Characters and the revelation model (Was: Re: Depth?)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 139904

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "horridporrid03" 
<horridporrid03 at y...> wrote:

> Betsy Hp:
> So James really *is* retiring and shy? <g>  Yes, the best way to 
> build up to a big reveal is to leave blank spaces and allow the 
> reader to assume.  But the author is unwise to lie.  And you seem 
> to be suggesting that JKR lied.  That we should ignore everything 
> that occured during the pensieve flashback.  That seems...wasteful 
> to me.  If it's all untrue, why write it to begin with?

Not lying.  Complicating.  We keep open the idea that the Pensieve 
scene is a snapshot of one aspect of character, one point in time--
but we are very wary of the assumption that we're going to 
extrapolate that to cover all situations.  You seem very comfortable 
using one scene as the baseline for all formulations of character, 
and linking up the similarities smoothly.  In situations with such 
little information, what you get depends on how you read--you want 
similarities, you get them; you want differences, you get them too.

> Betsy Hp:
> Was Sirius completely unrecognizable in the pensieve?  Was Remus?  
> Was Snape, for that matter?  Is the Harry of PS/SS so totally 
> different from the Harry of HBP? And is the man who walked bravely 
> to his death in order to buy time for his family so completely 
> different from the brash James of the pensieve, or even the shadowy 
> hero of the Prank?

Completely--no.  Even 'innocent' Draco of HBP is still the 
insufferable obnoxious little shit of the first book. :)  But I can 
certainly think of points in time when we shouldn't take what we'd 
see at that one point as *the* model of extrapolation for the 
character.  Ron isn't utterly defined by his jealousy of Harry, nor 
is Hermione always unforgiving and utterly convinced of her 
rightness.  That's the seriation problem: you can't make a pattern 
out of one incident.

> Betsy Hp:
> JKR certainly leaves enough holes to allow a reader to go astray.  
> But I really don't think she cheats in what she does definitively 
> state.  With James, obviously there's a change from the boy we see 
> in the pensieve and the future head boy.  But I'm quite confident 
> that the change will not be so drastic as to render the boy in the 
> pensieve a falsehood.  His character will maintain continuity, 
> he'll just take it in a more positive direction.

Okay, so we're left with a kind of genteel 'he changed' with no 
causal element.  Oh, passive and indeterminate constructions are so 
much fun--there's this great quip by Wittgenstein about...

Again, I've never asked for 'falsification', although there are 
aspects of character that could well be solidly falsified by the 
ending of the series.  But I think we could get enough to render one 
of the propositions way back, "The Marauders didn't have a genuine 
friendship, it was a myth" falsified.

> Betsy Hp:
> I'm quite sure the friendship between James and Sirius was solid.  
> But we've already been shown that Peter was a different story.  It 
> will take a whole hell of a lot to suddenly turn him noble and 
> true.  And since I doubt book 7 will be "Harry Potter and the 
> Redemption of Wormtail" I have a hard time seeing that happening.

I'm willing to bet even odds at the present that Wormtail is up for 
*some* kind of redemption.  What could well happen is that the 
postulated qualities of friendship which were fragmented by war and 
pressure are recovered.  We've had an explicit mention in book of 
Wormtail and a debt, as well as interview confirmation that there's 
something to it.  I dunno what, but this is one eminently open 
possibility for the resolution of that plot line.

>> -Nora thinks, from a literary point of view, that it would be both 
>> hilarious and ballsy if Spinner's End was mostly Snape telling the 
>> truth
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Well that's because you don't like him, Nora! <g>  You're strangely 
> immune to the Snape-mojo.  (And Snape was telling a good bit of the 
> truth in Spinner's End.  It's the best way to disguise the lie. <g>)

Snape, post-GoF, has made it pretty hard to like him (when I really 
very much wanted to like him before OotP).  But I'd like it most of 
all from the literary perspective.  I like the hiding things in plain 
sight approach, the readers hanging themselves with their own rope 
(and then screaming, as have the shippers, that the author is evil 
and mean and callous even though she doesn't matter).  We've made so 
much out of this character and invented complications that don't 
actually exist...it would just be so *funny* to have it end up much 
simpler.

-Nora recommends 'Act of Reading' to everyone out there