Morality in Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones

I recently had a conversation with somebody who watches Game of Thrones who was sort of classing everything not Lord of the Rings in a big group together as the other modern stuff we all read that doesn't achieve the same class as LotR but it's all got some good qualities etc, and the term "moral quality" was used specifically of Tolkien's work versus all others. I agree on there being  a high moral quality in Tolkien's work, but I don't agree with putting GotT and HP in a group as coequals in that regard.

I've read only the first three chapters of GoT before I gave up, and I've watched none of the show, but I gave up at that point in the book for specific reasons, and one of them was precisely moral. The first and more general reason was boredom with the prevalence of dark brooding: the dark brooding warrior comes home from the grim wars and sits by his dark well and broods, gazing at his fell sword upon his knees and pondering his family's dark gods ... *yawn*

The second issue, the moral one at which I put the book down, is the nipple-tweaking scene. I hit that and my first thought was, "ok buddy, you enjoyed writing that way too much for this to be healthy." The more general way to put that thought is to say that it seemed to me to be merely morbid fascination. It's a scene of manipulation of a young woman's (really a girl's) sexuality for political purposes, and that shit does go on, and maybe there is a place for examining it in some literary contexts, but this did not seem to me to be that; it did not feel to me like it had any moral tone ... it seemed simply morbid fascination at the phenomenon and the titillation of examining some sex shock material, being aloofly "adult" about some nitty gritty sexual stuff.

I actually came up with a jingle for it. Halsey has a song, "The New Americana": "We are the new Americana, raised on Biggy and Nirvana; high on legal marijuana, we are the new Americana." My version is "The New Sophisticati" (riffing on the whole illuminati trope): "We are the new sophisticati; we're very smart, but a little naughty; reading Game of Thrones and eating biscotti, we are the new sophisticati." I actually picked the book up to read it because I figured I should read it if I was going to compare it to Harry Potter because that was what was already being done in a conversation thread on Facebook I got dragged into by a a friend on a post he had on Harry Potter, in which the friend's brother was dissing HP and saying he had tried to get my friend into some real "adult high fantasy" like GoT. The "adult high fantasy" thing is what I mean by "sophisticati." I don't think Tolkien would have considered himself part of what is now considered under that self-identification, especially the "adult" part (Treebeard was, in part, a rebuttal to a beef he had had since childhood with the fact that the march of the woods on Dunsinane Hill in Macbeth wound up to be just a trick of the light and psychological night terror). The real meaning of the "adult" in the term "adult high fantasy" is much more akin to the more popular use of the word "adult" in contemporary culture, which is basically what the whole nipple-tweaking scene comes down to. There is a facade of "concern" for "understanding" such phenomena, a supposed quest for understanding or maybe "wisdom" that really is only the type of pipe-dream of "scientifically objective knowledge" Owen Barfield critiqued, a facade that easily gives way to the real morbid curiosity and quasi-pornographic fascination that  is really there.

Now, having basically stated that I think Game of Thrones is not in the same class as either Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter as far as moral quality (having felt some need to address that issue because it was that conversation and statement of putting HP and GoT in a class together under LotR in that regard that started me in the first place on the path of comparing LotR and HP on moral quality), I will move on to the question that really interests me, which is the differences between LotR and HP in regard to morals (and just in case you missed it, my verdict on GoT was that it has no morals).

The moral tone of LotR is largely exemplarist. The actions of the protagonist characters are exemplars when interpreted through certain lenses and language. Often the language comes from mouthpiece characters (but not always). When Gandalf advocates Bilbo's pity when talking to Frodo, we know that that is Tolkien talking, taking what is called a "stage-affirmative" tone toward having pity. Sometimes the moral quality is signaled by Tolkien's love of verse/song, and so Sam's not despairing in the tower and instead singing is an example to be followed, underscored by the fact that that it what finds Frodo. When Sam carries Frodo in Mordor, that is an exemplar of love. When Saruman tries to seduce with his voice, that is an exemplar of the type of manipulation not to do. When Faramir speaks softly to Eowyn of not rejecting Aragorn's pity because not all pity is arrogant, that is an exemplar of understanding to try to have. When Frodo argues for the life even of Sharky and Wormy, that again is pity to be emulated. And, to say that it is basically exemplarist, versus the existential question that I will describe as JKR's genre, is not to say that it is shallow. The issues and themes with which it deals are very deep ... and often interact with a certain type of psychological characterization (Frodo's suffering on returning to the Shire is heart-rending, and there are few lines that have knocked the wind out of me for a second like the last line [that final punch position] in one of the chapters in the trek through Mordor, when the last thing in the chapter is when Sam finally gets them to a safe distance not to be seen from the road and Frodo simply falls face first into the shallow pit, "and there he lay, like a dead thing" ... although one of them would be when Harry finally understands, and puts his lips to the snitch, and whispers, "I am about to die").

Harry Potter's approach to morality is a different genre altogether. I would almost call it more moral, but that would not be exactly right. It is that its genre is more directly focused on a question of morality. The morality of LotR suffuses the work in action and tone. Harry Potter, however, is preoccupied, and I think consciously, with a question that wasn't, as far as I can tell, on Tolkien's plate consciously, and that is the question of the relation between psychology and morals. As I said, Tolkien does have some psychology, and another example would be the father issues that Eowyn and Faramir have, and it does interact with virtue, particularly hope and forgiveness. But it's not the same kind of question as in Harry Potter. I maintain that Harry Potter does have a real moral focus. It's just that HP's question is an existential one of source, interpretation, and course of action: psychological or moral, or what mix.

JKR is very focused on psychology (see side note 5 at the end for extra instances beyond what I bring in here ... and there I go on a more vigorous defense of the HP series as legit because of taking on issues that should be taken on). I went to Lumos in 2006 in Vegas, and there I heard a paper by two clinical psychologists, Kim Decina and Josella Vanderhooft, that traced a number of characters out to clinical psychological disorders  by cataloging traits of those disorders as described in the then DSM IV: Lockhart as narcissist; Snape as disthymic disorder (persistent depressive disorder); Harry's reaction to the dementors as clinical depression episode ... and Voldemort as anti-social personality disorder (ASPD; the personality disorders, versus mood disorders, are purely behavioral, with no organic component, and start at a more formative age, such as what we see Dumbledore observe of eleven-year-old Voldy in the pensieve). KC and JV did some background too concerning JKR's background, and without recounting the details, JKR has done her time on the couch or in the chair ... psychological struggle is on her radar as a human issue. And I think it goes beyond using the DSM IV, which was an interesting conversation with KC and JV in a comments thread once, because I proposed Lupin as a psychological character and they said they tried him but could not trace him to a DSM IV disorder, and my reply was that he's not a specific disorder, but rather the self-perception of a diagnosed person: "too old, too poor... too broken" (end of book 6) and applying beast language to oneself, "my kind don't usually breed" (in the kitchen of #12 Grimauld Place early in book 7).

Quite simply put, I think morality is every bit as much a part of HP as it is in LotR, but it is being operated on in a different way, as a question rather than as an exemplar, although, as I will say in a moment, I do think that JKR gives an answer and that it is a bit of an exemplar, but in the end it is definitely a key element of difference between Tolkien and Rowling that it seems important to Rowling to keep it front and center that there is a question involved. And that question is: when you have somebody who is so toxic and harrmful and whose actions can be understood as either psychological malady (ASPD) or spiritual (moral) malady, which do you see it as, and more importantly (or rather, this is the reason the interpretation is important), which approach do you take in rebutting it or trying to change it? JKR's moral exemplar is to go with the moral approach, but I think it is also important to here to keep it on the page that the psychological is a factor and that it can be damn confusing trying to figure out which is the source (for more on this trend in HP, meaning making a choice to go with something as best that you can do in a difficult situation, see side note 4 below). In the final showdown in Hogwarts, JKR has Harry tell Voldy to "try for a little remorse" before he makes a huge mistake in attacking Harry again with the elder wand.  That is moral language. I think her point is that you go with that as a best guess or bet, but always admit that the interplay of the psychological and the moral is complicated, damn frustrating, and often damn painful for all involved. And that message, while still presenting a moral exemplar, is still simply a different project from JRRT's ... but still concerned with morality. As I said, she's almost more concerned with morality, but I have to clarify that, by that word here, I mean that it's more a burning question of interpretation and choice between two paths of action for her. Both LotR and HP are ultimately concerned very much with morality.

I can't deny that Tolkien's work, in addition to being of such greater breadth of world-creation and depth of world-texture, has a much higher and epic tone that does JKR's HP series. She has bits of Austen (particularly the third-person limited-omniscient narratival perspective) that simply are not Tolkien's genre at all (but I must try not to offend any Austenists by saying that Rowling has yet attained the classic status of Austen: where Tolkien has his breadth and depth of his created world, Austen has her breadth and depth of that period of historical English culture about which she writes; and as much as I love Rowling's wizarding world for what it is, the project of building a world with the same intricacy as either Tolkien's or Austen's is not the strength of Rowling's work, although she does borrow the manners and mores genre some ... Rowling's strength would really more be called "magic as metaphor" ... which is a different project even for magic than what Tolkien really does with magic in his world). And in spite of the fact that Middle Earth did become technically an alternate universe, I don't think it ever fully became the alternate universe of other modern "fantasy" works. In some ways it always remained "the mythology" he set out to create for England, closer to the world of fairy you find within our own in something like George Macdonald's Phantastes than it is like any other "alternate universe" in the "fantasy" genre (among those, my favorite is always Discworld, but I do like the first Name of the Wind too, epscially it's Dickensian city of Tarbean, and I remember Wizard of Earth Sea being good; interestingly, both of those have a strong focus on name magic, which JKR uses in places too, but you have to know the theory to catch it in her; see my post on the deluminator as a positive name-taboo device in HP book 7).

All that to say that Tolkien's imagination is a wonder, and he did something that I think is unmatched in many ways. But I don't think simply having substantial moral content is one of them. It may be arguable that Tolkien's is a higher form of art, for combining moral clarity with grand myth, than is Rowling or any of the more recent fantasy writers, but I also do think there is a very real place in the discussion of morals in literature for a more postmodern psychological voice like JKR's ... the postmodern is where we find ourselves at present, and I think there is a place in discussion of morals in art for works written in the postmodern language (but I stick to my guns that Cormoran Strike, or at least the first book, falls flat with regard to any real characterization, it's almost a caricature of psychology at some points, like she was trying too hard to write an "adult" work, when she had already done an amazingly deep psychological project in her "kids" book, and like she unfortunately listened to people who told her she needed to write adult works to be taken seriously).

And I would vigorously defend, to the teeth, against putting HP in the same boat as Game of Thrones as far as morals go. As should be evident in the first part of this post, neither my reading of the opening chapters of the first book of Game of Thrones nor anything I have since heard of either the books or the series gives me any indication that there is any moral content at all in GoT, or really any content other than the titillation of "adult understanding." I don't even have the incentive to read it that I had with Da Vinci Code, which was 400 pages of the most tedious mechanical writing I have ever endured (I agree with the NYT reviewer who called it "Dan Brown's best-selling guide on how not to write an English sentence" and Stephen Fry's characterization of it as "loose stool water and arse gravy of the worst kind"), but I finished it because I thought I should process it if I was going to critique it ... and indeed, as I suspected, it's argument was a little bit more involved than I initially realized, although not enough to amount to truth, just enough for the rhetorical ploy of "see, the religious side overreacts and shouldn't be listened to because they haven't even read enough to get the real position/event/etc. in the book ... the negative response is uninformed reactionism." But at least it was saying something. GoT really isn't saying anything that I have ever been able to tell.


[Side-note 1: Other contemporary works that I did manage to finish but only because it was the friend who actually suggested them and I did not want to offend the friend by not finishing [with GoT, it was a friend's snooty brother, so I felt no compulsion to finish] are Niel Gaman's American Gods and the first book of Lev Grossman's The Magicians, both of which, while I did finish, I found to be extremely derivative and tedious to read, and having the same kinds of morbid fascination with sexual material as GoT.]

[Side-note 2: On JKR and psychology in relation to the more-than-psychological, and not just morals, I think there is a question in book 6  especially of what goes into the question of divorce and annulment. She's not Catholic and I doubt she subscribes to the particular sacramental understanding of marriage that underlies Catholic teaching on annulment, but I do think that romantic love and marriage are a kind of magic for her that is among the class of such mystical or mysterious things she tries to symbolize in the magic in her world, the other key instance of which is the power of imagination. And the question is what psychological factors impact that magic of romantic love, particularly Merope Gaunt's unrequited love leading to her not using magic anymore and dying from that ... where is the line between the magic of romantic love and the manipulation magic of a love potion? Was her attachment to Tom love or desperation? And the issue of marriage plays in another two ways, one in the fiction and one in the history: there is another woman who engages in desperate action that has connotation of marriage imagery, Narcissa's hand-wrapping unbreakable vow (this is not some seedy tryst of Narcissa cheating or whatever pundits would accuse me of for suggesting this; it is a matter of literary themes and images circling together, the desperate actions of women and the effects on their child, one of them, Merope, losing hope to care for her child because the father did not return her love and that issue then reinforced by Narcissa, in a desperate attempt to protect her son, engaging in something that resonates on the level of image with the Scottish hand-wrapping wedding practice), and in the real-world history in relation to psychological issues, one of the two times JKR is on record as having suffered depression episode is with the divorce of her first marriage ... the relation of the psychological to love of all kind, Dumbledore's "deeper magic," is a key central question just under the surface of the whole series].

[Side-note 3: The film The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a good exposition of the question of the tension between psychological explanation and spiritual explanation, in which they shot all of the key flashback possession scenes recounted at the trial in two ways, once in a way fitting the demon-possession explanation by the defense and then another time in a way fitting the psychological explanation by the prosecution ... say, demonically forced contortion versus catatonic rigidity in schizophrenic episode, with each explanation getting a nuanced, distinctive visual effect, so the eyes flying open in the blackened eyes of possession versus showing a close up of full dilation happening in schizophrenic episode ... and the point of the film, which was was made by two evangelical Christians, is the extreme difficulty of discerning these phenomena.]

 [Side-note 4: The thing of choosing between two options when it's damn difficult to discern the situation is actually a core thematic element in book 7, the finale and wrap up of the whole thing, and so a focusing lens for theme. It is basically the statement made in Harry's head when talking to Aberforth near the end. He knows the damned difficulty of the question of Dumbledore's goodness in light of the history of which he has learned through Rita and Aberforth, but there is a specific, clear, purposeful statement that Harry has made a distinct decision to trust what Dumbledore left for him, fully aware of the problems, but doing the best he can with what he has.

And speaking of the deconstruction of Dumbledore, I should bring that in here, because (1) it was actually brought up in a recent book-club discussion in which the person bringing it up was doing so to place HP at a point clearly below LotR and (2) it is an instance of the same thematic playing out in the treatment of DD. The criticism was of the deconstruction, and I didn't have time or preparation there to rebut, but this would be the rebuttal. I myself have actually done interpretation of material on DD in book 7 that met with the response, "well, if you really want to totally deconstruct the character I guess." It's not a claim I have heard anybody else make, and so I have to assume I am the most deconstructionist bugger in the room. Only, I don't think it really deconstructs him in the end. I think it rather points up the dire difficulty of the situation. The instance (which I have heard nobody else talk about) is the brief snippet in Snape's string-memory Harry sees in the pensieve after Snape dies in book 7 in which Snape and DD are talking after the Yule Ball in book 4: Snape says Karkaroff intends to flee; DD asks if Snape will flee too; Snape replies that he is not such a coward; DD replies that no he is not; DD THEN adds "sometimes I think we sort too soon" and walks off; and Snape is described as looking as if he had been slapped. In Snape's world, to question whether he is truly a Slytherin is to attack his identity; part of what drives him is summed up by Phineus Nigellus's portrait when all the portraits cheer the victory at the end, "and let it be known that Slytherin house played it's part!" AND most importantly ... I think DD knows this and knows Snape will take it as an affront to his identity. AND I think it is intentionally done for this purpose by JKR: all the other memories in the string serve some other purpose, either Snape relating to Harry his real connection to Harry's world and his love of Lily, or revealing his own role in keeping Harry alive even while really, really, REALLY not liking how much he looks like James, or giving Harry DD's final instructions, or even just filling in details on moments in the plan we had gotten only a snippet of earlier, like getting the full argument between DD and Snape in book 6 that Hagrid hear only a snippet of or seeing DD's involvement in Sanpe pressing Quirrell in book 1; but this scene at the end of the Yule ball serves no purpose like that; all things materially relevant about the sending of Snape at the end of book 4 have been covered in other conversations since then in the books; the only purpose that scene serves is to cast DD in this light. I think DD intentionally antagonizes Snape. BUT I also think that it is telling that it is shown happening in a discussion of the dark-mark brand signalling an immanent return at the end of book 4, because I think the point is not to deconstruct DD as a way to deconstruct God and all that, but rather to point up the extreme difficulty of sending Snape in as a spy. We are talking about the most accomplished legilimens of the age, and DD knows this more than anybody because he is the only one who saw the young Voldy issuing the "TELL THE TRUTH!" command and saying he can always tell when people are lying to him. If you are going to send a spy in to try to trick somebody with that level of perception, they damn well better be the best liar on the planet. And the surest way to do that is to make it real ... method acting. No fat suit; you take time off from filming and go to Europe and eat like a pig like Deniro in Raging Bulll and come back with your health in worse shape to the extent that you can't take the same rigor of shooting schedule you could when you were in the stage of peak fitness for that section of the boxer's life. If you want to somebody like Snape to walk in and trick the greatest legilimens with the line "I am on your side because I hate Dumbledore," you give them some real antipathy toward yourself to make it believable by antagonizing them. That description on top of the tower is not just Harry's imagination; the hatred an loathing he sees etched in every line of Snape's face is really there: loathing for manipulating him, loathing for abandoning him by dying and leaving him to walk into the moth of hell alone. But I don't think DD is mean or antagonistic by nature or enjoys it ... but he is cumming. And it is like Snape himself says the first time he teaches DADA in book 6: the dark arts are a hydra, "ever-changing and eternal," and if you want to beat them, you have to be every bit as "creative" as the arts you seek to undo. It is a gray line, thinking about intentionally antagonizing somebody like this, but it is the line DD has to walk if he wants to defeat Voldy, or at least it is the best he is able to do with the situation and still be able to keep moving on it and not get frozen by the difficulty of how to do it and thus lose the opportunity and abandon how many to torture and death at the hands of Voldy and his followers. The point is not an evil DD; the point is the direness of fighting so cunning an evil as Voldy, and having to go with the best plan you can figure out (like Harry says when Hermione says she doesn't like the plan of being ambiguous on what they're promising Griphook, when he replies, "I don't much either ..." but it's the best plan they can get given the situation).

I think the "sometimes you go with the best you can" even plays out in JKR's material plotting of mechanics (on a side, side note, I once heard a nice funny way to put this: a certain prof in grad school always used the line in discussing how evil always starts with some good seed taken in the wrong way, often in not letting go of the good and letting it be fulfilled in something higher, "when the good becomes the  enemy of the best, it becomes evil," but in paper season, he would say not to get bogged down in perfectionism and despair, and he would say "in this case, don't let the best be the enemy of the good," and one time a friend in the class turned to me and whispered, "at this point, I'm more worried about the good being the enemy of the turned-in"). There has been a question ever since the end of book 7 of whether she dropped the ball on realism or plausibility of mechanics in having the Elder Wand be able to know Harry had beat Draco. And I think her mechanics actually work, although it takes some work to get it and so this type of reading is not for the lazy, but I was once telling a friend and he said it just seems like there should be some more core thematic answer to the riddle of Voldy, that even the mechanics should be more something along the lines of the magic of love. First let me detail the mechanical issue and that solution. The issue is how the wand knows Harry as having bested Draco such that he is now master of itself. Did it quickly view some news-reel of the Malfoy Manner events hosted on the magical version of the cloud? It seems a bit Deus ex machina. The solution is the wands involved: all the elder wand has to recognize it two things; the first is that the spell it is meeting in midair is being cast through the hawthorn wand it recognizes as the wand that disarmed its own former master, and therefore the master of the hawthorn wand is its own master, with the key factor being that it can recognize the other wand because they have had direct contact with each other before when Draco used the hawthorn wand to disarm Dumbledore of the Elder Wand on top of the tower at the end of book 6; and the second is that the hawthorn wand is acting under the direction the true master to whom is has given allegiance; the elder wands does not need to know that that allegiance has changed, just that this spell is cast in true allegiance, which it can sense through the strength and a sort of integrity. The main point in bringing this in here is for the purpose of the discussion of the "making do with what answers you can have in difficult situations," as I have been discussing, this material aspect of her work is actually pretty fitting of that theme. It would be ideal if Voldy was beat in the most fitting way, but the important thing is to get Vody beat and not killing and torturing people. One can argue that such pragmatic theme puts Rowling's work on a lower level than Tolkien's, but my main point is that I don't think you can put it in the same class as Game of Thrones, or even closer to GoT than to LotR. Rowling's point is still one of moral action, whereas I don't think, at least from what I have seen, that GoT is capable of that theme.]

[Side-note 5: I will put here some other instances of the heavy psychological theme in the Harry Potter series. Arainna Dumbledore is almost too obvious to need to be mentioned. There is also a psychological issue of class/economic disparity: when Ron interrupts Harry talking to Sirius in the fire in book 4, while they are mad at each other, Harry throws the "support Cedric Diggory" badge and hits Ron in the forehead with it and storms past him hoping Ron takes a swing, and it specifically says Harry hated every bit of Ron right down to the couple inches of bare ankle showing beneath his pajama legs. That's an odd detail to throw in, and I don't think it just means he hated Ron so much that he hated even little minor details about him ... that's not how good literature works. The too-short pajamas are a symbol of Ron being poor, because his parents can't afford to keep him in well-sized clothes with as fast as he is growing, and the strain of the self-consciousness of that poverty as combined with being overshadowed by brothers, a kind of poverty of prestige, is what drives his tension with Harry, whom everybody notices and who never worries for money, whereas Harry feels impoverished in regard to a certain natural membership Ron has in the wizarding world, having grown up in it and understanding it, whereas Harry is a bit of an alien sojourner in it sometimes, a theme that is actually fairly relevant in current affairs in America and the whole fight over born citizen with long family history versus immigrant.
And that is the place where I will defend Harry Potter as relevant literature to the teeth, the issue of psychological impact on kids. That is my last example here and the most central for my point here. Book 5 is obviously focused on psychology: even the surface level from the beginning has psychological dream interpretation, thank you Freud, and on more hidden levels of series structure, it chiastically pairs with book 3, which introduces the dementors, which JKR specifically has said she intended as the embodiment of despair and depression (and anybody who can't recognize the result of the dementor's kiss and even Harry's blacking out as catatonic state has never studied), with which Decina's and Vanderhooft's reading of Harry's response as depression episode fits well. But the one in book 5 on which I really want to focus is the eye of the snake: when Harry sees the attack on Arthur Weasely from within the snake itself and thinks he actually became the snake. This is internalization, pure and simple. This is when kids internalize the tensions between parents and see it as their own fault or have manipulators and abusers convince them that it's their own fault. This is when kids are allowed to internalize violence and see themselves as the aggressor who is wrong, and sometimes dirty. The epigraph from Aeshylus's Libation Bearers at the beginning of book 7 is not simply some line randomly chosen from some old Greek stuff simply because it has to with death; it's climax is: "answer the call, send help; bless the children, give them triumph now." Whatever other shortcomings there may be, and however much I may disagree with JKR on some attempts to force post-script interpretation through a tyrannical "authorial intent," the psychology in her work is done with clear concern for the suffering of kids and should not be put in the same class with some morbid-fascination description of the machiavellian older brother twisting his thirteen-year-old sister's nipples to make her appear more sexually interested in the political player with whom the brother wants to ally through a political marriage ... sorry, I saw no sympathy in that scene for the manipulation of a kid, just morbid fascination with the "sophistication" of being in the know that such things happen.]