Thursday, August 04, 2005
Meandering Thoughts on Pensives and Worst Memories
So, I've been arguing over in other people's journals about whether any of the handwriting in the Half-Blood Prince's book is Lily's. Thus far, the fact that there appears to be no discrepancy in the handwriting leads me to believe that no, it's all one person's, and that person is Snape.
Now, I like the Snape-Lily friendship idea, don't get me wrong -- I just can't get past the handwriting problem. Even without the book, though, I can't deny that there's evidence for their friendship having existed. (Actually, the evidence seems a lot flimsier now that I've realised a crucial timeline issue. See edit below.)
This got me to thinking about OotP, though, and "Snape's Worst Memory". It's been argued, particularly after HBP, that the memory was "Snape's worst" not because he was taunted by the guys he was always taunted by, but because he called Lily a Mudblood and thus ended the one friendship that meant something to him.
Harry thinks that Snape put this memory in the Pensieve because he did not want Harry to have access to it during the Occlumency lessons. I've always had a bit of a problem with this, because it doesn't make sense, exactly, that a memory can just disappear into a bowl. If that's the case, then how can you remember it enough to pick it out of the Pensieve? How can Dumbledore speak of his Pensieved memories in HBP before he and Harry jump in, if he's taken them out of his head? (A related digression: how does one get out of a Pensieve on one's own? Thus far Harry has always had someone come with him and lead him out (Dumbledore in HBP) or he's been joined by someone and yoinked out when that someone finds him sneaking around in it (Dumbledore in GoF and Snape in OotP).)
And now we know a bit more about Pensieves after JKR's interview with TLC and Mugglenet. She says, "But the Pensieve recreates a moment for you, so you could go into your own memory and relive things that you didn't notice the time." She doesn't say anything about, "The Pensieve rips a thought out of your head and lets you hide it". It seems to me that, despite what Harry thinks, that Pensieves are useful not so much to dump a memory outside of one's skull, thereby making it inaccessible to a Legilimens, but as a means of more scrupulously scrutinizing one's own -- and other's -- remembrances in the most objective way possible. When you put a memory into a Pensieve, you can see things within it that you might have missed in your own recollection within your head. You can pay attention to the details and relive the memory without it being wholly coloured by your initial experience of it.
Snape says to Harry in OotP, "The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by any invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing" (UK ed. p469); it just doesn't scan that one could simply yank out a memory to keep it hidden. And if Snape were hiding memories in Dumbledore's Pensieve, I would think they would be memories more crucial to the work of the Order, and he would be far more concerned about keeping them away from a master Legilimens like Voldemort rather than untrained and resistant Harry.
So why did Snape put the memory of his schooldays in the Pensieve before Harry's lesson?
Was it because there was something there Snape wanted to observe more carefully? Was he just masochistically reliving the pain of Lily's rejection, or searching for something that would rationalise or justify his (and her) behaviour? (Probably not; see edit below.) Or was it an elaborate set-up for Harry -- allowing him to see the depositing of the memories, then leaving the Pensieve in plain access -- since Snape suspected that Harry would let curiosity get the better of him, and then would see precisely how his father and his friends had behaved in their youth? (Though that doesn't quite fit with the apparent rage Snape displays when he finds Harry perusing his thoughts.)
It just doesn't add up to me, in any case.
Incidentally, if Snape's "worst memory" (something we get only from the chapter title -- is it really his "worst"?) was a break with Lily, was the issue here his calling her "Mudblood" and her never speaking to him again -- or, did he feel that perhaps she had betrayed him in some way, like spreading his Levicorpus spell all around the school, thereby allowing people like James and Sirius to use it against him?
EDIT: Disregard most of the above paragraph, because
Snape's Worst Memory took place during the last month of his fifth year, and the Advanced Potions textbook was a sixth year book. If Snape had been jotting down notes in the book, it would have been during his sixth year, and if Lily were to help him with his annotations at all, she would need to be close, perhaps as a partner, to him during her sixth year.
DUDE. That's a big, fat point that I hadn't seen brought up with the Snape-Lily handwriting arguments yet. So if Lily and Snape were friends in NEWT Potions and doodled all over one anothers' books, then the "Worst Memory" can't be his worst because he loses Lily. It also means they'd have to reconcile after this display of malice and namecalling. Also, it means his Levicorpus spell was making the school rounds before he may have been paired with any lovely young Gryffindors in NEWT-level Potions.
It doesn't rule out that they might have been lab partners in Potions before -- but that seems like something the Marauders would have noticed, as they would all have been in the same class at that point.
This whole Sekrit Friendz thing is looking much less likely.
Also, on an unrelated note, I love when I notice things like this:
"How come I saw through the snake's eyes if it's Voldemort's thought's I'm sharing?" (p470)
Snape says it's because Voldemort was "possessing" the snake at the time -- but it seems in light of HBP that perhaps Nagini being a Horcrux allowed him to see into the snake's mind. Interesting. I wonder if Harry has any way to connect to the other Horcruxes -- the ones that are inanimate.
| 1:55 AM |
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