Knowing it was Snape (was: What has Snape seen)

[eloise_herisson]

No: HPFGUIDX 119135


> SSSusan:
> Right, I agree about the pensieve.  But what I was talking about 
were 
> the memories Harry accessed during Occlumency lessons, not those 
> memories he experienced when he dipped his head into the pensieve.  
> It's the snippets of memories he got directly from Snape that we 
had 
> been talking about and which I was saying shouldn't require the 
> person himself to be a participant in.  Does that make sense?


~Eloise:

Perfect. :-) 

Sorry, I'd gone off tangentially there without completing the 
allusion. It just seems to me that JKR treats memories a bit oddly. 
If she does it for the Pensieve, then I think it's quite possible 
that she does so for the memories accessed in Occlumency. 

Although it's an attractive idea to compare those memories of Snape's 
which Harry accesses with those of his which Snape accesses, 
unfortunately I don't think we are in a position to compare like with 
like. Remember that when we hear about the memories that Snape 
accesses, we are hearing it from Harry's perspective, they are 
memories welling up in his mind and we are seeing them from his POV: 
they are narrated in the first person, as it were. We don't know 
*how* Snape sees them, just that he does. Maybe he sees Harry in the 
action. He's certainly not inside the memory enough to know, for 
instance, who Ripper belonged to, which was surely an integral part 
of the memory.

Again, when we see Snape's memories, we are seeing them from Harry's 
perspective and they *seem* to be told in the third person. We don't 
know if that is Snape's experience of them; perhaps he 
is "experiencing" sitting in his bedroom shooting flies, rather than 
watching a figure doing it.

We are told that Legilimency is an imprecise art, that it is *not* 
mind reading. Perhaps this third person viewpoint is one of its 
limitations.

It could also be simply a literary device consequential to the fact 
that the book being about Harry, we are familiar with Harry's 
memories, but not with Snape's. JKR is dropping in the first really 
concrete hints about Snape's early background and it would have been 
awkward and taken a great more description than she probably wanted 
to put in to describe the events from Snape's childhood in such a way 
that we recognised them for what they were without letting us see him 
in the action. If Harry had experienced the adults fighting without 
seeing the small dark haired boy crying in the corner, it could 
easily have been mistaken for one of his own memories. Letting us see 
Snape in the memories allows the information to be conveyed far more 
economically and therefore, I think, more effectively. Likewise, 
Harry's memories are told more economically from the first person 
viewpoint; the narrative would be more cumbersome if he had to be 
described seeing himself in the action.

~Eloise