Who is Faith? WAS: Re: What Came First: Task or Cabinet?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 157735

> Alla:
> 
> Magpie, I am not sure whether when you wrote you don't understand 
> about Faith, you meant that you have not read about her or whether 
> you read but did not understand.
> 
> So, in case you have not read about her, here is the link:
> 
> http://www.hpfgu.org.uk/faq/hypotheticalley.html#faith
> 
> In the TBAY, as far as I am aware ( and this is from the POV of 
> somebody who loved to read TBAY and hopes people will come back to 
> it, but never wrote it) the Faith is the personification of the 
> authoritarial intent, basically she accepts as given of what is 
> written on  the page, period. Again, TBAY theorists who actually used 
> Faith in their essays will correct me if I am wrong.
> 
> And very often the theories in Theory Bay were checked by Faith on 
> whether they can sail or not :)
> 
> So, yeah, I like this chick a lot :), even if sometimes she can be 
> wrong.
> 
> I think you already answered Snow's argument about Faith being wrong 
> about Sirius being a bad guy and Moody being the real one. That was 
> answered at the end of the book, so the way I understand it now - 
> Faith position would be at the end of the book exactly what was 
> written there.
> 
> I am especially confused about HBP proving that Faith was wrong that 
> Dumbledore was cruel leaving Harry with Dursleys. Is there anything 
> there to show that Dumbledore was **not** cruel? Wound't the Faith 
> position be that yeah, that was Dumbledore only choice, but she would 
> ask for more definite stance on that?
> 
> And in fact, isn't Faith position now that Dumbledore has regretted 
> what Dursleys did to Harry? And where is in HBP that states that 
> Dumbledore indeed had no other choice? He mentions blood protection 
> in OOP as well, where does he say that absolutely nothing could have 
> been done if not to remove Harry but at least for him to interfere?
> 
> I am just how on this topic Faith is proven wrong in HBP, not sure 
> **at all*, but this is moving from our topic.
> 
> So, yeah, that is Faith as I understand her.

Carol responds:
I think the important point about Faith is in the first line of that
document--she's first cousin to Naive and Gullible. If she believes
everything on the page, she'll not only accept the narrator's words
(Harry's parents were killed in an accident, SS/PS; there's no such
word as "Quidditch," GoF, etc., etc.) but everything any character
says. That acceptance of text as Truth doesn't allow for characters to
be misinformed, mistaken, guessing wrong, lying, or withholding
information--and we know many characters, including Dumbledore, Snape,
Harry, Hermione, Ron, Lupin, Hagrid, and Sirius Black who fit into one
or more of those categories. Her view doesn't allow for red herrings
or misdirection or the (sometimes) unreliable narrator and (mostly)
Harrycentric pov of all the books. And, of course, Faith doesn't allow
for speculation or theorizing, either, which is the point of her
(hypothetical) existence (not to mention that she can't account for
Flints and inconsistencies in the books, even those that JKR herself
has acknowledged and attempted to explain away).

Faith may be the personification of authorial intention, but the
problem is, authorial intention can't always be determined by what's
on the page. You have to look at other things, chiefly the limitations
of Harry's pov and the reasons why a character might be providing
incomplete or misleading information (Hermione suggesting that Tonks
is suffering from survivor's guilt, for example, or Hagrid saying that
all DEs are from Slytherin) to determine what the author is up to. Or
we can accept what's on the page in all cases: 

"Sirius was hiding, simply lurking out of sight" (OoP Am. ed. 807)

or "This was the end of his ambition to become an Auror" (HBP Am. ed.
103).

Absolute truth, right? There it is on the page. And if the Black
family tapestry is canon, Faith takes it on faith that certain boys in
the Black family fathered children at thirteen.

In some cases (Crouch!Moody in GoF, for example), we can see where
we've been tricked and the words on the page are either wrong or don't
mean what we thought they meant. But HBP is the first half of the
final book and there's a lot we still don't know. If we rely on Faith,
we're in big trouble.

Carol, who trusts Faith as she would adders fanged