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Much Snapestuff here. Snape and Reader Expectation. Snape and Subversion. Snape and his Old Gang. Snape and House Slytherin. Snape and the Malfoys. Snape's Sudden Movement. Snape Snape Snape Snape Snape.
No George here, though. George is getting a post of his very own.
And also, a mention of Avery. But only a very brief one, and at the very end.
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Porphyria wrote:
Moving on once again, to the discussion of Snape as standing in possible opposition to the series' problematic stances of 'all Slyth are evil' and the limits of individual choice. . . .Well, for one thing I think you're setting up a false opposition between Snape and the rest of the text.
Well, obviously Snape is a part of the text, and a very important part at that. And I agree with you that that an important aspect of his literary function in the novels is to serve a "subversive" function: not subversive in the sense of undermining authorial intent, but subversive in the sense of undermining genre conventions and the reader's own expectations of the text. In other words, Snape may be a spy, but he is Rowling's spy.
I also agree with you that the series is becoming increasingly morally complex as it progresses, and that Rowling does enjoy playing some rather sophisticated games with reader expectation and misdirection.
But as I've said on many other occasions, I still don't altogether trust Rowling as an author, and I'm not altogether certain that I will like where she's really going with the text. This causes anxiety -- but that is inevitable in any serialized work. As Eileen wrote, in a post some days ago: "Trust no author until she is finished."
One thing that I do feel compelled to point out here, though, is that my original reading of Snape's relationship with his old gang was in no way intentionally subversive. It was not something that I thought about at all, honestly. It was simply how I quite naturally and instinctively read GoF. It was only once I discovered this community that I came to realize that my instinctive reading had apparently also been a highly idiosyncratic one -- and then to begin to wonder why.
I think that a good part of the reason that my reading was so instinctive was because Snape is Rowling's spy: as you point out, she uses him quite often as a tool of reader misdirection.
I also think she leaves a lot of hints that might seriously tempt the reader to imagine him as being different than what he seems, and as I said this is a series where heavy reader speculation is consciously encouraged by the structure of the narrative.
Indeed. And because of that, my response to, say, Sirius mentioning Snape's old Slytherin gang was initial shock ("Snape had friends?"), followed immediately by acceptance ("Well...okay. And really, why on earth shouldn't he have had people he hung out with while at school?"). The fact that Rowling does so often use the character to shatter misconceptions made it a quite natural reading for me. And the successive series of revelations about the fates of the members of that little group, each of them worse (from Snape's perspective, anyway) than the last—Rosier wasn't just killed by "Aurors," he was killed by Moody. . .Snape was acting as Dumbledore's spy, so probably his information was what got Rosier killed by Moody. . .the Lestranges are in Azkaban for attacking Neville's parents. . . .Avery's still alive and well and almost certain to be filling in some secondary henchman villain duty in the next volume. . . .and the scary Lestranges are likely to get busted out of Azkaban as well. . .
::shrug:: It was just my automatic response to read this as emotionally relevant material. And when I discovered that others had not done so, I was puzzled—and frankly startled—and very interested to find out why.
Musings over why I might have read the text so differently than others did, and what this might say about the philosophical underpinnings of our readings, and all of that sort of thing came later.
But it interests me in part because it does touch on the extent to which I feel that I can "trust" the Author. Obviously my own reading has emotional resonance for me: if it didn't, then I doubt that I would have read the story in the way that I did. My sense of disappointment at the notion that because my interpretation was so unusual, it was therefore likely to be running contrary to Authorial Intent—to be, in fact, fairly subversive—was a disappointment with the author. My sense of disappointment that even though fan readings are so very often subversive, my interpretation was apparently nonetheless still a very unpopular reading of the text — that was a disappointment with...well, I'm not quite sure with whom, honestly. With the author again? Or with the fans? With the world as a whole? Or perhaps simply with myself, for being so goddamned weird?
I honestly don't know. It's hard to say. But the discussion here has made me feel a good deal better about it—it may have been a minority reading, but it was not, at least, an utterly unique reading—and I'm very much appreciating the opportunity to begin to understand why the more popular reading might also be one that people would consciously choose to favor.
Well, he seems to be a character fraught with internal and external contradictions. He has this 'neither fish nor fowl' quality which IMHO is a little subversive in itself. So in some cases the impulse to imagine his peers as being securely black is an effort to highlight this perverse, 'neither' quality of his...
So in other words, we don't want to blacken the black to make Snape seem white in comparison, but merely to highlight his grey?
That does make sense to me, on an intellectual level. It doesn't happen to work for me emotionally or viscerally—JKR's Whites are themselves quite grey, so for the blacks to be blacker than black just feels...oh, unbalanced somehow, in a way that is perhaps far more aesthetic than philosophical, and in a way which does absolutely nothing for me personally in terms of appreciating Snape's Greyness or his Indeterminacy—but I can understand how that could work differently for other people.
...and the temptation to imagine him as never quite fitting in with them can be read as an extension of his uncategorizable quality. . . . But I'm saying his function as a character in the text is one which is profoundly indeterminate, and what we see of his personality mimics this motif. Hence the impulse to preserve this theme in speculating his backstory.
Which I certainly agree with. I think that here, though, we're touching on some serious differences in precisely how, as readers, we interpreted that indeterminate quality in the first place.
So what we could imagine instead is a character whose 'nature' was always inconsistent and prone to conflicting impulses, someone who was never quite sure where he stood, and it took a lot of angst to finally make a decision.
Which works as a reading, no doubt about it. It just somehow doesn't quite work for me.
A while back, Eloise wrote, on one of the many George threads:
Of course, I also happen to believe he comes from a family of dark wizards, explaining all those curses he knew, and that though he's intellectually a good guy, many of his instincts lead him toward the dark side leading to a lot of tension.
And I think that that tension, that contrast between Snape's instincts and his intellect, has always been central to how I've read the character. I do not, for example, tend to see Snape as a person struggling with conflicting impulses, precisely. Rather, I tend to see him as someone whose impulses all lead him in one unerring direction -- but in a direction that he has chosen to reject on abstract and purely philosophical grounds. In other words, I see him as a Dark Wizard. In instinct. In impulse. In inclination. To some extent, perhaps even in essence. But by choosing not to act on those instincts and inclinations and tastes and desires, he manages to be something slightly different. Grey. Neither fish nor fowl, as you wrote, but neither fish nor fowl in a slightly different way, I think, than many others have read him.
The suggestion that Snape left the DEs because when it came right down to it, he lacked a taste for torture or murder, for example, has always left me a bit cold because in my reading of Snape, of course he has a taste for it. A taste for it is exactly what he's got. His taste for it...well, that's sort of his problem, isn't it?
It comes to the same thing, in many ways. But it leads to a lot of different assumptions. I, for example, assume that of course Snape would enjoy the company of the sort of people who become Death Eaters (at least, to whatever extent he enjoys company at all). They would share his tastes, and his inclinations, and his aesthetics, and his interests, and probably his sense of humor as well. They wouldn't share his principles, of course, which is the sticking point, but on grounds of pure compatability, they would be far better companionship for him than the vast majority of the people who do share his principles.
I can only counter to say that I think the text highlights Snape's conflict and indeterminacy in a particular way and wants the reader to sympathize with it
Well, I would agree...except that I'm beginning to suspect that the 'particular way' in which the text seems to highlight Snape's conflict and indeterminacy to me is perhaps not the "particular way" it does to others -- or even, perhaps, the "particular way" that the author intended.
However, as we've managed to make it through four novels so far without the author doing anything that has opposed my reading in the slightest—thus enabling me to maintain it both cheerfully and obliviously throughout—I suppose that I shouldn't let that suspicion worry me too much. Either something will eventually happen that will disappoint me terribly and then force me to revise my reading...or it won't. Either way, there's not much I can do about it.
(yes, I really feel he's written as sympathetic).
Well, of course he is! Part of it, admittedly, is that Clever Villain/Sympathy For the Devil appeal. You know, there's a Type here: the snarling drama queen in the black cape who gets all of the really funny cruel dry lines. Everyone always likes that guy, and Snape shares a lot of his qualities. And as a special bonus, he's not even really a villain, you don't have to feel the slightest bit guilty for liking him so much.
I mean, really. What sort of heartless monster wouldn't sympathize with Snape at the end of PoA, when he disintegrates utterly into his raving "Curses, Foiled Again, and Damn You, You Meddling Kids" hysteria? You'd just have to be made of stone, wouldn't you?
And of course there's the angst factor. Loads of angst.
And Mrs. Lestrange is sexy, so you can creep out from behind that coffee cup. ;-)
For a woman with no name—not even a maiden name, for heaven's sakes!—and only one line of dialogue, she certainly is Dead Sexy. I kind of want to be her, when I grow up.
Oh. Right. I'm already middle-aged, according to Cindy. Well...never mind, then. I guess it's too late.
Re: Snape's Favoritism of the Slytherins
I wrote:
I think he favors them primarily because Slytherin is his House, and because Snape is loyal to House Slytherin in spite of the fact that an appalling number of its Old Boys went bad during the last big wizarding war.
Porphyria wrote:
It just seems to me that his loyalty to Dumbledore probably outweighs his loyalty to his house, and this is significant when the two are at odds.
Loyalty to Dumbledore in no way precludes loyalty to House Slytherin. In fact, it demands it. Snape is the Head of House Slytherin; that is a very important part of his job at Hogwarts. And Snape's devotion to his job, to its duties and its responsibilities, is an enormous aspect of his loyalty to Dumbledore. Were he not loyal to his House, then that really would be a violation of trust, and a fairly serious one at that.
I think we may have some very serious disagreement here, though, over the issue of to what extent House Slytherin is separable from Voldemort and his agenda, or for that matter, from Dark Wizardry in general.
I see a clear distinction between House Slytherin, one of the four Houses of all Wizarding Britain, with a thousand-year-old tradition whose values include ambition, cunning, shrewdness, ends-over-means, resourcefulness, and a willingness to break rules (as well as purity of blood and a deep suspicion and fear of the Muggle world); and House Slytherin in its current political state, which would seem to have granted purity of blood primacy over many of its other values and chosen to express its hostility towards the Muggle world through active and violent means.
I have no difficulty at all in imagining someone feeling a loyalty to the House -- its traditions, its historical importance, its contributions to the magical world, the vast majority of its values (I think that Snape most certainly does value ambition, cunning, shrewdness and resourcefulness; and as someone who has worked as a spy, he surely cannot harbor too many objections to the idea of privileging the ends over the means!), and even the memory of its founder (Salazar presumably contributed something of value to the British Wizarding tradition), while simultaneously rejecting one or two of its tenets (I agree with you that Snape doesn't seem to be much of a purebloodist these days, anyway) and working to fight against a charismatic Dark Wizard who favors recruitment from within its ranks.
Going back to a few of the things you were saying earlier about JKR's taste for misdirection, I really do believe that Slytherin=Evil is a bit of a red herring in the books. When Dumbledore speaks to Harry about his Sorting at the end of CoS, I read a good deal of respect in his tone when he speaks of House Slytherin -- and Dumbledore is a Gryffindor, someone who has taken an unusually vocal stance against Salazar Slytherin's pureblood beliefs, and someone who spent many years fighting against a Slytherin Dark Wizard and his (for the most part) Slytherin followers. Hell, if Dumbledore can manage to find something to respect in the House as an institution, then I'm willing to accept that there's something there worthy of respect.
I would also point out that even Hagrid, as prone as he is to generalizations and hasty judgements, and as valid a personal reason as he has to dislike House Slytherin, does not tell Harry "Slytherin is the House of Dark Wizards." What he says (incorrectly, as it turns out) is: "Never a wizard went bad who wasn't in Slytherin." As biased as Hagrid is, and as biased as he has reason to be, that is how he phrases it -- and to my mind, that's significant. Wizards from House Slytherin go bad. They turn to Darkness. Slytherin isn't the House of Darkness; Darkness corrupts those of House Slytherin.
That's canon. It's also canon, though, that all of the Slyths we ever see are deeply unpleasant individuals, and that Snape is the only one of them we know of who has fought against Dark Wizardry. If there are Slyth grads who are Aurors, or who played important roles in the last war against Voldemort, then we've never heard of them. (Although I remain convinced, on the basis of no actual canonical evidence, that the Crouches, both Sr and Jr, were Slyths. Given Sirius' denunciation of Crouch Sr's performance in his role as a battler of Darkness, however, this supposition is still hardly a rousing defense of the House as a whole...)
I don't know quite what to make of this, honestly. My hope is that it's a case of reader misdirection and will be dealt with in later books. My fear is that it's Just Something That The Author Didn't Think Through Very Carefully. I'm willing to wait to find out which it might be, but in the meantime, I'm reading to give the author the benefit of the doubt.
I wrote:
As for Draco, I do think that Snape genuinely likes him -- or at the very least strongly identifies with him.
Porphyria wrote:
Given that Draco is a whiny, privileged kid, I think Snape's habit of letting him get away with everything is really a little fishy.
It's very difficult for us to have any idea what Snape lets Draco get away with, really. He lets him get away with just about anything that might annoy or discomfit Harry or the Gryffindors, certainly. But other than that, it's really impossible to say. Has he cracked down on Draco's bullying within House Slytherin (assuming, that is, that Draco does bully the younger Slyth kids, which I'm sure that he does, if he's allowed to get away with it)? Is he as unjust in his administration of discipline on his own students when House Gryffindor isn't involved? There's just no way to know. That issue's a black box.
Snape seems like the kind of guy who takes pride in his talent and works hard at it; it's hard for me to see how he'd approve of someone who slides along by malingering, falling back on family prestige and generally squirming out from under responsibility.
Snape has been known to play a few very slimy games with responsibility and power himself. He is talented, and he is proud, and he is obviously more than capable of hard work. But he is also a Slytherin.
Draco's malingering was to the benefit of the House in their efforts to win the Quiddich cup, and I suspect that Snape approved wholeheartedly of it. And while Draco does try to coast on his family name whenever he thinks he can get away with it, we've never seen evidence that he slacks off in Snape's Potions class.
I quite agree with you that Snape would not take kindly to anyone slacking off in his Potions class.
Snape appears to be giving Hermione better marks. If he really liked Draco as much as he seems to, why wouldn't he find some slimy reason to deduct points from Hermione's exam and add a few special bonus points to Draco's?
Snape does favor the Slyths, but I mean, really, Porphyria! There are limits!
He doesn't mess with the marks for exactly the same reason that he wouldn't take kindly to anyone slacking off in his Potions class.
Or better yet, if he really really cares about Draco, why aren't there signs that he's mentoring him in some really useful way? Does he even teach him better techniques for chopping ginger root?
Well, for starters, I think that the man that you're tilting at here gets more bursting with straw with each new paragraph. ;-)
If you'll look above, what I actually said was not that I thought that Snape "really liked Draco as much as he seems to," and most certainly not that he "really really cares about Draco." (And just for the record, I don't think that Snape gives Draco big loving hugs or tucks him into bed at night, either.)
I said that I thought that he does "genuinely like him -- or at the very least identify with him." That's not at all the same thing.
But really, if Snape had been, say, teaching Draco better techniques for chopping ginger root, then what sort of signs would you really expect to see of that in the text? Harry certainly wouldn't know about it. It wouldn't be likely to come up anywhere in the narration.
I don't really think that Snape is giving Draco private ginger-slicing lessons, mind. But if he were, we'd never hear about it.
And Snape's prompting of Draco's Serpensortia spell in the duelling club scene of CoS can be read as evidence that he has given the boy a bit of tutoring on the side -- although in curses, rather than in Potions. There would seem to be far more to learning a spell then just happening to know the proper incantation: you also have to know the proper wand movements, and in almost all cases, do at least a bit of practice. We've never seen even Hermione cast a charm on the basis of merely being told the appropriate incantation. Snape's whisper in Draco's ear there was a prompt: unless we are to believe that Draco is preternaturally talented with spellwork (which I don't for an instant believe), then he must have already learned that particular spell. And Snape must have known that he knew it.
So how did he know? Could have been an inspired guess, I suppose, based on what he knows about Draco's inclinations and the Malfoy family as a whole. Could have been because he'd seen Draco cast it before -- in the Slytherin common room, say, on a fellow student. Or it could be because he had taught it to him himself. I don't consider the last possibility all that unlikely, myself.
It seems more to me that what Snape does is curry Draco's favor in a way that, if Draco were smarter, he'd hold with some suspicion.
Heh. Well, if Draco were smarter, he wouldn't be Draco. Yes, of course Snape smarms shamelessly up to Lucius Malfoy's son. It's in his best interests to do so, on a number of different levels. But that doesn't mean that he doesn't genuinely like the kid, or that he doesn't favor his own students primarily out of...well, out of good old-fashioned favoritism.
I wrote:
As for Snape's Sudden Movement (which is beginning to remind me far too much of That Goddamned Gleam In Dumbledore's Eye)...
Porphyria:
Um, does this mean you're already tired of discussing it? Uh oh...
Nah. I'm happy to talk about it. I don't know quite where that up there came from -- some weird fit of irritability, I guess. Mainly it reminds me of the infamous Gleam because it is a one sentence line that prompts so many people to say: "Hey, did anyone else notice that sudden movement that Snape made when..."
[I suggested that Snape's Sudden Movement might have been a reflection of his desire to stop Harry from uttering Malfoy's name in front of Fudge, because he knew that the instant Fudge heard Malfoy implicated, he would refuse to believe a word of it]
I think your theory is plausible, but I can't help but imagine that the Movement foreshadows something further in the future than Fudge's reaction.
It might do, and I certainly hope you're right, because it's far more interesting that way. But I think it equally possible that it was...well, just a moment of characterization, rather than a Great Big Foreshadow.
I mean, given that his gesture is a little mysterious and all (the wording "sudden movement" is deliberately vague)...,
It is vague, which was the reason that I didn't even try to defend my objection to the idea that it was a gesture of fury, rather than one of alarm or dismay or warning. There's really not much there to go on.
...shouldn't it indicate more than what is depicted a few minutes later in this very scene?
You think? Well...maybe. I think that sometimes a Sudden Movement is just a Sudden Movement, but as I said, I hope that you're right, because I too am getting very antsy to find out what the deal is between Snape and Lucius Malfoy.
My take on this: I think Snape and Lucius are headed for a day of reckoning. The text keeps hinting at something along these lines.
You know, this is the thing that I'm most curious about? I am, as a general rule, not at all an impatient or a curious person. In fact, I drive my friends absolutely crazy sometimes with my lack of those particular character traits. I happily leave gifts all wrapped up until it's time to open them and have never once seen the point in shaking boxes or squinting too hard at their shapes; I receive mysterious parcels and then forget to look inside them until my housemates are overcome with curiosity and start nagging me to do so; I endure cliff-hangers with an aplomb that absolutely infuriates many of my aquaintances. The fact that Rowling's taking a long time with Book Five really just doesn't bother me. She'll get it done eventually, and I'm not planning on dying anytime soon, so all is good, as far as I'm concerned.
But I really am getting very itchy to find out what the deal is with Snape and the Malfoys, and whether Snape's behavior towards Draco is going to visibly change in Book Five, and whether we're ever going to see Snape and Lucius interacting face to face, and whether...
Well, yes. I'm...eager. Impatient, even. It's a bizarre sensation for me. I'm not used to it.
There's gotta be plot potential here...so if we agree that Snape's sudden movement is directly in response to the mention of Lucius' name, and that it communicates some sort of strong emotion other than naive surprise that Lucius, shocker of shockers, is still a loyal DE, well...to me this points to some sort of interesting fireworks between the two in a future setting.
I agree. And I'm...
Well, damn this emotion! This is just no fun at all. I finally begin to understand what the rest of you people are always whining about.
Well, OK, here's a theory: In CoS, Lucius shows up at Borgin and Burkes to unload some incriminating items that he really doesn't want the MOM to find in his house. Presumably he's got a wide variety of dark arts items stuffed under the drawing room floor, but he specifically mentions poisons to Mr. Borgin. So they must be pretty suspicious poisons, you know? Not just garden gnome poison or magical spot remover.
Sure. I somehow doubt that there's any wizarding law against having, say, arsenic in your possession.
So that set me to wondering where they originally came from. Hmmmm. Do we know anyone who was a DE back in the day who might have had a talent for brewing particularly nasty, illegal, specialized-function poisons?
I like it. So do you think that "poison" might be a kind of Dark Wizard euphemism for forbidden potions? It does seem to me that the nastiest and most illegal of specialized-potions would likely be ones that...well, that wouldn't necessarily be designed to kill. Or at least not only to kill.
Well, there you go, that's my theory for what Snape's particular DE function used to be.
Seems reasonable to me.
Plus that drawing-room chamber is just too intriguing to not come up again. I think these things will tie together: Snape and Lucius have a history which will come back into play in a big hairy way.
Oooooh, I hope so!
Say, do you think it make me a little...bent that I want to know more about Dark magic? We've had the Unforgivables, but they're really pretty run-of-the-mill Bad Things To Do To People, aren't they? I mean, what do Seriously Bad Wizards do? Magically, I mean. What constitutes the "Dark Arts?"
I've always liked to imagine that Divination is not, in fact, an impractical field of magic at all, but that the only really reliable forms of Divination qualify as Dark Arts -- which is the reason that Dumbledore gets stuck with poor Trelawney and her once-a-decade prophecies. I like to think that at Durmstrang, say, Divination is a highly challenging and intellectual—and effective!—part of the curriculum.
Why do I like to imagine this? I'm not sure. Maybe just because it would make Hermione so very annoyed if she knew. ;-)
Regarding Evil-yet-Hyper Avery:
Well, erm, I think my original reasoning was maybe he's evil and thus perfectly loyal to LV and then his histrionic fit would just be a strange but effective attention-getting device.
Like an abused child, you mean, who desperately wants Daddy's attention, but doesn't particularly care whether that attention manifests itself as praise or as punishment?
Yes. That works too.
But you must grant me the merest shred of slack here, because I did post this before your touching defense of him.
Hey. Someone needs to obsess about the totally minor characters, right? Otherwise they'd feel left out.
I'm getting a tad bored with Avery, though. I'm thinking of moving on to Justin Finch-Fletchley. For one thing, I'm pretty sure that he's had more than seven words of dialogue. Also, he's not a bad guy (yet), and I seem to be developing a reputation around here as some sort of sick pervert who is only capable of sympathizing with Very Bad Men.
Now I see the error of my ways.
I'm gratified. Although you know, if you liked Avery better Evil, then you could always go for my new "Fourth Man" theory.
However, I'm still trying to grok the distinction between a 'toady' and a 'nerveless hysteric.'
A true toady would have thought to thank Voldemort for the Cruciatus.
(Of course, it's possible that Avery really really wanted to, but that by the time he'd managed to catch his breath, Voldie had already lost interest in him, and there just wasn't any opportunity. It wouldn't have done, after all, to interrupt. Dark Lords just hate that.)
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on February 14, 2002 1:31 PM
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