OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

Much Ado About Memory Charms.

Some thoughts about Neville and his proposed Memory Charm: the extent to which the textual suggestions of its existence may or may not seem "obviously" planted there by the author; its overall canonical plausibility; its specific mechanics; and questions as to what its purpose might be, both from the in-world perspective of the Potterverse characters themselves and from the authorial perspective of narrative function.

Also, a bit of Sneaky!Neville, and a little bit of Snape.

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On the question of whether or not the possibility that Neville's memory problems might be the result of a memory charm was "obviously" suggested by the text, David wrote:

The question I really want to know the answer to is, what is it about us that makes things that are obvious to one person obscure to another?

I think that this may have a great deal to do with pattern recognition, which is largely a matter of training. Someone with a background in literary analysis is going to have been trained to notice certain types of patterns, someone with a background in linguistics others, and someone with a background in comparative religion still others. All three of these people are humanities types, but they're still not likely to notice the same sorts of things, nor to consider the same things "obvious."

I also think that this is often nothing more than a matter of pure idiosyncracy, or sometimes simply one of chance. Take mystery novels, for example. The mystery novel that you found profoundly unsatisfying because the solution was just far too "obvious" might be one that utterly stymied me — and vice versa. Often I think that this comes down to little more than dumb luck: one person happens to spot the relevant clue that causes him to start thinking along the right lines; the other person just doesn't happen to pick up on that one because his attention was flagging while he was reading that particular passage, or because the clue in question was about a dog and this reader just isn't interested in animals, or because some random "Ah-hah!" neuron didn't fire at just the right time, or whatever.

And of course, one can all too easily find something "obvious," and yet still be completely wrong in the end.

As indeed, people may well be when it comes to the memory charm theory.

On OT-Chatter I theorised that it has, at least in part, to do with the 'two cultures' divide between scientists and humanists.

Thoughts?

I'm always suspicious about that "two cultures" divide, partly because while I've always been an artsy-fartsy humanities type myself, I've also always been interested in stereotypical geek pursuits (RPGs, interactive fiction, science fiction, etc.), which are—or used to be, at any rate—mainly the province of the math-science folk. I've therefore spent much of my life hanging out with computer programmers and engineers and physicists, and all that lot, and I have to say that I've never really noticed all that strict a division in terms of how the two types think or perceive or analyze. Whatever differences in thought might exist between these two academic groupings pale in significance, IME, next to the differences encouraged by other quasi-cultural divides, such as theoretical/practical (the physicists vs. the engineers, for example), or conventional/iconoclastic, or Geek/Jock, or pacifist/militarist, or even smoker/non-smoker.

That's been my experience, anyway. Obviously others' mileages may (and likely do) vary.

But as to the Memory Charm Theory itself, I wouldn't say that I consider it "obvious." It did occur to me as a possibility when I read GoF for the first time, and upon second reading, as I observed in a more analytical fashion the specific things that had led me to consider it, I did indeed find myself suspecting that the author might have deliberately designed the text to draw the reader to this conclusion.

But unlike many others here, I'm not absolutely convinced that she did. It doesn't seem so very "obvious" to me that I feel at all comfortable ruling out the possibility that all of the textual suggestions of Neville as the recipient of a memory charm might not have been in fact utterly unintended by the author.

I do think, though, that the arguments for believing them to have been authorial intent are very compelling.

Kelly undertook the task of listing those textual suggestions:

* We are told that, while at Hogwarts, Bertha Jorkins was a gossip with a steel-trap mind.

* We are told that later in her life, while working at the MoM, she became forgetful, a bungler shuffled from department to department.

* We are told Crouch Sr. placed a memory charm on her.
[sidenote: While it is implied, I don't think JKR ever states that the Memory Charm caused the decline of Bertha Jorkins's mental processes. klh]

Maybe JKR doesn't, but in his veritaserum confession of Chapter 35, Younger Crouch does. Or at least, he reports that his father had claimed this to be the case:

"He put a very powerful Memory Charm on her to make her forget what she'd found out. Too powerful. He said it damaged her memory permanently."

* We are told that Neville is forgetful, a bit of a bungler.

Not only that, but the text emphasizes this aspect of Neville's character constantly. In PS/SS, Neville's first introduction to the reader comes when Harry overhears him telling his grandmother that he has lost his toad (again). In CoS, his introduction to the reader (not counting his brief one-line appearance in the dormitories, in which he is merely one of the "other second-years") is:

Neville was a round-faced and accident-prone boy with the worst memory of anyone Harry had ever met.

In PoA, Neville's introduction is:

...he also ran into the real Neville Longbottom, a round-faced, forgetful boy, outside of Flourish and Botts. Harry didn't stop to chat. Neville appeared to have mislaid his booklist and was being told off by his very formidable-looking grandmother.

And in GoF it is:

Several of their friends looked in on them as the afternoon progressed, including Seamus Finnigan, Dean Thomas, and Neville Longbottom, a round-faced, extremely forgetful boy who had been brought up by his formidable witch of a grandmother.

That Neville is both forgetful and a bit of a bungler (and that he was raised by his grandmother) is not just something that the authorial voice has told us. It is something that the authorial voice has chosen to emphasize quite strongly. In fact, Neville's forgetfulness and his bungling (along with his round face and his unusual upbringing) constitute his primary descriptors.

But Kelly left out what for me were the two really big suggestions of the memory charm possibility in GoF, namely the conjunction of the following factors:

* The behavior of Mr. Roberts, after receiving a memory charm:

Mr. Roberts had a strange dazed look about him, and he waved them off with a vague 'Merry Christmas.'

* The behavior of Neville in the corridor after DADA class:

'Oh yes, I'm fine,' Neville gabbled in the same unnaturally high voice. 'Very interesting dinner — I mean lesson — what's for eating?'

* Arthur Weasley's explanation for Mr. Roberts' befuddled behavior:

'Sometimes, when a person's memory's modified, it makes him a bit disoriented for a while...and that was a big thing they had to make him forget.'

* Chapter 30's provision of a "big thing" that is in fact much bigger than poor Mr. Roberts' "big thing," and which someone might indeed hae wished to make Neville forget, if in fact he had been a witness to it.

The combination of these factors—particularly the parallel between Mr. Roberts' confusion over the date and Neville's aphasia—certainly did inspire me, as a reader, to think about the possibility of a memory-charmed Neville.

But could they be coincidental? Could it not just be that as a writer, JKR has a fairly standard way of depicting characters in a state of confusion or mental distress?

I do think that this could be the case. For one thing, the parallels between Neville's muddled dialogue and Mr. Roberts' are not nearly as neat as they could have been. Had Mr. Roberts engaged in the same sort of word/concept substitution that Neville does, for example, or had Neville babbled confusingly about the time or the date, rather than getting his lessons and dinners muddled, then I would feel far more certain that it was the author's intent for the reader to conflate the two events. As things stand, though, I don't personally feel that it's nearly so clear-cut a case of "obvious" authorial intent as others here have proposed.

Kelly:

What is NOT obvious to me is whether Neville & Bertha together are a clue or a red herring.

No. That isn't obvious to me, either. JKR has always enjoyed the red herring game, and she's used plot device foreshadowing to this end before (all those who wondered if Lupin could be a Polyjuiced Sirius Black when they first read PoA, raise your hands!). By the time that she was writing GoF, she had to have been aware that speculation about future plot developments in her books had become a very popular hobby among her readers. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it could be misdirection.

I do, however, find it highly suggestive that to date every single one of the novels has drawn the reader's attention to the use and/or abuse of memory charms. We are introduced to the concept in the first book. The second volume gives us Lockhart and his nefarious use of Obliviate; it also shows us a clear example of just how badly such charms can confuse someone's mind, should they go awry. The third book includes explicit discussion of the use of memory charms both in regard to the Aunt-Inflating Incident which starts up the plot and in regard to the decade-old Sirius Black Incident. And of course, GoF is just packed to bursting with information about memory charms: their uses, their side-effects, their drawbacks, their abuses.

I think Neville's got one, myself. But even if he turns out not to, I'm still betting that memory charms are going to become relevant to the main plot of the series in some way or another before we're done, just as the Polyjuice Potion returned to play a starring role in Gof, after putting in its (implied) appearance as a red herring in PoA.

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So why would Neville have been given a memory charm, anyway?

Elirtai mused:

The reasons why he got the charm aren't that clear to me - the most obvious reason would be to help him get over the trauma of the DE attack on his parents. . . . . If you want to spare a small child some of the suffering, but don't really want him to forget, wouldn't you use a less definitive method? Such as we do in 'real' life without magic?

Well, some might. But then, as we don't have the option of using memory charms to try to erase traumatic memories, it's a bit difficult to say for sure whether we would try to use them for that purpose or not. Remember what Hagrid says in PS/SS, when he's explaining to Harry the reasons for wizards preferring to keep their existence hidden from the Muggle world?

Easy answers to difficult situations are always tempting, even when they yield unfortunate results. Didn't the end of GoF emphasize that notion?

And wizards do seem to be, on the whole, a terribly delicate breed, don't you think? They go mad in Azkaban. They allow themselves to get corrupted by evil at the drop of a hat. They're proud and fierce and emotionally volatile and neurotic; they hold onto grudges for damn near forever. And while it's unclear precisely what's wrong with the Longbottoms—are they actually catatonic, or utterly delusional, or merely possessed of some very strange form of selective amnesia?—whatever afflicts them is hardly what we would consider a normal adult response to even the most extended and brutal forms of mistreatment. If you ask me, wizards just aren't very emotionally stable. Harry's oft-touted resilience would seem to be yet more way in which he truly is extraordinary within the wizarding world.

But for people with such a disturbing propensity to mental illness, they don't seem to have done very much to advance the cause of mental health, have they? You would think that they'd have put some work into that, these past few centuries. The Longbottoms are still "completely insane" after how many years of hospitalization? And what about Lockhart? We haven't seen anything of him since his unfortunate accident.

Given all of that, it wouldn't really surprise me all that much if the immediate wizarding response to a distressed toddler who might have been witness to his parents' torture had been: "Oh, no! He'll be raving mad for sure! And then we'll never be able to fix him! He might even decide to Turn To The Dark Side! So quick — give that kid a memory charm, before it's too late!"

Anna wrote:

It seems kind of silly to me to modify the memory of an infant, but if Harry has the occasional nightmare about his parents, Neville could too.

At the risk of starting up the whole timeline debate again, I would point out that Neville could have been well out of infancy by the time of the incident. We don't know for sure precisely when it occurred, only that the order of events goes something like this:

(a) fall of Voldemort

(b) arrest of many DEs, some acquitted, some not (by the time of Karkaroff's testimony, there is talk of rounding up "the last of" the DEs)

(c) Karkaroff's testimony

(d) Rookwood's arrest

(e) Bagman's trial

(f) Longbottom Incident

Now, I personally think that all of that would have taken more than a couple of months. But others (Cindy, for example) have disagreed with me, and the God-like Lexicon itself proposes a late 1981 date for Crouch Jr's trial. So clearly, I'm in the minority here.

Even so, though, if we assume a fairly early date for the incident, Neville still could have been two years old. If we assume a later date, he could have been as old as three. Either way leaves him plenty old enough to have been aware of what was happening, and to remember it quite clearly, should nothing intervene to prevent him from doing so.

But what if the memory charm weren't placed on Neville purely for his psychological benefit? Anna suggested that it might have been some kind of wizarding witness protection scheme:

In Neville's case, it might be a form of protection - if he doesn't know anything, he's less likely to be tracked by the remaining Death Eaters.

This is a particularly interesting suggestion, to my mind, because it raises once more the issue of the Ministry's unspoken (but increasingly apparent) acknowledgement that many of those who walked free in the early '80s are indeed unrepentent Death Eaters.

It also leads into the suggestion that a memory charm might have been put on Neville not to protect him at all, but rather to prevent him from revealing something that somebody desperately wanted to keep under wraps.

Elirtai wrote:

Any other ideas? Did something else happen, which he absolutely had to forget? Did some DE put the charm on him so he wouldn't remember something? They wouldn't have felt compelled to be overly careful about it. If he ever gets his memory back - will we learn something important?

In response to which, Finwitch suggested:

Something... Like that Bartolomeus Crouch Junior did NOT take part in torturing his parents, but that Lucius Malfoy did! (or other liberated DEs Harry named...

Mmmmmm.

So tell me something here. Am I the only person so deeply and profoundly mistrustful of the Ministry that my immediate thought upon reading Finwitch's above suggestion was that if a memory charm had indeed been placed on Neville to suppress this particular piece of knowledge, then the culprit probably wasn't a Death Eater at all?

Just wondering.

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What does it take to break through a memory charm?

Finwitch wrote:

We have been told that a memory charm can be reversed by a powerful wizard.

::wince::

Well. Um. Voldemort claimed breaking Bertha Jorkins' memory charm as proof of his status as a "powerful wizard," true. But then, Voldemort is also a megalomaniacal sadist. Me, I kinda got the impression that anyone with a pair of blunt-nosed pliers and a sufficiently vicious imagination could probably have achieved the exact same effect. I mean, didn't they just torture the poor woman until the charm snapped? Maybe I'm just unusually morbid, but that was certainly my interpretation of how all played out.

Even if we assume that powerful magic other than that used to cause pain was involved, though, I still received the distinct impression that pain was key. And I really don't think that we want to wish such a fate on poor Neville, do we? Admittedly JKR does like to play her little games with that "History Repeats Itself Through The Generations" thing she's got running, but I think that even she would draw the line at that!

This does raise the question, though, of whether or not simple anxiety would suffice. For that matter, what role might personal will play in the erosion of a memory charm? What role might constant reminders of the suppressed memory play?

If we assume that Neville does indeed have a memory charm, then what do we make of his behavior in the corridor after Crouch/Moody's DADA class in GoF?

Could his evident distress there be a sign of memory charm erosion, brought on by the in-class demonstration of the Cruciatus? Is a memory charm a kind of perpetual spell, which lurks in a dormant state in the recipient's mind, only to kick into action to exert some form of magical suppression whenever the recipient makes some attempt to think about the forbidden topic? Is the reason that Neville appears so confused (and in much the same way as Mr. Roberts) in that scene because he had in fact just been trying to access his suppressed memory, and was thus even more directly under the charm's detrimental influence than he usually is? And if so, then does this also account for his general tendency to perform poorly when under stress?

This is certainly food for thought. It also leads us to the question of just what that proposed memory charm might be doing to the poor kid, anyway.

On this subject, Elirtai wrote:

Some other thoughts: Neville's innate magic ability took quite long to surface, and it only appeared under danger of death. Could a bungled memory charm have affected his ability to react with spontaneous magic to adverse situations?

Erm. I guess this all depends on precisely what effects you're imagining the memory charm to have on Neville's ability to react with spontaneous magic to adverse situations. I have to say that, his late-blooming aside, I don't see much evidence at all that Neville has any problem manifesting spontaneous magic when under adverse situations. In fact, I see his problem as lying in just the opposite direction. It seems to me that throughout the books, Neville has been shown to respond to stress with unusually strong—if also wild, unharnessed, and uncontrolled—manifestations of magical power, and that it is really this tendency, rather than any true magical weakness, that accounts for most of his difficulties.

Just look at what happened during his first flying lesson in PS/SS. The poor kid is terrified of flying, and so what happens? Does his broom refuse to take off at all? No. At first he can't get it to come to his hand, true, but when he finally does, then he loses control of it completely: it sends him soaring straight up into the air, seemingly utterly on its own accord, until he finally falls off. Harry's interpretation of the event at the time is that Neville must have been so nervous that he "kicked off" too early, but I don't believe for a moment that that's what really happened — unless one is willing to accept a rather broad definition of "kicking off." I tend to read that scene as just another example of Neville's magic getting away from him again.

(Very much like Trevor the toad, in fact. I often view Trevor as a kind of symbolic representative of Neville's magical talent itself, perhaps even as something akin to a familiar. Trevor is similarly always "getting away" from Neville, wandering outside of the reach of his conscious influence, leaving the sphere of his personal control. In fact, our very first glimpse of Neville is one of him complaining of this very problem — and to his grandmother, no less.)

Neville sometimes gives the impression of being simply incapable of performing magically. Far more often, though, his blunders in canon are portrayed as powerful but unfocussed, rather than as weak and ineffective. In GoF, for example, his difficulties with the banishing charm are described as: "Neville's aim was so poor that he kept accidentally sending much heavier things flying across the room — Professor Flitwick, for instance." In Transfiguration lessons, he sometimes simply fails to perform, but he also does things like "accidentally" transplanting his own ears onto a cactus. And his Potions blunders tend towards the spectacular as well: is melting right through the bottom of a metal cauldron really an expected result of failing to follow a potions recipe properly?

But how about that Potions Class, eh?

Kitty suggested that Snape might be deliberately trying to break through Neville's memory charm by antagonizing and frightening him in Potions Class.

Porphyria wrote:

Uncle Algie literally endangers the child's life (multiple times) in order to smoke out his magical ability, which is one among several indications that adrenaline directly affects wizarding skills. And when Voldemort needed to break Bertha Jorkin's Memory Charm, he did it by repeatedly torturing her. So I've wondered many times whether Snape imagines that if he can either terrify or infuriate Neville enough that it'll break the charm.

Oh? And here I was, thinking that Snape's habit of terrifying and infuriating Neville in Potions Class was part and parcel of his very cunning strategy for entrapping Harry and Hermione! ;-D

But seriously, as I've been reading it, Neville's adrenaline surges in Potions Class most certainly do cause him to exhibit strong surges of magical power. Surely that's why he melts so many of those cauldron bottoms! I've always read that particular manifestation of Neville's potions ineptitude as indicative of an uncontrolled and wild release of magical force. He's also incompetent in the more standard ways, of course—he gets his measurements wrong, and so forth—but I've always assumed that the cauldron-melting incidents are meant to represent surges of strong unfocussed magic, rather than an inability to follow instructions properly, or to remember ingredients, or anything of that sort.

But I don't tend to view this as evidence of a weakening memory charm. If anything, I think that it's evidence of an activated memory charm. I don't really think that what the memory charm is doing to Neville is blocking his magical power at all. I think that it is interfering with his ability to focus and to concentrate, and that it is this inability, rather than any real inability to access his magical power, that usually accounts for his blunderings.

For one thing, Neville is capable of normal magical competence when he's not under stress. In fact, he performs at his best when he is not frightened. His marks are always highest in herbology, a class in which he seems to feel relaxed and comfortable, and which is taught by the gentle Professor Sprout. And Lupin coaxes good performance out of him during that boggart demonstration by reassuring him, rather than by intimidating him.

Of course, that doesn't mean that Snape couldn't be trying to blast away Neville's memory charm. It seems perfectly likely to me that the way to break through a charm of that sort might be to "overload" it — which would explain why stress could both cause it to activate and (if enough stress were applied) to break it altogether.

What it does mean to my mind, though, is the the speculation, often proposed by memory charm fans, that the result of Neville being released from the charm will be a sudden surge in magical power doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Because as I see it, a lack of power isn't the kid's problem at all.

Even if he does want very badly for everyone to believe that it is.

No. I'm not joking. I really do think that Neville can be very sneaky when it comes to this subject. He certainly does try to encourage people to view him as magically-weak, doesn't he? He tells that story of his late magical blooming to everyone at the table during his very first dinner at Hogwarts, he expresses his concern that Salazar Slytherin's monster might be coming after him next, because of his "near-Squib" status...

Except that he doesn't. Not really. If you look at what he actually says there in CoS, I think that it's quite suggestive. Neville never once says that he is "almost a Squib." What he actually says is: "everyone knows I'm almost a Squib" — which isn't at all the same thing.

Certainly the student body as a whole seems to have accepted as Common Wisdom the notion that Neville lacks magical talent. But really, who was it who gave them that idea in the first place?

Yeah. Well, I'm not falling for it.

And neither is Snape.

Chapter Eleven, _CoS_:

'A bad idea, Professor Lockhart,' said Snape, gliding over like a large and malevolent bat. 'Longbottom causes devestation with the simplest spells. We'll be sending what's left of Finch-Fletchley up to the hospital wing in a matchbox.'

As is usual with Snape, the snide tone somewhat masks the real message (as well as the genuine concern for the safety of the students under his care). Snape's concern here is not that Neville is magically weak at all. It is that Neville is magically strong, but that he lacks control, is particularly prone to losing control when under stress, and is therefore more than likely to really hurt his opponent if forced to duel while under the pressure of being put on the spot in front of a large group of spectators.

And Snape was quite right to be concerned, IMO. When Neville is frightened, he far more often displays a kind of wild magical over-exuberance than he does any form of real magical block.

To tell you the truth, I don't think that that memory charm has anything to do with any magical block. If Neville's got a magical block at all, which I rather doubt, then IMO it's competely psychological.

It does make you wonder, though: what is it about Snape in particular that frightens Neville so badly? I mean, here we have Neville Longbottom, the only son of what seems to be a very old and proud and pure-blooded family. There's an ugly tragedy in his past: his parents were victimized by Dark Wizards during the last great wizarding war, in which his father was an active agent. His father was an Auror. His grandmother feels that he should be doing more to uphold the family name. He has some problems with controlling his magic — it tends to "get away from him," particularly when he's under a lot of stress, often with excessive results. He has some problems with attention and focus, and he has a terrible memory — possibly due to a memory charm. He doesn't seem terribly combatative overall: in fact, he seems to possess an instinctive aversion to most forms of conflict. When he is talked into engaging in conflict by his friends, whose good opinion is important to him, he plays to lose: he doesn't try to engage weedy little Draco Malfoy in fisticuffs, but instead attacks both Goyle and Crabbe at once; when he confronts his friends in the Gryffindor common room, he all but dares them to attack him — and he makes sure not to fail to remind them while he does so that he is merely acting on their previous instructions. He very rarely expresses anger. He seems to have little in the way of Proper Wizarding Pride.

He isn't really anything like a Squib—but he encourages everyone to believe that he is.

He isn't really anything like a coward either—but he encourages everyone to think that he is.

As a child, he refused to demonstrate any form of magical ability to his family until doing so was absolutely necessary to save his life.

And boy, that Sorting Hat sure took a long time with him, didn't it?

So just what is it about Professor Snape — ex-DE Snape, Snape who is proud and vengeful and combatative, and who is obsessed with duty and honor, Snape who looks like the very archetype of a Powerful Sorceror, Snape who is the Head of House Slytherin, Snape who appears in boggart form looking as if he may well be reaching for his wand (even though he teaches a wandless subject), Snape in whose class Neville keeps melting down his cauldrons, Snape who is onto Neville and obviously doesn't believe this "I'm just nearly a Squib" act for a second—

What does this man represent to Neville Longbottom? Just what is it about Snape that scares Neville so very much?

::innocent look::

Oh, I've no idea.

Maybe the image of Snape in Gran's clothing symbolizes more that we first suspected...

Oooooooh, yes. I'm firmly of the belief that it does.

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But all of this speculation does lead us to what to my mind is the most interesting question about the memory charm theory: if JKR has indeed been setting up a Neville-With-Memory-Charm plotline, then what is its purpose? What narrative function is it likely to perform for the series as a whole?

Elirtai:

If he ever gets his memory back - will we learn something important?

Well, from an authorial point of view, there would seem to me to be little point in setting up such a plotline in the first place if one did not plan on eventually restoring the suppressed memory. Furthermore, it would seem to me to be a terrible waste of a plot engine if such a recovered memory did not then reveal something of vital importance to the plot.

So what could that thing be?

The revelation that one or more of the Pensieve defendents had in fact been innocent—along with a corresponding revelation about the identity of the real culprit(s)—is one possibility. (Fourth Man With Innocence, anyone? *g*) Information about corruption within the Ministry also seems possible.

But neither of these really satisfy me somehow. So does anyone else have some other possibility they would like to suggest?

More to the point, though, what do people imagine the thematic function of a Memory Charmed Neville plotline to be? I have my own reasons for considering it a fascinating possibility, but although I've already hinted quite strongly at them, I'm now finding myself feeling reluctant to go into any greater detail along those lines, as I do recognize that my own favored reading of Neville is not only highly idiosyncratic, and not only unusual, and not only subversive, but also actively hostile to what I believe to be the author's true intent.

I therefore would like to open up this field of inquiry to others who do not share my hostility to the authorial perspective when it comes to Neville and his thematic relevance to the story as a whole. Tell me, memory charm fans: what do you see as the narrative function of this plotline? What do you imagine its thematic purpose to be? What do you perceive as the thematic relevance of issues of memory, remembrance, and the past to the story as a whole?

—Elkins