shadowscast (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shadowscast) wrote2005-08-09 01:38 am
shadowscast) wrote2005-08-09 01:38 am
My reaction to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
I've never been a part of Harry Potter fandom. I like the books immensely—I've read all of them in English and some of them in French—and I've seen each of the movies once or twice, but I don't do the online thing. The only serious Potterverse fanfic I've ever read was a Buffyverse crossover, the brilliant story The End of the Beginning by Marina Frants (in which Giles and Ethan run into some Potterverse folks in London in 1981, and end up getting mixed up in the war against Voldemort). I say all this to explain that this is the first time I've written about Potterverse issues in this journal, and it may turn out to be the last time, too ... but I've just finished reading the Half-Blood Prince, and I want to sort some things out in my head with regards to the Big Question of the book. This will involve drawing a comparison with certain events in the Buffyverse.
As I see it, the Big Question of HBP is, "Which side is Snape really on?" This was my main concern when I got to the end, and I've discovered it's an important question to lots of other people, too.
I'll say up front: I want Snape to be on the side of good. I really, really want to believe that he did not betray Dumbledore in the end, that even when he killed Dumbledore he was actually acting according to Dumbledore's plan, that now he's gone deep undercover with the Death Eaters, but he'll emerge as a crucial ally for Harry in the final book.
Why do I want this?
I didn't like Snape at first. I mean, you're not supposed to. He's a nasty man and an appallingly bad teacher. But he became more and more intriguing all the time. When I found out that he was a Death Eater, and that now he's a double agent working for Dumbledore, he became my favourite character in the whole series. He's the only one who really has depth, you know? He's fascinating, complex ... and anyway I think I've always had a kink for the "reformed bad-boy with a dark past" archetype.
If it turns out he was really evil all along, well, that's just disappointing.
Plus, Dumbledore trusts him. We're prepared in this book for the idea that Dumbledore can make mistakes, even great big mistakes ... but I don't want that to be Dumbledore's great big mistake. It would make Dumbledore's most cherished principles look foolish. It would make my most cherished principles look foolish. Like Dumbledore, I want to believe the best of people.
So I was worried about Snape from Spinner's End on in, and when I got to the end of the book and all indications were that yes, he had betrayed Dumbledore and proven his loyalty to Voldemort (I really want to say "the Dark Side" here), I was kind of dejected. And yet, I found that I wasn't 100% convinced that everything was as it seemed. I had niggling doubts. That's the point where I decided to go online and see what other people were saying about all this. I spent about three hours this afternoon reading posts at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
hp_essays.
The following essays reassured me that there are good, textual reasons to insist that we can't write off Snape as a bad guy yet:
Dumbledore's Man by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
emily_anne
That Riddle, Snape bysigune
Spinner's End byelvensapphire
And, for the opposing point of view:
On Severus Snape bysilverhill
Okay. So once I got through reading all of that, I started thinking again: what do I believe is really going on?
It occurred to me that what's going on with Snape now is kind of like what happened with Spike at the end of Season 6. In both cases you have a character who started off evil, gradually won the trust of the good guys (and the audience/readers), and then came to this pivotal moment where the text seemed to indicate he'd gone bad again. And then, hiatus!
In Spike's case, the question was whether he'd gone to Africa looking for a soul or a chip removal. I hadn't joined the fandom yet at that point, so I don't have a first-hand experience of what the online discussions were like during the post-S6 summer hiatus. I've seen bits and pieces in archives, but mostly I've only seen second-hand references. Anyway, my impression is that people were pretty split on the issue.
Similarly, as you can see from the essays above, a pretty reasonable case can be made for either the "Snape betrayed Dumbledore" or the "Snape remains loyal to Dumbledore" conclusion. And I guess it'll be at least two years before book seven comes along to settle the question. (Argh!)
But in Spike's case, the question has been answered. At various times in S7 of Buffy and S5 of Angel he refers to the fact that he chose to get a soul, and that he had to fight for it and everything. At absolutely no point does he give any indication that he was tricked, or that he was thinking about anything other than getting a soul when he first hopped on his motorcyle and sped out of Sunnydale. Not only do we have Spike's word for it, but it's my understanding that Joss Whedon has confirmed that the whole chip-removal thing was just misdirection.
My theory, now, is that JKR is employing a similar sort of misdirection. And you can see the evidence in one very important passage.
The thing about misdirection is that the author must make it seem like X is happening when really Y is happening. But then, once the reader gets to the end and finds out that it's Y that's been happening all along, they need to be able to go back over all the evidence that originally seemed to point to X and see that it actually points just as effectively to Y—ideally, Y should make even more sense than X, once you look at the evidence in this new light.
Take, for instance, Spike's last scene before he leaves town in "Seeing Red." Spike is definitely having some kind of breakdown, and the things he's saying are kind of disjointed. He seems to identify the chip as the source of his problems:
Spike: It's the chip. Steel and wires and silicon. It won't let me be a monster. And I can't be a man.
And then it seems like he's deciding to get rid of the chip:
Clem: Things change.
Spike: They do. If you make them.
and, moments later,
Spike: She thinks she knows me. She thinks she knows who I am. What I'm capable of. She has no idea. I wasn't always this way. It won't be easy, but I can be like I was. Before they castrated me. Before ...Then she'll see who I really am.
Okay. Note that, although you're meant to think he's talking about getting the chip removed and returning to being a monster, he never actually says so. If nothing sneaky was going on with this text—if there was no misdirection happening, if appearance and truth were meant to be the same—then the phrasing would have been less vague and strange. He would have said something like "I'm going to get this bloody chip out, and then the bitch will pay!" It doesn't make sense that he doesn't say it outright, unless there are tricks being played on the viewers—which, of course, there are.
Okay, so that's the confirmed misdirection in BtVS. Now, what's the possible misdirection in the HBP? Well, there are numerous scenes where we or Harry overhear Snape saying something that could be taken one way or another; most of them are explicitly acknowledged in the text when Harry tries unsuccessfully to use them to convince his friends or teachers that Snape and Draco are up to something. But in my opinion, it really all comes down to one line by Dumbledore at the very end. I refer, of course, to "Severus ... please ..." (Bloomsbury/Raincoast hardcover edition, 556).
The most obvious interpretion of the phrase is that Dumbledore is pleading Snape to help him and/or not to harm him. I'm pretty sure that's Harry's understanding of it.
On the other hand, from the Snape-is-a-good-guy-really! camp, we have the theory that Dumbledore is actually telling Snape to kill him. He means "Severus ... please ... follow through with the plan no matter how hard it is." He means "Severus ... please ... kill me." This is the interpretation I want to believe in, and it's a possibility that I think cannot be ignored.
The phrase, in the text, is incomplete. Please what? JKR is a very careful writer, and I believe she would not have made the last, crucial exchange between Dumbledore and Snape ambiguous by accident.
If Snape is really on Voldemort's side, and if that scene was meant to finally and utterly convince us, then shouldn't Dumbledore have been allowed another word or two to clear things up?
So, that's pretty much it. The vagueness of Dumbledore's last words set off my misdirection(!) sensors, and this leaves me convinced that Snape's still pulling for team Good. 'Cause if Snape really is on the bad guy's side, why leave that little bit of ambiguity for the readers? Harry's convinced that Snape is a bad guy. All the characters appear to be convinced. There's no point in letting the characters all be convinced and yet leaving the readers hanging unless the conclusion is ultimately going to be "Wow, he's good after all!" It's too late for the big, "Wow, he's evil!" reveal; Dumbledore's death scene was it.
At least, that's what I'm going to tell myself for the next two years.
As I see it, the Big Question of HBP is, "Which side is Snape really on?" This was my main concern when I got to the end, and I've discovered it's an important question to lots of other people, too.
I'll say up front: I want Snape to be on the side of good. I really, really want to believe that he did not betray Dumbledore in the end, that even when he killed Dumbledore he was actually acting according to Dumbledore's plan, that now he's gone deep undercover with the Death Eaters, but he'll emerge as a crucial ally for Harry in the final book.
Why do I want this?
I didn't like Snape at first. I mean, you're not supposed to. He's a nasty man and an appallingly bad teacher. But he became more and more intriguing all the time. When I found out that he was a Death Eater, and that now he's a double agent working for Dumbledore, he became my favourite character in the whole series. He's the only one who really has depth, you know? He's fascinating, complex ... and anyway I think I've always had a kink for the "reformed bad-boy with a dark past" archetype.
If it turns out he was really evil all along, well, that's just disappointing.
Plus, Dumbledore trusts him. We're prepared in this book for the idea that Dumbledore can make mistakes, even great big mistakes ... but I don't want that to be Dumbledore's great big mistake. It would make Dumbledore's most cherished principles look foolish. It would make my most cherished principles look foolish. Like Dumbledore, I want to believe the best of people.
So I was worried about Snape from Spinner's End on in, and when I got to the end of the book and all indications were that yes, he had betrayed Dumbledore and proven his loyalty to Voldemort (I really want to say "the Dark Side" here), I was kind of dejected. And yet, I found that I wasn't 100% convinced that everything was as it seemed. I had niggling doubts. That's the point where I decided to go online and see what other people were saying about all this. I spent about three hours this afternoon reading posts at
hp_essays.The following essays reassured me that there are good, textual reasons to insist that we can't write off Snape as a bad guy yet:
Dumbledore's Man by
emily_anneThat Riddle, Snape by
siguneSpinner's End by
elvensapphireAnd, for the opposing point of view:
On Severus Snape by
silverhillOkay. So once I got through reading all of that, I started thinking again: what do I believe is really going on?
It occurred to me that what's going on with Snape now is kind of like what happened with Spike at the end of Season 6. In both cases you have a character who started off evil, gradually won the trust of the good guys (and the audience/readers), and then came to this pivotal moment where the text seemed to indicate he'd gone bad again. And then, hiatus!
In Spike's case, the question was whether he'd gone to Africa looking for a soul or a chip removal. I hadn't joined the fandom yet at that point, so I don't have a first-hand experience of what the online discussions were like during the post-S6 summer hiatus. I've seen bits and pieces in archives, but mostly I've only seen second-hand references. Anyway, my impression is that people were pretty split on the issue.
Similarly, as you can see from the essays above, a pretty reasonable case can be made for either the "Snape betrayed Dumbledore" or the "Snape remains loyal to Dumbledore" conclusion. And I guess it'll be at least two years before book seven comes along to settle the question. (Argh!)
But in Spike's case, the question has been answered. At various times in S7 of Buffy and S5 of Angel he refers to the fact that he chose to get a soul, and that he had to fight for it and everything. At absolutely no point does he give any indication that he was tricked, or that he was thinking about anything other than getting a soul when he first hopped on his motorcyle and sped out of Sunnydale. Not only do we have Spike's word for it, but it's my understanding that Joss Whedon has confirmed that the whole chip-removal thing was just misdirection.
My theory, now, is that JKR is employing a similar sort of misdirection. And you can see the evidence in one very important passage.
The thing about misdirection is that the author must make it seem like X is happening when really Y is happening. But then, once the reader gets to the end and finds out that it's Y that's been happening all along, they need to be able to go back over all the evidence that originally seemed to point to X and see that it actually points just as effectively to Y—ideally, Y should make even more sense than X, once you look at the evidence in this new light.
Take, for instance, Spike's last scene before he leaves town in "Seeing Red." Spike is definitely having some kind of breakdown, and the things he's saying are kind of disjointed. He seems to identify the chip as the source of his problems:
Spike: It's the chip. Steel and wires and silicon. It won't let me be a monster. And I can't be a man.
And then it seems like he's deciding to get rid of the chip:
Clem: Things change.
Spike: They do. If you make them.
and, moments later,
Spike: She thinks she knows me. She thinks she knows who I am. What I'm capable of. She has no idea. I wasn't always this way. It won't be easy, but I can be like I was. Before they castrated me. Before ...Then she'll see who I really am.
Okay. Note that, although you're meant to think he's talking about getting the chip removed and returning to being a monster, he never actually says so. If nothing sneaky was going on with this text—if there was no misdirection happening, if appearance and truth were meant to be the same—then the phrasing would have been less vague and strange. He would have said something like "I'm going to get this bloody chip out, and then the bitch will pay!" It doesn't make sense that he doesn't say it outright, unless there are tricks being played on the viewers—which, of course, there are.
Okay, so that's the confirmed misdirection in BtVS. Now, what's the possible misdirection in the HBP? Well, there are numerous scenes where we or Harry overhear Snape saying something that could be taken one way or another; most of them are explicitly acknowledged in the text when Harry tries unsuccessfully to use them to convince his friends or teachers that Snape and Draco are up to something. But in my opinion, it really all comes down to one line by Dumbledore at the very end. I refer, of course, to "Severus ... please ..." (Bloomsbury/Raincoast hardcover edition, 556).
The most obvious interpretion of the phrase is that Dumbledore is pleading Snape to help him and/or not to harm him. I'm pretty sure that's Harry's understanding of it.
On the other hand, from the Snape-is-a-good-guy-really! camp, we have the theory that Dumbledore is actually telling Snape to kill him. He means "Severus ... please ... follow through with the plan no matter how hard it is." He means "Severus ... please ... kill me." This is the interpretation I want to believe in, and it's a possibility that I think cannot be ignored.
The phrase, in the text, is incomplete. Please what? JKR is a very careful writer, and I believe she would not have made the last, crucial exchange between Dumbledore and Snape ambiguous by accident.
If Snape is really on Voldemort's side, and if that scene was meant to finally and utterly convince us, then shouldn't Dumbledore have been allowed another word or two to clear things up?
So, that's pretty much it. The vagueness of Dumbledore's last words set off my misdirection(!) sensors, and this leaves me convinced that Snape's still pulling for team Good. 'Cause if Snape really is on the bad guy's side, why leave that little bit of ambiguity for the readers? Harry's convinced that Snape is a bad guy. All the characters appear to be convinced. There's no point in letting the characters all be convinced and yet leaving the readers hanging unless the conclusion is ultimately going to be "Wow, he's good after all!" It's too late for the big, "Wow, he's evil!" reveal; Dumbledore's death scene was it.
At least, that's what I'm going to tell myself for the next two years.
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:0P
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We are still missing a few important puzzle pieces in the story, but this is what I think:
HP6 is about losing/letting go of the "father" Dumbledore. JKR is writing a series that reflects certain psychological stages in the development of kids. At that age, growing up means cutting the umbilical cord to his (replacement) father (figure). Dumbledore had to a) be shown as someone who can mistakes, or who may actually fail (his hand is a very good reminder that even Albus Dumbledore is not invincible), and b) he had to be removed from Harry's life. No more parental safety net.
Ok, Dumbledore had to go. But for good? I don't think so. Gandalf came back, why not Albus? We are still missing memories and puzzle pieces which only Dumbledore can provide. We need him to give us more answers. Which is why I am certain he will be back eventually. He is, after all, fightung under the sign of the Phoenix, a powerful symbol of rebirth.
Also, Dumbledore just drank that enchanted water of death. Is it possible that Albus went to the cave to drink that water? To make his later "death" more convincing?
With Fawkes on his side, I feel that Albus has an ace up his sleeve. So, JKR has everything she needs to bring Albus back.
Large amounts of HP6 were stressing, how important non-verbal spells are. I'm convinced that Snape is able to verbalize one spell, and non-verbally cast another.
However, we know that he took the unbreakable oath. What if he told Albus about the oath and Dumbeldore decided that this was the perfect opportunity to play dead? If "dead", Albus might have more freedom to study Tom Riddle's horcruxes.
I am not convinced that there was no horcrux in the cave. Either Dumbledore salvaged it at an earlier opportunity, or he switched lockets shortly before his "death".
I'm thinking that one of the reasons why Dumbledore spent so much time with Harry was the necessity to prepare Harry for the death of his father-figure. To turn him into someone who may weather his loss and emerge stronger than before.
Snapes flight is interesting too. There is a desperation there, that's hard to explain. Why shouldn't Snape kill Harry, or allow him to be killed by the other death eaters (in which case Voldemort could not blame and punish him)? I think Harry came very close to ruining Albus and Snape's plan there.
Um, well, the purpose of this rambling post is to say that, I'm convinced that Snape is not working for Voldemort but for Dumbledore. Dumbledore failed Tom Riddle. One of the important lessons in HP6 is how spectacularly Albus failed to stop Voldemort when there was still time, thus causing deaths like James's and Lily's. Albus underestimated Voldemort, even though he'd seen a glimpse of Tom's true character. Would Albus have made the same mistake twice?
Personally, I don't think Dumbledore failed to see through Snape. I think that Dumbledore and Snape share the same burden. That they've played an elaborate charade for some time...
Seriously, this is the only interpretation that fits the pattern of the novels...
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I guess the whole Spike thing has made me a dyed in the wool redemptionist, no matter the fandom.
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It's interesting to me that this is your first venture into HP fandom, because I haven't gone there at all, and might have skipped this post in the past. But there is something about the ending of this book that drove me to actually think. I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed the previous books, but wasn't left with questions regarding good vs. evil, redemption, etc. So, now we wait. And, I think I go read the crossover you mention.
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EVERY girl chases the bad boys. >_< Don't even get me started.
I disagree entirely. The whole point of the "tricking the audience" and leaving the possibilities open to do either is precisely what she has done. Ignite the fandom, get them interested, make them care. Admittedly, I strongly suspect it's going to end up the same way you imagine, but that's because it's become a bit of a cliché in some ways.
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Poor Dumbledore ::sniff:: I had a growing feeling that it was going to happen - all that withered hand stuff seemed awfully ominous - but it still pushed the right buttons. RIP, dude. (Or not, as the case may be. All that phoenix stuff also seemed to be awfully significant, no? And why is his new portrait ASLEEP at a time like this?? Methinks he may be pulling an Obi-Wan Kenobi somewhere along the line).
If he is actually dead, then I think it was a pre-arranged plan. I had an immediate gut reaction of NOOO! SNAPE CAN'T REALLY HAVE BEEN EVIL ALL ALONG OMG!!, quickly followed by a mental reaction of pretty much the same thing. There have just been too many concrete statements of trust given by Dumbledore over the course of the series. He *knew* something, something that we don't. Yes, he has been shown to make mistakes - but if that was where we were going, then we would have been given the information so that we could see why/how he was wrong. There's simply no inherent dramatic potential in 'I trust this person totally for not good reason whatsoever. Oh, I was wrong. Oops.'
I think Dumbledore was dying anyway - either from the curse that withered his hand, and/or from drinking the potion (and why, exactly, did he have to drink it? Couldn't they have just poured it in the lake? There's more to that than meets the eye.) I think he intended to die, for whatever reason, and made Snape agree to do it. (They were overhead arguing about something, weren't they? About something Snape didn't want to go through with?) Dumbledore obviously knew what Draco had been told to do, and wanted to save him from having to do it. *That's* why he says 'Severus...' in a pleading tone - he's not pleading for Snape to spare him, but to do what he has to do. And the look of 'revulsion and hate' on Snape's face isn't directed at Dumbledore but at the act he's being forced to carry out. ::pets poor, brave Snape:: No wonder he freaked out about being called a coward, poor woobie. And now, of course, the Order still has a fantastically well-placed spy. Snape will find out the location of the other Horcruxes and tell Harry, and be in position to betray Voldemort when it really counts.
Or maybe I'm just altogether too fond of 'going deep undercover and looking into the abyss' stories. I guess we'll find out come Book 7 :-)
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