Still-Life With Memory Charm

ssk7882 skelkins at attbi.com
Thu Mar 21 00:25:50 UTC 2002


No: HPFGUIDX 36772

Much Ado About Memory Charms.

Some thoughts about Neville and his proposed Memory Charm: the extent 
to which the textual suggestions of its existence may or may not 
seem "obviously" planted there by the author; its overall canonical 
plausibility; its specific mechanics; and questions as to what its 
purpose might be, both from the in-world perspective of the 
Potterverse characters themselves and from the authorial perspective 
of narrative function.  

Also, a bit of Sneaky!Neville, and a little bit of Snape.

-----

On the question of whether or not the possibility that Neville's 
memory problems might be the result of a memory charm was "obviously" 
suggested by the text, David wrote:

> The question I really want to know the answer to is, what is it 
> about us that makes things that are obvious to one person obscure 
> to another?

I think that this may have a great deal to do with pattern 
recognition, which is largely a matter of training.  Someone with a 
background in literary analysis is going to have been trained to 
notice certain types of patterns, someone with a background in 
linguistics others, and someone with a background in comparative 
religion still others.  All three of these people are humanities 
types, but they're still not likely to notice the same sorts of 
things, nor to consider the same things "obvious."

I also think that this is often nothing more than a matter of pure 
idiosyncracy, or sometimes simply one of chance.  Take mystery 
novels, for example.  The mystery novel that you found profoundly 
unsatisfying because the solution was just far too "obvious" might be 
one that utterly stymied me -- and vice versa.  Often I think that 
this comes down to little more than dumb luck: one person happens to 
spot the relevant clue that causes him to start thinking along the 
right lines; the other person just doesn't happen to pick up on
that one because his attention was flagging while he was reading that 
particular passage, or because the clue in question was about a dog 
and this reader just isn't interested in animals, or because some 
random "Ah-hah!" neuron didn't fire at just the right time, or 
whatever.

And of course, one can all too easily find something "obvious," and 
yet still be completely wrong in the end.

As indeed, people may well be when it comes to the memory charm 
theory.


> On OT-Chatter I theorised that it has, at least in part, to do with 
> the 'two cultures' divide between scientists and humanists.

> Thoughts?

I'm always suspicious about that "two cultures" divide, partly 
because while I've always been an artsy-fartsy humanities type 
myself, I've also always been interested in stereotypical geek 
pursuits (RPGs, interactive fiction, science fiction, etc.), which 
are -- or used to be, at any rate -- mainly the province of the math-
science folk.  I've therefore spent much of my life hanging out with 
computer programmers and engineers and physicists, and all that lot, 
and I have to say that I've never really noticed all that strict a 
division in terms of how the two types think or perceive or analyze.  
Whatever differences in thought might exist between these two 
academic groupings pale in significance, IME, next to the differences 
encouraged by other quasi-cultural divides, such as
theoretical/practical (the physicists vs. the engineers, for 
example), or conventional/iconoclastic, or Geek/Jock, or 
pacifist/militarist, or even smoker/non-smoker.

That's been my experience, anyway.  Obviously others' mileages may 
(and likely do) vary.

But as to the Memory Charm Theory itself, I wouldn't say that I 
consider it "obvious."  It did occur to me as a possibility when I 
read GoF for the first time, and upon second reading, as I observed 
in a more analytical fashion the specific things that had *led* me to 
consider it, I did indeed find myself suspecting that the author 
might have deliberately designed the text to draw the reader to this 
conclusion.

But unlike many others here, I'm not absolutely convinced that she 
did.  It doesn't seem so very "obvious" to me that I feel at all 
comfortable ruling out the possibility that all of the textual 
suggestions of Neville as the recipient of a memory charm might not 
have been in fact utterly unintended by the author.  

I do think, though, that the arguments for believing them to have 
been authorial intent are very compelling.  

Kelly undertook the task of listing those textual suggestions:

> * We are told that, while at Hogwarts, Bertha Jorkins was a gossip 
> with a steel-trap mind. 

> * We are told that later in her life, while working at the MoM, she
> bacame forgetful, a bungler shuffled from department to department. 

> * We are told Crouch Sr. placed a memory charm on her. [sidenote: 
> While it is implied, I don't think JKR ever states that the Memory
> Charm caused the decline of Bertha Jorkins's mental processes. klh]

Maybe JKR doesn't, but in his veritaserum confession of Chapter 35, 
Younger Crouch does.  Or at least, he reports that his father had 
claimed this to be the case:  

"He put a very powerful Memory Charm on her to make her forget what 
she'd found out.  Too powerful.  He said it damaged her memory 
permanently."

> * We are told that Neville is forgetful, a bit of a bungler.

Not only that, but the text emphasizes this aspect of Neville's 
character constantly.  In PS/SS, Neville's first introduction to the 
reader comes when Harry overhears him telling his grandmother that he 
has lost his toad (again).  In CoS, his introduction to the reader 
(not counting his brief one-line appearance in the dormitories, in 
which he is merely one of the "other second-years") is: 

"Neville was a round-faced and accident-prone boy with the worst 
memory of anyone Harry had ever met."  

In PoA, Neville's introduction is:

"...he also ran into the real Neville Longbottom, a round-faced, 
forgetful boy, outside of Flourish and Botts.  Harry didn't stop to 
chat.  Neville appeared to have mislaid his booklist and was being 
told off by his very formidable-looking grandmother."  

And in GoF it is: 

"Several of their friends looked in on them as the afternoon 
progressed, including Seamus Finnigan, Dean Thomas, and Neville 
Longbottom, a round-faced, extremely forgetful boy who had been 
brought up by his formidable witch of a grandmother."

That Neville is both forgetful and a bit of a bungler (and that he was
raised by his grandmother) is not just something that the authorial 
voice has told us.  It is something that the authorial voice has 
chosen to emphasize quite strongly.  In fact, Neville's forgetfulness 
and his bungling (along with his round face and his unusual 
upbringing) constitute his primary descriptors.


But Kelly left out what for me were the two really big suggestions of 
the memory charm possibility in GoF, namely the conjunction of the 
following factors:

* The behavior of Mr. Roberts, after receiving a memory charm:

  "Mr. Roberts had a strange dazed look about him, and he waved them
  off with a vague 'Merry Christmas.'

* The behavior of Neville in the corridor after DADA class:

  "'Oh yes, I'm fine,' Neville gabbled in the same unnaturally high
voice.  'Very interesting dinner -- I mean lesson -- what's for 
eating?'"


* Arthur Weasley's explanation for Mr. Roberts' befuddled behavior:

  "'Sometimes, when a person's memory's modified, it makes him a bit
  disoriented for a while...and that was a big thing they had to make
  him forget.'"


* Chapter 30's provision of a "big thing" that is in fact *much* 
bigger than poor Mr. Roberts' "big thing," and which someone might 
indeed hae wished to make Neville forget, if in fact he had been a 
witness to it.


The combination of these factors -- particularly the parallel between 
Mr. Roberts' confusion over the date and Neville's aphasia -- 
certainly did inspire me, as a reader, to think about the possibility 
of a memory-charmed Neville.  

But could they be coincidental?  Could it not just be that as a 
writer, JKR has a fairly standard way of depicting characters in a 
state of confusion or mental distress?

I do think that this *could* be the case.  For one thing, the 
parallels between Neville's muddled dialogue and Mr. Roberts' are not 
nearly as neat as they could have been.  Had Mr. Roberts engaged in 
the same sort of word/concept substitution that Neville does, for 
example, or had Neville babbled confusingly about the time or the 
date, rather than getting his lessons and dinners muddled, then I 
would feel far more certain that it was the author's intent for the 
reader to conflate the two events.  As things stand, though, I don't 
personally feel that it's nearly so clear-cut a case of "obvious" 
authorial intent as others here have proposed.


Kelly:

> What is NOT obvious to me is whether Neville & Bertha together are a
> clue or a red herring.

No.  That isn't obvious to me, either.  JKR has always enjoyed the 
red herring game, and she's used plot device foreshadowing to this 
end before (all those who wondered if Lupin could be a Polyjuiced 
Sirius Black when they first read PoA, raise your hands!).  By the 
time that she was writing GoF, she had to have been aware that 
speculation about future plot developments in her books had become a 
very popular hobby among her readers.  I wouldn't rule out the 
possibility that it could be misdirection.

I do, however, find it highly suggestive that to date every single 
one of the novels has drawn the reader's attention to the use and/or 
abuse of memory charms.  We are introduced to the concept in the 
first book.  The second volume gives us Lockhart and his nefarious 
use of Obliviate; it also shows us a clear example of just how badly 
such charms *can* confuse someone's mind, should they go awry.  The 
third book includes explicit discussion of the use of memory charms 
both in regard to the Aunt-Inflating Incident which starts up the 
plot *and* in regard to the decade-old Sirius Black Incident.  And of 
course, GoF is just packed to bursting with information about memory 
charms: their uses, their side-effects, their drawbacks, their abuses.

I think Neville's got one, myself.  But even if he turns out not to, 
I'm still betting that memory charms are going to become relevant to 
the main plot of the series in some way or another before we're done, 
just as the Polyjuice Potion returned to play a starring role in Gof, 
after putting in its (implied) appearance as a red herring in PoA.



-----


So why *would* Neville have been given a memory charm, anyway?


Elirtai mused:

> The reasons why he got the charm aren't that clear to me - the most 
> obvious reason would be to help him get over the trauma of the DE 
> attack on his parents. . . . . If you want to spare a small child 
> some of the suffering, but don't really want him to *forget*, 
> wouldn't you use a less definitive method? Such as we do in 'real' 
> life without magic?

Well, some might.  But then, as we don't have the option of using 
memory charms to try to erase traumatic memories, it's a bit 
difficult to say for sure whether we would try to use them for that 
purpose or not.  Remember what Hagrid says in PS/SS, when he's 
explaining to Harry the reasons for wizards preferring to keep their 
existence hidden from the Muggle world?

Easy answers to difficult situations are always tempting, even when 
they yield unfortunate results.  Didn't the end of GoF emphasize that 
notion?

And wizards do seem to be, on the whole, a terribly delicate breed, 
don't you think?  They go mad in Azkaban.  They allow themselves to 
get corrupted by evil at the drop of a hat.  They're proud and fierce 
and emotionally volatile and neurotic; they hold onto grudges for 
damn near forever.  And while it's unclear precisely what's wrong 
with the Longbottoms -- are they actually catatonic, or utterly 
delusional, or merely possessed of some very strange form of 
selective amnesia? -- whatever afflicts them is hardly what we would 
consider a normal adult response to even the most extended and brutal 
forms of mistreatment.  If you ask me, wizards just aren't very 
emotionally stable.  Harry's oft-touted resilience would seem to be 
yet more way in which he truly is extraordinary within the wizarding
world.

But for people with such a disturbing propensity to mental illness, 
they don't seem to have done very much to advance the cause of mental 
health, have they?  You would think that they'd have put some work 
into that, these past few centuries.  The Longbottoms are 
still "completely insane" after *how* many years of hospitalization?  
And what about Lockhart?  We haven't seen anything of *him* since his 
unfortunate accident.

Given all of that, it wouldn't really surprise me all that much if 
the immediate wizarding response to a distressed toddler who might 
have been witness to his parents' torture had been: "Oh, no!  He'll 
be raving mad for sure!  And then we'll *never* be able to fix him!  
He might even decide to Turn To The Dark Side!  So quick -- give that 
kid a memory charm, before it's too late!"


Anna wrote:

> It seems kind of silly to me to modify the memory of an infant, but 
> if Harry has the occasional nightmare about his parents, Neville 
> could too.

At the risk of starting up the whole timeline debate again, I would 
point out that Neville could have been well out of infancy by the 
time of the incident.  We don't know for sure precisely when it 
occurred, only that the order of events goes something like this:

(a) fall of Voldemort

(b) arrest of many DEs, some acquitted, some not (by the time of 
Karkaroff's testimony, there is talk of rounding up "the last of" the 
DEs)

(c) Karkaroff's testimony

(d) Rookwood's arrest

(e) Bagman's trial

(f) Longbottom Incident

Now, I personally think that all of that would have taken more than
a couple of months.  But others (Cindy, for example) have disagreed 
with me, and the God-like Lexicon itself proposes a late 1981 date 
for Crouch Jr's trial.  So clearly, I'm in the minority here.

Even so, though, if we assume a fairly early date for the incident, 
Neville still could have been two years old.  If we assume a later 
date, he could have been as old as three.  Either way leaves him 
plenty old enough to have been aware of what was happening, and to 
remember it quite clearly, should nothing intervene to prevent him 
from doing so.


But what if the memory charm weren't placed on Neville purely for his 
*psychological* benefit?  Anna suggested that it might have been some 
kind of wizarding witness protection scheme:

> In Neville's case, it might be a form of protection - if he doesn't 
> know anything, he's less likely to be tracked by the remaining 
> Death Eaters.

This is a particularly interesting suggestion, to my mind, because it 
raises once more the issue of the Ministry's unspoken (but 
increasingly apparent) acknowledgement that many of those who walked 
free in the early '80s are indeed unrepentent Death Eaters.

It also leads into the suggestion that a memory charm might have been 
put on Neville not to protect him at all, but rather to prevent him 
from revealing something that somebody desperately wanted to keep 
under wraps.  

Elirtai wrote:

> Any other ideas? Did something else happen, which he absolutely 
> *had* to forget?  Did some DE put the charm on him so he wouldn't 
> remember *something*?  They wouldn't have felt compelled to be 
> overly careful about it.  If he ever gets his memory back - will we 
> learn something important?

In response to which, Finwitch suggested:

> Something... Like that Bartolomeus Crouch Junior did NOT take part 
> in torturing his parents, but that Lucius Malfoy did! (or other 
> liberated DEs Harry named...


Mmmmmm.

So tell me something here.  Am I the only person so deeply and 
profoundly mistrustful of the Ministry that my immediate thought upon 
reading Finwitch's above suggestion was that if a memory charm had 
indeed been placed on Neville to suppress this particular piece of 
knowledge, then the culprit probably wasn't a _Death Eater_ at all?

Just wondering.


-----


What does it take to break through a memory charm?


Finwitch wrote:

> We have been told that a memory charm *can* be reversed by a 
> powerful wizard.

<wince>

Well.  Um.  Voldemort claimed breaking Bertha Jorkins' memory charm 
as proof of his status as a "powerful wizard," true.  But then, 
Voldemort is also a megalomaniacal sadist.  Me, I kinda got the 
impression that anyone with a pair of blunt-nosed pliers and a 
sufficiently vicious imagination could probably have achieved the 
exact same effect.  I mean, didn't they just torture the poor woman 
until the charm snapped?  Maybe I'm just unusually morbid, but that 
was certainly my interpretation of how all played out.

Even if we assume that powerful magic *other* than that used to cause 
pain was involved, though, I still received the distinct impression 
that pain was key.  And I really don't think that we want to wish 
such a fate on poor Neville, do we?  Admittedly JKR *does* like to 
play her little games with that "History Repeats Itself Through The 
Generations" thing she's got running, but I think that even she would 
draw the line at that!

This does raise the question, though, of whether or not simple 
anxiety would suffice.  For that matter, what role might personal 
will play in the erosion of a memory charm?  What role might constant 
reminders of the suppressed memory play?

If we assume that Neville does indeed have a memory charm, then what 
do we make of his behavior in the corridor after Crouch/Moody's DADA 
class in GoF?  Could his evident distress there be a sign of memory 
charm erosion, brought on by the in-class demonstration of the 
Cruciatus?  Is a memory charm a kind of perpetual spell, which lurks 
in a dormant state in the recipient's mind, only to kick into action 
to exert some form of magical suppression whenever the recipient 
makes some attempt to think about the forbidden topic?  Is the
reason that Neville appears so confused (and in much the same way as 
Mr. Roberts) in that scene because he had in fact just been *trying* 
to access his suppressed memory, and was thus even more directly 
under the charm's detrimental influence than he usually is?  And if 
so, then does this also account for his general tendency to perform 
poorly when under stress?

This is certainly food for thought.  It also leads us to the question 
of just what that proposed memory charm might be *doing* to the poor 
kid, anyway.

On this subject, Elirtai wrote:

> Some other thoughts: Neville's innate magic ability took quite long 
> to surface, and it only appeared under danger of death. Could a 
> bungled memory charm have affected his ability to react with 
> spontaneous magic to adverse situations?

Erm.  I guess this all depends on precisely *what* effects you're 
imagining the memory charm to have on Neville's ability to react with 
spontaneous magic to adverse situations.  I have to say that, his 
late-blooming aside, I don't see much evidence at all that Neville 
has any problem manifesting spontaneous magic when under adverse 
situations.  In fact, I see his problem as lying in just the opposite 
direction.  It seems to me that throughout the books, Neville has 
been shown to respond to stress with unusually *strong* -- if also 
wild, unharnessed, and uncontrolled -- manifestations of magical 
power, and that it is really this tendency, rather than any true 
magical weakness, that accounts for most of his difficulties.

Just look at what happened during his first flying lesson in Ps/SS.  
The poor kid is terrified of flying, and so what happens?  Does his 
broom refuse to take off at all?  No.  At first he can't get it to 
come to his hand, true, but when he finally does, then he loses 
control of it completely: it sends him soaring straight up into the 
air, seemingly utterly on its own accord, until he finally falls 
off.  Harry's interpretation of the event at the time is that Neville
must have been so nervous that he "kicked off" too early, but I don't 
believe for a moment that that's what really happened -- unless one 
is willing to accept a rather broad definition of "kicking off."  I 
tend to read that scene as just another example of Neville's magic 
getting away from him again.  

(Very much like Trevor the toad, in fact.  I often view Trevor as a 
kind of symbolic representative of Neville's magical talent itself, 
perhaps even as something akin to a familiar.  Trevor is similarly 
always "getting away" from Neville, wandering outside of the reach of 
his conscious influence, leaving the sphere of his personal control.  
In fact, our very first glimpse of Neville is one of him complaining 
of this very problem -- and to his grandmother, no less.)

Neville sometimes gives the impression of being simply incapable of 
performing magically.  Far more often, though, his blunders in canon 
are portrayed as powerful but unfocussed, rather than as weak and 
ineffective.  In GoF, for example, his difficulties with the 
banishing charm are described as: "Neville's aim was so poor that he 
kept accidentally sending much heavier things flying across the room -
- Professor Flitwick, for instance."  In Transfiguration lessons, he 
sometimes simply fails to perform, but he also does things like 
"accidentally" transplanting his own ears onto a cactus.  And his 
Potions blunders tend towards the spectacular as well: is melting 
right through the bottom of a metal cauldron really an *expected* 
result of failing to follow a potions recipe properly?

But how *about* that Potions Class, eh?

Kitty suggested that Snape might be deliberately trying to break 
through Neville's memory charm by antagonizing and frightening him in 
Potions Class.

Porphyria wrote:

> Uncle Algie literally endangers the child's life (multiple times) 
> in order to smoke out his magical ability, which is one among 
> several indications that adrenaline directly affects wizarding 
> skills. And when Voldemort needed to break Bertha Jorkin's Memory 
> Charm, he did it by repeatedly torturing her. So I've wondered many 
> times whether Snape imagines that if he can either terrify or 
> infuriate Neville enough that it'll break the charm. 

Oh?  And here I was, thinking that Snape's habit of terrifying and 
infuriating Neville in Potions Class was part and parcel of his very 
cunning strategy for entrapping Harry and Hermione!  ;-D

But seriously, as I've been reading it, Neville's adrenaline surges 
in Potions Class most certainly *do* cause him to exhibit strong 
surges of magical power.  Surely that's why he melts so many of those 
cauldron bottoms!  I've always read that particular manifestation of 
Neville's potions ineptitude as indicative of an uncontrolled and 
wild release of magical force.  He's also incompetent in the more 
standard ways, of course -- he gets his measurements wrong, and so 
forth -- but I've always assumed that the cauldron-melting incidents 
are meant to represent surges of strong unfocussed magic, rather than 
an inability to follow instructions properly, or to remember 
ingredients, or anything of that sort.

But I don't tend to view this as evidence of a *weakening* memory 
charm.  If anything, I think that it's evidence of an activated 
memory charm.  I don't really think that what the memory charm is 
doing to Neville is blocking his magical power at all.  I think that 
it is interfering with his ability to focus and to concentrate, and 
that it is this inability, rather than any real inability to access 
his magical power, that usually accounts for his blunderings.  

For one thing, Neville *is* capable of normal magical competence when 
he's not under stress.  In fact, he performs at his best when he is 
not frightened.  His marks are always highest in herbology, a class 
in which he seems to feel relaxed and comfortable, and which is 
taught by the gentle Professor Sprout.  And Lupin coaxes good 
performance out of him during that boggart demonstration by 
reassuring him, rather than by intimidating him.  

Of course, that doesn't mean that Snape couldn't be trying to blast 
away Neville's memory charm.  It seems perfectly likely to me that
the way to break through a charm of that sort might be to "overload" 
it -- which would explain why stress could both cause it to activate 
*and* (if enough stress were applied) to break it altogether.

What it does mean to my mind, though, is the the speculation, often 
proposed by memory charm fans, that the result of Neville being 
released from the charm will be a sudden surge in magical power 
doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.  Because as I see it, a 
*lack* of power isn't the kid's problem at all.

Even if he does want very badly for everyone to believe that it is.

No. I'm not joking.  I really do think that Neville can be very 
sneaky when it comes to this subject.  He certainly does try to 
*encourage* people to view him as magically-weak, doesn't he?  He 
tells that story of his late magical blooming to everyone at the 
table during his very first dinner at Hogwarts, he expresses his 
concern that Salazar Slytherin's monster might be coming after him 
next, because of his "near-Squib" status...

Except that he doesn't.  Not really.  If you look at what he actually 
*says* there in CoS, I think that it's quite suggestive.  Neville 
never once says that he is "almost a Squib."  What he actually *says* 
is: "everyone knows I'm almost a Squib" -- which isn't at all the 
same thing.

Certainly the student body as a whole seems to have accepted as 
Common Wisdom the notion that Neville lacks magical talent.  But 
really, who was it who gave them that idea in the first place?

Yeah.  Well, I'm not falling for it.

And neither is Snape.


Chapter Eleven, _CoS_:

"'A bad idea, Professor Lockhart,' said Snape, gliding over like a 
large and malevolent bat.  'Longbottom causes devestation with the 
simplest spells.  We'll be sending what's left of Finch-Fletchley up 
to the hospital wing in a matchbox.'"


As is usual with Snape, the snide tone somewhat masks the real 
message (as well as the genuine concern for the safety of the 
students under his care).  Snape's concern here is not that Neville 
is magically *weak* at all.  It is that Neville is magically 
*strong,* but that he lacks control, is particularly prone to losing
control when under stress, and is therefore more than likely to 
really hurt his opponent if forced to duel while under the pressure 
of being put on the spot in front of a large group of spectators.

And Snape was quite right to be concerned, IMO.  When Neville is 
frightened, he far more often displays a kind of wild magical over-
exuberance than he does any form of real magical block.  

To tell you the truth, I don't think that that memory charm has 
anything to *do* with any magical block.  If Neville's got a magical 
block at all, which I rather doubt, then IMO it's competely 
psychological.

It does make you wonder, though: what is it about Snape in particular 
that frightens Neville so badly?  I mean, here we have Neville 
Longbottom, the only son of what seems to be a very old and proud and 
pure-blooded family.  There's an ugly tragedy in his past: his 
parents were victimized by Dark Wizards during the last great 
wizarding war, in which his father was an active agent.  His father 
was an Auror.  His grandmother feels that he should be doing more to 
uphold the family name.  He has some problems with controlling his 
magic -- it tends to "get away from him," particularly when he's 
under a lot of stress, often with excessive results.  He has some 
problems with attention and focus, and he has a terrible memory -- 
possibly due to a memory charm.  He doesn't seem terribly combatative 
overall: in fact, he seems to possess an instinctive aversion to most 
forms of conflict.  When he is talked into engaging in conflict by 
his friends, whose good opinion is important to him, he plays to 
lose: he doesn't try to engage weedy little Draco Malfoy in 
fisticuffs, but instead attacks both Goyle and Crabbe at once; when 
he confronts his friends in the Gryffindor common room, he all but 
*dares* them to attack him -- and he makes sure not to fail to remind 
them while he does so that he is merely acting on their previous 
instructions.  He very rarely expresses anger.  He seems to have 
little in the way of Proper Wizarding Pride.

He isn't really anything like a Squib -- but he encourages everyone 
to believe that he is.  

He isn't really anything like a coward either -- but he encourages 
everyone to think that he is.

As a child, he refused to demonstrate any form of magical ability to 
his family until doing so was absolutely necessary to save his life.

And boy, that Sorting Hat sure took a long time with him, didn't it?


So just what is it about Professor Snape -- ex-DE Snape, Snape who is 
proud and vengeful and combatative, and who is obsessed with duty and 
honor, Snape who looks like the very archetype of a Powerful 
Sorceror, Snape who is the Head of House Slytherin, Snape who appears 
in boggart form looking as if he may well be reaching for his wand 
(even though he teaches a wandless subject), Snape in whose class 
Neville keeps melting down his cauldrons, Snape who is *onto* Neville 
and obviously doesn't believe this "I'm just nearly a Squib" 
act for a second...

What does this man represent to Neville Longbottom?  Just what *is* 
it about Snape that scares Neville so very much?

<innocent look>

Oh, I've no idea.


> Maybe the image of Snape in Gran's clothing symbolizes more that we 
> first suspected...

Oooooooh, yes.  I'm firmly of the belief that it does.


-----


But all of this speculation does lead us to what to my mind is the
most interesting question about the memory charm theory: if JKR has 
indeed been setting up a Neville-With-Memory-Charm plotline, then 
what is its *purpose*?  What narrative function is it likely to 
perform for the series as a whole?  

Elirtai:

> If he ever gets his memory back - will we learn something important?

Well, from an authorial point of view, there would seem to me to be 
little point in setting up such a plotline in the first place if one 
did not plan on eventually *restoring* the suppressed memory.  
Furthermore, it would seem to me to be a terrible waste of a plot 
engine if such a recovered memory did not then reveal something of 
vital importance to the plot.

So what could that thing be?

The revelation that one or more of the Pensieve defendents had in 
fact been innocent -- along with a corresponding revelation about the 
identity of the real culprit(s) -- is one possibility.  (Fourth Man 
With Innocence, anyone? <g>)  Information about corruption within the 
Ministry also seems possible.

But neither of these really satisfy me somehow.  So does anyone else 
have some other possibility they would like to suggest?

More to the point, though, what do people imagine the *thematic* 
function of a Memory Charmed Neville plotline to be?  I have my own 
reasons for considering it a fascinating possibility, but although 
I've already hinted quite strongly at them, I'm now finding myself 
feeling reluctant to go into any greater detail along those lines,
as I do recognize that my own favored reading of Neville is not 
only highly idiosyncratic, and not only unusual, and not only
subversive, but also actively *hostile* to what I believe to be the 
author's true intent.  

I therefore would like to open up this field of inquiry to others who 
do not share my hostility to the authorial perspective when it comes 
to Neville and his thematic relevance to the story as a whole.  Tell 
me, memory charm fans: what do *you* see as the narrative function of 
this plotline?  What do you imagine its thematic purpose to be?  What
do you perceive as the thematic relevance of issues of memory, 
remembrance, and the past to the story as a whole?


-- Elkins





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