Snape & the DEs, Reprise (With Bits of Where's The Canon?)

[marinafrants]

No: HPFGUIDX 35208

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "ssk7882" <theennead at a...> wrote:

> No George here, though.  George is getting a post of his very own.

Woo-hoo!  George slicks back his hair, wiggles into his tightest
jeans, and practices batting his eyelashes in front of the mirror in
preparation for meeting his very own post.

First, though, there's one point I'd like to address.

I was mostly agreeing with you here:

> I do not, for example, tend to see Snape as a person 
> struggling with conflicting impulses, precisely.  Rather, I tend to 
> see him as someone whose *impulses* all lead him in one unerring 
> direction -- but in a direction that he has chosen to reject on 
> abstract and purely philosophical grounds.  

But then you lost me here:

> The suggestion that Snape left the DEs because when it came right 
> down to it, he lacked a taste for torture or murder, for example,
has 
> always left me a bit cold because in my reading of Snape, of
*course* 
> he has a taste for it.  A taste for it is *exactly* what he's got.  
> His taste for it...well, that's sort of his problem, isn't it?

See, there's cruelty and there's cruelty.  A predilection for reducing
people to quivering globs of jelly through dark threats, deadly
insults and viciously clever mind games is not the same as a
predilection for reducing people to quivering globs of jelly through
pulling their intestines out through their left nostril.  Snape goes
for the first, while Voldy and most of the DEs lean toward the
second.  Most people don't bother to make the distinction though, and
I suspect that young Severus himself didn't bother, which is why he
signed up at the DE membership drive, blithely assuming that torturing
the occassional helpless muggle would be as much fun as goading Sirius
Black into a temper tantrum during breakfast in the Great Hall.  And
when he discovered that it wasn't fun at all, he started thinking
about it ('cause Snape is the sort of guy who thinks about things),
and it's at that point that all those pesky abstract philosophical
grounds began to make themselves known.

And this is the point where Snape becomes someone I respect, see,
because most people in such a situation would drop-kick philosophical
considerations right out the door.  I mean really, how many people
live their day-to-day lives following a philosophical principle?  Most
of us just live following our natural inclinations, and because our
natural inclinations fall within the bounds of what society finds
acceptable, we manage to muddle through somehow.  Snape, OTOH, went
and threw his lot in with people he's naturally inclined to despise,
because he decided that *they were right.  And he risked his life
doing it, too.  I mean... wow.

> 
> It comes to the same thing, in many ways.  But it leads to a lot of 
> different assumptions.  I, for example, assume that of *course*
Snape 
> would enjoy the company of the sort of people who become Death
Eaters 
> (at least, to whatever extent he enjoys company at all).  They would 
> share his tastes, and his inclinations, and his aesthetics, and his 
> interests, and probably his sense of humor as well. 

Oh, absolutely.  I'm sure he enjoyed hanging out with them in the
Slytherin common room, saying snarky things about the Griffyndors and
practicing hexes on the smaller kids.  It's only when push came to
shove that he realized, "hey, these guys are *evil*."

Marina
rusalka at ix.netcom.com