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(continued from part two)
Three
The H Word
"How DARE you!" shrieks Eileen, so loudly that Elkins' hobby horse starts and shies away, and even Cindy jumps. "How DARE you call my Barty a hypocrite?"
"Oh, come on, Eileen!" Elkins struggles to calm her horse. "You know perfectly well that he was a hypocrite. You must do, surely. I mean, everybody knows that about Crouch. It's right there on his resume and everything. 'Hypocrite.' Just one bullet point below 'Red Herring.'"
"He is not a hypocrite!" Eileen turns to Cindy. "Cindy!" she complains. "Cindy, Elkins is using vituperative language again!"
"Vituperative language?" Elkins sighs. "Oh, dear. Okay. Look. Would you prefer for me to call him 'integrity challenged?' I mean, would that help at all? Because if you like it better that way, I could—"
"CINDY!" screams Eileen.
Cindy shakes her head regretfully. "Gee, I don't know, Eileen," she says. "I don't really think that you can object to 'hypocrite' when applied to Crouch Sr. That's a bit like Pettigrew and 'coward,' isn't it? Or like Voldemort and 'Evil Overlord?' Or like Draco and 'racist?' They may be vituperative, and there may be a few brave and enlightened souls out there who leap forward to contest them, but they're hardly novel, or weird or wacky, or, uh, subversive, or anything like that. So I really do think that you're just going to have to live with it this time."
"Sorry, Eileen," Elkins says, not actually sounding in the least bit contrite. "But you didn't really think that we were going to be able to have this conversation without the H Word ever once coming up, did you? I mean, did you really think that everyone was just going to sort of tacitly agree not to mention it? Sweep it under the rug, perhaps? Like the Wizarding World does everything having to do with Voldemort?"
"Well, I—"
"Look, even Charis knows that Crouch Sr. was a hypocrite. She wrote:
Barty Crouch Sr was acting every day of his life. He was the kind of actor people can only be in everyday life: an expert of disguising his true emotions and masquerading around as something he's really not. His last decade is of course a prime example of this, though I'd say he got into the habit long before that.
"And unlike me, Charis really really liked Crouch Sr. Yet even she realizes that the man had a pretty serious, um, H Word problem."
"But—"
"I mean, Tough and Steely Livian Crouch? Crouch the Ruthless Opponent of Dark Wizardry? Crouch Who Protects the Wizarding World Even At Great Personal Cost? Crouch Who Does Not Let Any of the Four Loves Dictate His Actions? Crouch Who Despises And Detests The Dark Arts And Those Who Practice Them? That's just his persona, isn't it? It's his facade, his masquerade, his public face. But it's not really him. And as for Crouch as Brutus...well!"
Elkins chuckles. "Crouch as Brutus," she repeats reprovingly. "Really, Eileen! I mean, really, now. Really. Honestly. Crouch? Crouch, of all people, as Brutus?"
Eileen flushes to the tips of her horned helmet.
"That was his wife's fault," she mumbles.
"Brutus had a wife. She's in that painting that you linked to in your Crouch as Tragic Hero Post. The Jacques-Louis David painting, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons. She's featured in it."
"Is she?" asks Cindy, with some interest.
"Yes. She's there on the right hand side of the canvas, the brightest part, where the viewer's eye will naturally travel first. She's with her two daughters. Weeping. Swooning. Because you see, unlike Crouch, her husband really did have her sons put to death."
"Okay, now I'm getting confused," says Cindy. "Which Brutus are we talking about here? Is this the man who assassinated Julius Caesar?"
"No," Eileen sighs. "No, Elkins is talking about the other Brutus now. The ancestor of Julius Caesar's assassin. The Brutus who put his sons to death for treason. Brutus Sr., if you will."
"Yes, Brutus Sr. Brutus the filicide," spits Elkins. "Not Brutus Jr., the alleged parricide. Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic. He drove the wicked Tarquin kings out of Rome and ended the monarchy. And he was quite the hero for it, too. But then, just when everyone was starting to feel safe, something rather unfortunate happened..." Elkins smiles grimly. "Brutus' own two sons were caught with a group of conspirators who'd managed to hide their monarchist allegiance and avoid getting purged the first time around. Apparently they were trying to find the exiled kings and restore them to power."
"Ah." Cindy nods. "Okay. I think that I'm really beginning to see what you mean about those parallels now."
"Yeah. If you know the story, then they're quite striking. I've always assumed that JKR was quite consciously and deliberately echoing the story of Brutus with her Crouch subplot. We know that she's fond of legend and myth and history, and the parallels are just far too blatant to be accidental."
"I think so too," agrees Eileen. "I said so back in April. I wrote:
The condemnation of Crouch Jr. seems to me to be a conscious analogue of the famous old story about Brutus (not the one who stabbed Caesar, but an ancestor) condemning his sons to death for their treachery.
Elkins nods. "Brutus' two sons were caught conspiring to restore the kings to power. Their father sentenced them to death for treason, thus demonstrating to all of Rome that even members of his family were not exempt from justice. He presided over their executions in person."
"Livy says that Brutus looked right into his sons' eyes while the lictors cut off their heads," Eileen adds happily, tossing her bloody featherboas over one shoulder. "And he didn't even flinch."
"Lovely," mutters Cindy.
"Brutus was Tough and Steely."
"Indeed he was," Elkins agrees drily. "If also perhaps a tad psychotic by contemporary standards. He was not, however, very much at all like our Mr. Crouch. For one thing, he actually followed through, which Crouch rather spectacularly did not. Brutus saw it done. He really did put his sons to death. What he did not do," she says. "Was to sentence his sons to death while the eyes of the public were on him, only then to turn around and smuggle them out from under the axes of the lictors to lock them away in his wine cellar one year later, when nobody was watching him." Elkins shakes her head. "Crouch as Brutus," she repeats. "Honestly, Eileen!"
"I did say that I thought that Brutus was the model for Crouch only to an extent," Eileen points out. "It's tragic irony."
"Oh, it's irony, all right. But irony to what purpose? Crouch is doing a Brutus there in the Pensieve scene. There's no question about that to my mind. No one familiar with the story could possibly not be reminded of it while reading that chapter. But that just serves to subvert Livian Crouch, doesn't it? Because later on, we realize that Crouch was just playing Brutus there. He was play-acting Brutus. He was 'doing a Brutus.' He's not a Brutus, but he plays one in the Pensieve. It's all an act. A sham. A show. Crouch was Brutus like his son was Moody."
"But—" begins Eileen.
"And there's another way in which Crouch was not like Brutus too, you know," says Elkins. "Livy wrote that the public tried to prevail on Brutus to pardon his sons. At the trial, the proconsuls were begging him to spare them. The people were clamoring for him to let them off the hook. The attendants at the execution couldn't even stand to watch them being decapitated; they wept, they turned away. Not very much like that jeering savage mob at Crouch's son's trial, that's for sure. A whole lot more like Ludo Bagman's jury, actually. Except that Brutus took a strong stand against the popular opinion. Where do we ever see Crouch doing that?"
"Well..."
"JKR's nod to the story of Brutus is certainly ironic," concludes Elkins. "But the purpose of that irony, as I see it, is to underscore the extent to which Crouch isn't really Tough and Steely Livian Crouch at all. Tough and Steely Livian Crouch is all an act. It's a red herring. It's both the author's misdirection and Crouch's own. And at the end, when it is revealed to the reader as such, that only serves to reinforce and to strengthen our appreciation of Crouch's true nature. Of the profound depths of his moral hypocrisy. In fact," she adds thoughtfully. "JKR plays much the same game with Livian Crouch as she does with Ends-Over-Means Crouch, doesn't she?"
"You don't see Crouch as representing ends over means?" Cindy asks, frowning.
"No, I do see him as representing ends over means. But I think that the text is really very underhanded in its approach there. In fact..." Elkins glances around the Bay nervously. She lowers her voice. "In fact," she whispers. "I think that JKR cheats."
"Cheats?"
"Yes. First she uses Crouch to encourage the reader to consider the value of prioritizing the ends over the means. But then she stacks the deck against that position by revealing her proponent of ends-over-means to be, in the end, a self-interested hypocrite. She subverts the moral equation by exposing Crouch as a fraud: his ends are in truth no better than his means, and by the end of the story, he's been positively mired in moral failing. And that is cheating, if you ask me. It pulls the rug out from under the entire moral dilemma. It's really terribly unfair. In fact, if I were Salazar Slytherin, I think that I'd be all set to sue J.K. Rowling! For defamation of character!"
Cindy considers the matter for a few minutes.
"You'd lose," she advises gravely.
"Would I?" Elkins shrugs. "Oh, well. What can you do? We all know what House the author would have been sorted into, don't we? Talk about ends and means! Authors are just awful that way. Those cunning folk use any means to achieve their rhetorical ends."
"Look who's writing," snaps Eileen. "You and your Crouch's Graying Hair Timeline! You and your H Word!"
"Well, I couldn't not bring up the H Word here, Eileen," says Elkins apologetically. "I really couldn't. Because the H Word is essential to how I perceive Crouch's narrative function, as well as to how I view his motives. It's the reason that I can't accept a reading of Crouch as a tragic hero. He just doesn't have any nobility of stature. Let's go back to what Talon DG said in April, shall we? About Crouch's motivations?"
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On April 8, in message #37574, Talon DG wrote:
Where I think you might get discussion over Crouch's character would be over motivation, not action.
He then went on to describe the two major branches of interpretation of Crouch's motives in regard to the trial of the Longbottoms' assailants:
If he wanted to send a message to the Death Eaters ("Nobody is exempt from justice, not even my son") well then, good on him. He's setting the example at great personal cost.
But if he just wants to look "tough on crime" for political ends, and is sitting on the tribunal because it makes him look really, really really tough... well... that is more than a little on the callous side, isn't it? Not the sort of guy you want in charge, is it?
In short, is Crouch self-sacrificing or self-serving? Is he a hard-liner, or is he a hypocrite?
I think that he's a little bit of both, myself.
But mainly the latter.
I also think that this is precisely what makes analysis of his character so very complicated.
It is difficult to force Crouch into the rather confining mold of "archetypical tragic hero with a single identifiable hamartia," IMO, because he serves a number of different functions in the text, all of them on slightly different levels.
On the ethical level, he invites the reader to contemplate the moral conundrum of ends versus means. On the moral level, he stands in as an exemplar of hypocrisy. On the political level, he serves as a double to Cornelius Fudge: as Fudge exploits the peace-time mentality for his own personal gain, seeks to perpetuate that mentality when it is inappropriate for him to do so, and falls into the twin political errors of appeasement and denial, so Crouch exploited the war-time mentality for his own personal gain, sought to perpetuate that mentality when it was inappropriate for him to do so, and fell into the twin political errors of tyranny and reactionism. On the thematic and symbolic level, I read Crouch as the Devouring or Tyrannical Father: he stands for the denial of individuation and the negation of freedom of choice. And on the psychological level, he seems to me to represent solipsism, or perhaps narcissism: the inability to recognize the existence of other people as independent from oneself and ones own desires.
Unsurprisingly, this proliferation of roles leads to confusion, as people desperately try to determine precisely where Crouch went wrong. Did his error lie in sending his son to Azkaban in the first place, or did it lie in rescuing him? Was his dismissal of Winky indicative of hubris, or of a far more Machiavellian brand of ruthlessness? Is he too soft or too hard? Is he driven by his passions, or is he a scheming manipulator?
Did the blood in the unfortunate Mr. Crouch's veins run too hot or too cold?
The situation is further confused, IMO, by the fact that some of Crouch's dramatic functions are filled more by his persona than by his person. Crouch is a hypocrite who presents one face to the public, a different face in his private affairs. For most of the novel, the reader is only aware of Crouch's public face; his true hypocrisy is only revealed at the end of the book. This means that he can easily fulfill two entirely contradictory sets of narrative functions simultaneously. His role as the representative of ends over means, for example, belongs properly more to his public persona than it does to his private person; that it stands in opposition to his role as an exemplar of hypocrisy does not really matter in terms of his narrative function. That function is still fulfilled, even if in retrospect we can determine that Crouch's role as its representative was actually a red herring in terms of the plot.
-----------
Eileen's analyses of Crouch have generally taken his ethical and political roles as their starting point. Crouch, she says, is a fanatical opponent of Dark Wizardry. He is motivated not so much by personal ambition as by the desire to protect the wizarding world from Voldemort and his followers. She writes:
Nobility in tragedy also refers to virtue, however, and Crouch has that as well going for him. Tragic heroes do terrible things and Crouch does terrible things, but they have a lot of things going for them as well. Crouch is on the good side. He fights against Voldemort and protects people against him. He does this at great risk to himself.
Crouch's flaw, she says, derives from his ruthless privileging of the ends over the means.
No, the key to Crouch's character (and I'm sure Sirius would ultimately agree) can be found in PS/SS.
"Those cunning folk use any means // To achieve their ends."
Before GoF, that ethic is limited to the bad guys. GoF's moral complexity stems from the fact that Crouch Sr. is introduced to employ that ethic on the good side.
Eileen sees Crouch's _hamartia_ in his willingness to resort to extreme measures in order to achieve his goal of protection, and in his corresponding willingness to overlook the rights of the individual and to refuse to allow either love or charity to influence his actions. She likens him to Brutus, who condemned his sons to death for treason, thus proving that his devotion to the communal ethics of law and state outweighed his devotion to the far more personal ones of filial devotion and blood ties. Where Eileen sees Crouch as falling into error is in his failing to place the appropriate checks on the actions that he is willing to take to further his admirable goals, thereby riding roughshod over the rights of others.
She writes:
I see here the tragic flaw asserting itself. The belief that people should do as he disposed him, that he did not have the responsibility to treat them as people first and foremost. . . .Barty Crouch Sr. did not let love (any of the four loves) dictate his relationships with others. He used people and therein lies his downfall.
I agree that this is Crouch's great flaw. It is a failing that applies across the board, both to his public and his private personae; indeed, it may well be the one thing that unifies every one of his narrative roles. It also characterizes every last one of his "fatal errors," the poor choices he makes which lead to his destruction. If I were to try to identify Crouch's hamartia, I would have to cite his unwillingness or inability to recognize the existence of other people as independent entities, and his corresponding disregard for their volition and their autonomy.
Where I disagree, however, is in seeing precisely the same connection that Eileen has suggested between Crouch's passion for denying others their freedoms and his prioritization of ends over means.
Traditionally, as I see it, the sin of ends-over-means thinking involves the sacrifice of individual rights for the common weal, or for some other widely recognized "Greater Good." If we accept that this is indeed the cause of Crouch's hamartia, then we must propose that his motives—his ends—are the protection of the wizarding world from Dark Wizardry. In his desire to protect the WW, he goes overboard and neglects to maintain the checks to his behavior that we consider necessary to moral integrity.
Now, if this were really the case, then I would expect to see a certain pattern to Crouch's fatal errors. Ideally, the text should show us Crouch erring out of his desire to protect the WW from harm. There should be some consistency to the specific ends for which he is shown as willing to use his unacceptable (Unforgivable?) means.
But in fact, the text doesn't show us this at all. Crouch's acts of disregard for others are not taken to achieve noble or self-sacrificing ends at all, nor do they very often bring "great risk" to him in any way that he could reasonably have anticipated. On the contrary, they always seem to me to be taken to protect Crouch himself, or to bring him some other form of personal advantage, satisfaction or benefit.
--------------
Eileen listed what she sees as Crouch's fatal errors:
Crouch Sr. chooses his downfall at several points throughout the story. First and perhaps most seriously, he chooses to authorize the Unforgivable Curses on suspects. Then, there is his "I Have No Son!" which leads thematically to his rejection and destruction at the hands of his son. He then chooses to flout the law by rescuing his son from Azkaban and putting him under the Imperius curse. At last, he dismisses Winky, the only protection he would have had against Voldemort.
I think that this is an excellent list. To it, I would also add:
This is a chicken which will come home to roost when Jorkins' damaged mental state leaves her vulnerable to abduction by Pettigrew. In effect, Crouch's disregard for others is what eventually leads Voldemort straight to his front door.
This is really part and parcel of Crouch's overall political approach. It is linked both to his authorization of the Unforgivable Curses and to his denunciation of his son. I see it as leading thematically both to his son's poor choices and to Crouch's own eventual use as Voldemort's tool.
His choices here are what forge his son into the blade that will eventually kill him.
I agree with Eileen that Crouch's fatal errors are all indicative of a profound disregard for the rights and volition of others.
What I don't see, though, is how they reflect the motives that Eileen has ascribed to him: the desire to protect the wizarding world, even at great personal cost. In fact, I am unconvinced that a single one of Crouch's actions are undertaken for any Greater Good at all. Rather, all of the evidence seems to me to suggest that Crouch is consistently driven by selfish motives: sometimes by the desire to protect himself and his own, sometimes by the desire to increase his own personal standing, sometimes by his desire to uphold his image -- but most often (and by far the most damningly) by his apparent need to control and to dominate those around him, to use coercion in his attempts to force others to serve as mirrors to his own ego.
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"And that's my problem with Crouch as Tragic Hero," says Elkins, looking around. "I just don't see him as possessing the requisite nobility of stature. When you actually take a close look at his actions, and particularly at his fatal errors, there's always a disconnect between his public persona and his private person, between his ostensible motives and his real ones.
"Why does he play the role of Barty Crouch, Fanatical Hard-liner, whenever he is in the public eye? Why does he engage in human rights violations? Why does he encourage mass hysteria? Why does he rescue his son from Azkaban and then keep him a prisoner of the Imperius Curse for over ten years? Why does he try to erode his son's sense of self? Why does he obliviate Bertha Jorkins? Why does he dismiss Winky? In fact, none of these fatal errors has the slightest connection to any action undertaken for a greater good. They aren't the actions of someone dedicated to protecting and serving the wizarding world, even at great personal cost. Rather, they are the actions of someone dedicated to protecting and serving himself. Often at enormous cost to the wizarding world."
"Oh, I contest that assertion!" cries Eileen.
Elkins smiles wearily.
"Well...yes," she agrees. "I rather thought that you might. How else do you think that this post got so incredibly long? Don't worry. I'll defend it.
"But for now, let me just say that I think that the text does set up Crouch initially as a model of Livian rectitude, as well as a proponent of ends over means. But by the end of the novel, we've been led to the understanding that in fact, Crouch's ostensible motives were all show. He wasn't the ruthless opponent of Dark Wizardry that he pretended to be. That's the real red herring in the Crouch subplot, if you ask me: this notion that Crouch's means may have been bad, but his ends were good. Once you actually take a close look at his fatal errors, they're nearly all motivated by self-interest.
"Now, a character who consistently falls into error while acting in accordance with self-interest can certainly be sympathetic," says Elkins. "He can be likable. He can inspire pathos. He can even possess a kind of wild heroic grandeur, like some of Shakespeare's better villains do. But in order to fulfill the criteria of the archetypical tragic hero, I think that a character really needs to exhibit some degree of purity of motive, and I'm just not seeing that in Crouch Sr. I don't really know if I think that a character who is so clearly demarked as a hypocrite can serve as a tragic hero. Hypocrisy is not precisely a tragic flaw. So while I think that you can make a very strong case for Crouch as a sympathetic shades-of-grey redeemed-in-death villain, I just can't read him as a tragic hero, because to my mind, he doesn't make it over that very first hurdle: Nobility of Stature."
"But he fits the mold so well!" insists Eileen.
"Well, he may seem to," says Elkins. "At first glance. At first glance. But then, he seems to fit the Livian mold too, at first glance, doesn't he? He seems to be a Brutus. But in the end, that analogue just turns out to be irony. These patterns are placed in the text only in order to be undermined later on. They're authorial misdirection used for ironic effect. They're...well, actually, they're...they're..."
Elkins hesitates.
Eileen glares at her. "They're what?" she demands.
Elkins glances over to the CRAB CUSTARD table. She sighs.
"Red herring mousse," she says.
************************
Elkins
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REFERENCES:
This post is continued from part two. It is primarily a response to message #45402 ("Crouch Sr as Tragic Hero"), but also references or quotes HPfGU message numbers 37476 ("The CRAB CUSTARD Manifesto"), 37574, 37769, 43447, and 45693.
Link to "The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons"
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on December 7, 2002 6:18 PM
1 comment (link leads to main site)
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