Hello! I know I'm posting a bit late, but I didn't get invited into the blog until a couple of days ago. I really feel at home posting on Gryffindor. I've been obsessed with Harry Potter since 1998, when I was 8 years old. I've written essays about the books (one of them even won an award from UC's English Department Competition), lots of fanfiction, and participated on Harry Potter discussion forums (mostly Mugglenet) for a very long time.
The subject-object division that Iser describes, as far as I understand it, is that the reader's thoughts and personality become secondary when we read very involving novels. The author introduces alien thoughts into our experience, and so we pay attention more to what is happening in the novel's world than what is happening in ours. We come to trust the main character, in this case Harry, because his thoughts override ours. Rowling has mentioned that she sympathizes for Harry and does introduce a lot of her own qualities into his character, and so that bridge between author, protagonist, and reader is shortened even further. By trusting Harry, we are not only adopting his thoughts, but we are accepting that Rowling has the authority to write from the perspective of an eleven year old boy.
There is a common problem in literature involving unlikeable protagonists. If a novel is written in first person or over-the-shoulder third and the protagonist is nasty or a criminal, the reader will be less likely to engage in the novel unless they are given some reason to sympathize. With Harry, we don't even have this problem-- he is a compassionate character and it is easy to accept him. But this subject-object division can disappear even in a novel about a mass murderer.
There is also the issue of unreliable narrators. This is when we have obvious reason to suspect that the narrator is not portraying the truth about other characters, or when he deceives himself about the nature of the world. I think there is some degree of unreliability in every narrator, but definitely more in certain ones. This leads me to my next question-- if we adopt Harry's thoughts as our own, are we likely to be led astray by him sometimes? I think definitely yes. In Philosopher's Stone, we are so convinced that Snape is going after the stone because Harry wants it and believes it so. We are also led to believe that Malfoy has been opening the Chamber of Secrets. And we also think the Hagrid can be trusted unconditionally through the lens of Harry.
There is a crucial reading skill which, there might be a fancier term for it, but I'll call it "discerning". I think of it as our ability to step back from Harry for a moment and think about what might be going on behind the scenes. Jo has a grand plan at work, and I think it is her determination to make us see from Harry's perspective that has us sometimes overlook her clues. She's built everything so beautifully and hidden it just as wonderfully as well. But this also engages the subject-object division-- where it disappeared as we read and accepted Harry, the division springs back up when we start to question him and his world, or even the author's authority in writing his perspective.
I think that someone who "steps back" from Harry a lot while reading the novel might have some very different ideas about his world. A parent or a teacher might read Philosopher's Stone and think, "Why didn't Harry, Ron and Hermione seek out help from the grownups more? Even after Dumbledore was gone, they should have tried harder to enlist adult help--like Hagrid, or try harder with McGonagall. Instead they seem to take this as a sign to go after the Stone themselves and be little rebellers". Another reader who "steps back" might question the Wizarding World's practices and how dark parts of the world can be. An even more critical reader might say that Jo sometimes fails in her task to portray an eleven year old boy, because his thoughts seem way beyond his years sometimes.
Even if you were a different character in Harry's world, you might have a very different perception of it. You might think that Muggleborns are inferior. You might think that house-elves are just another part of the way things work, and they deserve to be enslaved and should continue to because they seem to enjoy it.
Wolfgang Iser also spoke about expectations. I think I know which kind of expectations he's talking about, but I'd like to add that there is another kind of expectation he doesn't mention that Rowling certainly fulfills. The kind of "expectation" he's talking about is the personal objective of each individual character, and how those sometimes become our own expectations. Since Rowling builds up Snape as a malicious and nasty character, and because Harry and Ron accept this view so strongly, we too expect Snape to be the villain. This is obviously not fulfilled at the end of the novel---however, we are satisfied because someone else turns out to be the villain and this surprises us. It's the classic mystery scapegoat plot. It's important for an author to raise a character's expectation and fail to fulfill it because it makes their objectives even more important. It's just like how Harry wants a family so badly, and then Jo teases him by showing him his family in the Mirror of Erised. Dangling his desire in from of him and then snatching it away like a carrot and stick routine is what builds our suspense for Harry, and what makes us want him to get his objective so much more badly. Jo does this with our expectations as a reader, too-- she dangles clues in front of them, and snatches them away when it turns out to be something completely different. It shows that she has a strong control over her world, and that she knows how to entice readers.
There is a general expectation from a reader for the author to finish a plot thread once it is started. If you stepped back from the novel, you might see that Jo is definitely setting up SOMETHING to do with Snape-- you just don't know what yet. But you expect that arc to follow through and lead you somewhere. If Snape was suddenly fired and disappeared from Hogwarts, I think readers would be very disappointed because the expectation for something to happen with Snape has been thrown out the window. This plot arc expectation is just a basic part of novel writing. I think that, even though events have not turned out as Harry, Ron, and Hermione wanted them to/and or expected them to, the reader's plot arc expectation has been fulfilled because Jo continues to builds Snape's character throughout the next book, and to force you to wonder about his motives.
Finally, I think it's interesting that Wolfgang Iser says the failing to fulfill expectations is a characteristic of LITERARY texts. Though I think most people would qualify the Potter novels as genre writing, I think that there is so much skill and a balance between plot and interiority that make them really straddle that line between genre and literary. People really don't realize how complex these novels are. It's a show of craftsmanship-- Jo spent 5 years planning the series as she was writing Philosopher's Stone, and had crates of notebooks of backstory. She was able to sit and think about what plot threads she wanted to weave together on a very epic scale. I'm truly impressed by her plot skills. I'm studying the series now from the perspective of a writer, and my respect for her grows with each rereading (and I've read the series about 40 times now, so that really shows something).
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