Voldemort's graveyard confessions (warning: contains metadebate)

[dfrankiswork at netscape.net]

No: HPFGUIDX 47893

I would like to try to crystallise and move on some of the metathinking debate (BTW can I assure Melody that I for one follow this and Magic Dishwasher (1) with interest even if I don't post on it often).

One of the games we play here is to pretend that the world described in the HP books is real, and then try to get it all to hang together consistently.  For the playing of this game, it is unfair to bring what Pip calls the 'outside-in' perspective.

However, this game is weaker, considered as a mechanism for arriving at statements that in some sense may be considered true, than scientific enquiry.  That's because we are limited to the finite text of canon, and because the use of the imagination is a necessary component of the construction of the HP-world (the 'fictive universe').

The first limitation means that complex theories such as MD can 'use up' canon, leaving nothing behind (until a new book appears) for opponents to test it against.

The second, and more important, limitation means that different people have different observations of the HP world.  There isn't the element of objectivity that is assumed in (most) scientific enquiry.  If I self-consistently read something in a different tone of voice to the way you do, there is no way to verify which is 'right' - and hence there is no right way, subject to the general demand of consistency.

I have a practical example that is pertinent to MD, which I feel I do not myself have the tools to resolve.

In the graveyard scene of GOF, MD holds that Voldemort and some of the DEs are expertly lying.  Now, in the real world, when people lie, they do not always manage to behave in exactly the way they would when telling the truth - they give things away with body language, for example.  In the fictive universe, we don't have access to all the necessary information, only what the author gives us.  One consequence of this, IMO, is that conventions arise for describing behaviour in literature that signal lying or concealed emotion. (Think of Ron writing a foot away from his pad in the potions lesson when he hears Krum has asked Hermione to Bulgaria).

Consciously noting that conventions of this sort are applied is a form of 'metathinking' (no, I don't like the word either; IMO all our analysis is ultimately metathinking) that I don't believe has been applied in MD; furthermore because it to some extent takes the place of the controllled measurements of science that can't be done with an imaginative text it can be argued that it is valid in the 'inside-thinking' game.

So, listies, is there anything in the way that JKR has written the graveyard scene itself (not the context of the 'dirty war' between Dumbledore and Voldemort), that indicates either that Voldemort is telling the truth - perhaps more than is good for his cause - or lying - perhaps in a way that would indicate to an alert Harry or Dumbledore that there is more going than on the surface?  Or do we have to settle for a view that lying and truth-telling are indistinguishable within this scene, and can only be discerned by reference to the larger plot?

David

1) You will find the Magic Dishwasher interpretation explained at:

http://www.i2k.com/~svderark/lexicon/faq/hypotheticalley.html#md

thanks to hard work by Cindy, Pip, Dicey, Elkins, and Porphyria

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