[HPforGrownups] Re: Are The Schoolbooks Canon?

[heidi tandy]

No: HPFGUIDX 38968


--- abigailnus <abigailnus at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Oh dear.  I really thought this whole "Are the
> schoolbooks canon?" 
> business was a rather petty aside, and now it's
> ballooned into a monster.  
Water ballooned? :) (actually, that does sometimes
happen here - see the thread started from my one line
last week on Pride& Prejudice)

> Jobberknoll as a way 
> of getting around Elkins' claim that Reverse Memory
> Charm theories involved 
> a yellow flag violation (because, for those of you
> keeping score, there has 
> never been any mention in the books of a
> charm/potion/spell/magical device 
> for retrieving memories.)  

But there is - a Pensieve. It retrieves them, holds
them, makes it possible to reexamine them. And we know
from CoS that there's a way to get your memory back
after a Memory Charm - that's what they sent Gilderoy
away to do. So even if we don't know exactly what it's
called, we know that it's out there, the same way that
we knew that Voldemort had minions before Book 4, but
we didn't know that they were called Death Eaters.


> To summarize, there's nothing wrong with using the
> scholbooks for theorizing, 
> but the schoolbooks themselves don't provide
> canonical support.  

I still don't understand why you feel that they don't
provide canonical support. If you feel that way about
this, then you can't take the scribbled note in FB to
be canon evidence that Hogwarts is located in
Scotland. You can't conclude that the Chudley Canons
are a load of duffers. You can't even know that a
Minister of Magic hundreds of years ago was a woman.
You're really limiting yourself out of a lot of things
that JKR has as truths in the HP universe if you say
that the schoolbooks don't provide canonical support.

=====
heidi tandy

They say its a sign of mental health to hold apparently contradictory ideas in your mind. The world of late has been a particularly exotic stew of horror and beauty. There are killers, there are saints. The trick is to find the right spot on the spectrum between abject despair and total obliviousness. And then carry on...
Joel Achenbach

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