help with JKR quote/ Children's reactions

[muscatel1988]

No: HPFGUIDX 176542

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" 
<dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
> And aren't animagi taught in Hogwarts, just later than Marauders 
> learned how to do that? ( do not have PoA with me right now)

Being an animagus isn't the same thing as Transfiguration.  The 
former 
is rare - the only animagi we hear of are the Marauders, McGonagall 
and Rita Skeeter, and according to Hermione's research, there's only 
been seven in the 20th century [PoA, UK pb: 257] - and the Ministry 
regard it as a potentially dangerous or subversive ability, hence the 
need to register.  Nor, it appears, is it easy - according to Lupin, 
it took Sirius, James and Peter three years to work out how to do it 
[PoA, UK pb: 259].

It's true that students learn that animagi exist in school - Hermione 
reports "doing them in class with Professor McGonagall" [PoA, UK pb: 
257].  But there's no suggestion that the classes are practical - 
even in the WW, I doubt that a course that had only seven successful 
students in one hundred years would have stayed on the curriculum. 

It's always been suspected in fandom that Dumbledore was also an 
animagus, based on McGonagall's being one and on his having been 
Transfiguration teacher at the time of Hagrid's expulsion, but I 
don't think we ever found out for sure.

> I guess Mcgonagall is really into Dark Arts as well, by your 
> definition.

Well, she uses Imperius with alacrity.  ;-)

The question, though, is what counts as Dark Arts.  It doesn't seem 
to be intent - there's plenty of examples of the White Hats using 
some pretty nasty magic for purely malicious purposes (which the 
reader is clearly expected to cheer); it doesn't seem to be who you 
learn it from - although Lupin says that he tried to convince himself 
that Sirius was getting into the school "using Dark Magic he learnt 
from Voldemort" [PoA, UK pb: 261], it makes no sense to suggest that 
Voldemort had invented Dark Magic.  The only reading of "Dark Arts" 
that makes sense to this reader now is "magic done by the Black 
Hats".  

As I've said before, Quirrell seems to have been right: There is no 
good and evil - there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.  
This is not in itself an incoherent moral position - the world is 
full of things that are powerful and can be used for good or evil.  
But it is a position which six books had rejected.  

I think there's a deep flaw at the heart of the series: the author 
seems not to have worked out what exactly magic is in her world.  I 
recall when HBP came out, there was all that kerfuffle about 
Pratchett criticising her for not having realised that she was 
writing fantasy (as she admitted in the 2005 Time interview*, 
although she claimed to be subverting the genre (she's not; he is)).  
I think perhaps this is what he meant - if you're constructing 
another universe, you need to work out how stuff works in it (or 
doesn't).  Not that Pratchett is immune - The Colour of Magic is weak 
in precisely this way, though he learnt rapidly.  The reader was 
misled, I think, by the talk of all the notebooks full of back-story 
and detail - we assumed (or at least I did) that they constituted the 
construction of an internally coherent world.  They appear not to 
have - I can't for the life of me think why the question "What 
exactly is Dark Magic?" didn't occur to her, but I can't see the 
answer.  My objection here isn't that she provided an answer I didn't 
like - it's that an answer doesn't seem to be possible.  


* http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1083935-1,00.html)

Mus