Dissin' the Slyths

[marinafrants]

No: HPFGUIDX 38403

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "dicentra63" <dicentra at x> wrote:
> Judy observes:
> 
> However, that doesn't make it OK for Dumbledore to stoop to the
> Slytherin students' level; he is supposed to set an example for
them.
>  As someone said, Dumbledore is Headmaster and therefore should be
> impartial.
> 
> And I say:
> 
> According to whom?  WE certainly think he should remain neutral in
the
> House rivalries, because that's our idea of fair and proper.  That
> might not be the case at all in WW.  Remember, WW is messed up six
> ways 'til Tuesday.  A pie in the face from the Hogwarts Headmaster
is
> the least of their problems.

The WW is messed up, yes.  But Dumbledore is consistently presented as
the guy who's trying to de-mess it.  He's the eccentric reformer who
rejects the standard wizarding prejudices, who doesn't automatically
fall into the standard ways of thinking.  So just because the WW
thinks something is fair and proper doesn't mean that either we, or
Dumbledore, have to go along with it.  After all, WW considers it okay
to discriminate against werewolves and half-giants, to employ
Dementors as prison guards, and to punish house elves by making them
iron their hands.  We don't see Dumbledore going along with any of
that, do we?

> The point I'm making is this: what Dumbledore did is a bad idea ONLY
> if it affected the Slyths the way y'all imagine it must have. 

Not necessarily.  If a person does something ill-advised but,
fortunately, no ill consequences follow, it doesn't make the action
less ill-advised, it just makes the person lucky.

> And it
> affected them that way only if JKR wrote them to react that way.  In
> the context of Book 1 alone, there is no strategic mistake because
> there are no DEs, no resurrected Voldemort, no path of darkness for
> the Slyths to follow except one of their own making. 

Sure there's a Voldemort, Harry just got done fighting him.  Yeah, he
hadn't come back in a body yet, but Dumbledore knew there was a good
chance of it happening eventually.  It's not like he was caught
totally by surprise at the end of GoF -- he had contingency plans in
place and everything.

> Maybe JKR didn't
> have her chops down yet in Book 1, so Dumbledore's "tactical error"
is
> actually hers.  On the other hand, I would need to see evidence that
> the Slyths and Snape took it any harder than Neville did when he ate
> the canary creams. Do we hear them mutter about how they hate
> Dumbledore and his kind because of how they're being treated at
> Hogwarts? 

Given the perspective of the books, we wouldn't hear it if it did
happen.  The Slytherins could be holding daily bitch-fests on the
subject in their common room, and unless Harry finds an occasion to
lurk behind the arras, we'll never know about it.  We do know that the
Slytherins don't like Dumbledore, and none of them shed any tears when
he was temporarily removed in CoS.

> Has Snape put Dumbledore's little trick in the same
> category as Sirius's Prank?

He wouldn't, since Dumbledore's action did not come close to resulting
in his messy death.  But given what we learned of Snape's relationship
with Dumbledore in the later books, I feel fairly safe in assuming
that Snape *was* affected by what Dumbledore did.  He just put on a
good face about it in public.


> I'll concede this point: if Hogwarts were operating in the Real
World,
> you could certainly argue that Dumbledore's little drama was in poor
> taste at best, a tactical error at worst.
> 
> But as part of the Potterverse?  It's only a mistake if it was
written
> that way.

Perhaps it all comes down to a difference in reading philosophies,
then.  I believe that a work of fiction can have implications and
meanings that the writer didn't intend, and that the unintended
interpretations can be as valid as the intended ones.  (Not always,
but they can be.)  I'm fairly sure JKR didn't intend to present
Dumbledore's actions as anything more than an effective dramatic
moment to highlight the end of the book. And if the storiy had ended
with that one book, I might not have thought twice about it. But three
books later, I can't help but view it in the context of the larger,
darker, more morally complex story that she's currently telling.

I also can't just discard my knowledge of the real world as irrelevant
to my reading of the books.  Fantasy and science fiction writers do
sometimes deliberately construct totally alien societies where nothing
that we know applies, and readers must put aside all their human
preconceptions in order to immerse themselves in the story.  But I
don't think JKR intended that any more than she intended for us to
condemn Dumbledore.

Marina
rusalka at ix.netcom.com