Crouch's memory (was: Re: What is your all-time favorite line(s) from the book?)

[ssk7882 <skelkins@attbi.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 51024

Derannimer wrote:

> By the way, in a rather serious footnote: Elkins, do you 
> think that Mr. Crouch's inability to recognize other people's 
> identities has anything to do with his cronic inability to 
> remember his assistant's *name?*)

Heh.  I have no idea if "cronic" was intended as a pun or was
just a typo, but it amused me no end to read it as the former, 
given my reading of Crouch-as-Saturn.

Yeah, thematically, I do view Crouch's inability to remember 
Percy's name in just that light.  I also think that it serves 
to emphasize that whole "misplaced loyalty" motif for Percy, 
whom I see as being a bit of a double to Crouch Jr. in this 
story.  Poor Percy just *idolizes* this man, and he seems 
to be rapidly transferring his filial devotion onto him, 
and yet Crouch can't even be bothered to get his name right.  
Just like Voldemort never came to save Barty Jr. from the 
dementor.  ;-)

I also think that the whole "Weatherby" schtick, while it 
obviously serves mainly as a comedy routine, also may help
to facilitate the Whodunnit aspect of the story.  In and of 
itself, it's just humorous, a joke on Percy.  But combined
with all of the other strange or dodgy things that the author
keeps handed us about Crouch, I wonder if it might not also
take on faintly sinister connotations, thus serving to subtly 
reinforce Crouch's role as red herring.

Certainly, something about that stand-alone sentence about
Crouch leaving the tea undrunk has always read to me like
a deliberate authorial attempt at misdirection.  I think
that it does come across as a "clue," although in the
end, it's nothing but a false lead.

On the more mundane plot level, though -- in terms of
Crouch's character as a person?  Hmmm.  Well, I'd certainly 
say that it speaks to a certain tellingly high level of self-
absorption, much as does his refusal to take so much of a *sip* 
of the tea that Percy so eagerly offers him at the QWC (honestly, 
now!  Would it have killed the man to have taken just one polite 
*sip?*).  

Of course, Crouch would have been unusually stressed and distracted 
at the time that Percy started working for him.  Percy would have 
started working for him at just about the same time that he would 
have started fretting about Bertha Jorkins' disappearance.  I'm sure 
that he was also feeling stressed about his plan to take his son to 
the upcoming QWC.  And of course, he would have been very busy 
plannning the Tournament, as well.  Given all of that, I guess that 
maybe it's a little bit less surprising that his new employee's name 
somehow never properly registered with him, although it still does 
snap my suspenders of disbelief just a tiny bit.

It snaps my suspenders mainly, I think, because I just find it so 
hard to believe that even under somewhat adverse circumstances, 
Crouch wouldn't have been able to muster better interpersonal skills 
than those we see him display in canon.  He *was* a successful 
politician, after all, and while I myself share Meira's difficulty 
with remembering people's names, successful politicians don't.  
Successful politicians *learn* the trick of getting people's names 
right -- and then of remembering them.  They also know that they're 
supposed to sip the tea.  ;-)

Also, I really do find it hard to imagine how even an unusually
stressed and distracted Crouch could have failed to know Percy's 
name, given that (a) he did know Arthur, and (b) everyone else in the 
wizarding world seems to be able to spot a Weasley a mile off.  Even 
the eleven-year-old *Draco* knows a Weasley when he sees one.  So it 
does seem strange to me that it wouldn't have occurred to Crouch that 
his new red-haired-worker-who-has-some-name-beginning-with-a-W 
really *must* have been a Weasley.

One possibility that has occurred to me is that Crouch's powers of 
focus and attention might have been getting subtly sapped by his 
son's growing Imperius resistance.  Where's the cause and where the 
effect here?  Was Barty Jr. finding it easier to resist because his 
father was going into a mental decline?  Or was it because 
Voldemort's return to corporeal Ugly!Baby form was strengthening 
young Crouch's will, which in turn then had an insidious yet negative 
effect on his father's powers of memory and concentration?

I'm partial to the latter theory, myself.


-- Elkins (glad that Derannimer liked the Crouch posts so
much and currently trying to respond to Eileen's responses
*without* getting into the hundreds-of-pages-long problem.)