The Pensieve as Metaphor

[evangelina839]

No: HPFGUIDX 68669

First of all - I love the theory, I support it completely! I must
also point out that, if she 
did intend to use the Pensieve this way, it was a great move of
Rowling to add such a 
world-within-the-world to the books; another twist of perspective I
wasn't expecting. 
:)
lots of greets //evangelina

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...>
wrote:
> While we've been discussing the Pensieve it seems to have 
> been forgotten that there are several ways to use it. I think these 
> different ways of using the instrument are a metaphor for the way 
> we perceive the characters in the novel
> 
>  We see three different modes of Pensieve use. In GoF, 
> Dumbledore swirls the basin with his hand and the  faces of  
> Snape and Karkaroff  swirl about on the surface and speak.
> 
>  When Dumbledore  prods The Pensieve with his wand, a single 
> figure rises; Bertha Jorkins in GoF and Trelawney in OOP. Again 
> they speak, but they also rotate, with their feet in the basin.
This 
> would mean that Dumbledore is not only seeing the person 
> face-on, but also  from behind, a view he normally wouldn't have 
> had at the time.
> 
> The third way is to plunge oneself into the memory. When 
> Dumbledore retrieves Harry from the Pensieve, he doesn't 
> appear to be re-experiencing the memory as his past self. 
> Instead there are two Dumbledores in the vision, one of which is 
> able to do things like interact with Harry, which the memory self 
> cannot.
> 
> We don't know how truthful this other vision is supposed to be in 
> the context of the books. Harry has been warned that some  
> magical artifacts, like the Mirror of Erised,  contain neither 
> knowledge nor truth. But it seems that the Pensieve is a kind of 
> metaphor for the novels themselves. Certain of the characters 
> swim about on the page but never come to life. Others assume a 
> sort of three-dimensionality and we see more in them than 
> what's on the page. Still others draw us bodily, as it were, into 
> the world of the novels. When that happens, we really can't tell 
> whether what we perceive is what the author actually meant for 
> us to find there, or stems from our own imagination  and 
> experience. 
> 
> What sort of "life" the characters take on in the reader's mind is 
> not entirely under the control of the author, as what one sees in 
> the Pensieve seems not entirely under the control of the person 
> who laid down the memory.  It is not surprising that while we can 
> agree about what's on the page, the more we speculate about 
> the characters, the more diverse our view of them becomes.
> 
> Pippin