_____________________ DUMBLEDORE'S SHADOW Dylan Holmes _____________________ 2021/Nov/20 There's something lopsided about Rowling's work. It postures as a conflict between light and dark. But you see that it really can't be, as soon as you notice that the biggest chesspieces on each side---Dumbledore and Voldemort---are really the same person. I mean mythologically the same, of course. In the daylight world of the story, they've received different backstories: different parents and birthdays and so forth. But if you squint---and you have to squint, because the surface level story does not realize this---you'll see that they're the same character in two costumes. The same motives, origins, ideals, and flaws. We're told that, crucially, Dumbledore had a change of heart in his youth. He scrapped his plans for wizarding domination, gave up his dream to become master of death, abandoned his lust for political power, and hardened his heart against all passions and future attachments of love. It's quite a lot to suppress. And presently, along comes Voldemort, a Dark wizard supremacist who is volatile, power-hungry, and determined to conquer death. Look at how much more /alive/ the story becomes when you regard Voldemort's actions as acting out /Dumbledore's/ suppressed motivations. They are two halves of a complex person, where Voldemort does everything that Dumbledore does not let himself do. Voldemort's motivations, in isolation, have always seemed flat to me: Okay, so he wants to be immortal. He apparently wants to kill all Muggles because his absent father was one. He has no love in his heart because he was conceived under a love potion. And the wealthy racists who control society can't control it enough, so they give him money and power and allegiance in order to do ... whatever it is. Fine. In contrast, we understand that Dumbledore was vain and talented and fascist in his youth. Wouldn't all this evil be just like him? He saw muggles as lesser because magic is a meritocracy with him at the top. Doesn't that explain it? He craves power and authority. He's machiavellian. He's a shepherd of outcasts who happens to fill his ranks with half-breeds and orphans rather than death eaters and blood purists. And his coldheartedness is not just a potion-induced birth defect but personal choice: it is his life-long struggle to quash his human passions. The truth, expressed in dream-logic, is that you cannot master your own shadow by burying it. It always gets out, with a vengence. This is an important lesson, and I am always a bit troubled that Dumbledore never learns it. Perhaps Rowling hadn't either. Dumbledore dies, cold and calculating to the end, the god and martyr of his own plan. And just look at how the story cheers him on! Remember that fatal mistake with the ring? For just a moment, Dumbledore forgets his coolness. Something twinges in his heart---love, maybe. Ambition. Hubris. So he reaches out for the ring, and it dooms him. A shard of Voldemort lurking in the object of his desire. What was the lesson here---that Dumbledore should have repressed harder? That, tragically, even the best of us are weakened by our emotions? He spent a lifetime trying to dominate the heart by sheer force of will, and the story lets him get away with it. In a fantasy world populated by the projections of inner life, it's striking that the feeling functions are always demonized like that. The intellect swoops in to vanquish them: trivializing fears (boggarts), overruling grief (dementors), overcoming desire (the mirror of erised), auditing memory (the pensieve), concealing emotion (occlumency), etc. That's the real dragon in the story: sometimes when we're hurt, we want to become like an unfeeling stone. We want the intellect to dominate our passions and fears and hopes. Voldemort emerged as Dumbledore's unresolved shadow for just this reason. And although the story destroys him, it does not refute him: if Dumbledore made any mistake, Rowling seems to say, it was letting feelings back in. That's an unworkable moral, and it means that despite appearances, the story ends without solving its problem. Maybe that's why the epilogue always feels like a replay: another generation steps up---now what? Has the fundamental situation changed? Have we learned something that will help us confront the next evil? No, because the real confrontation has been merely postponed. Fairy tales are wise about this. I once read a fairy tale where the butler, having been jilted by the lady of the house, steals her newborn twins, puts them in a glass box, and throws the box into a river. (Of course the twins are later fished out and rescued by peasants.) The butler's attitude in the story is strange because he seems to want to destroy the children outright, and yet he chooses to put them in a /glass/ box rather than a cheaper wooden one, and to consign the box to the river rather than, say, bury it. It is as if with one hand the butler tries to destroy the twins, but with the other hand he interferes. In dream-logic, a problem has been repressed rather than resolved. The result is an incomplete, ambivalent destruction---and of course the problem comes back to the butler in the end. I am reminded of how Voldemort set out to kill Harry and how the killing spell was commuted into a cursed life instead. I am reminded, also, of what Dumbledore did afterwards. If you wanted to destroy a blessed prince with a special birthmark, you could murder him outright. Or you could do it indirectly: send him into exile to be raised by peasants.