Neville and the Canary Creams

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 36229

David wrote:

> I don't remember the incident terribly clearly, but we have to 
> consider that Neville's choking and spitting are, in fact, 
> overacting to enter into the spirit of the joke.

That's always possible, of course, but it doesn't strike me as
terribly consistent with Neville's portrayal elsewhere in the
books.  I could be failing to remember something, but I can't
off-hand think of a single instance where Neville has played
the buffoon (on purpose, that is) to entertain others, or been
seen joking around with his peers in that particular fashion.

Which isn't to say that he never does, of course, nor that it 
wasn't what he was trying to do in that particular scene.  It
strikes me as far more likely, though, that the choke and the
spit were instinctive "eeewwww, yuck, a tampered sweet that
could do God only knows *what* to me" responses.

Well.  Either way, he was a good sport about it in the end,
and that's what counts.

As for my "semi-autistic" comment...

> Semi-autistic?  You know yourself best, of course, and I know 
> little of autism, but Neville?  Forgetful, clumsy, possibly 
> disorganised, but (even semi-) autistic?

That was very poorly phrased on my part, sorry.  No, I don't view 
Neville as an autistic type at all.  On the contrary, he strikes 
me as quite sensitive to other people -- to interpersonal dynamic -- 
which is most decidedly *not* a characteristic of autism.

I myself was (incorrectly, in both my opinion and in those of 
subsequent doctors) diagnosed as autistic at one point in my 
childhood, as I had a number of classically autistic traits -- none 
of which Neville shares.  Some of the end results, however, were much 
the same: the apparent absent-mindedness, and the inability to deal 
very well with certain subjects in school, and the tendency to 
make the exact same mistakes (stepping onto that trick stair, for
example) over and over and over again, much to the frustration and 
the bewilderment of others.

So while the cause was very different, the end result, in terms of 
others' perceptions, was quite similar, if not identical.  That was 
all I really meant by that comment.

(And although I know that it's my own fault for having brought it up 
here in the first place, I really do think that if people wish to 
discuss autism itself any further, we should take that to the OT 
list.)

I wrote:

> I'll even let you in on a little secret here.  I thought that 
> Lupin's oh-so-blatant "let's bolster Neville's confidence" was kind 
> of condescending too, to tell you the truth.  

David said:

> Surely it had to be blatant, because Snape was blatant.  Lupin's 
> remarks, while serving the function of bolstering Neville's 
> confidence, were primarily a rebuke to Snape, which therefore had 
> to be administered before the same people who were witnesses to 
> Snape's remarks.  

I agree with you both that it served as an excellent rebuke to Snape, 
and that this was its primary intent.  

What I was responding to there, however, was mainly how Harry seems 
to have viewed Lupin's pedagogy in regard to Neville -- and therefore 
how we as readers tend to think of it.  

In GoF, when Harry learns of Crouch/Moody's passing on Professor 
Sprout's praise to Neville, he thinks of it both as "very tactful" 
and as "something that Professor Lupin would have done." (I'm 
paraphrasing from memory here, so forgive me if I'm a word or two 
off.)  The implication seems to be that Harry believes Lupin's 
encouragement of Neville to have been both tactful and wholly 
positive...and I'm not altogether certain that I believe that it 
really felt that way to Neville himself -- much in the same way,
in fact, that I'm not altogether certain that I believe that 
Neville's feelings towards Hermione's acts of kindness towards him
are utterly positive or without a certain degree of ambivalence.

Of course, I could be wrong about that.  And I am very likely to be 
over-identifying, projecting myself rather too much onto the 
character.  But it does strain my suspension of disbelief somewhat to 
think that Neville does *not* notice the pity and the condescension,
or that these things do not, on some level, bother him.


-- Elkins