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Do I run rare? You've changed some
I am still sorting some of my reactions to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I started last night around two in the morning and finished this afternoon at a quarter to one. (Yes, I slept in between.) I think that for the most part J.K. Rowling managed to draw together most of the wildly free-floating plot strands that had accumulated over the course of the series and bring them to a fitting resting point; where the story ends is as it should. I found it much more of a piece than its predecessor. And if she made decisions that did not so much please me, for either tonal or personal reasons—it was not my story, and her decisions are hers. I may write more about this tomorrow, or I may simply go back to proofreading Cavafy. But given my previously disclosed interest in Snape, I might as well mention him here.
I will confess straight off that J.K. Rowling did with Snape exactly what I had been fearing for the last several books: had him die confirmed on the side of Light, redeemed by his love for Lily Evans. Unless very well-earned, I tend to find character death a device for sidestepping complex relationships. I had no particular future blocked out, except insofar as I had vaguely been hoping to see Snape as Headmaster of Hogwarts in twenty years' time, but mostly I would have liked for him and Harry to have had to deal with one another and their whole weight of oddly complementary, not quite congruent past. They are refractions of one another, in the same way that Harry and Voldemort are darkly mirrored, and in some perverse way Snape has been standing as a father to Harry, his feelings for Lily undiminished by her marriage to his schoolyard nemesis and only confirmed by her murder in which he had an unthinking hand—if Harry is the last remaining trace of the woman he loved, then Snape will do everything in his power to preserve the boy, even if his simple existence is a reminder of how much Snape lost. Harry as himself never becomes quite real for Snape, I think. In his green eyes or his wayward dark hair, Snape is always seeing ghosts. And I know that in life we are not always offered the opportunity to work out such knots, but I also know that it's safer to think kindly of people when they're gone, and who in memory can become "probably the bravest man I ever knew" would in fact still have been the bitter bastard who never quite elbowed his way out of adolescence.
But if this was the route Rowling was going to take, then I have to be impressed that she pulled it off. Primarily because of the nature of Snape and Lily's relationship, I think, which turned out to be nicely complicated indeed. She was not, as might have been surmised from Order of the Phoenix, his unattainable adolescent crush turned unrequited obsession; she's his oldest and in some ways his only friend, whom he needs too hungrily to realize how he's turning himself into something she will never want. "But you call everyone of my birth 'Mudblood,' Severus. Why should I be any different?" The disintegration of their friendship is like the proverbial car crash in slow motion, where there's no question about the outcome and you still can't look away. Nor was Snape's the pure and selfless love that would have flattened him into melodrama in a minute—there's an uncomfortable element from the beginning, a skinny, dirty-haired stray in secondhand clothes watching from behind the bushes as a red-haired girl on a swingset soars higher than the laws of gravity should allow and shows her sister how she can make a picked flower beat like a heart. "You've got loads of magic. I saw that. All the time I was watching you . . ." He practically builds a hero-cult around her in the years after her death, when she comes to represent everything that he might have cared for in his sorry life; and I am not so sure that Dumbledore does not play on that guilt and grief in order to keep Harry Potter safe. Perhaps it's not redemption by love after all. Perhaps it's only the same kaleidoscope bits of dark and light we've been seeing all along. And so it is that despite the aftermath of the wizarding war, the deaths and the epilogue, the scene that I find most poignant of everything in the book is from the childhood of these two characters:
The scene dissolved, and before Harry knew it, re-formed around him. He was now in a small thicket of trees. He could see a sunlit river glittering through their trunks. The shadows cast by the trees made a basin of cool green shade. Two children sat facing each other, cross-legged on the ground. Snape had removed his coat now; his odd smock looked less peculiar in the half light.
". . . and the Ministry can punish you if you do magic outside school, you get letters."
"But I have done magic outside school!"
"We're all right. We haven't got wands yet. They let you off when you're a kid and you can't help it. But once you're eleven," he nodded importantly, "and they start training you, then you've got to go careful."
There was a little silence. Lily had picked up a fallen twig and twirled it in the air, and Harry knew that she was imagining sparks trailing from it. Then she dropped the twig, leaned in toward the boy, and said, "It is real, isn't it? It's not a joke? Petunia says you're lying to me. Petunia says there isn't a Hogwarts. It is real, isn't it?"
"It's real for us," said Snape. "Not for her. But we'll get the letter, you and me."
"Really?" whispered Lily.
"Definitely," said Snape, and even with his poorly cut hair and his odd clothes, he struck an oddly impressive figure sprawled in front of her, brimful of confidence in his destiny.
"And will it really come by owl?"
"Normally," said Snape. "But you're Muggle-born, so someone from the school will have to come and explain to your parents."
"Does it make a difference, being Muggle-born?"
Snape hesitated. His black eyes, eager in the greenish gloom, moved over the pale face, the dark red hair.
"No," he said. "It doesn't make any difference."
It's not a lasting idyll. It's not even an alternate history; by this point in the novel, Snape himself is dead, Lily has been dead for seventeen years, and not even the observing presence of Harry can ripple out changes from dead memory. What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation. / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present. But in this moment, they are each for the other a way into a different world—for Severus, an escape from his disastrous family; for Lily, a glimpse into the dangers and wonders of the wizarding life—and forever ten years old, daydreaming in the speckled light, neither of them has any idea what's coming. That stays with me. Ave atque vale, magister.
I will confess straight off that J.K. Rowling did with Snape exactly what I had been fearing for the last several books: had him die confirmed on the side of Light, redeemed by his love for Lily Evans. Unless very well-earned, I tend to find character death a device for sidestepping complex relationships. I had no particular future blocked out, except insofar as I had vaguely been hoping to see Snape as Headmaster of Hogwarts in twenty years' time, but mostly I would have liked for him and Harry to have had to deal with one another and their whole weight of oddly complementary, not quite congruent past. They are refractions of one another, in the same way that Harry and Voldemort are darkly mirrored, and in some perverse way Snape has been standing as a father to Harry, his feelings for Lily undiminished by her marriage to his schoolyard nemesis and only confirmed by her murder in which he had an unthinking hand—if Harry is the last remaining trace of the woman he loved, then Snape will do everything in his power to preserve the boy, even if his simple existence is a reminder of how much Snape lost. Harry as himself never becomes quite real for Snape, I think. In his green eyes or his wayward dark hair, Snape is always seeing ghosts. And I know that in life we are not always offered the opportunity to work out such knots, but I also know that it's safer to think kindly of people when they're gone, and who in memory can become "probably the bravest man I ever knew" would in fact still have been the bitter bastard who never quite elbowed his way out of adolescence.
But if this was the route Rowling was going to take, then I have to be impressed that she pulled it off. Primarily because of the nature of Snape and Lily's relationship, I think, which turned out to be nicely complicated indeed. She was not, as might have been surmised from Order of the Phoenix, his unattainable adolescent crush turned unrequited obsession; she's his oldest and in some ways his only friend, whom he needs too hungrily to realize how he's turning himself into something she will never want. "But you call everyone of my birth 'Mudblood,' Severus. Why should I be any different?" The disintegration of their friendship is like the proverbial car crash in slow motion, where there's no question about the outcome and you still can't look away. Nor was Snape's the pure and selfless love that would have flattened him into melodrama in a minute—there's an uncomfortable element from the beginning, a skinny, dirty-haired stray in secondhand clothes watching from behind the bushes as a red-haired girl on a swingset soars higher than the laws of gravity should allow and shows her sister how she can make a picked flower beat like a heart. "You've got loads of magic. I saw that. All the time I was watching you . . ." He practically builds a hero-cult around her in the years after her death, when she comes to represent everything that he might have cared for in his sorry life; and I am not so sure that Dumbledore does not play on that guilt and grief in order to keep Harry Potter safe. Perhaps it's not redemption by love after all. Perhaps it's only the same kaleidoscope bits of dark and light we've been seeing all along. And so it is that despite the aftermath of the wizarding war, the deaths and the epilogue, the scene that I find most poignant of everything in the book is from the childhood of these two characters:
The scene dissolved, and before Harry knew it, re-formed around him. He was now in a small thicket of trees. He could see a sunlit river glittering through their trunks. The shadows cast by the trees made a basin of cool green shade. Two children sat facing each other, cross-legged on the ground. Snape had removed his coat now; his odd smock looked less peculiar in the half light.
". . . and the Ministry can punish you if you do magic outside school, you get letters."
"But I have done magic outside school!"
"We're all right. We haven't got wands yet. They let you off when you're a kid and you can't help it. But once you're eleven," he nodded importantly, "and they start training you, then you've got to go careful."
There was a little silence. Lily had picked up a fallen twig and twirled it in the air, and Harry knew that she was imagining sparks trailing from it. Then she dropped the twig, leaned in toward the boy, and said, "It is real, isn't it? It's not a joke? Petunia says you're lying to me. Petunia says there isn't a Hogwarts. It is real, isn't it?"
"It's real for us," said Snape. "Not for her. But we'll get the letter, you and me."
"Really?" whispered Lily.
"Definitely," said Snape, and even with his poorly cut hair and his odd clothes, he struck an oddly impressive figure sprawled in front of her, brimful of confidence in his destiny.
"And will it really come by owl?"
"Normally," said Snape. "But you're Muggle-born, so someone from the school will have to come and explain to your parents."
"Does it make a difference, being Muggle-born?"
Snape hesitated. His black eyes, eager in the greenish gloom, moved over the pale face, the dark red hair.
"No," he said. "It doesn't make any difference."
It's not a lasting idyll. It's not even an alternate history; by this point in the novel, Snape himself is dead, Lily has been dead for seventeen years, and not even the observing presence of Harry can ripple out changes from dead memory. What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation. / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present. But in this moment, they are each for the other a way into a different world—for Severus, an escape from his disastrous family; for Lily, a glimpse into the dangers and wonders of the wizarding life—and forever ten years old, daydreaming in the speckled light, neither of them has any idea what's coming. That stays with me. Ave atque vale, magister.
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Yes, very much so, and well said on all counts. There were many things with which I was not satisfied in the book, but Severus Snape was actually not one of them, for the simple reason that while he died, as you say, confirmed on the side of Light, he wasn't all sweetness-and-light, which had been my fear. I also liked the fact that while, yes, he was redeemed by his love for Lily, the fact remains that he was still steeped in the Dark Arts until - and probably beyond - the moment he died. They are a part of who he is, and that never changes. Likewise, though there is a touch of heroism, and he is a brave man, he is not Gryffindor-brave, he's Slytherin-brave. And while Harry does refer to him as "the bravest man I ever knew," that's at least in part because Snape was also one of the people Harry knew who was most constantly plagued by fear. There are those who were more clearly heroic - but they were also more fearless. Snape had the most fear to work through before he could accomplish anything.
I do think that you're quite right that Snape and Harry's relationship is never fully resolved - but I think that was deliberate on Rowling's part. There's a war on. People die. Relationships get cut off in the middle. And at that point, there's so much frenzy and chaos, that Harry can't even stop to mourn for Remus Lupin, much less work things through with Snape.
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I did notice that when the ghosts are summoned up by the Resurrection Stone, Snape is not among them.
There are those who were more clearly heroic - but they were also more fearless. Snape had the most fear to work through before he could accomplish anything.
Yes. And he knows what there is to fear because he's done some of it.
that Harry can't even stop to mourn for Remus Lupin
And that was one of the decisions with which I was not so pleased, not even because the death happens in ellipsis or because Lupin was the character after Snape in which I had the most emotional investment, but because it's another refraction—another child left orphaned, whose parents have sacrificed themselves to keep him and his generation safe—that's never so much as acknowledged by the text. And it's not as though the issue hasn't explicitly been raised in the book, either. There should have been more consequence. Instead, nineteen years later their son is snogging our Victoire. Excuse me?
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It has reasons to exist, perhaps chief amongst them an attempt at closure-against-sequels, but it doesn't fulfill any other duties placed implicitly upon it.
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I liked the presence of Neville as Professor of Herbology, because I expect he's fantastic at it, and the implication that Harry has more or less grown up into obscurity and that's all right with him. Otherwise, yeah. I didn't need to know how everyone had paired off.
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Yes, and what they named their kids, just so that JKR could release the "Albus Severus" thing--yet (given the flat squishiness) we've nothing on Teddy Lupin. I like that not all of Harry's agemates are visible, though (i.e., surely not everyone paired off and had children within the specified timeframe).
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That's true, and I do like that.
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Heh. Indeed. That's an important distinction.
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As I've said elsewhere, the lack of this discussion is my primary problem with the series, and the one I have the hardest time getting past to enjoy the books. I just can't agree that ambition is a bad thing, even if it is one's foremost characteristic. It all depends on what you do with it.
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Yes. She consistently set up fascinating situations—like opening out the wizarding world to include non-British schools, or the working relationship of the Prime Minister with the Minister for Magic—and then rarely ever explored them in the necessary depth. I consider Snape one of the rare examples where she seems to have thought the implications of a character through.
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...that said, there are still all of these bits of worldbuilding that could have been so fantastic.
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Yes. The scene that just came into focus for me is the finale of Prizoner of Azkaban, where Sirius Black escapes and Snape goes completely spare. At the time, this seems to point to Snape's general instability and unpleasantness, that he'd fly off the handle so violently just because his least favorite student has outwitted him again and one of his boyhood rivals is again at large. It's even a little funny, if you dislike the character enough. But if Snape genuinely believed that Sirius, not Peter Pettigrew, was the man who had betrayed James and Lily Potter to Voldemort—after Snape had promised his loyalty to Dumbledore in exchange for their protection—then it's not funny at all, and it's not for the sake of some petty public-school grudge that Snape wants Sirius back behind bars, and in fact he has a right to wonder what in the hell is Harry playing at, because as far as anyone knows this newfound godfather is the same man directly responsible for his parents' murder. That scene always bothered me, because it seemed so out of character. Now it doesn't. It's not a personal affront; it's old pain raked up again.
And there are so many layers. I don't doubt it's true, what Dumbledore tells Harry at the end of the first book: "Your father did something Snape could never forgive. He saved his life. Funny, the way people's minds work, isn't it? Professor Snape couldn't bear being in your father's debt." Needing James Potter to save his skin from a prank of Sirius Black's? I imagine Snape resented it to the end of his days. But to imply that any protection Harry might receive from Snape is simply paying off that old debt— The truth is the best misdirection.
...that said, there are still all of these bits of worldbuilding that could have been so fantastic.
There's a lot of extraneous snogging.
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I'm still not going to read 7, but I'm glad nonetheless to read that Snape didn't get his grey wiped away at the end.
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That's what caught my attention about Snape in the first place and that's what kept me reading. And so as far back as the fourth or fifth book, I was worrying that J.K. Rowling's plans for him would involve some hidden nobility or long-cherished love or other conventional redemption . . . He stayed unconventional.
I'm still not going to read 7, but I'm glad nonetheless to read that Snape didn't get his grey wiped away at the end.
I'm glad to have let you know!
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Yes. My traditional shorthand for Snape has been "a bastard on the side of Light."
Similarly, I wonder (maybe this is explained) what course Snape would have taken if Lily had gone over to Voldemort's side.
It's never even raised. For all I know, he might have been perfectly content to spend the rest of his life (at least until the Order of the Phoenix caught up with them) as a Death Eater whose wife shared his flair for Potions; and I suspect he would have been much less interesting.
Was he dedicated to her because she was better than him, or just because he liked her?
Because he saw her playing with magic one day, I suppose, and she listened to him, and he liked her. It's only after her death that she becomes his ideal; his Patronus. One wonders what she would have said to him.
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Oh so very yes. That's a perfect description of him. And I love that it stays true.
his ideal; his Patronus.
This was so sad, to me. This was the moment I became totally okay with the arc his character showed throughout the series. This was beautiful. And you're right; one wonders what she would have said. And what she would have thought of him, regardless of what she said.
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That would have been fascinating.
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I liked that that he wasn't, actually; I'm not sure that J.K. Rowling did a very good job with the long-term consequences of things like war, torture, seeing your friends die right before your eyes, but I liked that his final reward was not to sail to the wizardly equivalent of the Grey Havens, but simply to become ordinary. (And the Horcrux-locket had already been a little too reminiscent of the One Ring for my liking.)
late to the party
I actually was reasonably satisfied with the Snape resolution. He is to my mind the series' most interesting character in much the same way that Gollum/Smeagol is the standout in Lord of the Rings.
Rowling has shown no tendency to attempt really complicated or daring things with her characters (consider by contrast Thomas Covenant in Donaldson's first trilogy, who rapes the woman who first befriends him in the Land, in part because he still believes the whole thing's a dream, and then has to deal with very realistic and grim consequences stemming from that act through all three books) so I wasn't surprised Rowling chose a method that wrapped things up neatly. Snape still stayed interesting, in that his motives for acting on the side of right were at their center still selfish...
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Yeah. I'm not sure how else the information could have been conveyed, since she hadn't particularly embedded the tracking of the Elder Wand in the text (so that it would have been unknown to Voldemort, but obvious to the reader), but I did notice there were about two straight chapters of conversation to make up the finale.
He is to my mind the series' most interesting character in much the same way that Gollum/Smeagol is the standout in Lord of the Rings.
He is definitely the character I kept reading for. And worth it, I think.
(consider by contrast Thomas Covenant in Donaldson's first trilogy, who rapes the woman who first befriends him in the Land, in part because he still believes the whole thing's a dream, and then has to deal with very realistic and grim consequences stemming from that act through all three books)
I actually couldn't stand The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, despite the Fisher King and Waste Land symbolism; I got through the first book on recommendations from friends and never went on to the rest. The writing absolutely did not work for me.
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I read the first trilogy as a teen and it blew me away; I think that, for me, the world Covenant discovered and the peripheral made up for his sins. The second trilogy I read more dutifully; it had some spectacular moments but on the whole wasn't as satisfying.
(The writing? Who cares about that? ;-p ... Actually, I recall them as well written, though not particularly flashy.)
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I dunno, maybe I've gotten old and cynical. Much as I enjoyed the Potter books, I can't say they ever held the same wonder I've felt when reading Prydain, Dark is Rising, Earthsea, A Wind in the Door, et.al. I think the books work more on the level of teenage mystery/thrillers (with fantasy/gaming ground rules) than as epics. That said, on that level, they work extremely well.
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I've been wanting Snape to get drunk or otherwise lose control and shout at Harry, "You should have been *my* son, you little bastard!" but it never happened. Well, "The Prince's Tale" was a rush, anyhow. I liked the same moment you do. Almost all the character-building my heart desired, in one huge dose that left me feeling like I'd eaten ten chocolate chip cookies.
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I was hoping to see more of him, especially given his significance to the plot. But you are right; I can't see how she would have managed that without serious shifts in point of view.
I've been wanting Snape to get drunk or otherwise lose control and shout at Harry, "You should have been *my* son, you little bastard!" but it never happened.
Almost all the character-building my heart desired, in one huge dose that left me feeling like I'd eaten ten chocolate chip cookies.
Yes. And while the mechanics annoyed me, the fact that it was now character-building after the fact, inaccessible, made it oddly more powerful for me: here they are planning their futures, and we already know how they end.