Paranoia and Flying Hedgehogs

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 36197

Cindy confessed to getting a little paranoid about who might be a DE.

Eloise wrote:

> That's OK, Cindy. It was precisely for people like you ( and me) 
> that I proposed the Order of the Flying Hedgehog. As I've said 
> before, I think paranoia at this point of the game is a reasonable 
> response. Seriously. I do. If JKR's doing her job, then we should 
> feel as paranoid as the wizarding community in the face of the next 
> Voldy War.

Hmmmm.  Do you think that JKR wants us to be paranoid because we 
*ought* to be, or because she wants to lure us into error, only to 
then chastise us for it later?  

It seems to me that GoF plays some very interesting games with the 
reader when it comes to suspicion.  JKR has always enjoyed the red 
herring game, of course -- she offers up Snape in the first volume, 
and Percy and Draco and Ginny and Hagrid in the second, and then 
Lupin and Crookshanks and the "Grim" in the third -- but in GoF she 
really goes wild with the aspersion-casting, giving us a truly 
dizzying selection of suspicious people: Bagman and Crouch, and 
Karkaroff and Krum, and Moody and Snape (yet again!), and Fudge and...

Well.  The list just goes on and on, doesn't it.

GoF is also, it seems to me, the first of the books which leaves the 
reader *still* feeling deeply uncertain about many of the characters' 
allegiances even after finishing the last page and closing the 
covers.  It also gives us far more characters of complicated, 
divided, or otherwise indeterminate allegiance than we've seen in 
past volumes.  Fudge, Karkaroff, Krum, Bagman, Percy, Crouch, Rita 
Skeeter...even Snape's allegiance is shown to be far more complicated 
than had been previously revealed. 

The extent to which Things Are Not What They Seem, always an
important element to the HB books, reaches an almost vertiginous 
level in GoF: even from the start, we are shown that Portkeys can 
look like an old boots, that Omniculars distract your attention from 
what's really happening in the game, that the beautiful Veela have 
the true faces of monsters, and that a cheerful QWC crowd can quickly 
become a racist mob.  By the time we get to the end of the book, 
we've had elaborate Polyjuice masquerades, and yet more unregistered 
animagi, and half-giants passing as merely big-boned, and double-
agent Potions Masters, and powerful Ministry officials transformed 
into bones, and dead characters who turn out to be alive after 
all...really, it's all a bit overwhelming.

Overall, the novel does seem designed to leave the reader with a 
sense of uneasiness, of foreboding, of indeterminacy.  Things aren't 
nearly as neatly wrapped up as they have been in previous volumes.  
There are many loose ends, and many characters who seem to be headed 
straight for some very tough choices.  

So yes.  I do think that the text is encouraging us to feel uncertain 
and paranoid and suspicious.  I also wonder, however, to what extent 
this might not be a kind of a trap.  I find it interesting, for 
example, that the text seems to place a very strong emphasis on the 
*perils* of paranoia...while simultaneously encouraging us to view 
this paranoia as justified.  There's a tension there, an uneasy 
ambivalence.  It makes me wonder if we might not start seeing 
paranoia itself emerging in Book Five to take its place alongside 
prejudice and envy as one of the Big Spiritual Perils of the
Potterverse.


> Constant vigilance!

Oh, constant vigilance indeed!  But let us not forget from whose 
mouth that sentiment was *really* coming all the way through GoF, 
shall we?  ;->


Meglet wrote, regarding Dumbledore's statement to the tribunal that 
Snape is "now no more a Death Eater than I am":

> I am sure that it is only my horribly twisted and suspicious mind 
> that has occasionally wondered if that last sentence could possibly 
> conceal an ironic double meaning. You know, the evil Dumbledore 
> thing which I mostly resist believing in.

Eloise, I hereby nominate Meglet for membership in the Order of the 
Flying Hedgehog.  She has not only confessed to secret thoughts 
of "Albus Dumbledore Is Ever So Evil;" she even found a nice bit of 
canon to back it up!  

Give the lady a...er...well, what precisely *does* one get when one 
joins the ranks of the OFH, anyway?  (Other than a nervous tic, that 
is.) 


Meglet also said:

> Don't panic. We are very definitely told that Snape was a DE. 

Indeed he was.  But then later on, you see, he re-Kanted.



-- Elkins, exiting at a run, while ducking rotten cabbages