Portraits - Additional: Actors Playing a Role

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 165010

bboyminn:
> 
> Owlery2003, you are taking my 'actor' analogy too literally. I don't
think for one second they hire an actor, throw him into the painting,
and let him spend his life pretending to be someone else. No, the
'actor' metaphor simply illustrates how a portrait can portray a
character with great depth, but still not be as fully realized as the
represented person.
> 
> The point is that the Portrait is NOT the real person but a
/representation/ of the real person. A representation that has deep
and intimate knowledge to draw on via the bit of the living person
that has been placed in the painting. But, there is a limit to the
portraits ability to draw from the bank of knowledge of the orignal
person, just as an actor has a limited bank of knowledge to draw on to
represent the character they play.
<snip>

> The real portrait can play the role of the real person personality
and all, and do so very convincingly. It is only when you search for
depth and meaning that you discover that the depth and meaning aren't
really there. It is all show and no go. 
> 
<snip>
> So, again, the whole point of using the 'actors' analogy was to
address the limited depth we find in portraits. Their job is not to be
the person, but to represent the person to the best of their limited
ability.

Carol responds:
But the portrait isn't *portraying* the person. He's an *imprint* of
the person as the person was in life, just as a ghost is a (stronger)
imprint of the person's now departed soul. Nearly Headless Nick
thinks, speaks, and acts exactly as he did in life, except that his
activities and interests are more limited (lamenting that he canno
longer enjoy banquets, providing information on the Sorting Hat,
wanting to join the Headless Hunt--not a goal he would have pursued in
life, but illustrative of his personality). NHN isn't acting; he's
being himself to the degree that he can do so without a physical body.
Ditto Professor Binns and Moaning Myrtle.

The portraits, despite being two-dimensional and having more limited
mobility, are much the same. They aren't acting (pretending to be
someone else). Their thoughts and feelings are those of the person
whose "imprint" they are (Phineas Nigellus's grief for his
great-great-grandson is not feigned even though in life he never knew
that great-great-grandson), but they can no longer take an active part
in the world, being limited to observing, commenting, and "giving
counsel." But something of the original wizard must be in them, as
you've often postulated--not a soul bit or they'd be Horcruxes (as
they clearly aren't--their subjects are all dead), but something
analogous to the "brains" in the Sorting Hat, which enables it to
think as the Founders did regarding the incoming first-years.

I agree that the portrait is not the person and that a portrait is a
representation or image, not a living being, but in the WW objects can
sometimes think for themselves, and the thoughts of the portraits
appear to be the thoughts that the person himself would have in the
limited capacity of observer/advisor. They are not *acting* any more
than the Sorting Hat or Diary!Tom (a memory made more powerful by the
addition of a soul bit) are acting. Diary!Tom speaks, thinks, and acts
exactly as sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle would have acted if he
encountered a Time-Turning Harry in the Chamber of Secrets. The
portraits, though they have no three-dimensional bodies and are not
animated by soul bits, also speak and think for themselves in
something beyond the "catch phrases" that JKR credits them with. In
fact, that description is much more applicable to Mrs. Black, Sir
Cadogan, and possibly the Fat Lady than it is to Phineas Nigellus--or,
we can hope, to Portrait!Dumbledore.

Carol, who realizes that Portrait!DD is not Dumbledore but still hopes
that both he and Phineas will prove useful to Harry in DH