shadowscast

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

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_anne

That Riddle, Snape by

sigune

Spinner's End by

elvensapphire

And, for the opposing point of view:

On Severus Snape by

silverhill

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.