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Hi, Jamie!
Wow. Did you know that you were touching on all of my favorite topics here? I mean, it's just uncanny. You hit Crouch Jr. You hit the graveyard scene. And you even brought up the ever so mysterious Fourth Man!
I hope that you don't mind long replies. ;->
Jamie asked:
Does anyone else think that, while Crouch Jr. was certainly guilty of being a Death Eater, he may not have been guilty of using an Unforgiveable Curse?
Yes, that's occurred to me as well, and honestly, it wouldn't particularly surprise me if JKR were to reveal this as truth in some later volume. It seems perfectly likely to me that while guilty of being a Death Eater, Crouch really was innocent of torturing the Longbottoms. Dumbledore himself acknowledges that there was little real evidence against him, and from what we saw of the ugly mood of the crowd at his sentencing — not to mention his father's desperation to uphold his hard-line reputation — his trial was obviously grotesquely biased.
Like Eileen, I too find myself wondering if Crouch might not have been telling the truth whenever I contemplate his behavior in Penseive. He was obviously a rebellious teen, and there does seem to me to be a strong hint of that classic indignation of the bad kid actually wrongly accused for once in his life — "But when I'm really telling the truth, you won't even believe me!" — to his pleas in Penseive. It's emotionally magnified by a factor of thousands, of course, but nonetheless I do still see bit of it there.
And it is interesting that no one bothers to ask him about the Longbottoms while he's under the veritaserum, isn't it? Certainly JKR's left open the possibility that he might have been innocent — and making him so would be just the sort of thing that she likes to do.
But then, of course, there's plenty to support the notion that he was guilty as well.
Personally, I tend to prefer to believe that he really was guilty, but only because I find that believing him so makes his interactions with Neville in GoF absolutely fascinating for me to contemplate. (And also, as Eileen pointed out, I really do enjoy spinning wild and implausible backstories predicated on the assumption of young Crouch's guilt. For "Neville Owed A Life-Debt To Barty Crouch," see the ends of both messages #35187 and #35895.)
It's come up before that maybe he was under the Imperious Curse. How else could a man who spent most of his adult life in Azkaban perform such difficult magic unassisted?
There is some suggestion in the books that either Voldemort himself or allegiance to Dark forces in general might indeed have the ability to imbue wizards with magical powers previously beyond their capabilities.
In the Shrieking Shack scene of PoA, for example, Pettigrew offers up Sirius' escape from Azkaban as proof of his Dark allegiance. ("He's got dark powers the rest of us can only dream of! How else did he get out of there? I suppose He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named taught him a few tricks?") And Pettigrew himself seems to me to be extremely magically capable, for someone who is constantly accused of being a weak wizard. That muggle-blasting spell couldn't have been easy, and I imagine that the ritual spell by which Voldemort was rebirthed in GoF must have been quite difficult — yet Pettigrew manages to complete it even after severing his own hand.
It seems more than likely to me that casting ones lot in with Dark forces really does grant one a certain boost in magical power. It would do much to explain Dark magic's siren song appeal to those ambitious, power-hungry, ends-over-means, rules-disregarding, fair-play-is-for-dummies members of House Slytherin. And there's also an enormous weight of cultural and literary precedent behind the notion. Traditionally, after all, deals with the Devil do usually get you something — even if you pay far too high a price for it, in the end.
If this is the case, then it could help to explain Crouch's magical prowess. We know that he was exceptionally bright to begin with: he got twelve O.W.L.S. And then, under the influence of veritaserum, he claims that once he had been nursed back to health after being rescued from Azkaban: "I had to be controlled. My father had to use a number of spells to subdue me."
In fact, his father eventually resorts to the Imperius Curse to keep him under control. That certainly makes it sound to me as if even at the age of twenty, young Barty was magically powerful. If he was getting an added boost from Dark magic, then he could have been quite formidable indeed.
It seems unlikely to me that such a young man with no family background in the Dark Arts should be able to perform the Cruciatus curse to the degree required to drive the Longbottoms to insanity.
Well, at the risk of sounding utterly morbid here, I don't really know that I think this would be nearly so much a matter of magical prowess as it would be a matter of...well, time mainly. Time and patience and, er, determination. We don't know, after all, how long the Longbottoms were forced to suffer. I rather got the impression that it, um... ::wince:: that it went on for a while.
And, of course, Crouch had help. Which brings us to...
Who are the other Death Eaters involved in that trial? There are two men and a woman - one of those men and the women might be the Lestranges?
The text never explicitly states that they were the Lestranges, but it implies it so very strongly that I think we're reasonably safe making that assumption. I find it very difficult to imagine why JKR would have chosen to deliberately lead the reader astray on that particular point.
Who is the last man? Anyone we know?
Ah-HAH!
Eileen wrote:
/me calls to Cindy, Elkins, and Avery (still dripping wet and cowering under Cindy's tough gaze)
"Let's row the Fourth Man kayak over here to talk with Jamie, OK?"
Yes! Let's!
<Elkins pins her SYCOPHANTS badge onto her chest, leaps into the kayak behind Eileen, and picks up her paddle, grinning in anticipation of yet another exhilirating battle with the treacherous currents of canonical plausibility.>
Jamie wrote, about the mysterious Fourth Man:
Whoever he is, we can presume he is still in Azkaban.
Ah. But can we?
It certainly is curious that Voldemort doesn't mention him by name in the graveyard, isn't it? He raves on and on about the Lestranges, after all, who were loyal to him even after his downfall, who have suffered imprisonment for him, who will be sprung from Azkaban and be honored above all other Death Eaters, yadda yadda yadda. He just can't stop rubbing all of the other DEs' noses in how much he loves those Lestranges, right?
So what about that Fourth Man? If he were still alive and in prison, then presumably he would be mentioned along with the Lestranges. Even if we assume that he died in Azkaban, you would still think that he would warrant some special mention, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you think that as Voldemort was walking around his Death Eater circle, he would have said something along the lines of: "And here is where once stood so-and-so, who remained loyal to me, who died a martyr's death for me in Azkaban," and all that blah-blah-blah?
Well, I sure would.
I also find the Fourth Man's utter anonymity in the text highly suspicious. Why does he go unnamed throughout Book Four? The reader is certainly encouraged to be interested in the Longbottom Affair. We are given (or at least believe ourselves to have been given) the names of the other three defendents. So why should the identity of that Fourth Man remain so strangely hidden from view?
Could it be because his identity is intended to come as a surprise when it is finally revealed to us?
Could the Fourth Man in fact be a character we have seen...and yet not seen? Is there a character who seems unusually strongly emphasized by the text, and yet has no seeming narrative function? A character that we as readers have been actively encouraged to pay attention to and to remember, but who nonetheless seems to have no strong connection to anything else within the story? A character who although he has indeed appeared, has yet remained so utterly lacking in any form of physical description that he really could be just about anyone? A character whose face and normal speaking voice have been obscured both from both Harry's view and from our own?
Is there a character who has a name, but neither face nor role — just as the Fourth Man has both a face and a role...but no name?
The "Fourth Man" theory, outlined in message #35062, proposes that the mysterious Fourth Man in the Pensive scene was actually Avery, who managed to secure himself a pardon when his case was reexamined during the political backlash to which Sirius refers in the "Padfoot Returns" chapter of GoF, the same wave of public sentiment which swept Fudge into office as Minister of Magic and got Crouch Sr. shunted off into the Department of International Magical Cooperation.
It further proposes that after his release from Azkaban, Avery shunned Dark activities, severed all connections with his former DE colleagues, and certainly made no effort at all to seek out Voldemort. This, claims Fourth Man, is the reason that Avery arrives at the graveyard in such a highly nervous condition, and the reason that he cracks so quickly once Voldemort starts accusing his Death Eaters of ideological infidelity.
It is also, the theory suggests, the reason that Voldemort punishes Avery for the same sins that he is willing to overlook in others. The other DEs abandoned Voldemort at the time of his fall, which is a matter of self-interest, of wishing to be on the winning side — in short, a matter of ambition, a motivation which a Slytherin Old Boy like Tom Riddle can grudgingly accept. Avery, on the other hand, remained loyal to Voldemort even after his fall and only later abandoned his efforts, thus making it obvious that his infidelity was motivated less by any personal ambition than by weakness and fear — both things that Voldemort simply despises.
"Fourth Man" therefore offers the suggestion that the reason that Voldemort never mentions Crouch Jr's fourth co-defendent in the graveyard scene is because all of the DEs present already know perfectly well who the Fourth Man was: he was Avery, and Voldemort has made it all too clear what he thinks of the Fourth Man's performance — namely, that it was shoddy beyond all hope of forgiveness, so craven that only thirteen years of faithful service could possibly even begin to make amends for it.
The canonical defense for this theory, and for its mother-theory, "Redeemable Avery," is laid out in messages #34911, 35062, and 35187.
Eileen wrote:
Avery comes with sidehelpings of Imperius, Remorse, and whatever else you want to add.
Yup. We're pretty accomodating here in the Fourth Man kayak.
Because the Fourth Man Theory grew out of a previous "Redeemable Avery" defense, many of the variants on Fourth Man are designed to excuse or to defend his behavior, but if you like him better as a thoroughly venal and villainous coward, then you're free to stick with "No-Frills Fourth Man."
Otherwise, you could go for "Fourth Man with Remorse," in which Avery feels truly repentent about his DE past and has been striving for the past decade or so to redeem himself. In "Fourth Man With SHIP," Avery was hopelessly in love with Mrs. Lestrange, remained so even after she married his classmate and omantic rival, joined the DEs in the first place largely in the hopes of impressing her, and joined with her and her husband in searching for Voldemort chiefly out of personal devotion. In "Fourth Man With Imperius," Avery really did spend much of his time as a Death Eater under the Imperius Curse. There's even a "Fourth Man With Innocence," in which Avery, although he was indeed a Death Eater, was nonetheless utterly innocent of any complicity at all in the Longbottom Affair and was arrested and convicted solely on the basis of guilt by association with the Lestranges.
Naturally, all manner of permutations of these factors (some even involving perversions!) are possible. "Fourth Man with Imperius, SHIP and Remorse," for example, is my own personal favorite (and also one for which Porphyria has expressed a preference), while I believe that Eileen prefers to take her Fourth Man with Remorse alone. Cindy, who does not share our Bleeding Heart tendencies, is far more of a No-Frills type.
Avery himself, although he sometimes shares the kayak with us, doesn't get to express his own opinion on the matter, because he's just an in-jokey parody of somebody else's fictional character, and so doesn't count. ;^)
So that's Fourth Man. It's, er, not a very popular theory, I'm afraid. In fact, at one point I seem to remember being reduced to claiming that two people constituted a "drove" in my feeble attempt to portray it as a burgeoning speculative movement. But you're welcome to join us, if you like. We don't have staterooms or cute cabin boys or tasty snacks or great big can(n)ons, like some of those bigger ships do, but...um...we do have Avery on board as our mascot. And sometimes Cindy brings S'mores.
Eileen warns:
But remember that the crew of the Avery kayak: Elkins, Cindy, Eileen (and anyone else?)...
Well, Porphyria once agreed to join us, but I think that she was probably just being polite.
...are rather bloodyminded people, and are also into bloody ambushes.
That is true, I'm afraid, but you don't really have to be morbid and bloody-minded to adhere to the Fourth Man theory. In fact, Fourth Man is really quite a kind and gentle theory, offering as it does the possibility of redemption and great reader sympathy to a character who, frankly, does not seem terribly likely to be granted the same consideration by Rowling herself.
Nor, for that matter, do you even have to join the Society for Yes-Men, Cowards, Ostriches, Passive-Aggressives, Hysterics, Abject Neurotics, and Toadying SYCOPHANTS — an organization for the promotion of reader sympathy and identification with a wide range of grossly underappreciated character types — if you don't want to. Very few people do. In fact, I believe that Eileen and I are SYCOPHANTS' only two members. Which does mean, though, that if you want in, you'll be on the ground floor, so that when the stampede to join us begins, as really, it must do, one of these days...
<Elkins pauses in her rather desperate attempt to convert Jamie to her cause, frowning. Wait. What is this? Something seems amiss. Eileen is looking decidedly....dejected. She hasn't even put on her life-jacket, and her Lucky Kari helmet is drooping at a distinctly dispirited angle.>
Eileen?
Eileen, still smarting from being called a SYNCHOPHANT by Elkins, but not sure how to deny it...
Smarting? Uh-oh.
<Concerned, Elkins offers Eileen a tube of soothing ointment>
Smarting? Because I called you a SYCOPHANT? Oh, but Eileen, consider the source, will you? I mean, I'm all in favor of sycophants! Look, I've even got the badge to prove it.
And besides, you think that I'm one to talk? The person who grovels at Captain Tabouli's feet, only to then turn around and spray-paint graffiti all over the side of her SHIP? The person who snaps at Tough Cindy about canonical support, of all things, only to then back away quickly, hands raised and teeth bared in an ameliorating submissive grin, whining for forgiveness? The person who calls herself a Sweetgeorgian, yet who jumps onto the Big Bang destroyer whenever she gets bored, vacillates wildly between wearing her featherboas with pride and shuddering at the mere thought of them, claims to dislike SHIPs but can't seem to stop boarding them, and confesses to a partiality for So EWWWWWer It's In the SEEWWWWWWer? And you're worried because I called you a sycophant?
<Elkins shakes her head in saddened dismay at this new evidence of just how marginalized our people have become, how deeply and utterly we have internalized society's loathing for all our kind. This Just Will Not Do. It's time for some serious Sycophant Anti-Defamation. Her mouth tightens in resolve and she rises to her feet, staggering slightly as the kayak tilts dangerously from side to side.>
There is nothing wrong with being a SYCOPHANT! We are fine people, people of great sensitivity and refinement. Oh, sure, we may not have much in the way of those boring old heroic virtues, like Toughness and Valor and Honesty and Integrity and the Courage of Our Convictions. We may not get much in the way of reader sympathy, and we may rarely get happy endings. But we have something even better than that! We have...we have soul, is what we have! We have complexity! We're cross-motivated! We have pathos, and we have bathos, and sometimes we even have a touch of eros! We. Have. HUMANITY.
And so long as we stand together...
...er, which may prove a little difficult for us, as truth be told we're not really known for our loyalty...
...and, um, which might also prove a bit difficult for us as we are, as a class, generally more comfortable kneeling, or lying prostrate on the ground, or else curled into fetal position than we are standing...
...and, um, which could also prove difficult given that to date there are in fact only the two of us here in SYCOPHANTS, no one else having been willing to buy a badge, or even to accept a free badge, or even for that matter to sign a single lousy one of our many petitions...
...and...and...oh, damn, where was I?
Oh, yes. That's right.
And, so long as we stand together, we shall certainly if not exactly prevail (for in truth, we hardly ever do that), nonetheless survive — which is very nearly almost as good as prevailing, once you factor in all of the extenuating circumstances, and, um, well, and...you know. And take one consideration with the other. And all of that.
<Elkins resumes her seat in the kayak. It occurs to her that she's really got to work on that oratory thing. That last bit somehow just didn't have quite the inspirational punch that she had been hoping for. She scrawls a note to herself: "To Do List: (1) Work on oratory. (2) Try to avoid weak endings.">
—Elkins, offering to read Eileen that nice bit at the end of Return of the King where nasty old Saruman finally gets his, if it will help her to feel better about the whole SYCOPHANTS thing.
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on March 13, 2002 3:20 PM
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