OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

On the Train Stomp, Cindy wrote:

I had a different issue with that scene. Bad guys kick their foe then they are down and helpless and unconscious. Good guys do what they have to do and move on. They do NOT curse people just for saying something they don't like, stomp them, and then leave them there powerless to rescue themselves.

I share that issue.

No, there was nothing chivalrous about it at all, was there? Five against three. (And given that two of those three were Crabbe and Goyle, perhaps we ought to call it 'five against one and a half?') Fred and George attacking from behind. Not to mention the fact that, as far as I could tell, the Slyths hadn't even considered reaching for their wands.

And that's before we even got to the stomping.

But then, Harry and friends are only fourteen years old, and the verbal provocation was quite severe, and poor Harry had quite the trauma-inducing year, so I'm willing to forgive them for it.

Fred and George, however, are another matter. They're seventeen years old, for heaven's sake! By the standards of their culture, they're legal adults! And they're hexing a bunch of fourteen-year-olds in the back, stomping all over them while they're lying there unconscious, and then leaving them alone on a train in the middle of London? Where I come from, we had a word for older teens who did stuff like that. We called them "bullies."

Then, I've never much cared for the twins. (Oh, boy. I'm really not making myself popular here, am I?) Playing their practical jokes on everyone. Springing booby-trapped sweets on unsuspecting younger kids. And hissing poor little eleven-year-old Malcolm Baddock at the Sorting Ceremony, just because he got sorted into Slytherin.

That last is by far the worst, to my mind. I mean, really! What a rotten thing to do. We've never seen even the Slyths hiss or jeer at anyone during the Sorting Ceremony. Inappropriate. Inappropriate, and very mean-spirited.

And what a lovely way to start your school career. I mean, can you imagine it? Here you are, you're just a little kid, it's your very first day at Hogwarts, everything is incredibly intimidating, you're scared to death of this whole Sorting process, you put the hat on your head, it pronounces you a Slytherin, and then, just as you're beginning to feel that maybe this might not be so bad after all ("Hey, those kids at that table are actually clapping! For me! Cool!"), just when you're beginning to relax, that's when these two enormous red-headed louts over at another table -- and they're really big kids, too; they're big, and strong, and much much older than you—they start to hiss at you. As if they hate you, or something! And you've never even met them before!

Sheesh. Poor little Malcolm Baddock.

Me, I think the twins are a couple of cads.

Maybe the train stomp scene is transitional and is designed to show that this is an all-out war now? I hope that's all it is supposed to be.

I hope so, as well. Like I said before, I really do find myself hoping that the train stomp—like the nastiness of Draco's comment that prompted it—was supposed to make the reader feel saddened and wearied and concerned about the corrupting effects of all of this hatred and violence on these terribly young people...

But I really don't think that it was. I've a horrible suspicion that JKR actually intended for the payback to be a feel-good moment for us.

If so, then it sure didn't work on me. I found it...grim.

I wrote:

It makes me laugh to see people desperately struggling to extricate themselves from impossible or embarrassing or even potentially lethal situations. I don't know quite what this is called, but I tend to think of it as the primary comedic attribute of Farce.

Cindy said:

Hmmm. I'm trying to think of examples of this from canon.

Well, Gwen (I believe) classified the Yule Ball sequences as "romantic comedy," but I see many aspects of farce there as well. Ron and Harry's attempts to find dates, and the inevitability that they are going to embarrass themselves in this endeavor, qualifies as farcical to my mind.

But the classic farce scene in GoF, which I'm appalled to notice that I actually forgot to mention last time around, comes in the "Egg and the Eye" chapter, when Harry gets stuck in the trick stair under his invisibility cloak and has to try to get himself out of the situation while dealing with Snape, Filch and Fake Moody, all of whom are themselves pursuing their own agenda.

I love that scene. It's got everything. It has Harry's predicament, which is fundamentally absurd, yet compelling. It has dreadfully mistaken characters insisting on their version of events at the top of their lungs ("I'm telling you, it was Peeves!"). It has some variants on mistaken identity—who has been breaking into Snape's office, anyway? And where the devil is Bartemius Crouch? It has (on rereading) all of Crouch's sly double-edged comments. And it also has a secondary dilemma, also only visible on second reading, in Crouch's own predicament: his reaction to the Marauder's Map, the near-miss aspect of Harry's fingering him (or, rather, his father) as the mysterious intruder in Snape's office.

And on top of all of that, it also falls back on that old farce stand-by of allowing us to see ordinarily dignified characters wandering around in their night-clothes. That's a classic. You can just never go wrong with that one.

One is Pettigrew trying to talk his way out of trouble, as you mention. Another is Harry trying to escape from the graveyard.

Harry trying to escape from the graveyard does fit my description, but I didn't find it farcical at all—it just wasn't written that way. Of course, the question of "how something is written" is always a rather difficult one—it's a question of nuance, and of tone, and thus totally subjective. Hmmm. Let's see if I can manage this...

Shrieking Shack, deadly serious though it may have been in some ways, also had quite a few farcical elements: Pettigrew's repeated "Yes! There! You see?" comments every time one of the kids makes an argument in his favor, for example, or the humor implicit in his appealing to Ron on the grounds that "I was a good pet" (when in fact the notion that Scabbers was an utterly unsatisfactory pet has been emphasized repeatedly throughout the rest of the book), or the painfully obvious way in which he appeals to each and every person in the room (one at a time, as if he's following some sort of official "supplication by the numbers" manual), or the way that he keeps changing his story, looking for an exit strategy.

Harry's duel with Voldemort, though...well, I just didn't see any elements of farce there. Yes, Harry did want quite desperately to escape from the situation, but there's no touch of the absurd there, as there is in Shrieking Shack, and there's no point at which his desperation becomes...well, funny. He doesn't resort to any ridiculous lengths, or attempt anything utterly untenable, or...

Well, gah. Humor is hard to define. It's more a matter of tone, I think, then of anything else.

I think for me to be amused by a character squirming in a tight spot, the tight spot can't be a matter of life or death.

::nods:: Farce usually keeps the stakes lower than life or death, and for just that reason. I think that most people stop finding it funny once it starts to get too grim.

[Crouch/Moody, stomping in to announce the plot right after Harry's name spits out of the Goblet]

On a re-read, I was amused by just how brazen Moody is. He walks right in and gives away half of the plot twist, and I didn't believe it. Nope. I wasn't buying anything Moody said in that scene.

Crouch Jr. was just such an utter show-off. It's one of the things that I found so very appealing about him.

Really? Crouch Jr. was kind of a flat-liner for me. I mean, he was great as Moody, but I didn't get a real sense for him individually.

I liked him for the way that he was constantly entertaining himself by making all of those sly double-edged comments that no one else (except the re-reader) could possibly ever appreciate. I enjoyed both his sense of irony and his sense of malice, and the pure and simple glee that he seemed to take in combining the two. I found the fact that he really did seem to be having a whole lot of fun with this mission—this whole masquerading as Moody thing was the greatest thing since sliced bread so far as he was concerned; he was just having a blast with it—to be curiously endearing, even refreshing.

And I think that he really enjoyed teaching the DADA classes as well. I'm convinced that Crouch could have been a damned fine teacher himself, if only his life had gone...well, very differently.

I also found his acting talent extremely impressive and found it interesting to contemplate the extent to which his ability to immerse himself so fully in his role might not have been an effect of having spent over a decade effectively stripped of any real identity of his own—enslaved, invisible, presumed dead, permitted to speak to no one but (shudder) Winky.

(Sudden image of Barty Crouch, staring blankly at himself in the mirror between Polyjuice doses and murmering to himself: "But what's my motivation here? I mean, really now: what's my motivation?)

I felt a certain sympathy for him, too, even though he was admittedly a very evil fellow. His insistence on viewing Voldemort as his Good Daddy figure was just so very pathetic.

And now that you mention it, I gather that we are not supposed to like Crouch Sr., but I liked him well enough. I guess we're not supposed to like him because he spent too much time at the office, and because he gave his son a rather truncated trial.

Me, I don't care about 'too much time at the office.' But I do think that the man was a hypocrite and a control-freak, and that he wasn't terribly clear on the entire notion of a child as an individual person, rather than as an extension of the parent's identity. I also think that what he did to his son was considerably more cruel than just leaving him to die in Azkaban would have been.

That said, I also think that (whatever young Barty himself might have thought on the matter), Crouch Elder did genuinely believe that he loved his son. I'm just not certain that he really got the whole love thing, at least when it came to his own child.

Really, what did Crouch Sr. do to deserve his unfortunate transfiguration into a bone, other than show mercy to his no-account, good-for-nothing, disgrace-to-the-family-name offspring?

Mmmm. Well, as you know, Cindy, I'm decidedly squicky on the subject of the Imperius Curse. But all the same, it still seems to me that stripping your no-account, good-for-nothing, disgrace-to-the-family-name offspring of all personal volition, rendering him completely invisible, denying him all human contact, and keeping him locked in your kitchen is...well, that isn't exactly mercy, is it?

That isn't mercy at all. That's stripping someone of all of the signifiers of personal identity, and then just keeping them around as a kind of robot. It's preserving the form, while denying the essence. It's almost like a lesser manifestation of the Dementor's Kiss.

I read it as fairly symbolic, myself. Crouch always viewed his son as an extension of his own identity, and so when his son rebelled against him by turning to the Dark Side, he first tried to sever the tie ("You are not my son!") and then, when that didn't work out for him, he chose instead to use the Imperius Curse to render the boy incapable of being anything but an extension of his own identity.

You know what they say about all unhappy families...

I'll definitely cut Crouch Sr. a break, but not Crouch Jr.

Aw, hell. I'm happy to slather on the slack for them both. After all, one of them's dead, and the other is worse than dead, and they didn't leave anyone else to carry on their twisted family legacy, so why hold grudges?

—Elkins