Deathly Hallows: Page 389
Harry and Ron's ridiculous fake blackberries, the Ministry's vicious pursuit of muggle-borns, why "The Taboo" is the most impressive magic we've ever seen, and Voldemort's literary mental state.
Good morning! Welcome to another issue of Potter Pages. This is a free post, which come out every Friday morning: to support the newsletter in a more concrete way, you can upgrade to paid for $5 a month or $30 a year; you’ll get access to bonus posts and commenting, and the feeling of improving the world by supporting a newsletter that analyzes how stupid Harry and Ron are. Today, we look at page 389 of Deathly Hallows. Enjoy!
Page 389 of Deathly Hallows is all smiles at the start. Harry is so happy, he can hardly keep a straight face. A mysterious silver doe has just guided him to the Sword of Gryffindor, which he and Ron have used to destroy the locket. One horcrux is down, Ron is back, and the trio seems to have a powerful, mysterious ally, not to mention a weapon they can use to destroy the other horcruxes.
Hermione, on the other hand, is still annoyed at Ron’s sudden reappearance. It’s hard to call her wrong. Ron probably came back in the best way possible, what with destroying the horcrux and saving Harry’s life and bringing the sword with him, but still, Hermione has been bottling up an awful lot of emotions in the weeks since Ron left, and now that he’s back, she finally has an outlet. It’s strange that she’s still annoyed on this page, though: this takes place the day after Ron returns, even though it seemed like Hermione had gotten all of her anger out the previous night, and had even turned slightly mischievous and joking by the time the trio went to sleep. Apparently she’s had time to think about it, and she’s decided that she couldn’t just vent her anger in a one-time burst and be rid of it: she’s genuinely annoyed at Ron, and he’s going to have to deal with that for a while.
Hermione’s anger is especially evident in the next paragraph. Harry and Ron manage to get some time to themselves on the pretense of looking for blackberries, in what by all indications is a hedge that very clearly doesn’t have any blackberries. They seem to think they’re clever, but to me it’s fairly obvious that Hermione is fully aware of what’s going on, and just isn’t really interested in being around either Harry or Ron right now.
I mean, just for a start, there’s no reason that Harry and Ron would have to take an extended blackberry picking trip; all you need is one. As Hermione explains later in the book, while Gamp’s Law says that you can’t conjure food from nothing, you can increase the amount if you already have some. Just pick a single blackberry, and Hermione can turn it into enough to feed a village.
What’s really going on here, I think, is that the entire trio is fully aware, but nobody overtly says it to anyone else, that this isn’t blackberry picking for practical reasons: this is more of a mental health retreat. Ron needs to talk, Harry needs to listen, and Hermione needs to avoid the other two. This isn’t a particularly foreign concept: people go apple picking all the time because it’s fun and outdoorsy and relaxing, even though it’s obviously easier to buy a bag of apples at the supermarket. But Harry and Ron are taking it to another level: they’re doing an obviously recreational activity and pretending that they’re on an essential survival mission. It’s as if two friends decided to meet up at a bowling alley, but didn’t want their wives to know they were just having fun, so they told their wives, “I wish I could stay home with you, but the doctor says my hair will fall out if I don’t bowl six games a month.”
Harry and Ron sometimes remind me of the classic American male sitcom character. Not a particular character, but that classic archetype: Ralph Kramden/Fred Flintstone/Homer Simpson/Doug Heffernan/etc. They think they’re incredibly clever, a step ahead of everyone else, and sometimes they are, but only because everyone else is laughing at how ridiculous they are. I mean, seriously: here’s a scene that must have taken place a few minutes earlier.
Hermione is looking grumpy. Harry enters.
Harry: “Hey Hermione...we’re going to...uh...pick blackberries. Probably not together, we won’t talk or anything, just getting blackberries.”
Hermione stares, not sure whether to guffaw or slap him. She decides to keep the charade going to see what Harry comes up with.
Hermione: “Oh? Are there blackberries nearby?”
Harry: “Yeah...uh...in the...hedge.”
Hermione: “What hedge?”
Harry, now confident in his lie, responds: “The hedge. Out there, it’s a hedge. Big hedge.”
Hermione: “What do we need blackberries for?”
Harry: “Um...we’re making jam.”
So, while they’re out fake blackberry picking, Harry catches Ron up on everything that’s gone on. Then Ron explains to Harry what he’s seen out in the real world. There’s a line that’s thrown in there, before the next big moment: Ron mentions “the various desperate attempts of Muggle-borns to evade the Ministry.” For a start, I wonder how Ron knows about these various attempts. He’s been staying with Bill and Fleur; it’s not like he’s undercover at the Ministry. But let’s say there’s a completely sensible explanation: he’s reading about the attempts in the Prophet, or something. This is just terrible to hear. It’s likely an allusion to the Holocaust, when European Jews had to use increasingly difficult, desperate means to hide from the Nazis. Indeed, a lot of the actions of the Ministry in this book are allusions to Nazi Germany (interestingly, that’s probably emphasized more in the movie than the book itself).
The allusion here is a little subtle, but put together with other parts of the book, it becomes quite clear. We hear later on from Dirk Cresswell that the Ministry is taking Muggle-borns to Azkaban; they’ve quite literally got a concentration camp going out there. At the Ministry, Umbridge is doing genealogical examinations of suspected Muggle-borns, with the outcomes predetermined and little or no scrutiny or oversight. The Wizarding World is a completely failed, fascistic state right now. What’s especially revealing is that this all happened because of one person: the imperiused Pius Thicknesse. It’s obvious that in the Wizarding World, there’s no working system of checks and balances. Once you get the guy at the top, no one else in government can resist, and the people themselves don’t have enough power to change anything quickly enough. The weakness of the Wizengamot has never been more obvious.
Meanwhile, listening to Ron’s story, Harry, completely incidentally, almost ruins everything. When Ron brings up “the taboo,” and mentions that Harry and Hermione have stopped saying Voldemort’s name, Harry — there’s some more Doug Heffernan energy at work here — almost responds (I’m paraphrasing) “you mean Voldemort?” Fortunately Ron manages to shout him down just in time, because had Harry said the name, he would have instantly broken every protective enchantment hiding the trio from the rest of the wizarding world, and summoned gangs of Death Eater sympathizers directly to their location.
The question, I think, is obvious: how the hell can they do that?
Two elements of The Taboo merit analysis. First, there’s the “breaking protective enchantments” one: where saying the name, without imbuing it with any magic or meaning to do anything, can still cause magical disturbances to happen that break spells. Second, there’s the instant detection and location: as soon as anyone says the name, basically, they’re surrounded by snatchers, who seem to be little more than deputized Death Eaters. We’ll take these two in turn.
As far as the first element is concerned, this is completely beyond the reach of any other magic that we’ve seen so far. Obviously, a powerful wizard can remove a protective charm that someone else has cast. But they have to at least be where the spell is. This is a completely different magical plane: Voldemort has somehow manipulated magic so that a given sound can effectively become its own magical agent. The only way I can imagine this being possible is that Voldemort somehow has access to the fundamental levers of magic, the great mysterious force that flows in wizards. It’s not like anyone can just wave a wand and say “from now on, anyone who uses the word ‘sriracha’ will turn green!” This takes a level of access to magic that even Voldemort, until now, didn’t seem to have.
It has to, because think about the implications. Someone is listening to the entire wizarding world, and that’s not an exaggeration at all. The taboo only kicks in when you say “Voldemort,” but something has to be listening to hear you say “Voldemort.” The taboo doesn’t have any idea who anyone is — Harry manages to convince the snatchers, later on, that he’s someone named “Vernon Dudley” — so it’s not like it’s only capturing a pre-loaded set of people; it’s literally listening to the entire country for the word “Voldemort.” Magic itself is listening to Wizards. The taboo, I think, is the single greatest demonstration of Voldemort’s power, and I don’t even think it’s debatable. He’s literally created a surveillance system that covers the entire country.
And it’s not just surveillance: it’s instant reaction. The moment anyone says “Voldemort,” they’re surrounded by hostile forces. This, frankly, is Voldemort’s shining moment as a general: he’s created a system that pretty much instantly allows him to locate and capture his enemies. Whatever communication and coordination system the Death Eaters are using to follow the taboo, it’s pretty much airtight: as soon as Harry violates the taboo, for instance, the trio is instantly surrounded by a large gang of snatchers. That means that as soon as he said the name, the snatchers somehow got an alert that let them all instantly apparate to the right place. There was no thought that went into it, no pausing to search the area: it’s seconds from name to total domination and surrender.
The taboo is an unbelievable magical accomplishment, that’s for sure. There’s only one problem: Voldemort chose the wrong word to use. It’s true that members of the Order of the Phoenix tend to use the name more often than ordinary, everyday wizards, so tabooing the name might help root them out. But Voldemort is particularly interested in Harry, who is prophecied to kill him or be killed by him, so by tabooing his own name, he’s diluted his resources. Rather than choosing a taboo word that was Order-specific, Voldemort should have gone all-in and chosen one that was Harry-specific.
The answer? It’s obvious: Hermione. All kinds of people mention Voldemort’s name: members of the Order, but also just random people who say it by accident. Who’s mentioning Hermione’s name? Maybe a few miscellaneous people here and there, the Weasley’s and some Hogwarts students, but it’s mostly just Harry and Ron. “People mentioning Hermione’s name” must be a smaller subset, and one of more interest to Voldemort, then “people saying Voldemort.”
What’s interesting is that Voldemort makes a choice based on conflict and war, when the choice that examined friendship and relationships would have been far more effective. I think I’m digging deeper here than Rowling ever did, but it says an awful lot about Voldemort that his taboo isn’t as effective as it could be because he can only think of people as enemies, rather than as friends of others.
Still, though, while it’s not as actively scary as some other scenes, the taboo is probably Voldemort at his most powerful and dangerous. This is Voldemort when he’s not distracted by nonsense: he’s not running around hiding his snake inside Bathilda Bagshot or kidnapping Muggle Studies teachers. When Voldemort gives himself time to think and actually uses his powers instead of just going all-in on cartoon villainy, he’s incredibly dangerous. That’s why the trio is so lucky that he’s completely irrational and emotionally unstable. When you tell Voldemort that you’re going to pick blackberries, he doesn’t laugh at how stupid you are; he just kills you, and doesn’t get any blackberries.