Slytherins come back WAS: Re: My Most Annoying Character/Now Rowling's control

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 180292

Magpie wrote:
> <snip>
More interesting quite possibly--I admit I sort of added it as I was 
reading! But I don't think it makes more sense. It doesn't fill any
holes since the book provided alternate motivation.

Carol responds:
Here I agree with you. Canon shows us an intellectual infatuation
shared between two brilliant boys, the kind of thing that has happened
many times in real life at schools like Eton (I'm thinking of Percy
Bysshe Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, but I'm sure
other people can think of other examples). The text shows the young
Grindelwald as charming and merry as well as brilliant and DD as
refusing to see the darkness beneath that pleasing exterior, but we
never see their friendship beyond a photo of two laughing boys and one
letter about the greater good, signed not "love, Albus," but "Albus
Dumbledore, with the "A" being the sign of the Deathly Hallows. Fans
of slash fanfic, some of whom saw Lupin and Black as lovers, may have
read in a romantic relationship, but I certainly didn't. I saw, and
still see, a passionate intellectual friendship in which Albus saw his
own brilliance and his own ideas reflected in someone else who turned
out to be condiderably less scrupulous than Albus, to put it mildly. I
don't at all mind JKR's saying that she always imagined him as gay;
it's her thinking that what she imagined but didn't put on paper is
the ony valid interpretation that I find disturbing.

> Magpie:
> The moment just doesn't read as ambiguous to me in any way.

Carol:
Not *to you*, but it does read as ambiguous to others. ("Seemed" is a
clue that what Harry thinks he sees isn't necessarily accurate.
Remember "They didn't see what they thought they saw," Sirius Black's
description of his "murdering" the Muggles and Pettigrew? Remember the
Hufflepuffs thinking they saw Harry egging the conjured snake on to
Justin? Remember Harry seeing Snape "murder" Dumbledore and DD
pleading for his life? One of the themes of the books is that what
appears to be true, including what Harry perceives to be true, isn't
necessarily true. Harry watches "the man he hated" die, not even sure
what he's feeling, and comes away from the Pensieve scene no longer
hating Snape--without ever having undergone a logical thought process
to understand how he reached the point where he could publicly
vindicate him. We don't see his thought processes; all we can do is
judge from his changed view not only of Snape but of Slytherin House
inself. And, again, Phineas Nigellus *appears* to be--my
reading--speaking of Slytherin House as a whole playing its part, not
only the current and past HoHs, one of them dead, or the long-dead
Regulus, whose part not even Phineas Nigellus understands, but the
Slytherin students. That's how it reads to me. It makes no sense,
again, to me, any other way.)

Magpie:
> The sentence doesn't make it any more ambiguous that Slughorn's
brought back the Slytherins than it's ambiguous as to whether or not
Slughorn hasn't brought back an army of Inferi, Sirius Black or the
Captain and Tenille. She doesn't need to say "but no Slytherins" since
they  wouldn't naturally be included in the group anyway. There's an
infinite amount of things that the author doesn't tell us didn't
happen--the books made up of things we hear did happen.  Things like
Harry's not knowing Theo Nott's name back in fifth year or Slytherin's
acting less than evilly anywhere else are imo irrelevent.

Carol:
Except that the Captain and Tenille are not characters in the book and
Slughorn neither could nor would have brought back an army of Inferi.
 Some interpretations are possible and valid; other "interpretations"
would not even be considered. We might as well say that Voldemort and
Harry were twins separated at birth, born on Tatuini (sp) Slughorn did
*canonically* accompany his own students to the Hog's Head (as well as
younger students form other Houses). He obviously *did not* accompany
the students who remained at Hogwarts, and Harry's *interpretation*
that the adults he sees are the parents of kids who, not having cell
phones, had no way of contacting their parents (they weren't allowed
to send owls) makes no sense. (For that matter, his interpreting
"Neither can live while the other survives" as "One of us has to kill
the other" makes no sense, either, at least to me.)

> Magpie:
> My vote goes to that he knows because this is just the narrator
telling us what's going on in the battle and we're not supposed to be
caring about stuff like how Harry has recognized these people (though
it certainly seems to shoot down the idea that he couldn't recognize
people he knows even better). <snip>

Carol:
Oops. JKR is not using an omniscient narrator here or even a
third-person dramatic narrator who reports the events objectively from
the outside without entering the minds of the characters, as in
"Spinner's End." She's using her usual third-person-limited narrator
*interpreting* what Harry sees, *limited* both by what Harry sees (and
hears) and by Harry's knowledge, which, for the umpteenth time, does
*not* include the identity of the people who *look like* the entire
population of Hogsmeade and the parents of "all the students who
remained [at Hogwarts] to fight," the last *interpretation* being
extremely unlikely if not impossible, not only because those kids had
no way to contact their parents, nor did Slughorn, who would only have
known the parents of his own students and been able to contact him
because those kids were with him, but because some of the parents of
students who remained to fight (Seamus's father, for example) were
Muggles. (Did his mother come from Ireland to fight? I rather doubt it.)

At any rate, let's look again at the canon that we're interpreting
differently, not to prove that you're wrong and I'm right but to show
that both interpretations (and that's all they are) are valid. The
scene is not the narrator telling the reader what's happening. It's
the narrator, as usual, reporting Harry's interpretation of what he
sees. "And now there were more, even more, people storming up the
front steps, and *Harry saw* Charlie Weasley overtaking Horace
Slughorn, who was still wearing his emerald pajamas. They *seemed* to
have returned ath the head of *whatr looked like* the families and
friends of every student who had remained to fight, along with the
shopkeepers and homeowners of Hogsmeade. The centaurs, Bane, Ronan,
and Magorian burst into the hall with a great clatter of hooves, as
behind Harry the door that led to the kitchens is blasted off its
hinges" (DH Am. ed.734). the next second, the House-Elves burst in,
and Harry recognizes only Kreacher (the rest being just nameless
generic House-Elves to hi--we don't know whether Winky is among them
and he doesn't stop to look for her). And then we get a chaotic scene
of House-Elves hacking and stabbing at the ankles and shins of DEs,
which takes Harry's attention away from the new human arrivals. Harry
speeds between duellers, paying no attention to their identities, into
the Great Hall, where Voldemort is "in the center of the battle,
striking and smiting all within reach" (735). Finally, Harry, unable
to get a clear shot, stops to watch the action, and we get names of
people important to him or easily recognizable to him, including the
more important DEs or DE allies: Dolohov, Yaxley, Macnair, Rookwood,
Greyback, Thicknesse, and the fleeing Malfoys, along with Harry's
friends and former teachers: George, Lee, Flitwick, Hagrid, Ron,
Neville, Aberforth, Arthur, Percy, McGonagall, Slughorn and Kingsley.
A moment later, Harry sees Hermione, Ginny, and Luna fighting
Bellatrix. It's not that no one else is fighting, it's that these
people are at the center of the battle and Harry knows them, so that's
where his atttention is focused. He's not looking at or thinking about
the anonymous crowd that followed Slughorn and Charlie into the Great
Hall, along with three Centaurs, with a horde of House-Elves entering
from the opposite direction. In any case, the DEs are greatly
outnumbered, and by the time Bellatrix is mentioned, only she and
Voldemort are left. Then Molly Weasley takes on Bellatrix and the
narrator says that they're both fighting to kill, though how either
the narrator or Harry knows that when neither has yet cast a Killing
Curse is beyond me. All the others--students, teachers, shopkeepers,
even, no doubt, Centaurs and House-Elves, are lining the walls and
watching. Then, with all the DEs either Stunned, dead, or otherwise
out of the battle, Harry focuses on Voldemort.

The narrator names only the people in whom Harry has a specific
interest, including DEs that he fought at the MoM (Macnair, Dolohov,
Rookwood, the unarmed and humiliated Lucius Malfoy) or saw on the
Astronomy Tower the night that DD died (Yaxley, the semi-DE Greyback)
and the Imperiused Minister for Magic, Thicknesse, now treated as a
bad guy. It just occurred to me that Mundungus either didn't show up
with the Order members or simply isn't named. I think he would have
been mentioned if he were there, though, since Harry would have been
surprised to see him.

As for the people who showed up with Slughorn, it looks as if their
importance was primarily their sheer numbers. They don't seem to have
had much chance to fight the greatly outnumbered DEs. The few of-age
Slytherins who *may* have been included (at most, Theo Nott. Blaise
Zabini, four seventh-year girls (I'm sure Pansy ran to safety), and
maybe nine out of twelve sixth-years, the rest being still underage)
would have "played [their] part" simply by showing up to defend Hogwarts. 

Carol, who has examined the text quite carefully and finds that it
does *not* present the objective "truth" (I'm putting "truth" in
quotes here because DH is a work of fiction) but only Harry's hurried
impression of chaotic events, focusing on people he knows and can
easily recognize