James, a paragon of virtue? Was: Why Do You Like Sirius?

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 123603


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67" 
<justcarol67 at y...> wrote:

> Carol responds:

<snip>

> Severus, in contrast, clearly *knows* DADA in detail and clearly 
> cares about what he knows. He's not trying to get a high mark for 
> its own sake or to "get by" like rich boys Sirius and James, who 
> won't need to earn a living when they finish school. Severus 
> clearly wants to *master* the subject, possibly to use it in his 
> career, possibly because the subject itself is important to him. 
> Just because a student studies doesn't mean he or she isn't 
> naturally bright. Look at Hermione.

Goodness.  I don't think I've had a statement that was made tongue-in-
cheek and labeled as such responded to with such vehemence in some 
time. 

I have to point out that you are also assuming a lot when you argue 
that James and Sirius are only just 'getting by'; could be, could 
not.  With Hermione, she is certainly naturally bright, but she also 
works very hard at it; it is canonically honestly hard to tell where 
the actual balance falls there.

<snip>

> Snape has memorized many complicated potions, which he transfers to 
> the chalkboard with a flick of his wand. And we *know* that Snape 
> is bright. We've seen him put two and two together time and again. 
> We never see Sirius do anything of the sort. As for James, we
> don't see him do much of anything except tease Remus about being a
> werewolf, show off with a Snitch, hex Severus, and talk briefly to a
> girl who thinks he's a bully.

We also see Snape make various kinds of deductive errors (often of 
the "when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me" variety).  
We do not see either Sirius or James in situations that we see Snape, 
so we have no model of comparison.  But we do have McGonagall's 
testimony (not disputed by the present Flitwick), and the amazing 
(and textually noted as such) Animagi feat.

And, frankly, it's better generally to take what you have than what 
you don't, which leads into number two...

> Carol responds:
> Um, erm, what? I'm lost. What do you mean by "seriated" and how does
> it relate to the Severus/MWPP discussion? And "hapax"????

A hapax (short for 'hapax legomenon') is something which occurs only 
once in a corpus of works and therefore ranges from extremely 
problematic to impossible to evaluate, as you have no models of 
comparison.

To apply that to the situation at hand, we have actually SEEN *one* 
(count 'em, one) episode of MWPP's schooldays.  That makes it a 
problem to elevate that to the model for the whole--it leaves us 
eminently open to get smacked by future revelations.  As has been 
stated before, it would be like taking Harry and the gang's reaction 
to Draco and crew at the end of GoF as a completely isolated 
incident; we would read it very differently without having it put 
into a series.

You can find some detail about seriation here:
http://www.explore-anthropology.com/anthropology/S/Seriation.html

It began as a principle in classical philology, and has since spread 
its wings into disparate areas such as archaeology and semiotics, 
especially music with the works of Jean-Jacques Nattiez.

And to quote from that article, here's an art historian about it:

'Whether we deal with historical or natural phenomena, the individual 
observation of phenomena assumes the character of a 'fact' only when 
it can be related to other, analogous observations in such a way that 
the whole series 'makes sense.' This 'sense' is, therefore, fully 
capable of being applied, as a control, to the interpretation of a 
new individual observation within the same range of phenomena. If, 
however, this new individual observation definitely refuses to be 
interpreted according to the 'sense' of the series, and if an error 
proves to be impossible, the 'sense' of the series will have to be 
reformulated to include the new individual observation.'

At present, we do not have an actual series; we have one witnessed 
event, one event that is decidedly (and deliberately, methinks) 
fragmentary, and some scattered comments that never reach the status 
of 'event'.  

Note the "new individual observation".  This is what I suspect you 
will find downthread (if you haven't read it already) when I pointed 
out that our perception of one event can be strongly changed by the 
addition of others.  That's seriation at work; one thing by itself 
has a lack of proper context.  When you get a new thing, you have to 
try to fit them together, and so on as you add more things.

-Nora thought she had an explanation of seriation downthread...