Snape and Magic Dishwasher. Was: Re: DD and the rat:

[bluesqueak]

No: HPFGUIDX 115871


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Nora Renka" <nrenka at y...> 
wrote:

> 
> I'm going to lean mostly with Alla on this one, despite that very 
> interesting analysis of the way the rage is described 
> differently.  I'm not *sure* that's meaningful, but it could be.  
> There's another thing that makes me want to link these two 
> incidents together as actual genuine fury...
> 
> They're both intensely personal.  Snape does seem to be a 
> reasonably good actor, as pointed out with Umbridge--but she's not 
> hitting him where it counts by any means, which is what happens in 
> both the Occulmency blowup and the Shrieking Shack.  We know, post-
> OotP, that there's a lot of bad feeling (to put it mildly--and 
> JKR's told us that we'll learn more about it later) between Snape  
> and Black.  We'vealso been told, as you noted below, about 'scars 
that don't heal'.  

> Doesn't that make a fairly good explanation for Snape bugging out 
> in the Shrieking Shack?  Given that Snape is, often, barely 
> controlling his temper--how we see him tense and glaring, stalking 
> around and snapping at people (poor students, hiding in the  
> bushes), I think thesituation itself in the Shack was enough to 
send him over the edge.  
> He was thinking in intensely personal terms in that situation, and 
> that's what Lupin's rather nasty yet cool rebuke is about.


I think my *big* suspicion is simply - a spy (which we know Snape 
was in Voldemort War One - see GoF) who is often barely controlling 
his temper would probably have the survival rating of a puffskein in 
the Weasley household. The DE's would use him for bludger practice. 

But Snape survived. 

Further, he describes a person who practices occlumancy as 
being 'able to shut down those feelings and memories that contradict 
the lie'.

Snape's supposed to be good at that. So he can shut down feelings 
and memories in a situation where he's likely to be tortured to 
death if he gets it wrong.

On a literary note, JKR uses 'appearance' descriptions an awful lot 
with Snape. He gets modified verbs. He is 'looking' deranged. 
He 'seemed' beyond reason. Then he's 'looking' madder than ever. 
Black and Lupin don't get those modifiers. This is fairly constant 
throughout the books - in the OOP Occlumency chapter, Snape's 
actions are modified by 'apparently', 'sounding', 'looked' 
and 'sounded'.

And there's that blasted riddle in GoF, of course. 'First think of 
the person who lives in disguise/ who deals in secrets and tells 
naught but lies.'[GoF Ch. 31]. The two revealed spies in GoF are 
Crouch Jr and Severus Snape. We know Crouch Jr spends GoF living in 
disguise, and lying all the time. Why does JKR also choose to reveal 
Snape as spy in *that* novel?

The difference between the occlumency scene and the Shack? Firstly, 
time. In the occlumancy scene, Snape has come into the office, gone 
into the pensieve to fetch Harry, and found out what scene it is. He 
tells Harry to get out of his office within eight lines of this 
discovery. 

In the Shrieking Shack, otoh, he hangs around under the invisibility 
cloak for four pages. Which doesn't exactly sound like bugging out 
with rage. 

Secondly, the physical force used. For one thing, Snape doesn't kill 
Black when he's given the perfect excuse and could easily get away 
with it. 'With a roar of rage, Black started towards Snape'. [PoA 
Ch. 19] We are talking about an escaped convict, from Azkaban, 
believed to have killed at least thirteen people, who is attacking 
Snape in front of witnesses. I believe that if Sirius Black had 
tried that on an armed man in many countries he'd now be full of 
bullet holes [grin].

But Sirius doesn't get killed, attacked, tied up safely, *anything*! 
Just a threat from Snape which is actually a warning - 'Give me a 
reason to do it and I swear I will'. 

Harry in the Occlumency scene in OOP [Ch. 28] is held so hard he's 
bruised, shaken and thrown onto the ground - all good physical 
stuff. Lupin and Sirius in the Shrieking Shack get 'minimum force'. 
Lupin the werewolf-on-the-night-of-the-full-moon is tied up, Sirius 
gets a wand aimed at him. Any 'violence' is very strictly verbal. 

> Nora:
> (On a side note--isn't it interesting how Snape's 'cover story' 
> for the kids actually ends up hurting their cause, in the long    
> run?  

Yup. It's also interesting how Harry's successful rescue of Sirius 
in PoA actually ends up hurting his own cause, as Voldemort uses 
Sirius to trap Harry in OOP. 

Some things don't work out in the long run. [grin]

In the short term, after two solid novels of announcing he wants 
Harry expelled, Snape is seen backpedalling furiously when the kids 
are bang to rights with an expulsion offense, and possibly a 
criminal offense of helping an escaped convict. This does rather 
backfire a year later - but while in my MD mode I think Dumbledore 
is pretty perceptive, I don't think he's endowed with the power of 
prophecy. :-)

Pip!Squeak