Twins, Toons, Humor and Instinct

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 43319

Dicentra wrote:

> First, let me preface this with some clarifications. I wrote my 
> initial "Toon" analysis of the twins waaaaay back last Friday 
> [43083].  Two hundred messages later, it seems that some people 
> [both who agree and disagree with me] have inadvertently misread 
> what I was saying and have assumed I meant things I didn't mean. 
> I'll take the responsibility for that: a good essay shouldn't be so 
> easy to misread, and obviously I didn't craft it well enough.

No, Dicentra.  Your essay was beautifully crafted, and the fault was 
my own.  It *had* been a while, and I think that I must have 
improperly conflated a statement of Abigail's with your own intent.  
This was the statement that I had been remembering:

> Fred and George Weasly, as the chief suppliers of comic relief in 
> the books, tend to be responsible for most of these actions, but I 
> find it hard to believe that we are meant to read any insight from 
> this into their character. 

I had been responding in large part to that sentiment.  But as Amy 
pointed out, that had not in fact been your argument, and I do 
apologize for misrepresenting your views.  I'd also like to thank you 
for extending to me the benefit of the doubt conveyed by that 
word "inadvertently."  I appreciate that a great deal, as I honestly 
*hadn't* meant to go jousting after straw men in that message, and 
I'm glad for the opportunity to correct my error.

> The core of the "Toon" argument is not that the cartoonish scenes 
> are somehow apart from the rest of the text. It is rather that the 
> twins engage in behavior that has the *form* of bullying, but not 
> the *substance*. It's mock violence instead of real violence. 

Okay.  I think that I see your point, which if I'm understanding it 
correctly is that whether or not something really constitutes 
"violence" is determined by its actual *effect.*  The *substance* of 
violence is harm.  So an action is only a "violent act" if it causes 
harm.  If it does not cause harm, then no violence has really been 
committed.  

Since cartoon violence doesn't really do any harm -- Toons just pick 
themselves right up again and go on their merry way -- therefore the 
actions themselves cannot properly be described as violent acts.  The 
perpetrators of said actions are therefore not really committing 
violence, and so it is inappropriate to ascribe to them a label 
("bully," for example) which implies that they have caused harm.  Is 
that right?

I suppose that there are two reasons that I can't myself adopt this 
approach.  The first reason is one that you yourself touch on here:

> The twins themselves, however, aren't the ones who decided to make 
> it mock violence--JKR did. 

Yes, precisely.  I suppose that it is largely because of that that I 
still feel that the labels are appropriate.  From the perspective of 
the *Toons,* their actions are still "real" because they share the 
same reality as all of the other Toons.  So a Toon bully, for 
example, can still be called a bully, even though he is a Toon, 
because he is still engaging in bullying behavior.  It just means 
that he is a "Toon bully."

Elmer Fudd, for example, is a Toon, and he is also a hunter.  The 
fact that he is incapable of actually catching or killing or harming 
Bugs Bunny -- or any other animal, for that matter -- in any 
permanent or meaningful fashion does not, to my way of thinking, 
really make him any less of a hunter.  It just means that he is a 
Toon hunter, rather than a real one.

The second reason that I have some trouble with this approach is the 
one that I touched upon in my last message: namely, that the 
"Toonishness" of the characters in the books often varies from scene 
to scene, and that actions taken at one level of cartoonishness
can sometimes have ramifications that emerge later on at a different 
level.  So it's hard for me to imagine, for example, how I would be 
able to read the scene between Arthur and the kids in the aftermath 
of TTT, if I didn't accept the Dursleys' terror as real, and the 
twins' actions as therefore constituting Muggle-baiting.  

On this topic, Amy wrote:

> The Ton-Tongue Toffee skates along the border of Muggle-baiting, 
> yes (since their Muggle victim is more terrified by it than a 
> wizard one would be), even though I agree with Elkins that they 
> were not cognizant of this at the time. I love her point that it is 
> on the light end of an increasingly dark progression of wizard-on-
> Muggle violence portrayed in GF (not in the Pensieve, though; in 
> chapter 27. There is nothing about attacks on Muggles in the 
> Pensieve). 

Oops.  Didn't make myself clear there, I guess.  I'm glad you liked 
that reading, Amy, but I think that it's actually yours.  In fact, I 
think I may like it better than my own.  So, uh, well done! ;^>

When I wrote about TTT presaging both QWC and Pensieve, I actually 
didn't mean to be referring to wizard-on-muggle violence.  I was 
referring to the phenomenon of normal regular people, "goodies," 
behaving in ways that the text portrays as wicked, yet without any 
apparent recognition of the fact that that is what they are actually 
doing.  I tend to view the increased incidence of this phenomenon as 
one of the signs of the series' growing moral complexity, and I laud 
it.  

All of the people who join the Muggle-baiting parade at the QWC, for 
example, cannot possibly be Death Eaters.  There are too many of them 
for that, and their numbers *grow* as the scene progresses.  They're 
not criminals or evil-doers or anything of the sort.  They're just 
regular old witches and wizards who had been drinking a bit too much 
and got caught up in the mood of the mob, and they don't seem to have 
any real self-awareness of the fact that they are doing something 
strikingly wicked.  Similarly, the crowd in the Pensieve, screaming 
and hissing and jeering at the sentencing, are presumably all decent 
people.  They're supposedly on the side of "good."  But they have 
been carried away by emotion, and it has led them to behave in a 
manner that is described quite chillingly. Their behavior comes 
across as very nearly diabolic -- and yet we understand that they
are ordinary people, people who could live next door to you.  

TTT presages those scenes, to my mind, because the twins are "good 
guys."  They're Harry's allies.  They're Harry's friends.  They are 
not racists, and they object when their father accuses them of having 
been Muggle-baiting.  But they *were* Muggle-baiting.  They're 
characters who aren't "baddies," doing a thing that the text condemns 
in no uncertain terms as a signifier of "badguyness."

That was my reading of TTT in the context of the novel as a whole, at 
any rate.  But it sort of falls apart for me if I try to deny the 
reality of the Dursleys' fear.  It makes Arthur deluded -- it means 
that he is *wrong* about what just happened at the Dursley residence -
- and that really just doesn't work for me at all. 


Dicey suggested:

> As for Arthur and Molly's reaction to the episode, they don't see 
> the Dursleys as Toons. They see them as ordinary muggles, and they 
> see the twins' behavior as muggle-baiting, regardless of whether 
> Dudley can be hurt or not. 

But if the twins can perceive that the Dursleys are Toons, then why 
can't Arthur and Molly? And if the twins *can't* perceive that the 
Durlseys are Toons, then what possible bearing does the fact that the 
Dursleys are Toons have on the question of what the twins' behavior
reveals about their character?


-- Elkins