Slytherins come back WAS: Re: My Most Annoying Character

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 180300

> > >>Carol:
> > <snip>
> > (Have you ever tried to identify faces in a rushing, pajama-clad   
> > crowd?)
> > <snip>
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Have you ever identified a hypnosis victim in a pitched battle in 
the 
> middle of the night? <eg>  I'm afraid JKR doesn't cling close to 
> reality when she enters the realm of battle.

Magpie:
Well, yeah--why should I take for granted the descriptions of 
Quidditch games or think I know what went on during the TWT. After 
all, Harry had a lot on his mind then! I do take it for granted 
because this is a work of fiction and the author's the one telling me 
what's going on and the story is only made up of the words on the 
page. The author can trick me by tricking Harry, but as you point out, 
I know that happened because it was revealed as part of the story. The 
author would just be stupid to make scenes say something other than 
what she meant based on some torturous idea of what Harry would 
misunderstand, and JKR is not stupid that way. (Nor do I think Harry 
mistaking Slytherin students for shopkeepers etc. makes sense even 
from Harry's pov.) 

Examples like these, imo, only validate the idea that the pov is not 
that screwed up. If we were dealing with stuff as basic as: The 
Slytherins teased Harry from the sidelines. When what it means is: "It 
was the Hufflepuffs what did it. Figure out reasons why Harry got it 
wrong" I can't imagine anybody sticking with the things. On the 
contrary throughout the books JKR is basically clear and careful about 
seeing things correctly. When there's a discrepancy between what Harry 
interprets about the scene and what was real, it's given to us just as 
clearly. Then we can go back and clearly see where he went wrong. 
That's in no way the same whatever is going on here.



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? 

Magpie:
I just don't think that objectively that sentence is so unclear as to 
really be called ambiguous. Yes it says seems, but is that enough to 
call into question that this is basically what we're seeing. I mean, 
I'm trying to read a fun light-hearted fantasy here, should I really 
have to think about a throwaway sentence like this that's never 
questioned in the text?

This isn't one of those mysteries that are cleared up later. It's just 
a sentence adding more people to the room, with that information never 
revised anywhere by anyone. Sure it's just a basic impression, hence 
the use of the word "seems." I think JKR is instinctively choosing 
that because to say that Slughorn entered in with those people 
wouldn't hit quite the right note. It would imply greater knowledge 
than Harry has--not because he can't see the crowd, but because it 
suggests a method for recruiting we readers don't know. Maybe it's not 
the family and friends of *every* student already fighting (it still 
seems like that "seems" is obviously refering to the number of 
people), but I can't see any reason to assume it's actually other 
people perfectly recognizable to Harry. There's just no reason for an 
author to literally *disguise* the Slytherins if she's never going to 
reveal them. No matter how many shadows we cast over Harry's 
perception, a shadow is not a Slytherin. (Heh--the only context in 
which that is true!)

This is all exactly the opposite of all the examples of Harry seeing 
one thing and our only later learning the truth of it, because this is 
never revised. If the narrator says, "It seemed like the whole school 
had turned out to see Harry in the TWT" sure the narrator's leaving it 
open enough to suggest that there has not been an exact headcount. But 
I still would get the general impression that Harry is surrounded by 
his fellow Hogwarts students. And I wouldn't take that sentence 
as "ambiguous" as to whether or not the the Dursleys have also turned 
out to see it unless I'm told they did. 

Carol:
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:
And to me it makes perfect sense plenty of other ways--and did to many 
other people, obviously, if they were both surprised by the 
revisionist idea of Slughorn appearing with a crowd of Slytherin 
students heretofore undescribed and yet not totally confused by 
Phineas' earlier statement. I have a hard time believing that if 
that's the only way the statement makes sense that it was never 
queried by an editor--as in, "So the Slytherin students returned and 
fought? Because you have them leave and never return." That seems like 
pretty basic editing to me--if you have somebody leave the room they 
can't do something in the room without coming back into it again. 
Despite the claims of some that Slytherins are suddenly such non-
entities that they never need to be described, that's a pretty big 
thing to forget and easy enough to fix.

"Slytherin House played its part" (more truly ambiguous, imo, 
because "Slytherin House" can mean different things in different 
contexts, as can "played its part) is imo a truly bizarre way for the 
author to tell us that oh yeah, there was one more group in the battle 
that was there. Her style for the rest of the battle was to just tell 
us who was there. Why does she suddenly lose her ability to speak 
plainly about something so simple just around this one issue?

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.

Magpie:
Just because Slughorn has some connection to characters or has had 
scenes with them in the past doesn't have any bearing on this 
sentence. (I think one would have an even better argument for a minor 
walk-on like Sanguini being there since while he's no more identified 
than the Slytherins, and no more a part of the groups that are 
described at least he, unlike the Slytherins, wasn't specifically 
shown buggering off earlier.)

I don't have to make up reasons as to why Slughorn (who knows dark 
magic) couldn't have brought Inferi with him--that would be going 
right back down the rabbit hole. There's no reason for me to explain 
why he didn't bring Inferi because nobody said he did. Inferi and 
Slytherin students are equally absent from this sentence. I'm 
intentionally including examples from outside the book because once 
you start saying something can exist just because the author didn't 
specifically say it wasn't there, anything could be there. Slughorn 
bringing Slytherins back with him might seem more in the realm of 
possibilities of canon, but when it comes to the actual canon Slughorn 
bringing Slytehrins back with him is no more stated than Voldemort and 
Harry being twins separated at birth on Tatooine. 

This comes up in fanfic all the time too, where someone will try to 
claim that their fanfic is "more canon" because they've got, for 
instance, a canon pairing. But the fact is, a story where Ron and 
Hermione start dating in fourth year isn't any more canon than a story 
where Harry and Snape are dating in sixth year. One's a bit wilder 
than the other, but neither are canon.

> 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.)

Magpie:
No, not oops. I did not forget how the pov worked. I'm saying, for the 
umpteenth time, that the author's trying to describe a battle here the 
best way she can and so I don't think she'd be more clear, not less, 
about what she feeds our imaginations. And the picture she's sketched 
out here, the only one we readers are ever given, is of shopkeepers 
and friends and family of students already fighting. Those are the 
only people that are ever suggested are there. As an author, you put 
the information in the text the way you can. A few words in the book 
just saying that Slughorn returned with the Slytherins would do it. 
Dozens of paragraphs from readers explaining to me how they can 
imagine the Slytherins there with Harry not seeing them is meaningless.

The narrator is telling us what's happening. Yes, the narrator is 
doing it through Harry's limited pov as usual, so there's some 
interpretation there but the main point is: there's a battle scene 
here, and we need to be able to follow it for us to know what 
happened. 

Carol:
"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."

Magpie:
Yeah, and that's all she wrote. No later reveal that in fact "what 
looked like" the family and friends and shopkeepers were in fact the 
Slytherin students even more familiar to Harry. So why on earth would 
I revisit the sentence and put them in there? Harry's given me a 
perfectly good general impression of who's there. It's his impression, 
but an impression of something that he's qualified enough to be 
accurate on. (It's not like Harry mistaking Crouch Jr. for Moody when 
he's polyjuiced.)

Basically, the only evidence lies in the words "seemed to" and "looked 
like" to describe the crowd of people coming from the outside who are 
therefore better described in this way (Wow, they seem to have rounded 
up the friends and family of everybody here and everybody in Hogsmeade-
-hurray!). Even if you accept that this means Harry could be wrong, 
you still need to correct him by putting the Slytherins there 
*literally* afterwards, and that never happens. It's one of many 
snapshots of the battle. We see it and move on.

I understand how the battle works after that, but explanations as to 
why Harry isn't describing all the Slytherins there simply don't hold 
up to me when the book hasn't put them there to begin with. If the 
author had just included the obvious words that included the Slytherin 
students in the crowd with Slughorn (hell in her interview she seems 
to have dispensed with the canonical crowd completely and has Slughorn 
bursting in with his students--a scene that's vivid enough to her five 
months later, but not to Harry or her narrator who are still stuck 
with what she wrote) I wouldn't need any explanation as to why Harry 
would be describing people other than them. They'd have been 
introduced and I'd just know they were there. It's really not asking 
much. It's asking nothing at all to provide the basic task of telling 
me the people I'm supposed to think are in the scene.

Carol:
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

Magpie:
I don't think this is about objective truth, but normal reading and 
writing. This is asking me to go beyond both in ways that frankly just 
seem unnecessary and irritating. JKR described the scene perfectly 
fine. It doesn't include Slytherins. It doesn't need to include 
Slytherins. If she wanted it to include Slytherins, all she had to do 
was put them on the page. 

-m