Goblet of Fire: Page 297
Hermione's absurd summoning choices, Hogwarts scheduling, a psychoanalysis of Ravenclaw, and the free-for-all wizarding market for muggle goods.
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From the beginning, page 297 of Goblet of Fire is a beautifully weird encapsulation of the Harry Potter series. It’s not particularly action-packed, but it’s such a delightful celebration of magic, and the world that Rowling has built. Right from the beginning of the page, we get one detail after another that basically amount to Rowling taking a deep breath, then cracking her knuckles, and saying “wouldn’t the world be wonderful if it was magical?”
The page starts mid-description: Harry is retroactively narrating Hermione’s experience during their recent Charms class, during which they’ve practiced summoning charms. Hermione, according to the page, had objects zooming towards her all lesson, “as though she were some sort of weird magnet for board dusters, wastepaper baskets, and lunascopes.”
I do have to wonder why Hermione picked summoning targets that seem, when you step back and look closely, like the three worst things she could possibly summon. An entire wastepaper basket? It’s going to dump trash all over you. A board duster (which, I presume, is an old-fashioned chalk eraser)? When you summon it, that’s going to engulf you in a giant cloud of chalk dust. And a lunascope? This is a wizarding instrument that’s basically a big metal spyglass. So Hermione must have excellent faith in her ability to catch, otherwise she’s going to get bludgeoned by a flying lunascope. When you think about it, there’s really no difference — at least at close range — between summoning something and having someone else throw something at you. That works well when it’s something like a ton-tongue toffee, which is small enough to catch in one hand and isn’t going to hurt you if you miss, but...a lunascope? An entire garbage can? A chalk-filled eraser?
Professor Flitwick couldn’t provide feathers or cushions for summoning, like he did, respectively, for levitating and banishing? He couldn’t have his students summon jelly beans or handkerchiefs? For summoning, the first lesson starts right away with trash bins and big brass lunascopes?
Looking closely at the text, however, we see that maybe everything went fine: Hermione, after all, summoned (at least according to Harry’s retelling of the lesson) more than one of each of those items. So she summoned a lunascope, a wastepaper basket, and a chalk eraser, and it all went fine, so she kept at it. Maybe Professor Flitwick chose those items carefully for safe summoning, though for the life of me, I can’t tell you why. The fact that she’s surrounded by lots of these things also implied that Professor Flitwick pretty much filled his classroom with them, so that everyone would have enough to summon, which must have been a sight to behold. “Well, students, you’re probably wondering why the room is filled with trash cans, chalk erasers, and lunascopes. Well, have I got a lesson for you.”
This is the kind of detail that takes a really close reading to notice, and it’s easy to imagine Rowling writing it with a grin tugging at the side of her face. “I’m going to make Hermione summon three things that don’t make sense at all to summon,” she’s saying to herself, “but I’m not going to say anything about it; it’s going to pass completely unnoticed and unremarked upon. I wonder how long it will take anyone to notice?”
Harry, meanwhile, did miserably in class, but Hermione tries to explain that there’s a simple fix. “You just weren’t concentrating properly,” she says. Harry responds “wonder why that was,” just as Cedric, recently chosen as the legitimate Hogwarts Champion while Harry was instantly cast into the role of interloper, walks past. Cedric is surrounded by a large group of girls described as “simpering,” who look at Harry “as though he were a particularly large Blast-Ended Skrewt.”
Now, is “simpering” the right word here? I looked it up: Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines “to simper” as “to smile in a silly, affected, or ingratiating manner.” So, at first glance, this description seems fairly accurate. But the thing is, “simper” is also used in a vastly different context later in the series: to describe Umbridge’s fake smile when she’s talking to people she very clearly detests. In fact, by remarkable coincidence, the very same Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary page uses this as an example:
"I'm sure I must have misunderstood you, Professor Dumbledore," she said with a simper that left her big, round eyes as cold as ever.
So does it really make sense to describe girls trying to look pretty for Cedric Diggory and Dolores Umbridge staring at Dumbledore with a fake, hate-filled smile using the same verb? I would say that it clearly doesn’t. Then again, though, my understanding of the word is flawed. Because of the timing of the series, I first started understanding words and reading them on my own and figuring out what they meant right around the time I read book five. Thus, because that book uses “simper” so many times in contexts involving Umbridge, that’s what I understood the word to mean — a sort of unpleasant, fake smile — until five minutes ago, when I checked the dictionary. So the question becomes, why does Rowling describe Umbridge so many times as “simpering”? Is she even really simpering? But that’s a question for another time.
Most of the next paragraph is about how awful Double Potions always is, which seems fair enough. There is one question, though: apparently, a double period lasts an hour and a half. Presumably that includes time, at least five minutes or so, between the two single periods that make up the double period, which would mean that assuming they’re the same length, those ordinary single periods only last 40 minutes each, maximum. Simply put, that’s far shorter than I imagine a Hogwarts class lasting. Surely, 40 minutes isn’t enough time to brew a potion in a standard single-period potions class, or to fully learn a charm or a spell, or to crystal-gaze, or anything like that. At my middle and high school, the shortest classes were 45 minutes, and I can’t imagine they’re shorter at wizarding school. My memory is really good — trust me — but it’s not good enough to remember whether there’s any other instance throughout the series in which any character references how long classes take, so for now, this is all I have to work with, and 40 minutes just seems too short. Especially in classes like Care of Magical Creatures, which sometimes involve long walks to the actual location where the class is happening, it’s just not enough time, not to mention Hogwarts students don’t actually take that many classes during a single day, so 40-minute classes wouldn’t seem to be enough to fill up a typical 8:00-3:30 school day.
In this paragraph, we also gain some important context for what will come next. Slytherin, we learn, seems determined to punish Harry for becoming what they see as an illegitimate school champion. The whole series makes for all kinds of strange bedfellows, and this is yet another example: the Slytherins, usually abhorred by the other three houses, can now gang up on Gryffindor. Obviously, Slytherin and Gryffindor are longtime, natural rivals, and what with Cedric being basically the high point of Hufflepuff’s existence, their animosity towards Harry is understandable. What about Ravenclaw, though? What drives Ravenclaw’s disdain for Harry in favor of Cedric?
On the one hand, maybe it’s their high-class, educated nature: Ravenclaw, the house of intelligence and knowledge, seems likely to have the highest regard among the houses for rules and procedures. The Parliamentarian of the U.S. Senate is probably a Ravenclaw. So it’s easy to imagine Ravenclaws inferring that Harry entered the tournament illegally and treating him as a harmful ignorer of the proper order of things, and thus treating his candidacy as a fourth champion with disdain. At the very least, it’s easy to imagine them reacting with visceral, reactionary negativity to his seemingly unfair selection as champion, then using a rationale something like the one I just laid out as a post hoc justification for their attitude towards him.
On the other hand, though, Ravenclaw isn’t all tweed-suited old guys bemoaning the degradation of civility; there are also oddballs like Luna Lovegood. We don’t know Luna’s reaction to seeing Harry chosen as the fourth champion for sure, but it’s pretty easy to imagine: she’s enthralled by the whole thing, and fascinated to see how it will turn out. So maybe what’s happening is that there are two or more factions within Ravenclaw: one establishment-style anti-Potter, one sort of anarchist “watch the world burn” pro-Potter, and maybe one or more in the middle. And the strong anti-Potter faction, of course, will be far louder and more expressive than the just-watching pro-Potter faction, so Harry will only notice his haters, and it will seem like everyone is against him. Or maybe everyone is just against him.
Harry and Hermione arrive at potions ready for disaster — but they can’t possibly have anticipated what they’ll find. The Slytherins are all wearing badges — “for one wild moment,” Harry thinks they’re S.P.E.W. badges, which is a fantastically compact moment of humor — but instead, they’re the badges that will become infamous: “Support CEDRIC DIGGORY — the REAL Hogwarts Champion!” On the next page, we’ll see that when pushed, they transform to say “Potter stinks.” The writing on the badges is luminous and red; in the dark potions hallway, they shine like neon lights.
This gets back to a question I’ve raised about wizard manufacturing: where did these badges come from? The answers to this question basically lie along a spectrum: the two extremes are “the Slytherins made them from scratch” and “The Slytherins ordered them ready-to-wear from some sort of supplier.” In the middle, you have a few possibilities too: maybe the Slytherins ordered blank badges, added the text, then transfigured them to shine and change their display, or maybe the Slytherins ordered badges with “Support CEDRIC DIGGORY” written on them already, and transfigured the writing itself.
But still, though, who’s making these badges? If the Slytherins are making them themselves, they still had to get a supply of blank badges to Hogwarts. Maybe they conjured them, which would be really advanced, and quite frankly, boring.
“Okay, I conjured another one!”
“Great, drop it in the bucket...we need to get to 300!”
But the alternative is that they somehow mail-ordered the badges. Either A) they wrote to a Wizarding wholesale badge manufacturer to order them, which would mean that there’s such thing as a “Wizarding wholesale badge manufacturer,” or B) they ordered them from a muggle badge company, then transfigured them.
The latter possibility opens up a whole bucket of strange possibilities. Can you send packages from muggle businesses to Hogwarts? We know that there likely wizards working undercover in the postal service to get wizarding mail where it needs to go, but so far, we’ve only seen Aunt Petunia’s childhood letter addressed to Hogwarts take that route. Would a muggle business send a package to a school that, to it, doesn’t exist, and certainly doesn’t have a muggle mailing address? I have to doubt it. Which opens up an intriguing possibility: maybe there’s a whole grey-ish market for muggle goods like badges. Grey-ish in the sense that, while it doesn’t seem illegal, it does seem like the kind of market that would be sort of loosely regulated and decentralized. Rather than having a “muggle goods store,” or anything like that, it seems like the way to obtain specialized or modified muggle goods would be to call some sort of specialist, a “field agent” or “operative,” who could get you what you want.
If you need six ping-pong tables for your remote Welsh wizarding lodge because wizards like ping pong too, you’re not going to order them from a ping pong website, because that creates all sorts of logistical problems and more wizard/muggle contact then you want, and you’re also not going to go to some sort of muggle goods emporium run by wizards, because that doesn’t seem like a viable business model (unless it’s Ministry-subsidized, which is a whole different story, albeit a fascinating one). What you do do is call your guy who knows the market and knows the players, who calls his guys on the ground in the muggle world, who can get you the merchandise as long as you’re willing to pay.
It’s a cool thing to think about as a potentially real fictional business category, but also an interesting opportunity for government workers to move to the private sector and thrive. I’m thinking specifically of Mr. Weasley (and Perkins, I suppose). Say Mr. Weasley, after 30 years with the Ministry including a long time working with muggle artifacts, decided to go private. He could become a “Muggle Goods Acquisition Consultant,” the way fixers and right-hand men always have fancy official job titles, and charge sky-high rates: the work involved, combined with Mr. Weasley’s expertise and access to government personnel, would make the demand for his services sky-high. Say you ran a magical security company, for instance, and you needed to buy a fleet of cars to magically modify so that your agents could blend into the muggle world. There’s literally nobody in the wizarding world better-equipped to figure out what kind of cars you need, and then actually get the cars to you, than Mr. Weasley, and because of that, he could charge a small fortune for such a big job. Mr. Weasley himself, of course, doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would actually leave the Ministry to get into that line of work, because he loves his job and the feeling of serving the Wizarding community, but in general, it could happen.
Wow — we’ve gotten off course. Basically, all of that is the long way of saying that one of three things happened: either A) the Slytherins got the badges from a muggle supplier and then modified them, which could imply the existence of a fascinating grey-area market for muggle goods run by lone-wolf operatives with enough expertise to know the market and charge for it: B) the Slytherins got the badges from a Wizarding company, which would mean that a Wizarding company exists that can mass-produce magical badges, and that’s a company I’d love to know more about; or C) the Slytherins conjured the badges themselves and also did the magic on them themselves, which would mean that a bunch of Slytherins sat around in the Slytherin common room for hours, boring themselves to death as they waved their wands at one badge after another. Either way, whichever of the three possibilities is actually true, I’d love to see a documentary about it. Again, there’s no action on this page, but there’s a lot of the detail that makes the whole series spectacular. Also, the badges are really rude — damnit, Draco! Be nice! One day your son might get lost in time chasing Cedric Diggory, and then you’ll be sorry about the badges.