[HPforGrownups] Re: Significance of missing line (was: HBP paperback)

[Magpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 156211

Nikkalmati:
> I'm US too and consider myself educated <g>. I had never heard of
> Philosopher's Stone and probably would have been thinking Aristotle, Kant,
> etc.  I
> suspect the change was pretty much on the order of changing  skirting to
> baseboard
> (where does that occur?) or biscuit to cookie.

Magpie:
I don't mean to be anal about this, and maybe I'm misunderstanding the
comparison, but the point is it's *not* like changing biscuit to cookie
because "Sorcerer's Stone" is not the American word for Philosopher's Stone.
There's only one name for it: Philosopher's Stone.  Sorcerer's Stone was
made up for this book.  So rather than biscuit to cookie it's like changing
telephone to ringy-ding.  The same term is used in the UK and the US, and
I'm sure there were people in the UK who thought of Kant etc. when they read
Philosopher's as well.  But either way it's defined within the story as what
it really is.

Not having heard of the Philosopher's Stone doesn't make one
uneducated--alchemical terms aren't exactly central to a 21st century
education.  It was familiar to me, but that was probably just chance.  I
must have come across is somewhere.

Alla:
 It **may** match the description as you said, but
I am not sure that writer consciously uses it, but more like us fans see the
**choice of words** where we want to see it,where we want to accept the
character as sympathetic.

Magpie:
The fans may or may not react a certain way to certain words, but the author 
is always choosing the words she wants to choose.  It's true that we all are 
going to lean towards our own instinctive reaction to a character, but 
whether the words are there are not is objective.  At the time of writing 
the essay Elkins couldn't have known where Draco was going really, so was 
analyzing what was on the page to try to get away from just the emotional 
reaction and
analyze where the emotions might come from.

Elkins:
>so why can't she do the same for Draco? She doesn't even have
>him "scream" when he gets attacked by Buckbeak. He's certainly
>acting like a great big baby, but at the same time, the verb that
>she
>actually chooses to use for his line there is "yell," which is a lot
>more macho then her usual "shrieking," to be sure.

Alla:

I don't see how this choice of word by JKR is supposed to make Draco
more sympathetic, more stoic, etc. For all I know maybe JKR just got
temporarily tired from using **shrieking** and used **yell** instead.

Magpie:
It could have been that, as I think Elkins suggests in the post.  But yell 
and shriek are two different words that describe a different kind of shout. 
She uses it very carefully when Pansy shrieks, and chooses again to make 
Malfoy yell rather than shriek on the Quidditch Pitch in OotP.  In 
retrospect I think the pattern Elkins pointed out in the text was validated. 
JKR loves giving Draco real pain, and having him sometimes  handle it, even 
while also making him personally repulsive.

Alla:

Yes, she indeed tries to figure out Draco's place in the story, but I
maintain that the **underdog** thing is not necessarily coming from there.
Yes, the **weak protagonist** part of her post deals with Draco's place in
the story, but **redeemable Draco** is done  more on metathinking level IMO.

Magpie:
I read it that she was thinking of the possible roles he could be slated 
for, and redeemable was an obvious one in this genre.  She was trying to 
guess which way the author was going based on her making one choice over 
another, and I think she was proved far more right than wrong.  I don't 
think she was saying that the author was primarily trying to win sympathy 
for the character, but rather that the author knew where she was eventually 
going with the character and so would always be writing to that ending. 
Looking at Draco post-GoF she was already seeing signs of Draco going one 
way rather than another, she just couldn't be sure which way that was yet.

Underdog is of course a positive word, so yes you could say she chose a 
positive word to describe the way Draco's constant losing comes across to
her--a reaction that a lot of people in fandom had.  (I personally remember 
calling him the Wile E. Coyote of HP.)  Is that what the author was going
for?  Could be.  But if she didn't want that possibility open it would have 
been easy enough.  Just make Draco win more in significant ways.

Alla:

Let's look at Slytherin winning the Cup for seven years example. I am not
sure what in the text gives Elkins the impression that despite Slytherins
winning the Cup for seven years in a row, they are the underdogs of the
series.

Magpie:
I don't think she did say that.  She said that the Slytherins never win the 
House Cup or the Quidditch Cup during the time we are reading about, and 
that this undercuts the impression that the *Gryffindors* are the underdogs 
of the series.  That's where some people in fandom get their notion that 
there's an actual bias against Slytherin at the school, but does not say
there actually is a bias against them.  Whether she wants to see or does see 
a bias against Slytherin doesn't change the facts of canon she's analyzing. 
We can argue that there's a bias against Slytherin.  We can't argue that 
Slytherin has won a House Cup during the time Harry's been at Hogwarts.

Alla:

But that is the thing - for me she did kill the possibility of sympathy for
him and now, when I acknowledge that he can be sympathised with in book 6, I
really cannot, because what happened before was too repulsive for me, if I
look at his actions in context.

Magpie:
You don't feel sympathy for him, and many other people don't either.  But I 
think that's why Elkins is looking at the word choices the author uses 
rather than just her own emotional reaction.  She has her own reaction like 
anyone else, but the fun part is her trying to analyze what's happening and 
where that
emotional reaction might come from.  Can you build a case based on what's 
actually there?

For me, for instance, I can't stand Ginny in books 5 and 6.  I can analyze 
why I don't like her personally.  But really looking objectively at the text 
is a different story.  I see her described with word choices that are
positive.  There are things I can deduce about Ginny as written that are 
very different from the way I react to her. Shipping is a similar thing, 
actually--many people claim that certain shippers just got lucky in Book VI 
that things went their way, and not everyone who predicted R/Hr and H/G 
really did so based on what was written rather than just wishing for the
couple they liked.  But still, it's untrue to say that these pairings 
weren't foreshadowed in the text.  I don't like H/G, but heard it coming 
loud and clear in OotP.  It's not like there was no foreshadowing and then 
it suddenly appeared in HBP, just as the Draco we see in HBP didn't only 
appear there.  (Unfortunately I do think that Ginny throughout canon is the 
exception to this, but there that's a gimmick that's commented on within 
canon.)

With Slytherin I think the conflicting opinions are built right into the 
text, as Elkins says with the bit about what we're told and what happens. 
The Slytherins are described negatively very consistently.  But they're also 
given the ability to hurt.  Draco does, imo, get moments where his pain is 
real--the red spots on his cheeks, his pale face before a Quidditch game, 
etc.  JKR didn't have to give him those things.  She writes Dudley with less 
dignity when he's under fire.

I like Draco a lot so obviously I can't claim to be neutral about the 
character.  I've often seen him as sympathetic when other people 
don't--though also often the unsympathetic reading was less accurate (I mean 
in terms of incorporating more stuff in canon).  Whether people see 
Slytherin as victims or monsters is probably going to be a personal 
preference.  But seeing signs that the view of them as demonized rather than 
demons...I don't think that's just emotional.  Things like the Sorting Hat 
singing twice in a row about how there has to be a healing of this rift...I
don't think that means Slytherins are really sympathetic or not, but that 
it's correct to pick up on the discrepancies between what we hear and what's
really going on.  It seems like the real question is whether or not the 
books are leading towards a new view of Slytherin and I think that's more 
what she's really picking up on.

-m