Deathly Hallows: Page 100
Wizarding Constitutional Law, Lockhart's journalistic integrity, the trio's dumb luck, and why Ron needs to stop following his own train of thought.
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Page 100 of Deathly Hallows starts in the middle of a chaotic, funny scene: Ron is mocking Mrs. Weasley, who has gone sort of crazy in the lead-up to Bill and Fleur’s wedding.
“Ginny’s probably left a speck of dust on a poxy napkin ring,” Ron says. “I dunno why the Delacours have got to come two days before the wedding.”
Jokes about women going crazy over wedding preparations are nothing new: Dave Barry has written dozens of them. It’s funny to see them in a magical context, though, because it really does drive home the point that we’re all alike in our nervousness over lack of control. Mrs. Weasley can wave her wand, and in mere seconds can accomplish wedding feats that take muggle couples months. Wizards can conjure beautiful invitations and thick, luxuriously-textured envelopes out of thin air; they can alter a dress and conjure a fine lace veil with a flick of the wrist; they can conjure beautiful flowers, the finest china, and fluttering doves without breaking a sweat. And still, Mrs. Weasley is running around losing her mind because despite the fact that, for goodness’ sake, she can do magic, she’s still not immune to worry.
This makes me wonder: obviously, there are some things that you can’t conjure with magic (like food, one of the five exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration). But are there laws about what people can and cannot conjure? There’s no magical reason that a Wizard couldn’t conjure a brick of solid gold, or a diamond the size of a grapefruit, or a gigantic wad of cash, but are there laws against doing so? Come to think of it, there’s probably next-to-zero low-skill manufacturing in the Wizarding World. There’s manufacturing, but it involves high-skill magic or artisanal craftsmanship that ordinary people can’t do: things like wand-making and manufacturing broomsticks and whoever makes that tiny, perfect moving model of the solar system. But why would anyone manufacture plastic cups or hats or paper? You can just conjure them, once you’ve learned how.
It makes me think of the Great Depression, and of Wickard v. Filburn. In the case, the Supreme Court ruled that the government had the power to regulate how much wheat a farmer grew on his or her farm, even if the farmer didn’t sell the wheat but just planted it, harvested it, and consumed it himself, or used it to feed his animals. The government is allowed to regulate “commerce…among the several states,” which has been broadly interpreted since the 1930s, so no one disputed that the government was allowed to regulate the broader wheat market. But Filburn, the farmer, argued that his wheat had nothing to do with the interstate wheat market: his farm was its own self-contained wheat system, so governmentally-established wheat limits didn’t apply to him. The Supreme Court disagreed. The court basically reasoned that by growing more wheat than he was allowed on his farm and using it to feed his animals, Filburn was impacting the interstate market for wheat, because it meant there was less wheat (or maybe more; I sort of get bogged down in the theory, and lose track of the movement of the actual wheat) being sold on the open market than there otherwise would have been. Thus, because it impacted interstate commerce, the government was allowed to regulate it.
The Ministry of Magic doesn’t have the Commerce Clause, at least that we know of, but I wonder: are there laws saying, for instance, that if you conjure a chair, you have to pay a tax on that chair, which goes into a government fund that gets redistributed to wizards who make chairs? If not, then there’s zero incentive for anyone to manufacture most things, since wizards can just conjure them. On the other hand, maybe manufacturing just isn’t a very important industry for wizards, for the same reason: most wizards can just conjure the things they need. So it might be an industry that the government pretty much ignores.
One other note on this first line: for a long time, I didn’t know what “poxy” meant. I learned by accident from a British friend that it means, basically, “small and mostly unimportant.” So that’s what Ron thinks of napkin rings. It has nothing to do with epoxy or pixies, even though for a while I thought it must.
To Ron’s question about the Delacours coming early, Hermione responds that Gabrielle is a bridesmaid and she needs to be there for the rehearsal dinner, and she’s too young to come alone. Maybe, but I wonder whether this is a reference to her competence or her emotional intelligence. In a literal sense, she could make it to The Burrow on her own; just set up a portkey, and she’s there effortlessly. But maybe she just can’t handle the emotional process of taking a transnational portkey by herself. There’s also the fact that Voldemort has infiltrated the Ministry, so everyone is being watched, and it’s just a dangerous time in general, so the Delacours can be excused for not wanting their daughter to travel alone to a strange house in the English countryside.
Far more interesting, though, is what Hermione is looking at as she answers: Break with a Banshee, by Gilderoy Lockhart. To be exact, she “pore(s) over it indecisively.” Despite the fact that Lockhart has been pretty conclusively proven to have been a fraud, and she’s seen him in the hospital without full possession of his mind, she still can’t convince herself that his books just aren’t helpful.
Are they, though? Now that I think about it, Lockhart’s books sound a lot less like outright fabrications, and a lot more like embellished works of journalism. Lockhart, after all, has talked about how hard he had to work to write his books: he would only modify his victims’ memory after he’d learned exactly how they’d done what they did, down to minute detail, so that he could put it in the book. So maybe Hermione has calculated that while the author was proven to be a fraud, that was for a very simple reason: he falsely replaced the third person with the first person. He made the books about him, when they were really about others. The only reason he would have exhaustively investigated how the actual events happened, presumably, is if he was actually going to put them in his books, and Hermione is smart enough to know this. So perhaps there’s still some value to reading a Lockhart book: even though the “Lockhart” part is probably false, there’s a good chance that the events and methods he describes in his books are absolutely true. Does Hermione know this? Probably. Is it sort of pretextual, a reason Hermione can give for bringing the book that she actually wants because she hasn’t quite shaken her second-year crush on her old Defense Against the Dark Arts professor? Also probably.
After Ron remarks that “guests aren’t going to help mum’s stress levels,” Hermione changes the subject. Specifically, she says they need to talk about their actual plan: how they’re going to hunt down the horcruxes, and where they’re going to start looking. It’s a good question, and given that it’s literally all of their lives and the entire wizarding world at stake, you’d think the trio would have thought a little bit more about it.
Harry, at this point, wants to start in Godric’s Hollow. As we learn later, Voldemort saw this coming a mile away, and prepared a trap in the form of a snake with part of a soul inside it, hidden inside a dead historian (not mad-libs). You’d think he could have set up a trap that was a little more effective and less of a danger to his horcrux — he could have set it up, for instance, so that when Harry got to his parents’ grave, a giant anvil fell on his head — but regardless, the key point is that Voldemort knows exactly what Harry wants, and Harry knows that this is a possibility but refuses to think of anything else. So Harry’s part of the plan, so far, isn’t very well thought-out at all. Then again, Hermione and Ron don’t have any leads on horcrux locations either. They’ve got five days before they leave, and there is absolutely no plan in place.
Fortunately, we know that the first place they go, #12 Grimmauld Place, contains the lead on the first horcrux that will eventually set the whole journey in motion. Here’s the question this brings up: just how much of this did Dumbledore orchestrate, and how much was true dumb luck? As far as the locket is concerned, I suppose there’s an outside chance that Dumbledore could have been casually told about the heavy locket that turned up as the trio was cleaning up Grimmauld Place for the order; he could have connected it to the locket in Hepzibah Smith’s memories, and reasoned that Regulus Black must have stolen the locket and somehow had it transported back to Grimmauld Place. So there’s a chance — it seems incredibly unlikely, but it’s a chance — that Dumbledore knew the trio would get to Grimmauld Place, and would find what they needed there.
If he did know this, though, it raises several strange questions. For one, Dumbledore never saw the note from R.A.B., and it seems unrealistic to the point of ridiculousness to suggest that Dumbledore somehow knew there would be a note inside a fake horcrux that he also knew R.A.B. would leave behind. And without the note from R.A.B., I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the trio would never have found the locket. How could they? Kreacher isn’t telling, and it’s not like they would ever have thought to ask him. “Hey Kreacher, you know how you’re always calling us ‘blood traitors’ and ‘mudbloods’ and ‘filthy scum’ and all that? Well, totally different subject, very random question, and no particular reason, but we’re just wondering if you’ve helped a dead master destroy a horcrux?”
There’s also another question: if Dumbledore knew that the locket was at Grimmauld Place, why did he take Harry to the cave? There’s no information that Harry needs in the cave: the only information the trio gets out of it are clues that the actual horcrux is at #12 Grimmauld Place, which, if Dumbledore knew, he could have just told them. He could have avoided endangering his school and drinking the debilitating horror potion, and could have actually shown Harry how to destroy a horcrux. Those who disagree might suggest that he needed to take Harry to find the horcrux in order to provide a pretext for the Death Eaters to enter the castle, thus setting up the all-important moment when he finds himself on the Astronomy Tower, ostensibly alone with Draco. But Dumbledore could have done this in any number of ways; he could have just actually gone out for a drink, as he was pretending to when he took Harry to the cave.
Beyond that, there’s only one potential explanation, and it’s not really an explanation at all: it’s something like “Dumbledore wanted Harry to grow from the experience.” I’d say this doesn’t make sense, except for the fact that we know Dumbledore well enough that it kind of makes sense. And — spoilers — they find the horcruxes eventually, so everything turns out fine, besides, you know, several deaths.
We go on, and the page ends just before the next part of the conversation begins. Harry muses to himself about how his parents graves are only part of his attraction to Godric’s Hollow; he just thinks the place must hold answers for him. This is one of those moments when Harry starts to get annoying: it’s as if he’s realized that his entire life is really a book, and because of that, starts thinking that his entire life has to start playing out like literary fiction. It’s like when Michael Scott describes a scenario he’s invented in which he’s spending time with his fake girlfriend in New York: “we spend the rest of the day walking around slo-mo, drinking latte.” Yes, the connections between Harry Potter and The Office will continue, by the way: be ready for them.
So Harry, because the place holds answers for him, announces again that he wants to go back to Godric’s Hollow, and Hermione responds, don’t you think Voldemort might think of that? And the entire extent of Harry’s reaction, paraphrased, is “oh...I hadn’t thought of that.” And then, as Harry tries to think of a response, Ron speaks up, “evidently following his own train of thought.”
The trio should think about following Robert’s Rules of Order, or something like that. What they have is a really unique situation, where, because the government is completely compromised, it falls to a more-or-less random group of 17-year-olds to save the world, more or less because they happened to be a somewhat powerful guy’s favorite students. It would be sort of like if the United States was attacked, and the government wouldn’t admit they were attacked, and through a wild set of circumstances, a group of kids had to save the country, led by a ringleader who had access to a bunch of secret information because he once took a painting lesson from George W. Bush. So it’s a weird situation, and not one in which 17-year-olds should find themselves without much choice in the matter, but still, they should recognize how important it is that they succeed at what they’re doing, and start acting like it. Take it seriously, guys!
“Ron,” Hermione should say tersely, shutting down the back and forth and making Ron do a double-take. “This is serious. We’ve got to work together and figure out what we’re going to do. Stop following your own train of thought.”
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