Severus and the Dark Lord (Snapedom March Challenge)

My official response to the March Challenge at Snapedom. Verbatim repost.

All right, since it’s the end of March and I apparently have time to write insanely long responses to other people’s challenge entries, I might as well go ahead and attempt to put my thoughts on Sev and Voldie into some kind of order. Be warned that this is not a proper essay arguing a point, but merely a long (very long!) ramble about my thoughts on different aspects of Sev and Voldemort’s relationship. Tangents, long detours, etc. may be ahead.

Response to Janus’ Post on Sev and Voldemort [at Snapedom]

This is (yet another) repost from snapedom, this time of my response to Janus’  March Challenge entry on Severus and Voldemort. Rather long, and I suggest you read Janus’ original post first.

Sev’s Own Personal Columbine (repost from Snapedom)

The piece below is something I cooked up on the fly and posted to Snapedom a few days ago – where it has aroused somewhat more controversy than I expected (the HMS STFU’s response was, OTOH, sadly predictable). I’ve reposted it verbatim below; like most of my other posts it really only touches on some things I’d like to go deeper into, and feels at best half-finished. However, given that I still have at least two proper essays yet to be completed and posted, a rewrite of this might be a while in the making. Hopefully it will get done.

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This isn’t really a response to the [Snapedom] March challenge, since I’m not going to touch on Voldemort in any depth. Hopefully I’ll get my planned challenge response done in time (as usual I’m probably trying to cover too much in it). In the meantime, though, I thought I’d post some musings on a somewhat related topic – Severus, Hogwarts and the DE’s – which came to me the other day when I was reading the cover story of the latest issue of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. I’ll have to take a quick detour through the article and some related stuff before I get to Sev directly.

The article was about Tim Kretschmer, the 17-year-old perpetrator of a recent school shooting in southwestern Germany (see Winnenden School Shooting) – the usual attempt at answering the normal questions: “Why? What was wrong? Who was this person, that he did this?” etc. In themselves neither the article nor the incident struck me as particularly extraordinary in comparison with other such shootings and their aftermaths – tragic and senseless, of course (and my heart goes out to the victims’ families) – but sadly not unusual. The number of such incidents here in the US alone is frightening, but as this tragedy shows they are not restricted to America. Such incidents have occured in Finland, Germany, Denmark, Canada and Scotland, to name a few. Rather, what struck me was precisely the fact that such outbreaks of violence in schools on the part of students are not unusual, and (as a moment of research on the internet proved) are not a particularly recent phenomenon either. Such incidents have a history in the US alone stretching back to at least 1966 (the U of Texas at Austin massacre, 17 dead), and – if one includes the Bath School disaster as an incident of this type (questionable, as it was carried out by a member of the board rather than a student) – even back to 1927.

Oddly, despite the frequency of such incidents, the creation of a standard ‘profile’ of a proto-school-shooter seems not to be feasible. The perpetrators of such attacks historically came from varying backgrounds – some came from apparently normal, happy homes, others were children of divorce or were foster children. Nor were they all your standard ‘loner’ – some were, but others had circles of friends. One of the few constants, however, is the presence of bullying, and of a sense (on the part of the perpetrators) of victimization at the hands of and alienation from their peers and the wider school society. Katherine Newman at Princeton has pointed out that, often the perpetrators “are ‘joiners’ whose attempts at social integration fail … [and that the] shootings seem as though an attempt to adjust their social standing and image, from ‘loser’ to ‘master of violence.’” (1)

Sometimes a sense that the school’s faculty and staff are ignoring the problem of bullying is also present, as the Wiki article on Columbine points out: “Some commentators charged that school administrators and teachers at Columbine had long condoned a climate of bullying by the so-called jocks or athletes, allowing an atmosphere of outright intimidation and resentment to fester which, they claimed, could have helped trigger the perpetrators’ extreme violence.” (2) The article in Der Spiegel brought up the issue bullying in connection with the prevalence of feelings, not only of depression, but also in particular of helplessness and sometimes self-hate in the perpetrators, who have nearly always been young men.

And it was this sense of helplessness that sparked a mental connection to Severus for me. Think about it for a moment. Think about the infamous Pensieve memory, and what’s really going on in that scene. Why and how is this particular memory Severus’ “worst” memory, when (as has repeatedly been pointed out) he’s got years’ worth of memories as a DE involving things objectively worse than humiliation and de-pantsing to choose from? Partly, of course, is the fact that this is the moment where everything with Lily breaks down (ignore for the moment, if you please, the problematic nature of their supposed friendship). But I’m willing to bet that another aspect of this incident that makes it so very unpalatable is the absolute sense of helplessness that Sev must be feeling – he’s physically helpless (bound or hanging in the air), verbally helpless (soapsuds, then too emotional to be rationally articulate), magically helpless (no wand), and emotionally helpless (he knows he needs help but is too embarrassed by that and by the fact that it’s a girl – and not even a member of his own house! – who’s rescuing him in front of the entire school to be anything other than humiliated and angry; he’s probably quite aware that he’s a pawn in Lily and James’ little mating dance; and to top it off at the end he’s got the guilt of the Mudblood-slur weighing on him too.) He’s helpless, he knows it, and virtually nobody is doing anything other than laugh at him for it. And his helplessness leads him to destroy his connection to his one real ally and friend, the person who he values more than any other, permanently. Considering how much Severus seems to value self-sufficiency and his well-known abhorrence of open displays of emotion, which he considers “weak,” I wager that Severus probably hates being helpless more than anything, especially after the incident by the lake. And he therefore wants to avoid this feeling at all costs. After five solid years of four-on-one bullying (ignored and therefore tacitly condoned by the administration) and the constant threat of attack, with nobody to back him up, he probably feels that he’s always one short step away from being helpless again, and so likely wants to do something about it, preferably something to permanently remove the threat.

Rereading the Der Spiegel article with this in mind, I really started to wonder what might have happened had Severus not been so thoroughly roped in by the group of proto-DE’s occupying Slytherin – or, to put it another way, what might have happened had Harris and Klebold, or Cho, or Tim K., been surrounded since childhood with a specific ideology of bigotry and, at school, a group of friends who were all proto-members of the corresponding hate group. After all, at the time when Sev was probably making the decision to join the DE’s (his last year or two of school into his first year or two afterward) the key individuals responsible for making Sev’s school years a living hell were all closely connected to the DE’s opposite number (the Order) and were gleefully making targets of themselves (“thrice defied” and all that jazz). And in my understanding of Sev’s psychology, I see a definite pattern of extending emotions focused on very personal issues (e.g. Lily) into a broader setting (e.g. –> saving Harry –> the Order –> the war). If love works like this for him, why wouldn’t hate as well? Was joining the DE’s Severus’ own personal Columbine?

I’d like to go further into this, but I’ve gone on long enough for one post here, so for now I’ll leave it at that. It could be theoretically interesting to examine (through meta or fic) the possibility of a Columbine-style incident at Hogwarts, and how the WW might conceivably react. Does the wider WW actually GET such incidents? If not, why, and is this then bound up with the prevalence of Dark Lords? Dumbles certainly, IMHO, seems deeply implicated in creating the dreadful circumstances Sev found himself in and which quite probably had a lot to do with him joining the DE’s. But is he a reliable guide to viewing the typical Hogwarts Headmaster, or a spectacularly bad example of one? So many questions, so little time.

The links I originally had to the Wikipedia articles in question apparently didn’t work, so here they are: (1): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting (2): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre Bath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster UT at Austin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman

Repost: Severus Snape and the Doctrine of the Calvinists (with apologies to Hemmens)

Here’s a semi-organized rant that I posted over at Snapedom a few days back on the subject of Severus as a Catholic figure in a Pseudo-Calvinist world, inspired by Dan Hemmens’ excellent article on Calvinism and Harry Potter. I do eventually intend to do a proper essay on the subject, but for now it’s a start. Reposted in its entirety (minus the excellent and thought-provoking comments – I do suggest you pop over to Snapedom and give them a look-through here).

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I was browsing through some old DH rants and reviews a while back and rediscovered Dan Hemmens’ excellent essay, “Harry Potter and the Doctrine of the Calvinists” posted over at Ferretbrain. Hemmens, IMHO, does a fantastic job in putting together a coherent, workable theory of just what on god’s green earth is going on in the Potterverse and how it can so blatantly propose a clear double standard on just about every major moral issue it touches. My question, after rereading the article, was: what about the characters’ own worldviews, within the books? Particularly Severus’, considering how he fought so hard, for so long, out of an apparent belief that he could in this way somehow make up for his earlier failing/s and thereby earn something – praise, respect, or even just a respite. A change in category, if you like. Redemption. But where does he get this idea, if the world is so clearly and definitively Sorted into the Elect and the Not? You’d think seven years of Hogwarts under the Marauders would have given him a clue, but apparently not. So what gives? What IS his world-view, in comparison with his contemporaries’? Well, I’ve got a theory. More behind the cut.

This is, I warn you, not an actual essay with a proper argument, just some ranting thoughts about how Severus fits into the Potterverse in light of Hemmens’ theory. I intend to come back later and post a proper essay on the subject sometime, with more coverage given to just why the notion of Severus as a Catholic (in the character of his world-view, not necessarily in formal practice) makes a lot of sense to me. In the meantime: I do hope no-one takes offense at anything I say here – I’m not attempting any kind of judgment of any religious tradition, merely examining how the implications of Hemmens’ theory work out on the level of the characters themselves and their world-outlooks. That is: how a Potterverse character’s view of the world can clash, or not, with the view of the world the books themselves lay out, and what this can mean for the characters, including – of course – our poor dear Sev.

Link to Hemmens’ article, a definite read if you haven’t already: http://www.ferretbrain.com/articles/article-161.html

There will be no foolish wand-waving…

…or silly incantations in this blog!

Well, alright, perhaps a few silly incantations from time to time. For the fun of it.

Anyway,  hello all out there and welcome to the dungeons of my mind (or at least the upper basement – the real dungeons are a few levels down). This is the space where I (intend to) come to rant about various subjects having to do with everyone’s favorite Potions Master in a slightly more coherent way than I generally do on forums, and to collect my already-scattered thoughts on this subject from the corners of the internet. I expect also to eventually post my fic here; in the meanwhile I shall provide fic recs from time to time. Please enjoy all offerings at your leisure.

So now we come to the question that – for some of you – probably doesn’t need answering: Why Snape?

Well…the short answer, and most coherent one, is: he’s Snape. Despite JKR’s repeated attempts to belittle her own creation and the industrial-strength psychic blinders she must be wearing if she honestly doesn’t see what a marvelous, complex and beautiful character she has created, there’s something about Severus Snape that simply refuses to be let itself be ignored. There’s a real depth of possibility (and character) there, something that shines through even DH’s clunky prose and even clunkier plotting. The man is, one has to admit, fascinating. And endlessly debatable. And I’m not simply talking about the Is he a White Hat or a Black Hat? discussion – DH pretty much answered that one, at least in the CanonVerse. Rather, it seems to me almost as if in Severus Snape JKR has (accidentally? purposefully? unknowingly?) given us a realistic character moving in a world that is decidedly non-realistic (beyond the simple issue of magic, I mean); it’s a folk-tale-ish, half-allegorical world in which realistic psychology and moral growth/decline sticks out like a sore thumb…or like Severus Snape. And yet, he (almost) fits. There’s some strange alchemy going on between the character and the world though which he moves, it seems, and it just cries out to be interpreted, analysed, sifted and gone through. Unlocked, if you like.

Alohomora.