Dumbledore on the Dursleys in OotP (LONG)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 151494

> Alla:
> 
> Trying really hard to remember about keeping silence about Sirius' 
> flaws and respecting the feelings of us poor broken-hearted Sirius 
> lovers and drawing a blank here :) ( Erm... this is of course not a 
> remark for you Pippin, but just in case again to avoid the arguments 
> of this type, since I did get them in the past discussions - we are 
> joking here and I am not asking anybody to refrain from discussing 
> the flaws of  the characters.)
> 
> But, Pippin, I promise to think about it if you can prove that you 
> belong to Snape immediate relations :).
>

Pippin:
I suspect a lot of people will be more devastated to lose Snape than
their immediate relations :-) And of course I was joking -- if you feel
so sorry for your favorite characters that you can't stand to hear negative 
things about them you probably aren't reading this list :) 

I suppose that is what you are saying, that Dumbledore should have
realized that Harry couldn't stand to hear such things about Sirius
and that Harry needed a comforting narrative he could cling to
in order to come to grips with what happened.

But Dumbledore was grieving too. He wasn't emotionally attached to
Sirius, but he was emotionally attached to Harry, and so he too had
suffered a dreadful blow.  He was not just lecturing here, IMO, he too 
had an emotional need to construct a story of what happened.

It may be that hearing Harry's view of Sirius was just as painful to DD 
as hearing Dumbledore's view of Sirius was to Harry. They were 
inventing conflicting narratives to explain to themselves what had
happened, and it wasn't only the plot of these narratives that
conflicted but the type. 

Harry was inventing a melodrama, in which Sirius was a pristine
hero destroyed by a foul scheming villain. He understood the
story Dumbledore was telling as a melodrama also, in which
Sirius was a villain who had abused Kreacher and deserved to
die. But it wasn't.

 Dumbledore perceived a tragedy, in which  Sirius was flawed, 
and his flaws made him vulnerable to forces which, no matter
how valiantly he struggled, eventually took matters 
beyond his control. This was no insult to Sirius. Only the great
can be heroes of tragedy, because only the great can struggle
against those forces at all.

For Dumbledore, the story of Sirius's downfall did not begin with the
villains, as it would in a melodrama.  It began with a lie: the belief 
that wizards are a superior race who  do no wrong.  It is interesting 
that in HBP he begins telling Harry the story of Voldemort in the 
same place, with the Gaunts who took this belief to its most 
extreme absurdity. 

Sirius  had the greatness to reject this lie, but it was all around him, 
woven into his life even in the isolation of Grimmauld Place. In 
Dumbledore's narrative Sirius did not understand that even
though he didn't consciously believe the lie, and fought against
it all his life, it was its influence that led him to see  Kreacher as 
unimportant.

Harry, though he also did not realize it, echoed the lie  when he
objected to acknowledging any flaws in Sirius or any latent good 
qualities in Kreacher. I think that is why Dumbledore was so forceful
with Harry. It can't have felt good or right to let Harry embrace 
the very lie that, in Dumbledore's view, got Sirius killed. 

Nor would it have comforted Harry for long. It might have numbed 
the pain for a while, but it would only have been worse when Harry 
realized the truth, just as Harry's idealized vision of his father made 
the pain of learning that he'd been a bully while he was at school 
all the worse for him.

Pippin