Is Lupin ambiguous? was: What's subversive? (long)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 101202

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, 
olivier.fouquet+harry at m... wrote:
> Pippin
> which brings me to my main point. David gives me far too 
much credit. I did not invent the ambiguities surrounding the 
character of Remus Lupin. JKR did that. All I did was catalogue 
them -- and suggest a possible explanation. It seems to me that 
in Lupin's case the subversive reading is to deny that the
 ambiguities exist or to claim that they are accidental. <veg>
> 
> Now Olivier
> 
> At the end of my message is a collection of all the 
appearances of  Lupin in OoP, just to assess if indeed Lupin is 
ambiguous or not. I  urge the interested reader to skim through 
them.
> 
> Well, let's see now: is Lupin ambiguous? Well, maybe he is, 
but the  least we can say is that the non subversive way to read 
him is the  calm, quiet, intellectual guy with a certain talent for 
human relation <

Pippin:
I agree. But what, in that characterization, precludes him from 
joining Voldemort?   I found your list of OOP references 
fascinating and useful but perhaps a bit, er, selective? Not on 
purpose, I hasten to add. In that spirit, a few additions:

 You mention that Lupin thinks the goblins would be tempted by 
freedom more than gold, but not what he thought  they would be 
tempted to do: ally with the murderer of their families.

You agree with me that Lupin is capable of legilimency, but don't 
suggest he might be using it when he aims  his long, hard look 
at Sirius as Sirius is thinking about how much of what he knows 
should be told to Harry. 

Olivier:
> We can suspect that Sirius and  Lupin both know from the start 
about Dumbledore's plan to trap  Voldemort in the Mom (look up 
the fleeting look between them during the  diner). He has also 
argued that Lupin's weak points are his cowardice  and his 
desire to be liked. However, in all the references above, I  fail to 
discern such traits. Even in the Pensieve scene, it is Peter  and 
the pair James/Sirius who seems very concerned about being 
liked.  Remus is utterly absent, he reads and wants to do some 
homework.<

Pippin:
Whoa!  Now *that's* what I call subversive reading, Olivier!  JKR 
is the one who said that Lupin's great weakness was his desire 
to be liked, and offered that as the explanation for why he cuts 
his friends so much slack. (Albert Hall interview)  

It would also be a subversive reading, IMO,  to think that 
Dumbledore is not telling Harry everything he knows about the 
Prophecy when he says he is.  And Dumbledore takes sole 
responsibility for Harry's ignorance about the  prophecy. He says, 
over and over, that he alone could have warned Harry that 
Voldemort was trying to lure him to the Department of Mysteries 
--meaning that up to the time of the conference in Dumbledore's 
office, there was no one else, besides Voldemort and his 
servants, who  to Dumbledore's knowledge was aware of it. 

Supposedly, the  Order only knew that they were guarding a 
prophecy about Voldemort, that only Voldemort could retrieve. 
Dumbledore says that Snape "deduced" where Harry had gone. 
If Dumbledore thought Snape  knew that  Voldemort was trying to 
get Harry to the DoM to retrieve the Prophecy for him, then he 
wouldn't have thought  that Snape  had to deduce anything. 

 If Sirius and Lupin have knowledge of Harry's connection to the 
prophecy, they didn't find out from Dumbledore.  So 
that is an ambiguity. Maybe Dumbledore is lying. Maybe JKR 
made a mistake. Maybe Dumbledore told James about the 
Prophecy but wrongly believes that James told nobody 
else. Or maybe Lupin's knowledge comes from Voldemort, and 
he  told Sirius, pretending that he got the knowledge from 
James. Which reading is subversive? Beats me.

Since Lupin saw that Harry had the prophecy,  we don't know 
whether he was trying to save Harry or the prophecy, or both. 
ESE!Lupin theory does not preclude  Lupin from serving two 
masters, or trying to. 
 
Olivier:
> Maybe Lupin will turn out to be evil, maybe he will be a traitor to 
the Order, just like Peter was the first time. However, to say that 
this is  the natural way to read the character seems to me to be 
an incredible  stretch.
<snip>
> 
> PS: Pippin, you left aside David quotation of Elkins: Do you 
personally  recognize yourself in Elkins characterization of the 
subversive <

Pippin:
Hmmm. In each book there turns out to be  a villain whom Harry 
thought innocent or incapable of   deceiving him: Quirrell, Tom 
Riddle, Scabbers, Impostor!Moody, and Kreacher. In each book 
there are ambiguities which the intelligent reader recognizes 
were deliberately planted clues to the identity of this person. On 
her website JKR says that she is constructing Book Six with the 
help of a huge chart that tells her which clues have to go into 
which "innocent" chapters. 

 Rowling is consciously and deliberately playing a guessing 
game with the readers. Some readers, of course, don't enjoy or 
don't care about this aspect of the books at all. But it seems to 
me a stretch to deny that it's there. 

Is it an unnatural or subversive reading of a whodunnit to try and 
guess whodunnit? Is it an incredible stretch to think it might be 
someone the reader is not being led to suspect, except in very  
subtle ways? I confess Elkins is a bit beyond me sometimes, 
but I don't think that's what she meant by subversive.

I believe Elkins was referring  the sometimes heroic  efforts on 
the readers' parts to go  beyond the author in achieving 
versimilitude, by doing such things as  reconciling the accidental 
ambiguities which creep  into any work of fiction or  adding 
complexity to  minor characters. If the Potterverse were a real 
place, then it would, we fondly imagine, possess internal  
consistency, it would be non-catastrophic (ie events would be 
related as to cause and effect) and  the other people in it would 
have lives just as full and complicated as Harry's.  This leads to 
the longing for more complicated Slytherins, monumental efforts 
by the members of this list to reconcile the wand order glitch,   
and to such efforts as Elkins's nine part Crouch post.

Elkins also might be referring to the things readers imagine to 
make an engaging tale fit better with their personal 
philosophies or desires, in contravention of the authors' intent or 
the sense of the story.  I could  be guilty of that, but I have tried
to support my ideas with references to JKR's philosophy and 
intentions, not mine.

 I don't feel a need to make Lupin more complicated, if that's 
what you are asking.  I do feel a need to resolve the ambiguities.

The question of which ambiguities are deliberate and intended 
to be resolved fascinates me. One of the things I love about 
Rowling's toy universe is that it is unashamedly a toy universe.  
Some things are deliberately left non-functional.  Like an 
old-fashioned toy piano, the black keys are only painted on. So 
there's no figuring out how many students there are at Hogwarts, 
and yes, the school year always starts on Sunday, September 
1st.  On the other hand,  the "white keys" are supposed to really 
play, and when one of them glitches, like the wand order, 
Rowling fixes it.

The ambiguities surrounding Lupin seem far too numerous to 
me to be accidental or painted on. This is not a glitch like writing 
"ancestor" for "descendant" or getting the wand order confused. 
This isn't something that doesn't pertain to the theme, like the 
school calendar. This is a character who admits to being a 
coward and a skillful liar, who says he understands why 
someone would betray his family to Voldemort for the promise of 
freedom, who  admits he has been unworthy of Dumbledore's 
confidence,  and who has no alibi for any of the murders. Of 
course it could all be a double bluff,  but then being taken in by a 
deliberate red herring is not subversive either. 

I guess what I see as subversive is the argument that no one as 
nice as Lupin could be ESE! That seems to have more to do with 
the readers' affection for the character than with what JKR is 
trying to say. She says she likes all her characters, even the bad 
guys (well, maybe not Vernon<g>).

Pippin