All the good in the world you can put inside a thimble and still have room for you and me

[sovay]

In which you learn far more about my reasons for reading Harry Potter than I imagine you ever wanted to know, and it is proven once again that fucked in the head (excuse my Hittite) may be the highest compliment that I can give a character.

From this description, therefore, one should be able to guess my primary reason. It is indeed comprised of two words. Those are: Severus Snape.*

Feel free to start running now.

(Cut for extended rambling. And also a certain amount of self-analysis. But mostly rambling.)

There, it's said. You may leave your respect for me at the door. I am well aware that there are entire fandoms out there devoted to Severus Snape and his manifest charms. I ran across a fansite once wholly devoted to Byronic portraits of Snape, looking darkly antiheroic.** What's written here, you'll have seen before; I doubt I have anything new to offer. But I haven't been able to sleep all night, and I wrote this so as to have it all down on paper, and figured: what the hell. So, without very much ado, let's talk about Snape.

I like complicated characters. (I should hope most people do.) See yesterday's interchange with fleurdelis28: it's not solely the quality of fucked-in-the-head that interests me, because you can name any number of incurably disturbed characters at whom I don't even look twice, but there's also a certain level of moral haziness and characteristic weirdness that tends to catch my attention. This is not to say that I can't imprint on innocents, if they are suitably odd: sweet and awkward Vir Cotto, whose family despises him in the time-honored I, Claudius fashion and who proves unexpectedly intelligent and tenacious, is my second favorite character on all Babylon 5. But Londo Mollari, who could furnish an underworld river from the blood on his hands, is my first. Keeping in mind that I have not yet read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I do understand that Snape does not—so far as I know—have quite Londo's level of moral tarnish. What he does have, however, is complication in spades; and frankly, in J.K. Rowling's universe, that's oddity enough for me to sit up and take notice. ***

At first glance, Severus Snape is a total stock character. As if the sibilance and sneer of his name weren't enough to signal his role, his physical appearance is all stereotypical villainy,**** and most of his actions do nothing to disabuse the reader of this impression. Beneath his billowing black robes and lank black hair, there does not beat a hidden heart of gold. (At least, there damn well better not. If J.K. Rowling decides to take the easy way out and beatify him with love or nobility or secret heroism, it is entirely possible that I will lose most of my respect for her series. Read on.) He plays favorites with his students and does not even bother to hide the fact. He carries a schoolboy grudge down to the son of his old enemy, past most rational limits, and again makes no apologies for his behavior. Bitter, malicious, condescending and unsympathetic, always ready with a cutting remark or a penalty for the pettiest of reasons, he's a student's worst nightmare and frankly can't be that much of a delight at department meetings either. And yet, and yet . . . No, sorry, he's still an absolute bastard. And on the side of Light. And an absolute bastard.

I love this.

One does not cancel the other. Despite his hatred of James Potter, Snape saves Harry's life; despite his resentment of his tormenting schoolfellows, makes for Remus Lupin the wolfsbane potion that allows the werewolf-professor to live a reasonably normal, unmoony life; against great risks, carries out some unspecified errand for Dumbledore; and was apparently something of a double agent in his youth. He has, if looked at coldly, performed many of the actions of a hero—none of which makes him any fairer, better-tempered, or generally more fun to be around. He's not a nice person. He may not even, in the strictest sense of the word, be a very good person. (If nothing else, he displays a marvelous contradiction of degrees: on the grand scale, his moral compass seems to point due honorable; on the interpersonal level, it's swinging wildly and might stall out at any second.) But for a character who initially seemed the summation of every unpleasant teacher ever to blacken the pages of an English school novel, he has this dimension of ambiguity that does not obliterate all his disagreeable characteristics; complicates him without anything so cheap as redemption. He has multiple facets. He is several shades of grey. In short, as much as I worry that J.K. Rowling may be tipping him in one dark-and-light direction or another, he is the nearest thing to a full three-dimensional character I've seen in the whole series—of all the names that one could call Severus Snape, and there are many, "flat" is not really one of them.

Obviously I am curious to know what happens to him in the sixth book, other than the spoilers I have already guessed. I am really hoping he won't die, as that would be far too simplistic an exit for so intricate a character,° and I am deeply afraid that J.K. Rowling will not be able to restrain her tendencies toward traditional melodrama where death cancels all debts and wipes out all sins. The way she's started killing off characters lately, anyone's fair game. On the one hand, I respect that: no one should survive a series simply because they're credited before the title. On the other, I personally think that having to keep living with the consequences of serious life-changing action is much trickier, and consequently more interesting; but I have no evidence that the author agrees. To the bookstore with me tomorrow, then, and we'll see how the body count rises.

Well. That's me and Snape. I did weed out a fair amount of extraneous rambling: past four in the morning, it is not always a good idea to preserve for posterity the thoughts that leap first to mind. But most of it's here.

Questions, comments, howls of outrage . . . ?

*For the purposes of analysis, I would like to state now that I will be speaking primarily of Snape-as-written rather than Snape-as-Alan-Rickman. Not that I dislike Alan Rickman, mind you; exactly the opposite holds true. I was lucky enough to catch him on Broadway in Noel Coward's Private Lives in 2002, and that was one of the best straight plays I have seen in my life. Consequently, I love him as Snape. But he invests the character with a physical and emotional attractiveness that I am not sure J.K. Rowling—at least originally—intended the Potions Master to possess, and as a result much of what intrigues me about the written character collapses into itself. (And Rickman's Snape clearly washes his hair far more often than his literary counterpart, but we’ll leave that aside.)

**Moment of incomprehension. I understand the fascination with Severus Snape. If I were inclined to draw portraits of characters I liked, and had any visual talent whatsoever, I might take a shot at him. But—he’s not handsome. He has no fallen angel's glamor. As written, he is a sharp-faced, sallow, scowling man who rarely smiles without malice and badly needs to wash his hair, and he doesn't brood like a Romantic poet: he glowers, insults your father, and docks your house an unjust number of badly-needed points. None of which precludes some romance in Snape’s life—I don't write these books, and God knows he probably needs some—but I was bewildered by this particular fan's insistence on making him conventionally sexy. Hasn't anyone noticed that unconventionally and unexpectedly sexy is so much cooler? We do not love people because they are beautiful; they are beautiful because we love them. Check out Humphrey Bogart sometime. And with all due respect and adoration for Alan Rickman, let me thank God that he is not Byronic.

***Weirdness is nothing to blink at, here. Pretty much everybody in the wizarding world is a walking eccentricity. There goes one of my primary tools of favorite-character diagnosis.

****More than any other aspect of the world J.K. Rowling had created, and that includes the massive classical references, I think it might have been her willingness to play with—and take full advantage of the reader's knowledge of—the stereotypes of British school fiction in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone that made me pick up Chamber of Secrets. The Snape-Quirrell counterpoint truly impressed me. There's Severus Snape, so clearly presented as the professorial antagonist that the reader bristles after only a few seconds of introduction. A moment later, there's poor, pale Quirrell, shellshocked and stuttering like a World War I invalid, the young professor of such great promise whose own students scare him now—who wouldn't feel sorry for him? The astute reader should be able to realize that some kind of massive switch is being set in motion, that the authorial rug is about to be pulled out from under the literary feet, but the evidence keeps contradicting the intuition. Besides, we’ve been playing to all the obvious archetypes: why stop now? Such reversals and revelations of identity are now as integral to the Harry Potter formula as puzzles or Quidditch or after-the-fact explanations by Dumbledore, but this was the first time around: I was impressed. Not surprised, because I was brought up on Diana Wynne Jones—I've practically been trained to last-minute and well-foreshadowed character flip-flops; see A Tale of Time City, Archer’s Goon, Howl’s Moving Castle, et alii—but since I'd been feeling rather disappointed that Snape seemed exactly as negative as he looked, and I had expected more complexity from a book that my parents gave me for my high-school graduation, I was extremely pleased to see that (a) my instincts were right (b) J.K. Rowling was a less conventional writer than I'd feared. So when Chamber of Secrets came out, I promptly bought it. And, in fact, didn't like it all that much. But Prisoner of Azkaban was worth the wait. Ask me about Remus Lupin some other time.

°I am already a little unhappy with his backstory as revealed in Order of the Phoenix. While I understand that J.K. Rowling might have wanted both to flesh out Snape's character (and that whole knot of characters: James, Lily, Sirius, Remus, Peter) and make him a little less flatly unlikable, the result felt unearned: I'd have been far more interested in watching the character, as an unapologetic bastard, gain the reader's sympathy through his actions in the present day, rather than receive it duty-free because of some trauma in his past. Emotional bruising only goes so far to interest me in a character. And somehow, it streamlines the contradictions. I want thorns.

Comments

[bleedtoblue.livejournal.com]

Bestor, the psi-corps....there's another bad guy with a heart of unremitting evil, yet strangely soft about some things. I enjoyed Bestor a great deal because I am a long time Star Trek fan and the contrast of this character with Chekov was fun. His hatred for mundanes was a beautiful thing, and another parallel of sorts, to HP.

[sovay]

Bester is probably Walter Koenig's best role: I loved the scene where viewers' suspicions about the name were confirmed. (My father and I had been almost one hundred percent certain, but there was still massive re-reading of The Demolished Man to celebrate.) And yes, I hadn't considered it as a Harry Potter parallel before, but his devotion to his lover Carolyn—true and unarguable as it is—does not at all get in the way of his absolute assurance that mundanes are the way of the past, nor does it soften his blank-check morality. He shouldn't be trusted farther than he can be thrown. He has no qualms about using other people until they break. He loves the woman who will bear his child. He sees no contradiction in any of these behaviors . . . I did like that.

[kraada.livejournal.com]

And for those that haven't read it, I highly recommend the Bester books by J. Gregory Keyes.

[sovay]

I didn't read those, even though I really like J. Gregory Keyes' Waterborn and Age of Unreason; I was worried that a trilogy about the character would make Bester too easily explicable. They worked?