OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

Well, I guess you all probably know already how I'm bound to respond to Eileen's questions about the sycophant characters, right?

But I'm going to answer them anyway.

Eileen wrote:

Sycophants make great characters at point. Note Grima Wormtongue and Peter Pettigrew. But do people actually like them? Do you ever feel sympathetic with a sycophant?

Yes. I always identify with weakness—weakness is really the one characteristic that unifies all of those character types included under the SYCOPHANTS banner—and the minions are almost always my favorite characters.

Part of the reason for this, I suppose, is pure sympathy for the underdog. Head Villains very rarely win in the end, it's true, but at least until they finally get what's coming to them, they do get to be powerful. (The story wouldn't be very satisfying if they didn't.) They may be doomed to failure within the wider scope of the narrative, but until the end of the story, they get to kill and bully and torment and otherwise lord it over everyone who crosses their path. And because it's genre convention that proper villains ought to be charismatic, they often get really snappy dialogue, as well.

Their minions, on the other hand, don't even get that much. Not only are they doomed to failure, they're also subject people even while their own side is winning. And not only that, but even the authorial voice often doesn't seem to care for them! If they're not cannon fodder, pure and simple, then they're secondary villains that the reader is supposed to roundly despise: they hardly ever get any cool lines of dialogue, they rarely have a decent dress sense, they're almost never good-looking, and their dignity is stripped from them as a matter of course. Minions just get no respect or sympathy from anyone: they're despised by their enemies and their evil overlords alike. They're losers, through and through.

And of course that garners my sympathy! I mean, what sort of person doesn't instinctively root for the underdog?

When you read the Shrieking Shack scene for the first time, were you feeling it more from Sirius/Lupin's angry POV or Pettigrew's desperately afraid POV?

This is very similar to one of the questions proposed for discussion at the end of the summary of Chapter Nineteen of PoA, back when this list was still doing weekly chapter-by-chapter discussions of the books. The question then, IIRC, was something along the lines of: "Did you feel any sympathy for Pettigrew?"

And I have to admit that I was shocked to read the responses. I kept scrolling through the messages, reading "no," "no," "absolutely not," "are you kidding me?" and the like, over and over and over again, and my jaw was just dropping to the floor. I honestly could not believe what I was seeing.

Well, it might be something strange in me but I was seeing it from the second POV.

I guess I must share your strangeness then, because for me, if there's one person in the scene in fear for his life, then that's the person who always gets the first claim on my sympathy. It doesn't matter who it is or what he's done: the desire not to die is just so compelling, so universal, so utterly fundamental that it garners sympathy and identification as a matter of simple human default — very much as physical pain does. I could no more have withheld identification from Pettigrew in Shrieking Shack than I could have withheld it from Harry in the graveyard at the end of GoF (to take an example in rather striking contrast when it comes to the character's actual behavior in the face of imminent death).

And also, really, identification with Pettigrew in Shrieking Shack is just so very easy, isn't it? I mean, it's a total no-brainer. There's absolutely nothing alien about his situation except for its sordid and excessive details.

Afraid of death? Yup. Been there. (Hell, I live there.) Hopelessly overpowered by those around you? Yeah, I've been there, too. Anyone who didn't spring fully-grown from their father's skull has been there. Know perfectly well that you've done something wrong, and that you have absolutely no real excuse for it? Well, yeah, I've been there as well. Hasn't everyone been there, at least once in their life?

I sympathized very deeply with Sirius and Remus, of course, but I can't say that I was really identifying with either of them in the same way. I wasn't feeling their rage. What I was feeling in regard to them was pity, mixed with a very deep concern. I was fearful for them and worried about them, and I wanted to protect them from themselves — which I suppose placed my reader identification far closer to one with Harry in that scene.

On a related note, Eileen also asked:

BTW, did you feel a twinge of sympathy for Pettigrew when he said the Dark Lord forced him to betray the Potters? I did (at least the first time around) and Lupin's reaction still doesn't feel good for me.

Hmmm. Lupin's reaction? Do you mean his charming "You should have realized if Voldemort didn't kill you, we would?" Or were you thinking more of Sirius' "you should have died rather than betray your friends" statement?

(Or...no. No, excuse me. What I really meant to say, of course, was Sirius' "YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED RATHER THAN BETRAY YOUR FRIENDS" statement. So sorry.)

That line of Sirius' has never made me feel too good either. I mean...

<Elkins squirms uncomfortably>

I mean, of course we all like to believe that we'd die rather than betray our friends, don't we? But...well...I mean...

<more squirming>

I mean, "Who doesn't crack every once and a while?"

Yes! Exactly.

::brightly::

But actually, you know, the situation wasn't really like that at all! So we don't have to worry about it any more. Right?

Now, of course, it looks like Pettigrew's guilty as sin.

Right. Phew! What a relief that is! Weaklings all across the globe were just swooning with gratitude when JKR made that authorial decision, I can tell you.

Cindy, on the other hand, is not Weak, but Tough. She therefore Has No Sympathy:

My goodness! What's going on here? Are you guys starting to—well, there's just no gentle way to say it—go Soft on me? What am I hearing? Sympathy for Pettigrew? Doubt about Crouch Jr.'s guilt? What next – Tom Riddle was just misunderstood?

Er...not to quibble, but haven't we always been "Soft?" I mean, Eileen and I have always been the Bleeding Heart Sycophants around here, haven't we? Neither of us has ever made the slightest claim to Toughness. So I don't really know whether it's even possible for us to "go" Soft. We started out that way.

But as to Tom Riddle, of course he was misunderstood! He was terribly misunderstood. After all, back in his student days, it seems that just about everyone but Dumbledore thought that he was a really nice guy. I'd call that a case of being fairly well misunderstood.

The poor dear.

No, I don't think I can sign on for the Pity Party that seems to be forming here. Pettigrew was Evil. Evil, evil and really evil.

I'm with Eileen here. Yeah, Pettigrew's a rotter. He's seriously bad news. But people don't have to be good to get my pity; they just have to be wretched and miserable and helpless and trapped. And Pettigrew's certainly all of those things. In fact, I pity Pettigrew far more than I would a truly admirable person, because he doesn't even have the solace of knowing himself to be essentially blameless to see him through. He knows that he's guilty, he knows that he's got no one but himself to blame for his situation, and he knows that even though his behavior is sickening, he's still not going to change it.

And yeah, I really do pity people like that.

You know why I'm not cutting Pettigrew or Crouch Jr. a break? Because neither Pettigrew nor Crouch Jr. is sorry.

Crouch Jr. indeed shows no signs of remorse for anything he has done anywhere in GoF, unless one counts his evident fatigue, twitchiness, and possible absent-mindedness the morning after his father's murder. And even if one does choose to interpret these as signs of remorse, he would seem to have quashed those nasty little feelings of qualm quite adequately by the time he reaches his "mad, am I?" monologue at the end of the book.

Pettigrew, though? Oh, I think it's quite clear that Pettigrew feels remorse. What he doesn't do is to allow that sense of remorse to override his sense of self-preservation, and thus to do anything to actually atone for his wrong-doings. Instead, he just falls into self-loathing.

Now, self-loathing isn't at all a useful response to remorse, it is true. It does absolutely nothing to mitigate the original offense, it doesn't make you feel any better — in fact, it does absolutely nothing beneficial for anyone. But it's still certainly evidence of remorse.

Pettigrew never expresses any regret at all in the Shrieking Shack.

That all rather depends on how you interpret his breaking down at the end of the scene, doesn't it? I mean, I suppose that you could read his bursting into tears there as purely manipulative behavior: his one desperate last-ditch attempt to inspire mercy. You could view it as a manifestation of simple terror. Or you could view it as indicative of the guilty despair of remorse.

I read it as a blend of all three, myself.

Back to Eileen:

Now, I can take the pain given to weaker characters, and, being a FEATHERBOA, enjoy it, but my heart still goes out to every miserable fictional character that comes along.

<Elkins smiles in sympathy and offers Eileen a sprig of Dicentra Eximia, the Western Bleeding Heart, which grows bountifully here in the drizzly Green city of Portland, Oregon.>

Is this wide-spread phenomenon? Or are we only a few whose supply of pity is infinite?

We may be few, Eileen, but at least it's not just the two of us anymore. Jamie actually purchased a SYCOPHANTS badge!

She did so off-list, admittedly (that shame factor is just so hard to combat, isn't it?), but she did say that it would be okay if I shared the news with everyone.

And I also just noticed this, from A Goldfeesh:

A Goldfeesh -who wonders at the Sorting Hat putting her in Slytherin, not being too ambitious or cunning and so likely destined to be a lowly sycophant...

<Elkins peers into the Goldfeesh's bowl, offering a badge and a packet of pamphlets>

SYCOPHANTS membership packet, Goldfeesh?

Eileen:

I have this tendency to get along well with sycophants, neurotics and the rest. One of my first fanfics was about how Gollum survived Mt. Doom and Merry and Pippin brought him back to the Shire and reformed him by taking him swimming and on picnics. (I was very young.)

Oh my God. Eileen, that is so cute!

But how about Grima? No redemption scenario for poor old Grima Wormtongue, the patron saint of sycophants?

Grima Wormtongue, the patron saint of sycophants! But he didn't survive, Elkins, he didn't survive. Even Frodo couldn't save him.

Eileen goes off polishing her SYCOPHANT badge sadly.

::sigh::

No. He didn't survive.

But then, you know, if the sycophants were really in the habit of surviving their stories, then I highly doubt that we'd feel such an overwhelming desire to champion them.

—Elkins, polishing up her own SYCOPHANTS badge as she wanders down to the beach to see how the Fourth Man kayak is bearing up under the pressure of its recent population explosion