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On Serpensortia, Porphyria wrote:
Is serpensortia a curse? I thought it was a conjuring of some sort.
I don't know. I'm very hazy on the distinction between curses and charms and hexes and jinxes and spells. Not to mention conjurings. ;-)
I just used the word "curse" there because it seems to me that when the characters discuss the sort of spells used in duels, or aggressive spells in general, they often use the term "curse." And conjuring up an aggressive snake that then goes after the person at whom you've aimed your wand definitely seems aggressive and "curse-ish" to me. But I suspect that technically speaking, it's a charm.
I agree that it's unlikely Draco could have busted this one out on his own without coaching. I figured either, a) Slytherin love practicing this one in the common room because it's their mascot animal...
::sigh:: The poor Slytherin prefects. What a terrible job they must have. Just think of all the time they must spend disposing of all of those stray snakes that the younger students have conjured and then lost track of...
...or b) Snape did indeed teach it to him -- to smoke out Harry's parseltongue abilities.
And there's the question.
Tabouli wrote:
Now this is something that has always intrigued me. What made Snape suggest that particular spell? House pride, because it's a serpentine Slytherin speciality? I mean, presumably he was relishing the thought of deliberately and publicly putting Harry in mortal danger, but was there any more to it? And when Harry turns out to be a Parselmouth, Snape doesn't seem surprised... he looks "shrewd and calculating". Does Snape know something we don't? (actually, he knows a helluva lot we would dearly like to know) Did he pick that spell in order because he wanted to test a theory he had about Harry, or Voldemort, or the failed curse?
<Elkins volunteers to man the can(n)non>
Well, let's see what's actually there, shall we? ::sound of flipping pages:: Duelling Club scene, Duelling Club...oh, it's the name of the chapter...well, that makes it easy to find, doesn't it? Ah. Here we are.
Okay. After dissuading Lockhart from using Longbottom and Finch-Fletchley as his volunteer pair for a demonstration of spell-blocking, Snape suggests Malfoy and Potter (it's the second time in this scene that Snape forces these poor kids to duel each other):
'How about Malfoy and Potter?' said Snape with a twisted smile.
(Ah, those twisted smiles!)
Lockhart fails to demonstrate blocking, Snape bends over and whispers the prompt in Draco's ear—there's really nothing to go on in the description there. When the snake actually appears, we get:
'Don't move, Potter,' said Snape lazily, clearly enjoying the sight of Harry standing motionless, eye to eye with the angry snake. 'I'll get rid of it...'
(Ah, those 'lazily's!)
And then Lockhart jumps in and makes a mess of things, the snake gets infuriated and goes after Finch-Fletchley, Harry speaks to it in Parseltongue...lots of commotion. But we don't see anything of Snape again until:
Snape stepped forward, waved his wand and the snake vanished in a small puff of black smoke. Snape, too, was looking at Harry in an unexpected way: it was a shrewd and calculating look, and Harry didn't like it.
And that's pretty much it, when it comes to Snape's demeanor. That's all we have to go on.
So...well, what do you all think?
It's certainly open to interpretation. Personally, I have to say that it really doesn't look to me as if Snape's intention there was to smoke out Harry's parseltongue abilities. It's highly subjective, of course, but what we are given there just doesn't leave me with the impression of Snape as a man awaiting the results of an experiment: he does not, for example, seem either surprised or disappointed when Harry freezes, rather than speaking to the snake initially. I rather get the impression that he suggested Serpensortia merely as a way of entertaining himself.
He does seem to suspect where Harry might have come by his talent very quickly, though—that "shrewd and calculating look" is suggestive—and it wouldn't surprise me at all if he'd wondered that about Harry before. But I just can't quite force myself to read that scene as 'Snape tests out his hypothesis.' It simply doesn't ring true to me.
But of course, other mileages may vary.
About that "shrewd and calculating look," though. If, as Tabouli suggests, Snape knows more than we might suspect about Voldemort or the failed curse, could this be due to his experience with the Dark Arts themselves? Was there something about Voldemort's favored brand of Dark magic that might have made that odd form of soul-leakage that seems to have accompanied his failed AK a more likely side-effect for him than it would have been for, say, just some random wizard trying to use a Killing Curse on a mystically-protected baby Harry?
And what are the Dark Arts, anyway?
Porphyria wrote:
Oh, I can't tell you how much it galls me that JKR has not provided us with an adequate theory of the Dark Arts! I mean, what is it? Are there only certain spells that qualify, or does it have more to do with the intention of the caster?
I'm relieved to hear that I'm not the only one vexed by this question.
Yes, what are the Dark Arts? Are there forms of magic that are intrinsically 'Dark'—that are, for example, spiritually corrupting by their very nature? Or is Darkness merely a matter of application, the tool of magic used for evil ends? Or is the term used loosely, to refer both to a particular brand of magic and to criminally wicked wizarding behavior?
Take the Unforgivables, for example. Their "Unforgivable" status is described in "Moody's" class as a matter of legal distinction: they are the spells the use of which is most severely punishable under Wizarding Law. But are they also Dark in some metaphysical or spiritual sense? Does one learn about them in a DADA class because only a "Dark" (ie, criminal) Wizard would be casting an illegal spell in the first place, making defending oneself against them DADA by default? Or is there something intrinsically Dark about them apart from their nasty effects?
Before Crouch authorized his Aurors to use the Unforgivables, were they allowed to kill in self-defense? And if so, then were there non-'Dark' lethal magics that they would have used, rather than the dread AK? (Light and fluffy lethal magics, perhaps?) Or would all magics designed to kill be designated 'dark' by default?
I've seen others speculate that the Unforgivables may be Dark because they require a certain purity of intent: that to cast Cruciatus, for example, would require a focused and sincere desire to cause pain, to cast Imperius the desire to dominate, to cast AK the desire to kill. This would certainly seem to make them Dark by nature. But if this were indeed the case, then I find myself wondering how they could possibly ever be demonstrated in a DADA class without grave suspicion falling upon the DADA instructors themselves. We know that the Unforgivables are a regular part of the 6th Year Curriculum at Hogwarts. Are they ordinarily never demonstrated, not even on spiders?
I find that unconvincing, somehow.
Porphyria:
And all the DADA classes apart from "Moody's" seem to concern themselves with dark creatures. Sure, defending against grindylows is practical knowledge, but there mere condition of being a grindylow does not constitute proficiency in a Dark Art.
Well, if there is such a thing as intrinsically Dark magic, magic that is potentially spiritually corrupting, rather than simply being a matter of a powerful tool used to bad ends, then I could certainly understand why you might choose to teach your younger students Defense Against Dark Creatures first, before exposing them to Dark spells and such. Learning how to defend yourself against a grindylow offers little in the way of seduction, as you cannot choose yourself to become a grindylow. Learning how to defend yourself against a Dark spell, on the other hand, would place a certain degree of temptation in your path.
But it seems clear that even if some magic is intrinsically "Dark," it's still culturally acceptable to know it, so long as one never uses it—or only uses it rarely, and for very good reasons. When Professor Binns is telling his students about the Chamber of Secrets, and someone suggests that perhaps it's never been found because one would have to use Dark Magic to find the opening, Binns snaps back something along the lines of: Just because a wizard doesn't use Dark Magic doesn't mean that he can't. (Sorry for the paraphrase: it's later now, and I've abandoned the canon, which I don't have at hand.) The implication there, IIRC, was specifically that Dumbledore would know enough Dark Magic to have found the Chamber. And there's implication of that sort in the very first chapter of the first book as well, when McGonagall goes gushing all over Dumbledore for being "too noble" to use all of the tools at his disposal.
<Elkins pauses here with an expression of profound distaste, as she hates that scene with a cold and undying passion, and mere mention of it cannot help but recall to her mind the sensation of being forced to choke down huge unchewable wads of unseasoned plot exposition and undercooked characterization. She gags, once, as the memory of McGonagall's fawning behavior floods her taste buds once more, but soon enough she has recovered and moves on...>
The Dark Arts are still taught in wizarding schools outside of Britain. Durmstrang still teaches them. (Does Beauxbatons?) My suspicion here is that Hogwarts only stopped teaching them, changing DA to DADA, upon Dumbledore's ascension to Headmaster—this seems somewhat implied to me by Draco's little speech about how Daddy considered sending him off to Durmstrang, where the curriculum was not so restricted.
All of this combines in my mind to form the impression of a society that does consider Dark magic to be intrinsically dark—potentially corrupting? deriving from Evil sources?—but that is nonetheless not so nervous about its corrosive power that it considers knowing some Dark magic as necessarily all that terrible a thing. Use of them would seem to be the sticking point.
What exactly do these Dark Artists do? I realize that one can glean a few ideas from outside sources (other fantasy novels, Wiccan philosophy), but that doesn't cut it for me; I want a Potter-specific theory.
Yes! I find the lack of magic theory in the books frustrating as well. Of course I understand that Rowling can't very well go sticking treatises on the theory of magic in the Potterverse into the books, but it would at least be nice to know, say, what constitutes 'Dark Magic,' particularly as the importance of resisting its influence is such an important aspect of the story.
Well. There are always hopes for future volumes.
About Divination, I wrote:
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.
Porphyria asked:
Are you suggesting that real, effective divination would be unethical, and thus dark? Or something about the practice of it, like necromancy, would be the darkening factor?
I was thinking the latter, myself. (On a purely personal level, I'm not very comfortable with the notion that there might be anything intrinsically unethical about divination.)
Trelawney's one "real" prediction that we see in canon seems to be a sort of mantic trance, a channeling or a possession. She goes into a seizure, her voice is not her own, she has no memory of the event once she has come out of the prophetic state. (Technically I suppose, by the terminology of the 19th Century British Spiritualist Movement whose idiom Trelawney herself seems to favor, she isn't really a 'Seer' at all. She would instead seem to be a 'Medium.')
My impression there was that something was speaking through her, that the prophecy was really being delivered by an outside agent which had chosen to use poor Trelawney as its channel, or as its "horse."
And I'm not altogether certain how I feel about the alignment of that outside agency.
It refers to Voldemort as the "Dark Lord," for one thing, which often seems to be a marker of Darkness in the books. Generally speaking, Good Guys don't call him that; his followers do. And the entire tone of the prophecy, the choice of phrasing, well...
"It will happen tonight. The Dark Lord lies alone and friendless, abandoned by his followers. His servant has been chained these twelve years. Tonight, before midnight...the servant will break free and set out to rejoin his master. The Dark Lord will rise again with his servant's aid, greater and more terrible than ever he was. Tonight...before midnight...the servant...will set out...to rejoin...his master..."
"Alone and friendless?" "Servant has been chained?" "Greater and more terrible than ever he was?"
I just don't know about that voice. Its sympathies seem to lie rather strongly with Voldemort, if you ask me. It doesn't even sound much like it's delivering a warning at all; it sounds far more to me as if something out there is exulting over what's about to happen.
The possibility has occurred to me that really effective divination (for human beings, at any rate, as opposed to, say, Centaurs) might necessitate opening oneself up to outside influence as a regular and conscious practice—actually inviting whatever is out there to use you as its horse—and that far too many of the things that might choose to answer such an invitation could well be, like Trelawney's prophetic voice, Not Very Nice. And while I can't claim to know for certain what effects galloping around with Not Very Nice Things riding on your proverbial back might be, I strongly suspect that it wouldn't be very good for you. Even aside from the obvious perils involved in allowing an unknown entity to hold your reins like that, it might also be somehow intrinsically corrupting.
Perhaps spiritual possession is the only truly reliable and effective form of Divination that human beings can manage? The Centaurs obviously use astrology to great effect, but we've seen no evidence yet of any wizards doing so. Perhaps all of the means of Divination that Trelawney favors—crystal-gazing and tea-reading and astrology and the like—are very weak tools in the hands of humans, while all of the more effective tools available to them involve dealing in one way or another with spiritual entities about which not very much is known and which are therefore highly suspect?
Just a thought. But that would explain, to my mind, why Divination might have remained on the Hogwarts curriculum when it seems to be such a very ineffective and poorly-respected magical field: it is, in fact, not an ineffective branch of magic at all, but merely one whose only non-forbidden applications are also its least effective ones.
It would also, I think, add an additional level of explanation to Trelawney's own reaction to being told that she has just entered a trance state and delivered a prophecy. It's not just that she doesn't believe it; she also doesn't want to believe it, because doing that sort of thing is suspect, Dark.
I wrote:
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. ;-)
Porphyria said:
She sure needs some angst in her life. Everyone else has some.
I really loved Eric's suggestion that Hermione needs to be confronted with a serious academic rival in the next book. I'm plumping hard for that plotline, although I haven't the slightest idea how such an academic rivalry could be introduced at this stage in the game. But Hermione needs Envy problems. Everyone else has had to struggle with envy, and I won't find it nearly so interesting if Hermione's envy problems prove to be sexual or romantic, or in any way purely relationship-based. Ron has his money problems, and Harry has his various athletic competitions -- so why should the girl be the one mired down in the great emotional bog when it comes to her own struggles with envy? Just rubs me the wrong way, that does.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on February 17, 2002 1:45 PM
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