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[originally published July 23, 2009]

Because I’m not an automaton, I guess, I cried when Dumbledore died. Even though I went to see the sixth Harry Potter nearly a week after the film first released, the whole theatre was quiet after Dumbledore fell, with little sniffles breaking out here and there, a damp Morse code of vicarious mourning. Maybe we were all remembering Gandalf, or our grandfathers, or our favorite teachers. Or maybe Dumbledore, that retrospectively gay icon, really does tug at heart-strings for his own individual reasons.

I’m fine with Dumbledore. Just fine, though: he’s not my favorite character. I usually treat the morally-complex, grandfather figures in childrens’ literature the media (see: Gandalf, see: Aslan, see: Obi-Wan Kenobi) with a kind of indulgent tolerance. I’m routinely sad when they inevitably die (and I’m routinely glad when they inevitably come back to life, either physically or through constant little psychic messages) but it doesn’t exactly move me to the same levels of obsessive interest as other, less heavily-symbolic figures.

When I cried about Dumbledore’s death, I was really being a pretentious nerd and moving forward to the final book, drawing on knowledge I wasn’t supposed to have yet in the world of that particular movie, and crying about Severus Snape instead.

What hasn’t been said about Harry Potter? (I ask pompously and rhetorically, and then ignore my own question.) It used to be popular to rant against the books, either because of their devilry or because of their supposed intellectual malnutrition.Dear old A.S. Byatt took her stand in the New York Times over half-a-decade ago, which is still a little embarrassing for me to read: like an esoteric, embittered professor ranting away at a popular middle-school student. I think her points are (wait for it) pointless, although maybe that’s because she was missing the final two books. Probably not, though. The epilogue in the sixth book must have peeled a good year off Byatt’s life.

Every time I re-read the books or watch the movies, I’m freshly impressed by the depths of moral ambiguity in Rowling’s kiddie-pool. Snape is probably the best example of this. Rowling plays perfectly on the inevitable readerly sympathies for the underdog … the flashback to a lonely teenaged Snape zapping flies with his wand is still one of the two instances in the book that make my throat clog up with tears (the other being Neville Longbottom and the gum wrappers). Rowling is much better at these small, unexpected instances than she is at jerking tears through death scenes, especially in the final book, when the beloved corpses pile up in such an orgy of sentimentality that it’s difficult to process any one of them.

Even when Severus Snape is peering out between his greasy unwashed hanks of hair and tyrannizing poor Potter and his pals, there’s still, I think, a tug of sympathy, a stubborn hope that Snape is sort of a good guy after all.

Dumbledore’s death is a terrible moment for two reasons: not just the loss of Harry’s mentor, which feels inevitable to the fabric of such a standard-issue epic, but more because of the blow to Snape’s supporters, who trusted Snape in spite of everything, only to have him act as the catalyst in an unambigious act of violence. No matter what, you’re going to be marked as a pretty bad egg to keep on defending Snape after his cowardly betrayal of the cuddliest, most Christ-like figure in the whole series. Even Alan Rickman can’t redeem Snape now. That’s why I cried when I first read about Dumbledore’s death (way back in 2005, reading the only English-language copy I could find in Austria as I “studied abroad”) and that’s part of the reason why I cried on Tuesday evening, watching the film.

But not the whole reason.

Submerged beneath each family-Bible-sized tome, all 4,000-plus US-edition pages, behind all the chaste teenage angst and overblown battle scenes and the heroic deaths of nearly everybody and the 11-year-olds drinking pumpkin juice on an invisible train, I think the entire backbone of Harry Potter is a love-story between Snape and Lily. His unrequited adoration for Lily, the single bright point in his life, is what drives the entire ungainly plot forwards, even if it takes until the last quarter of the last book for anybody else to even begin to understand. Of the adult characters, Snape probably suffers the most in the coy-but-unforgiving universe Rowling has created: emasculated, vilified, constantly contrasted to teenagers and found comically lacking. In an ideal world he would have been Harry’s father, if Lily hadn’t turned around and married the charming playground bully. It’s the kind of harshness you never find levelled towards the adolescent characters themselves. It’s a romance too odd and awkward for adults, far too tragic for kids. It could only really survive as unspoken exposition in a children’s book that pretends to be about something entirely different.

Snape’s death passed by more-or-less uneventfully, trapped in a cage with a serpent. In the film version (which I assume will appear in five years or so) it may not draw as many tears as Dumbledore. But Rowling herself, in the otherwise embarrassing wish-fulfillment wallow that is the epilogue of Book VII, manages to gently link Harry Potter’s new family back to the figure who has belonged there all along.

 

“Albus Severus,” Harry said quietly, so that nobody but Ginny could hear, and she was tactful enough to pretend to be waving to Rose, who was now on the train, “you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin, and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew.”

- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Epilogue

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