Half-Blood Prince: Page 445
The emotional role of fictional snow, a word on J.K. Rowling's use of narrative voice, a tiny moment of sloppy writing, and Voldemort's utter stupidity about the Room of Requirement.
Hello! Good to see you again! Today we cover page 445 of Half-Blood Prince. It’s a barn-burner (I say that every week). Enjoy! Subscribe! Be merry!
Page 445 of Half-Blood Prince starts with some classic imagery in an interesting context. We see the middle of a quote:
-a snowy night, merely to wish you luck as you attempted to secure a teaching post.”
We see a second later that it’s Dumbledore talking, and we’ve already learned on the previous page that he’s talking about the Death Eaters, who Voldemort has described as merely “friends,” who are all waiting down in Hogsmeade; at the Hog’s Head, if I’m not mistaken.
Here’s my first question: what does this tell us about the role of snow in the series as a symbol or a prop? Often, weather plays a role in what’s going on: it’s a beautiful day and Harry is happy, or else it’s a beautiful day and Harry is sad because he doesn’t get to be outside for one reason or another. Likewise, rain generally comes at the more dreary, unhappy portions of the series: it rains, everyone gets muddy, Filch starts imposing weird punishments, etc, and nobody is happy about anything.
But here we have snow, and more than that, we have snow upon which Dumbledore specifically remarks. Snow, in the series, doesn’t have a well-defined role the way that other weather conditions do. Sometimes snow is joyful and fun (the snowball fight before the Yule Ball, first-year Christmas, etc), but sometimes it’s more of a dull gray snow that doesn’t make anybody happy. For what it’s worth, that bad snow seems more like rainy conditions, while the happy snow seems more like sunny, warm conditions, but if this already-derailed thought of mine goes any further off-track, some university might decide to award me a PhD for it, so I’ll try to stay on track.
The question is, how come in fiction, snow doesn’t have a well-developed symbolic role the way rain or sunshine do? Part of it probably comes from real life. Snow can take on different emotional meanings depending on the context. Here’s a for-instance: I live in Michigan, and last winter, instead of a few big snowstorms, we got about a quarter-inch of snow every day for three months. After a week or two, it stopped bringing overtones of wrapping paper and Christmas music, and started reminding me more of shoveling the sidewalk and how wet my feet were. It’s hard to get tired of bright sunny days, and unless you’re a Devil’s Snare, it’s also really rare to see a dull, gray rainy day and be thrilled about it. So rain and sun can easily take on their fictional roles — but snow is a lot harder to assign.
Dumbledore’s awareness of the traveling party, we see, is deeply disarming to Voldemort. There’s an interesting piece of writing here, that captures the subtleties necessary to capture things like “the narrator is viewing a memory in which he’s not participating and has already happened but whose plot he doesn’t know;” Rowling writes that “there could be no doubt” that Voldemort didn’t appreciate Dumbledore’s knowledge, rather than “there was no doubt.”
Broadly, the Harry Potter series is basically written in “third person limited,” with maybe a touch here and there of third person omniscient. This means that while Harry isn’t the narrator, we can see inside his head and hear his perspective. So basically, when Rowling writes that “there could be no doubt” that something was true, we’re basically getting the equivalent of Harry’s movie commentary. She doesn’t say “there was no doubt,” because Harry can’t be absolutely certain yet; it’s like waiting until the end of a movie before talking about the plot, even if you think you’re absolutely sure of what’s going to happen. The “could be” takes us a little inside the mind of the viewer (Harry), whereas “there was” would be impersonal, and would elide the fact that we’re not watching (or reading) this scene directly; we’re seeing it because Harry is seeing it, and we get it filtered with his instant reactions to what he’s seeing.
Despite the unwelcome knowledge, Voldemort recovers at once. “You are as omniscient as ever, Dumbledore,” he says. Dumbledore responds “Oh no, merely friendly with the local barmen.” Obviously, he’s more than friendly with the owner of the Hog’s Head; they’re related. I wonder, though: does Voldemort not know that? And does Dumbledore know that Voldemort doesn’t know that? It seems like there could be a Sherlock Holmes-esque series of deductions going on:
Voldemort tells his Death Eaters to stay at the Hog’s Head.
Aberforth sees them and tells Albus that they’re there.
Albus hears that they’re there, and realizes that if they’re there, Voldemort must not know that Aberforth is his brother, since he would never instruct his Death Eaters to go stay with Dumbledore’s brother.
Knowing this, Albus decides not to mention that he’s related to Aberforth, and to merely say that he’s friendly with the local barmen.
This seems weird, though; it’s hard to imagine that the wizarding community doesn’t know that Aberforth Dumbledore owns the Hog’s Head. It’s definitely something you’d expect Voldemort to know, which brings us back to the question of why Dumbledore refers to his brother as “barmen.” There are a few possibilities: maybe Dumbledore is just being extra-careful to protect Aberforth’s identity, or maybe I’m just remembering this whole thing wrong and there’s another reason.
It should be noted that Dumbledore says the line about the local barmen “lightly.” But then Rowling does something she does well: she completely changes the tone of a page in a short line. Dumbledore sets down his glass and draws himself up. He touches the tips of his fingers together, and when he talks again, we can tell that pleasantries are over.
There is a moment here where the writing actually seems sort of sloppy. When Dumbledore draws himself up in his seat, Rowling describes him: “The tips of his fingers together in a very characteristic gesture.” That doesn’t really mean anything: it’s basically saying “the tips of his fingers together in a Dumbledore way.” And the “very” especially doesn’t mean anything, because the only effect it has on the sentence is to make it mean “the tips of his fingers together in an especially Dumbledore way.” This is one of those rare moments when Rowling violates the “show, don’t tell” rule. Don’t tell us that Dumbledore is being like Dumbledore; show it. Write “the tips of his fingers together in a gesture Harry had seen before,” or “just as he’d often surveyed Harry.” It’s not a huge problem, and it doesn’t ruin the page or anything like that, but it’s still a rare writing difference that I have with J.K. Rowling.
“Let us speak openly,” Dumbledore continues. “Why have you come here tonight, surrounded by henchmen, to request a job we both know you do not want?”
I must say, this whole meeting is a masterclass in psychological warfare on Dumbledore’s part. He welcomes Voldemort with open arms, and at first seems receptive, then throws him off his game with the remark about the henchmen at the Hog’s Head — then just when Voldemort think he’s figured Dumbledore out, Dumbledore completely derails the meeting and takes Voldemort to a place he never anticipated. Dumbledore is supposed to be warm, bubbly, and forgiving. For him to suddenly turn matter-of-fact and cold has to be a shock, even for Voldemort himself.
Of course, Voldemort might have come into the meeting expecting this possibility. The fact is, while he might have wanted the job as a training ground for Death Eaters, or whatever his actual plan was, a big part of his real purpose was something else: hiding the Diadem in the Room of Requirement. We learn in the next book that he hides the horcrux the night he asks for a job, so now that that’s done, his interview barely matters. In fact, he might never have remotely expected to get the job at all: maybe he just needed an excuse to get back into the school to hide the horcrux, and even after hiding it, he had to take the interview to avoid suspicion.
Here’s what I’ve always wondered about the night Voldemort hid the horcrux in the Room of Requirement: how in the world did he think, as he we later see him think to himself, that he was the only one who had ever discovered the Room of Hidden Things? The place is literally a cathedral-sized room full of things that Hogwarts students have needed to hide. It’s not remotely plausible that Voldemort was the first to discover it, and all the other things were added later; when he entered the room to hide the Diadem, it was already full of hidden bad stuff. So basically, this had to happen: Voldemort had to enter the Room of Requirement, find a giant room absolutely stuffed with things other people had hidden, and think to himself, “I’m probably the first person who’s ever been in here.”
I mean...am I missing something? In book seven, we see Voldemort say something grandiose and stupid to himself. If I remember correctly, it’s “he alone had plumbed the deepest secrets of that place,” or something. But he’s literally talking about a room that’s completely jammed with things other people have put there. Voldemort makes some tactical mistakes, but this seems downright moronic.
Also: where did all these hidden things come from? A cathedral-sized room full of stuff...not that many people are supposed to know about the Room of Requirement, so how is it so full? Let’s say there are around 1,000 items in the room, which seems fair. Hogwarts has been around for 1,000 years, give or take, so that’s about one hidden item a year. Who’s hiding all these things? You’d think it would be once a decade, if that, a really rare occurrence. But based on the state of this room, Hogwarts students, at least once a year, just think to themselves, “ah well, something’s gone wrong again...better hide this stuff in the Room of Requirement!”
Maybe it’s mostly teachers, some of whom seem to know more about the room than students...but that’s still a lot of hidden stuff. It still amounts to a pretty frequent occurrence, which doesn’t really fit with what we’ve seen.
Anyway, looking “coldly surprised,” Voldemort disagrees: he wants the job very much, he says. Maybe he really does, or maybe the cold surprise is a strong acting performance. Either way, Dumbledore isn’t playing around anymore. He calls Voldemort’s bluff.
“Oh, you want to come back to Hogwarts, but you do not want to teach any more than you wanted to when you were eighteen,” he says. “What is it you’re after, Tom? Why not try an open request for once?”
Dumbledore, here, lays all his cards on the table. I know that you’re here for a bad reason, he’s saying. I don’t quite know what that reason is, but it’s very obvious that you’re up to no good, and we’re not going to keep talking as if you’re not.
The only thing that changes how you might read this page is that Voldemort might just be acting. Sure, if he is, it’s a really good performance, but maybe Voldemort is just really good! The easy way to read this page is to read it as “Voldemort tries to sneak his evilness past Dumbledore, but Dumbledore knows all about it.” But the true reading might be different: “Voldemort wants Dumbledore to think he’s trying to sneak his evilness past him, but really he couldn’t care less because the horcrux is already hidden, but Voldemort has to look like he’s trying, otherwise Dumbledore will get suspicious about what the hell Voldemort is doing in the building in the first place.”
In fact, Dumbledore gets half way there: he asks Voldemort why he’s come back, looking for a job they both know he doesn’t want. But he never gets an answer! The question is asked but never goes anywhere until the next book. For now, though, it remains unanswered, a tiny clue for what might come next.
Dumbledore and Voldemort are now more or less agreed: Voldemort isn’t getting a job. So Voldemort gets up angrily, ready to leave the room...but it still might all be an act. That’s what’s strange on this page: it might all be fake, when you really think about it. If it is an act, it’s a really good one: Dumbledore’s face fills with “a great sadness.” I wonder, though, how much of this is just a meta-act. What could actually be going on here — if you really, really think about it — is that both characters know that they’re just acting, but they’re not sure how much the other character knows about how much they know, so they keep up the act just in case. They’re just, as they say, keeping up appearances.
As Voldemort leaves, Dumbledore starts saying the line that really pulls the chapter together: “The time is long gone when I could frighten you with a...” As we know, he’s talking about the flaming wardrobe and the mouth organ. It’s a sad commentary about how the things we create can grow beyond what we intend (a sort of mini-Frankenstein in a sentence or two). But it’s also a moment when, you can imagine, the characters start steeling themselves for what’s ahead. Dumbledore now knows where Voldemort’s anger is taking him; Voldemort knows that Dumbledore is fully onto him and his evil nature, and that they’re going to run headlong into each other into the future. And neither of them knows the emotional role of snow in fiction, because nobody could ever know that.