant friscalating, a constant dissipating. A shepherd's tone always going up and up and down and down and up and down and up and down. As the poem says, there is only a coming together of things. A coming together of things. But this means that nothing in life is ever finished, completed, settled. There's no ultimate security. There's no time when we can finally relax. There's no place where we can just be still, calm. Death, on the other hand, we are finished, settled and complete. The only time that we are. And so, any attempt to find lasting security, permanence, will inevitably take on the aspect of death. Because we'll have to stop the movement and fluidity. We'll have to still the friscalating, calm, stop the coming together of things. Freeze everything in place forever. Like the talking head song, heaven is a place where nothing, nothing ever happens. And we've long known this. Or at least we've had inklings, flashings, in our poetry and mythology, where we go to actually understand the world. We've long known that our attempts to escape death are really the result of shutting off light. And so when J.K. Rowling starts to write Valmart the Scar Artist in the 1900s, she has centuries, millennia of lore to draw on. Kind of magpie post-modernism, collecting bits and pieces from here and there. It's this kind of very 90s realization that in a time of belatedness, when everything's kind of already been done before, the only way to really be creative is to make a collage of things that you weren't there first to make. Take Horcruxes. The mythological understanding that we try to gain immortality by transferring our lively energies into dead objects, I mean, goes up to phylacteries in Dungeons & Dragons. It has its start, I don't know, sometime before, like in prehistory, some song or poem that wasn't written down because we didn't have people in writing yet. J.K. Rowling takes this legacy on deathly. Voldemort is a really admirably apt characterization of how the flight from death becomes a flight from life. How detached he is from other people. How he literally takes on the aspect of death himself, physically. His skin turns colorless and his face turns into a skull. His fingers become spider-like bone claws. How his separation from life and risk and other people makes intimacy and affection impossible. The human form of the coming together of things. And how that leaves him with just isolation and hatred and sarcasm and passive aggression and anger. It's really well done. But it's partial. There's a mistake that a lot of writers make where they think that every important part of a character has to have some specific basis in their past, in the character's past. Basis that we see in the narrative, or at least get told about. Think about in True Detective. Matthew McConaughey, he can't just be a weird guy who half-read Nietzsche. He has to be a weird guy who half-read Nietzsche because he ran his daughter over in his car. This is storytelling with humans as cause and effect machines. Very definite causes that lead to quite hemmed in effects. And this is over-explaining. To define is to limit. Take Iago. He gives a bunch of different and contradicting stories for how he came to hate Othello. A bunch of different genealogies for that hate. And we come to realize that we don't know the backstory. We don't know that he hasn't told us the actual genealogy for that hatred. And so it can be so much bigger. Because it's not proportionate to some specific slight that happened in their past. It's unbounded. And it can be huge. Or another example. The Joker in Dark Knight. I'm guessing they might have stolen this from Othello. But he gives all these different explanations for how he got his scars. We come to realize, again, his whole history is just a complete mystery to us. And so the Joker can be so much bigger than just one specific measly human character. He comes to stand for the idea of chaos. But with Voldemort prowling over his plans. With the racism, the hatred of Muggles. We know, she gives us the backstory. His dad was a Muggle. His dad abandoned him and his mom. Voldemort hates Muggles. But Voldemort's racism doesn't need a backstory. The denial of death and his need to freeze things in place. That's enough to go by. To hold things where they are, you need to control them. You can't do that alone. You need to be able to make people follow your commands. You need to have political power to get broad swaths of people to follow your commands. To multiply out your power. And for a society to hold its form, it really ought to be made in a specific shape. To keep people from moving out and moving around and destroying the peace. They really should be pressed into their station by the other people around them. And their station should be definite and knowable. And very clear. We label things so that we know where to put them. And that doesn't necessarily lead to racism. There are multicultural versions of capitalism. I think that's kind of what people a lot of the time mean when they say neoliberalism. Well, that's not to say that neoliberalism is perfectly anti-racist. But there are kinds of stratification that aren't overtly racist. But racism does slot in there really easily as an organizing principle. And again, Voldemort's flight from life leaves him as a being of just hate and anger and isolation. Isolation. Racism is kind of just a specification of hate, anger, and isolation. Or, hate is the genus, racism is the species. And so, Voldemort's racism, rightly, comes directly from his denial of death. And his need for power. Or it could. But Rowling doesn't understand this. And so she feels like she has to show us the basis. Show us the backstory for the racism. And so, by explaining it, Rowling makes his racism, and Voldemort himself, smaller. I don't think she minded that. I don't think that as she was writing that she felt it as any kind of a lack. Because she always wanted him to be a human and die a human, a man's death. Just Tom Riddle Jr. dead in the middle of the dining hall. But Rowling overdid it. She humanized Voldemort too early and too thoroughly. So when he dies the death of just a regular person, like, we know. We've known for books. We saw his whole backstory. And that's the problem with the end of the book, and the end of Voldemort's life, and the series as a whole. It's a problem of scope. The Battle of Hogwarts ends up just being a few dozen Death Eaters versus, like, the good guys that we've already met. It's less of a battle and more of just a large skirmish. And there are political implications. Like, they'll change the head of the government and get rid of some of the most racist policies. But there aren't that many social implications. For one thing, if Voldemort had been allowed to be a bigger villain, kind of unexplained evil without such a clearly delineated origin, then that death would have hit a lot harder. That death is just a guy in a room. A body in a room. It would have made much more of an impact. And more broadly, if Voldemort had been allowed to be more than, or if we had been allowed to feel like Voldemort was more than just a mere man, if he was this thickly diaphanous combination of this cloud of the denial of death, and the need for power, and the racism that so frequently dovetails from them, then defeating him would have had to be correspondingly so much bigger. Victory would have meant defeating the bad guys in battle, yes, but it would have also required them to overcome the things that motivated the bad guys in the first place. It wouldn't have just been Harry Potter as a lone, heroic individual coming to accept death. It would have required a whole society coming together to create a world based on life, not death. To create a whole new politics based on vitalism, not morbidity. It would have been a society that found the deadening hierarchies of the past simply unbearable. Hierarchies of power, race, magical ability, class, species, magical species. It would have been the utter upheaval of their entire world. And that would have meant an ending that was good. Big and satisfying, not just one guy defeating another guy. Harry Potter fails as a series because Voldemort fails as a character because J.K. Rowling doesn't understand death and power and hatred. Hatred is a catastrophic feeling. But, with seeming irony, it can come out of a need for a desire for simple comfort. Again, to have a peaceful society, to have a stable society, you need to have a society that's formed into shape. And people who don't fit into that shape, well we might lament the fact, but we just can't let them in. J.K. Rowling has this very typical, very widespread sort of frozen progressivism. It's a progressivism of positions that were forward thinking in 1998, but no later. It's like a statue that was built leaning ahead, but it's stuck in place. She wanted to let people find their level. People who had previously been marginalized and had limits arbitrarily set to their success. She wanted them to be able to find their place in society. But she wasn't thinking about changing the shape of that society, or getting rid of the shapeliness altogether. There were some groups that got eliminated from the game of musical chairs that was the 90s liberal conception of the world. And trans people didn't make it. It's not like the eternal 90s lib, the eternal Polaroid in this case, or the eternal Clintonite. It wasn't that they were disgusted by trans people, or that they hated trans people. And they could be friends with trans people, they could listen to their stories and sympathize with them and have compassion for their struggle as trans individuals, as their trans friends. And they could be proud of having a trans friend. J.K. Rowling used to boast about having a trans woman friend, though I suspect that that relationship has been problematized. But they, the 90s lib, couldn't let in trans people as a group. Once trans people hit a threshold, or a tipping point, as a 2015 cover of Time magazine, I think, called it, then we had to start adapting things. We had to change how we talk. We had to experiment with new terminology, some of which would stick and some of which wouldn't. One of the early moments on the J.K. Rowling bigotry sequence was her pain at having to see the words, from the person who menstruates. No new groups, they put everything in flux, to make us change the language. To be unful of the origami structure that is society, to incorporate a new group, at least to say that it'll hold back together, and just lose its shape. I think that in general, we kind of imagine that you hate someone, so you harm them. But it also goes the other way. Sometimes you harm someone, so you hate them. Think of it just like your daily life. Sometimes you'll, in the spur of the moment, mistreat somebody, and then realize you mistreated them, but then, instead of coming to grips with that, you'll back-solve and come up with all the reasons that they might have deserved it. Hate must be a vortex. You mistreat someone, so you come to hate them. You hate them, so you treat them even more poorly. You're treating them so badly, that you draw even more hatred from yourself. And besides the general internet brain rot and negative polarization, I think this is what's happening to J.K. Rowling. You start out by tweeting about your hesitancy about trying to use some new trans-inclusive terminology, and you end up finding yourself funding anti-trans court cases. Probably not end up currently. Who knows where it will end or could end. I mean, J.K. Rowling used to talk about her compassion for trans people and their experience, how she would march with them in the extremely hypothetical situation where they were being oppressed. But that's totally gone. She's totally past that, even as a purely rhetorical move. Now it's just pure, daily animus. So yeah, J.K. Rowling became a hateful bigot, not because of some initiating trauma or a starting point of hatred, but just from an attachment to the way things are, led to a kind of 90s liberalism that got frozen in place. Her attachment to castles, and boarding school novels, and returning every fall to the shabbily cozy Gryffindor common room. But she herself doesn't understand how hatred can have such an ordinary provenance. And so she failed at writing Baltimore. She gathered together all these strands of the lore of evil quite well, admirably well. But she thought that she had to contextualize Baltimore's fate, she had to narrativize it. And thus she made Baltimore too small, and rendered his defeat ultimately underwhelming. And of course, Rowling didn't understand that by twists and turns, hatred can come from a simple desire for permanence and calm and stillness. She doesn't know that because she herself feels this deep affection for the status quo, for the way things are. And it would be too unsettling to question that. Unsettling things is exactly what we don't want to do. It's exactly, that's the whole point of everything, is that we can't stand to do, have things be unsettled. Hence she couldn't interrogate the roots of hate, her own hate, or hate more generally. Which is why she failed at writing Baltimore. J.K. Rowling failed at writing Baltimore because J.K. Rowling is Baltimore. Thanks for watching all that. This is part of the video where I would be scrolling my Patreon patrons, but I don't really have those. I don't have those. I do have a Patreon, though. I used to use it as a semi-facetious text blog. I think I deleted most of the text, or most of the blogs, but I still have the website there. If you want to support my work, give me money. Also, I would like to upgrade my tech and get a camera and a microphone and a computer for an editor. That would be cool. You might want a reading list of books that I was reading while I prepared this, but I didn't really do that. I was just kind of going. I was just kind of writing. But a couple of books that were on more or less deep background. First, Life Against Death by Norman O'Brown. If you don't, if you're interested, actually, conveniently, I think the next video I want to make is going to be about Life Against Death. I'm looking for updates. Then, another book, Eros and Civilization by Marcusa. That's a good book to compare with Life Against Death anyways. And then maybe The Denial of Death by Ernst Becker. I'm going to be honest, I never actually finished that. I only read the first 200 pages. But I liked the beginning a lot. There's just a point where he starts talking about Maslow and the humanists and his thinking gets a little bit loose. I stopped reading. But the beginning of The Denial of Death I can recommend heartily. I'll put a link to my Patreon. Subscribe to the channel if you want to. Like, comment on the video. It'll move you. It feels so... I expected it to be gross. I've never done the little calls, YouTube calls to action. I expected it to be gross and it felt gross. I'm sorry you all had to get it through that video. Go read your Norm O'Brown. Thanks again for watching this.