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My goodness! People have been busy today!
A bunch of Point Award Scene thoughts here. If I've replicated anyone's arguments, or missed out on anything vital, then please accept my apologies. It's a bit tricky to compile a post when so many people have had such interesting things to say on the topic, and although I've tried to make this at least marginally coherent, I fear that I may jump around a bit.
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Errol wrote:
Goodness Gracious! The end-of-term argument all over again!
::smile::
I just love this argument, I really do. It's one of my all-time favorite topics. Heaven only knows why.
I agree that the timing of the announcement was lousy. But it was lousy because the room was already decorated and the Slytherins had prematurely congratulated themselves. My question here is -- Who decorates the hall for the feast? Did the Slytherins put up the house colors anticipating the victory?
You know, I had never considered that angle before? If it came up last time around, I must have missed it.
Certainly, if the Slytherin students were indeed the ones who decorated the hall themselves, as a premature gloat, then that changes my interpretation of the event quite a bit!
Nonetheless, I really do find it hard to imagine that the decorations were put up by students. I feel convinced that they were the work of the school administration itself. If Dumbledore himself doesn't do it, then one of the other professors does, or the elves do, or the banners and suchnot are somehow magically connected to whatever spell or device keeps track of all of those house points in the first place. No matter what the precise mechanism, though, I feel certain that it still comes down to the school administration, just as I feel convinced that it was Dumbledore and the school administration, and not any particular group of students, who made the decision to decorate the hall in mourning black to honor Cedric's memory at the end of the year in GoF.
It's a nice thought, though. But I really do think that Dumbledore allowed the Slytherins to rest assured in their assumption of victory on purpose. Just to swipe it out from under them at the very last minute, in order to make his point.
I think he was in error to do so, myself. Others, however, clearly disagree.
As for the fairness of the point award itself, though, I am in agreement with all of Errol's arguments on this count. I don't think that the fact that none of the other students had the opportunity to save the world from Voldemort is particularly relevant. Points seem to be regularly awarded or penalized for actions taken under special circumstances not shared by the student body as a whole -- the Troll in the toilet is a good example. Students with inner ear problems aren't going to be winning a whole lot of points for their house by playing Quidditch either, but that's okay: they have their chance to do so in other arenas.
Then, as I've said before, I don't see anything the slightest bit "fair" about the point system in the first place. What on earth does winning Quidditch (and the houses do get points for winning it, you know, not for displays of sportsmanship while playing it) have to do with comportment or moral virtue? What does knowing information that you have never been taught and which is not included in any of your coursework, but which you could only have come by through outside reading, have to do with diligence? What does not breaking curfew have to do with academic achievement? What about speaking respectfully to ones professors?
None of these things really has a thing to do with each other. They are merely displays of those traits (athletic prowess, intellectual curiosity, compliance with the rules, respect for ones elders) which the Hogwarts admin wants to encourage in students. The willingness to risk ones life in order to prevent an evil wizard from gaining the secrets of eternal life is presumably also such a trait. Therefore, it is worth points. And (quite rightly, IMO) lots of 'em.
No, it's not the point award itself that bugs me. It's the timing. Not to mention the attitude.
Maria wrote:
I was really sorry for Slytherin at the end of PS. Not only did they lose in such a "humiliating" way, but even more - everybody is incredibly happy to see Slytherin lose. I don't think anyone deserves that.
<Elkins smiles fondly at Maria and offers her a sprig of Bleeding Heart, as while Mr. Kiersey and his cronies may indeed classify her as a "Rationalist" ::waves at Scott::, neither normal colloquial English usage nor her own sense of logic nor the evidence of history suggests to her that being such in any way conflicts with also being a (smaller-case "I") "idealist">
Yeah, I know what you mean. At the same time, though, what we see of their behavior in the first book also makes me feel as if they really did earn that dislike. Also, I think it's pretty natural for people to feel happy to see the seven-year-champions finally get taken down. I'm a New Yorker, and yet I always used to root against the Yankees, just because I was so sick of them winning all the time. If I lived in the Potterverse, I'm sure that I'd share Ron's fondness for the Cannons. ;-)
I feel a lot more sympathy for the Slyths these days, actually, when they've been on this losing streak for three years, and yet the Huffs and the Claws are still prone to cheering on their constantly-winning rivals. Even though I suspect that their rotten interpersonal skills contribute to their being not very well-liked, I still rather sympathize with them, much as I tend to sympathize with Snape, who similarly brings his unpopularity down upon himself by means of his own bad behavior.
Grey Wolf asked:
Do you really think the Slytherins would've been less ticked off if they had lost the House Cup two days before, when Gryffindor suddenly found itself one moning with 170 extra, unspecified points? If you don't mind me saying so, that would've ticked them off exactly the same way, if not more.
Of course it would have ticked them off! Just look at how much it ticked off the Gryffindors, when they woke up one morning to learn that a bunch of their own idiot first-years had lost them 150 points in the middle of the night! They were mad enough to engage in ostracism over that, weren't they? Ostracism of their own house-mates. At a boarding school, in a milieu in which said housemates had absolutely nowhere else to turn for social engagement. Charming.
No, I'm sure that if the Slyths woke up one fine spring morning to find that Gryffindor had been awarded 170 points overnight, they would have been terribly suspicious, and they would have spent a lot of time muttering darkly among themselves about bias and so forth.
And Dumbledore still could have taken advantage of the feast to explain to everyone precisely what had warranted the point award. It would have been a far more emotionally effective way to make the point that he was trying to make, IMO, and actually, I do think that it would have ticked off the Slyths a whole lot less.
I don't think that conflating the message of our protagonists' heroism with the deliberate humiliation of House Slytherin did very much to convince the Slyths that there wasn't bias in play. Nor do I see the slightest bit of evidence in the books to suggest that what Dumbledore did taught the Slytherin students a damned thing about sportsmanship, or about fair play, or about virtue, or about self-sacrifice, or about generosity, or about rolling with the punches, or about trust, or about faith, or about the possible benefits of actually listening to what those in authority have to say -- rather than, say, joining a terrorist organization aimed at bringing down the current status quo.
Well, actually...allow me to rephrase that.
I see no evidence that what Dumbledore did taught them any good lessons about any of those things.
There were certainly plenty of lessons to be learned from his attempt at moral instruction. But I don't think they were at all the lessons that it was really beneficial for the Slytherin students to be learning. If you get my drift.
Not, mind you, that I think that anything that Dumbledore did was very likely to instill the Slytherin students with any deep respect for the virtues of fair play. But if that was indeed what he was trying to do, then he picked the wrong strategy, IMO, just as I think that he picked the wrong strategy with Student!Snape in the aftermath of the infamous Pr*nk.
Maria:
Dumbledore must be aware of the dislike between Gryffindor and Slytherin, but his actions speak of the fact that he simply doesn't care about it - he increases the dislike even more, when he, IMO, should be trying to let them reconcile.
Yes, precisely. That's exactly how I feel about it as well. The Gryff-Slyth rivalry strikes me as a real problem in wizarding society. It's hard for me not to read it as having helped to facilitate Voldemort's first rise -- and it now seems likely to help facilitate his second rise as well.
I often find Dumbledore a troubling character because while at times he seems to be set forth as a person who is unusually capable of transcending what I perceive as the true evils of the Potterverse, at other times he seems to be either oblivious to it or even helping to facilitate it. This is a tension, an ambiguity in his character that I find simultaneously intriguing and unsettling.
Of course, it's also what makes me enjoy him so much as a character. If he didn't strike me as so very fallible, then I'm sure that I would find him perfectly unbearable. ;->
That doesn't make Dumbledore evil (and yes, Grey Wolf -- don't worry! I know that you don't believe in an Evil!Dumbledore! This is just on route to making a broader point). It just means that he's flawed, and that he makes mistakes. As indeed, he has been shown to be, over and over again in the books. Indeed, from that snippet we've now seen of Book Five, it looks as if this trend is likely to continue: Dumbledore should have told Harry something five years ago. But he didn't. In short, he made a mistake.
I think that this was probably what Snapesangel was trying to get at when she wrote:
I think you rather have the idea that Dumbledore is omnipotent. This is clearly not true. He makes mistakes, or fails to act, in several situations (or so we can infer, since bad things have happened during his tenure as a teacher and then as Headmaster.)
[snip very good list of Dumbledore's mistakes]
Yup. (Although not to be pedantic here, but I think maybe "omniscient" might have been even more what you meant? Not only that he isn't all-powerful, but also that he doesn't know everything, that he cannot "see all?")
Dumbledore can make mistakes, and he does. That he can and does make mistakes is canonical. To suggest that he may have made one when it comes to the point award may run contrary to what seems to have been the authorial intent, but it is in no way contrary to the letter, or even really to the spirit of the canon.
But as to that pesky authorial intent. . . .
Did the author intend for the reader to view Dumbledore's last minute point award in PS/SS as one of his mistakes?
Well, obviously none of us can say for sure, but I personally don't think that she did.
And if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
How JKR wanted people to read the scene matters diddly in the long run. In cold hard reality, many readers do interpret the scene in just that way, and that reading is perfectly compatable with all of the other places in the text where Dumbledore is shown to be imperfect: good, yes, and very well-intended. . . .but also very fallible.
If the author wanted this scene to be read one way and one way only, then she made a mistake. Sometimes authors, very much like Dumbledore himself, do make mistakes. They write scenes which they mean to bolster one aspect of the story, but which in fact, for many readers, bolster a completely different aspect of the story instead. So long as the scene can still serve to bolster some coherent aspect of the story, though, then the narrative can still work.
In fact, sometimes it works far better than it would have if the authorial intent had held sway. I once read an excerpt from Henry James' journal, in which he described what he meant to say in the novel _What Maisie Knew._ Now, I just love Henry James, and I really like _What Maisie Knew_ a lot. But I think that it would have been kind of a lame book if Henry James had actually succeeded in writing it to say what he thought that he was trying to say, because what actually ended up on the page is way more interesting than what he describes in his journal.
It's good for fiction to be somewhat ambiguous, IMO. Unambiguous works of fiction—particularly morally unambiguous works of fiction—are really not very enjoyable to read. Even very small children tend to view them with profound disaste, and indeed, often voice their contempt for such stories in terms far more harsh and vituperative than we adults would be likely to use. ;->
Bboy wrote:
The next point is that, we must view this not from Slytherin's perspective or Gryffindor's, but from the perspective of a reader.
The fact of the matter is, though, that all readers do not read from the same perspective.
It's quite obvious that opinions here differ a great deal. To some people, the last minute victory was indeed (as I agree with you the author very likely intended it to be) thrilling, exciting, climactic. A dramatically satisfying end to the story.
To others, however, it left a very nasty taste in the mouth.
I confess that I had the latter reaction to the scene, the first time that I read the book. I did not care for it at all. It was a total eye-roller for me. In fact, I found it sufficiently annoying that I probably would never have bothered to read CoS at all, had I not brought it along with me on the same plane ride. After finishing SS, it was either CoS, the in-flight mag, or a nap. And I wasn't feeling sleepy. ;-)
I didn't really start liking the series until CoS, and part of the reason for that was that I saw many signs in CoS that the author was setting about to undercut to number of the things that I had so DISliked about SS: the pronounced yet unexamined dualism, for example, and the emphasis on inheritance, both of which are privileged in the first volume, but take serious cuts to the jaw by the end of the second.
From the perspective of writing a fun thriling story that encourages us to root for the hero and feel the thrill of his victory, JKR got it right.
For some readers, she did. And for other readers, she really got it wrong.
It seems obvious to me, however, that even people who did not read this scene as an unambiguous "feel good" moment can still enjoy the series as a whole. They're all over this list, right?
So obviously either the ways in which the scene "failed" for them were not sufficient to turn them off of the books, or their reading of the scene was not, in fact, a "failure" at all, but rather, an alternative type of authorial success.
Bboy still:
I do get the point being made from a real world perspective, but from a literary perspective, the last minute vitory snatch from your foes, was the right choice for a thrilling happy end to the story.
What did you think of the "cursing the Slyths on the train" scene at the end of GoF?
I ask because that scene strikes me as very similar to the point award in that it is a humiliating defeat for the Slytherins which makes some readers cheer with glee, but which always leaves a very nasty taste in my mouth.
I also think, though, that the scenes are very unlike each other, not merely in terms of what is actually being depicted (a defeat handed down by an authority figure vs. a squabble between peers, for example), but also because I think that Train Stomp is presenting much the same dynamic to the reader, but in a far more ambiguous and morally complex light.
The similarities and differences that I perceive between these two scenes often strike me as evidence that the series is indeed moving away from an "us vs. them" aesthetic and striking out into some rather more complicated thematic waters.
But now I'm really curious to hear what others think on this. So a question for the list as a whole:
Did the scene on the train at the end of GoF have the same emotional effect on you as the point award scene at the end of PS/SS? If not, then why not? What are the differences in how these two scenes are presented to the reader? How do we interpret those differences in light of the motion of the series as a whole?
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on January 30, 2003 9:45 PM
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