Snape, Snape, Loverly Snape...and authorial intent

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 148242

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Irene Mikhlin 
<irene_mikhlin at ...> wrote:

> That's very possible, but if that's the truth, I don't understand 
> Rowling's game at all. If she wanted Snape to be ambigous, and his 
> treason in book 6 to be surprising, then she didn't do such a great 
> job, did she?
>
> Certainly Harry (together with the majority of the readers) had 
> never expected from Snape any better.  Surely she didn't wrote the 
> whatever ambiguity is there just to surprise the small number of
> Snapeophiles among us? :-)

I feel like I've written this before--wait, I have--but I'll go once 
again. :)  Harry hasn't, and readers who strictly follow his 
viewpoint are therefore not terribly shocked, although I still think 
the events are BANGy to Harry out of sheer horror.

But she's played a trust card with Snape very hard with two 
characters who are often The Voice of Exposition--those being 
Dumbledore and Hermione.

As Dumbledore is the Headmaster with infinite titles and a 
considerable amount of wisdom, many readers are going to take his 
assertions as being far more valid and trustable than the naive 
intuitions and biases of Harry.  And he asserts with categorical 
firmness that he trusts in Snape, and refuses to gratify Harry's 
angry inquiries.  We are, I think, generally meant to take what 
Dumbledore says as true and well-thought through, although this did 
take some slag in OotP.  Whether that's ultimately going to connect, 
whether it was foreshadowing for HBP, remains to be seen.

Hermione is often presented as the voice of reason and the voice of 
diagnosis; she solves problems and offers her perspective on what is 
actually going on.  Scrap of paper in her hand provides the essential 
information in CoS, for instance.  And she trusts wholeheartedly in 
Dumbledore, saying that if we can't trust him, who can we trust.  
(That set off red flags for me, but probably not for all readers.)

These are, IMO, pretty powerful things to play against Harry's 
distrust card, as these are two characters often cited as authorities 
on facts, and readers prize their evaluations of things highly.  
After all, Harry's always been suspicious, and he's often been wrong 
both about facts and motivations.  Add in what many listies consider 
the "Harry filter" and their conscious attempts to read against it, 
and there is a lot of material encouraging us not to take his side on 
this issue.

And that, for me, is what made it BANGy.  I didn't predict a traitor!
Snape, either real or fake, after OotP--although if I searched the 
archives, I'd probably recall my buzzers starting to go off about the 
trust with no evidence issue.

I don't think this proposed setup takes a Snape-centered reading, or 
even an essentially positive view of Snape, to work.

-Nora runs off to class on something far messier and complicated than 
the case of one Snapeykins