Dumbledore on the Dursleys in OotP (was:Re: Old, old problem.)

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 151377

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "amiabledorsai" 
<amiabledorsai at ...> wrote:
<SNIP>
> 
> This is the problem I have with the various puppet master 
scenarios. 
> If Dumbledore wanted Sirius dead, he could simply have kept sending
> him out on increasingly dangerous missions until the inevitable
> happened.  A martyred Sirius would have worked out very well for
> Puppetmaster!Dumbledore ("Harry, Sirius would have wanted you to do
> this").

Yes, that is very true.  Although I suppose one can argue that the 
most successful puppetmasters are those who never appear to be 
pulling strings -- for instance the killer puppetmaster that Agatha 
Christie presents in "Curtain," who is so good, and so untouchable, 
that the only recourse Poirot has is to kill the villain 
himself.  "Sirius would have wanted you to do this," would be to 
blatantly reveal Puppetmaster!Dumbledore's true nature, at least to 
the reader.

I, like you, don't have much faith in a manipulative Dumbledore, 
however.  As you point out, if he's manipulative he often isn't very 
good at it -- although a Dumbledore of any variety often isn't very 
good at a lot of things, so that isn't saying very much.  More to 
the point, a manipulative Dumbledore would have to be the world's 
greatest expert at divination to know how certain things would turn 
out -- or a visitor from the future, which JKR has already said he 
is not.

> I don't think he was rationalizing, so much as trying to find some
> little nugget of good in Harry's suffering at the Dursleys'.
> Consider how frustrated Dumbledore must be by the whole thing--
here is
> a man who is used to literally and figuratively pulling miracles 
out
> of his pocket, and the best solution he can find for protecting 
Harry
> is to board him with a couple of child-abusers.
> 

Hmmm.  Well, if that's what Dumbledore meant that's what Dumbledore 
should have said.  Instead we get a confusing, bizarre, and 
incredibly off-putting display of coldness and high-handedness that 
actually seems, on the face of it, to make Puppetmaster!Dumbledore 
plausible -- and which has, indeed, become the crux of many a 
Puppetmaster!Dumbledore scenario.  I don't think JKR means for DD to 
come off as a Puppetmaster, but she certainly shot herself in the 
foot with that scene -- at least judging by how often people cite it 
as Puppetmaster Exhibit A.  As I've said before, if there are subtle 
clues otherwise in the scene, many of them have fallen on a lot of 
deaf ears (and been read by a lot of blind eyes), and I'd have to 
say that relying on subtle clues that don't work falls under the 
category of, as I've said before, being too clever for your own good.

Actually, I don't think she meant for there to be subtle clues in 
the scene.  I think, as is often the case with all authors, that JKR 
knew what she wanted to say and didn't realize that it just doesn't 
come off that way, at least not to a lot of people on a face-value 
reading.  Actually a friend of mine who teaches writing classes to 
high schoolers mentioned something like this over lunch this 
weekend.  He said he often has the kids write a scene, then has the 
class trade papers and each person read another person's scene.  He 
said that anywhere from 25% to 50% of the time, the person who wrote 
the scene objects "I didn't say that!" but, when asked to look at 
the page with the recent reading in mind, inevitably confesses 
something to the effect of "Well, I guess I DID say that, didn't I?"


Lupinlore