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Eileen wrote a terrific essay on reader sympathy for the Slyths, to which I have only a few things to add.
Eileen:
Or at least I think so. There is also that little matter of a sneaking liking for House Slytherin.
In many people, it's a little more than sneaking. And this seems to be one of the issues that upsets people most when it comes to debates about "proper"intrepretations of canon.
If the author did not in fact want readers to feel a sneaking affection for House Slytherin, then she should have done a number of things differently. She should be letting them win more often. She should also be allowing them to do permanent damage to the protagonists without recourse to their adult allies. She should have given their representatives in the text, chiefly Draco Malfoy, some real form of advantage over our heroes, one that is not easily or immediately trumped by Harry and his allies. And she should not have depicted the Slyth kids as, on the whole, not only nasty, but also stupid, incompetent, incapable of tactics and (for the most part) butt-ugly.
She should also have handled Snape's entire PoA plotline completely differently.
Hell. She shouldn't have written Snape at all.
Now, interestingly enough, JKR does not seem to be a dolt when it comes to other aspects of story-telling. She does know how to keep the reader from sympathizing too much with her secondary villains. Quirrell, Lockhart, and Barty Jr. are not sympathetically portrayed characters. A few weirdos, like myself, do indeed feel affection for these guys (although even I can never muster much of anything but irritation with Lockhart), but it's very much a minority reader response.
Sympathy for the Slytherins, on the other hand, is a very common reader response. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the author herself is not altogether uncool with that. If she had wanted to combat it, then she could have. She has shown elsewhere in the series that she knows how it is done. That she is not doing it in regard to the Slyths indicates to my mind that for whatever reason, the author doesn't really want to rule it out as a reader response.
Eileen:
But hark, what is it Elkins is saying?
"After all, it often turns out that other people are seeing things in the books that I find rewarding as well, once I'm willing to give them a try.
Or not. Sometimes when you try a new food, after all, it really does taste every bit as disgusting as you thought it would. That happens too -- especially to me. I'm a pretty picky eater. ;-)"
Is that C.R.A.B.C.U.S.T.A.R.D. you're talking about, Elkins?
Heh. No, actually, you know, it wasn't? I was using the same analogy, more or less, but your CRABCUSTARD hadn't even crossed my mind.
Besides, I did muster up some canon for that Dead Sexy Crouch Sr. of yours, didn't I?
No. For reasons of politeness, I hadn't planned on mentioning precisely which readings of the text I've given the good ol' college try, but then rejected on the grounds that I find them unrewarding. There have been some, though: readings which are perfectly coherent and consistent, and which seem just as canonically plausible or canonically defensible to me as the ones which I prefer, but which I reject because their adoption does absolutely nothing for me in terms of leaving me with a rewarding vision of the series.
To reject someone's reading is, of course, nothing personal. But it did seem to me that given that the analogy I chose was "disgusting" food, it might have been a bit harsh to give examples. Really, I don't often find other people's readings of the text disgusting. Unpalatable, perhaps. . . . but not disgusting.
And when I do find them disgusting, I try not to say so. Not outside of Theory Bay, at any rate, where the standards of discourse are slightly different. ("Dead Sexy Crouch Sr? Ewwwwwww! Yuk! ::violent retching sounds:: You must be totally Bent to suggest such a thing! What do you have, some sort of unresolved Oedipal issues or something?" *g*)
Scott Northup wrote:
PS A lot of the posts defending Snape (and Draco) over the past few days have piqued my curiosity. Snape-defenders: do you stick up for Wormtongue and other slimy folks in literature in movies? Do you say to your friends "Grima was a good guy! He just hung around with the wrong crowd!"
Eileen wrote:
Oh most definitely? Did you not know, Scott, that some of us listies practice a private devotion to St. Grima Wormtongue, patron of sycophants? The shrine is in the Garden of Good and Evil. Candles can be purchased at the front desk of the Canon Museum.
::lights candle to Blessed Grima Wormtongue, the Patron Saint of SYCOPHANTS::
SYCOPHANTS = Society for Yes-men, Cowards, Ostriches, Passive-Aggressives, Hysterics, Abject Neurotics and Toadying Sycophants.
Yes, Scott. It's true. Some of us—a few, true, but a happy few—do make it our practice, nay, even consider it our solemn duty, to defend those characters who receive, on the whole, less reader sympathy than any others: the cowards, the grovellers, the minions, the toadies, the secondary villains who don't even get snappy lines of sadistic dialogue, who don't even have good dress sense.
Those characters are always my favorites. They always have been, ever since I was very small. Not the cute versions, mind you. Ugh, no! Not the Gurgis and the Dobbys and the like. I can't bear Gurgis, those nasty little SYCOPHANTS wannabes.
No, I liked the real SYCOPHANTS, the sincere ones, the ones who had nothing in the least bit admirable or noble about them. I would sometimes forgive them if they found redemption in death. Sometimes. But I much preferred they not.
I like minions. I like Grimas and Smeagols, and all of those unfortunate Imperial officers in the Star Wars movies too, the ones who were always getting offed. I like the DEs in the graveyard.
I am particularly partial to Avery.
Hey, what can I say? I just dig those characters. Some people always like the villains, but me? Nah. I always like the villains' minions best of all.
I think, though, that you'd best be careful implying that Snape really fits into the same category -- the Snapefans will be after you in a heartbeat. Seriously, Snape really doesn't seem to me to partake of the same appeal at all. For one thing, the dude is seriously heroic in his own way, which is the one thing that you absolutely cannot say about SYCOPHANTS. In fact, a profound lack of heroism is the unifying characteristic of SYCOPHANTS. Snape, with his redemption subplot, his past spying career, and his sense of integrity, doesn't fit the same mold at all. He's a completely different type of character, IMO.
The dynamic of reader response that fuels SYCOPHANTS is, though, one that I think has quite a lot of bearing on the question of Sympathy For the Devil and related phenomena.
Eileen:
The reason I don't think that Sympathy for the Devil is exactly the same thing as rooting for the underdog is that you can often be rooting for the underdog without feeling much for the character.
There's another distinction that can come into play here as well, and I'm not quite sure what to call it. I tend to think of it as the difference between "Sympathy For The Devil" and the operative dynamic of SYCOPHANTS.
I think of Sympathy For the Devil as "rooting" based purely in the readers' understanding of how the meta-text defines the ultimate "winners" and "losers" of the piece. We understand that the villains are the designated losers, and we therefore feel inclined to pump for them. Sympathy for the Devil leads people to sympathize with characters like Voldemort. Darth Vader. Milton's Satan. Guys with flair.
There's another type of "rooting for the underdog" dynamic, though, which applies less to those characters one perceives as the designated losers in "game terms" as it does to the designated losers in terms of authorial portrayal. This is the dynamic that tends to lead to reader sympathy for characters like Peter Pettigrew, Quirrell, Grima Wormtongue. Guys who don't even have style to sustain them.
(Quoting myself here, from a SYCOPHANTS post back in March)
Part of the reason for this, I suppose, is pure sympathy for the underdog. Head Villains very rarely win in the end, it's true, but at least until they finally get what's coming to them, they do get to be powerful. (The story wouldn't be very satisfying if they didn't.) They may be doomed to failure within the wider scope of the narrative, but until the end of the story, they get to kill and bully and torment and otherwise lord it over everyone who crosses their path. And because it's genre convention that proper villains ought to be charismatic, they often get really snappy dialogue, as well.
Their minions, on the other hand, don't even get that much. Not only are they doomed to failure, they're also subject people even while their own side is winning. And not only that, but even the authorial voice often doesn't seem to care for them! If they're not cannon fodder, pure and simple, then they're secondary villains that the reader is supposed to roundly despise: they hardly ever get any cool lines of dialogue, they rarely have a decent dress sense, they're almost never good-looking, and their dignity is stripped from them as a matter of course. Minions just get no respect or sympathy from anyone: they're despised by their enemies and their evil overlords alike. They're losers, through and through.
I do view these as slightly different 'rooting for the underdog' dynamics. Characters like Draco Malfoy and the other Slyth students, of course, often get to partake of both, because while they are being presented to the reader as antagonists proper (rather than just as minions, or SYCOPHANTS), they are also just...
Well...
Oh, well. You know. They're just ever so lame!
----------------
Eileen also brought up reader self-insertion:
The question here is "How would I as someone who is both cunning and ambitious fit into Hogwarts?"
If you see yourself as a Slytherin, you're going to sympathize with the Slytherins, even if JKR doesn't seem entirely crazy about them.
And again, if JKR didn't anticipate this, then she was a fool.
It's often occurred to me, you know, that one of the reasons that these books are probably so very popular is that they have a personality test built right into the narrative?
Seriously. People love personality tests. People always claim to hate being categorized...but they don't. They really don't. They eat it up. They love being categorized. They like nothing better than to be put in little boxes, and then telling other people which little box they belong in, and then getting to make assumptions about other people based on which little box those other people fit in, or even which little box they think that someone else might properly fit in. They love astrology, and they love Myers-Brigg, and they love Enneagrams, and they love that 'Celestine Prophecy' stuff, and in Japan, a lot of people even believe that blood type, of all the wacky things, is a reliable indicator of personality! Books that purport to turn readers on to some new and even better way to categorize them become best-sellers. "What sort of X are you?" quizzes sell magazines. People flock to websites in droves to take little tests that will tell them what they are.
I mean, people really do just love that stuff. I imagine that it largely derives from a terror of anonymity, a fear of having no identity, of not being known. At least if you can give people some handle to hook you on, you figure that they might have some chance of distinguishing you from every one of the other nameless lumps of clay littering up the face of the planet. You have to share your category with a whole bunch of other people, true, but hey. It's better than nothing, right?
Or maybe not.
But anyway, for whatever reason, people really do enjoy systems of interpersonal categorization. And the HP books have one as a part of the narrative itself.
You may laugh when I say this, but I'm not joking. I truly do believe that this is one of the factors contributing to this series' mass popular appeal.
But here's the thing. If part of the appeal of the books is the built-in personality test, then you cannot expect for House Slytherin to somehow get exempted from the dynamic simply on the basis of its members being the designated enemy. It just doesn't work that way. It would be like inventing sun signs as a part of your novel, and then telling your readers that Scorpios are Evil. It just doesn't work. If people are being drawn to the books in part because they find the whole Sorting thing so darned appealing, then some people are going to find themselves in sympathy with House Slytherin. It's just unavoidable.
So again. If JKR didn't actually want some of her readers to find themselves in sympathy with House Slytherin, then she's only got herself to blame.
Bad Move JKR, indeed!
Eileen:
If you see yourself as a Slytherin, you're going to sympathize with the Slytherins, even if JKR doesn't seem entirely crazy about them.
Yeah. Although, you know, this can cut both ways. I myself happen to have the opposite problem with House Slytherin. No offense at all intended to Eileen's brother, or to any of our many ambitious, cunning, ruthless, power-minded listmembers (all of whom are, I am sure, perfectly lovely people), but when I read the Slytherin House descriptors, you know what my immediate emotional response was?
"Oh lord, no! She means people like my family!"
As it happens, you see, I really don't get on too well with the rest of my family.
The affective fallacy is a double-edged sword. ;-)
This is also, however, largely why I always find myself feeling so very uncomfortable by the "like father, like son" sentiments expressed by the series. For heaven's sake, don't any apples fall far from the tree in the Potterverse?
It annoys me, it does, and while I'd like to think that my annoyance is purely philosophical and ethical, deep down inside, I know better.
-------------
Eileen also mentioned the possibility that for some readers, Cheering the Slyths is just a roundabout way of Dissing the Gryffs.
Eileen:
And, if you have unresolved issues with Oliver Wood, as I do, you just might start cheering on Marcus Flint, as I ended up doing. And that's helped on by the fact that we don't know anything about Flint.
You really must tell us about your...issues with Wood sometime, you know, Eileen. You really must. Is there some unpleasantly cliquish RL jock lurking around somewhere behind that antipathy?
'Cause I have to say, Oliver Wood was such a flat-liner for me that I didn't even have a mental image of his physical appearance until I was led to one by, er, fanfic contamination. And that's really unusual for me. I tend to visualize things quite vividly while reading fiction. Oliver Wood, though? Nah. He was just a blank slate in my mind.
Good old Marcus Flint, on the other hand, I visualized quite clearly. So strange, how that works!
Eileen, who is considering writing an overview of the portrayal of Slytherin in fanfiction, and how it relates to reader uneasiness with the canon portrayals, but thinks that might be a little too ambitious
Too ambitious? For a Slytherin sympathizer like you? Nonsense!
Seriously. I'd love to read this. Please write it.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on February 2, 2003 1:20 AM
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