Half-Blood Prince: Page 489
Harry and Dumbledore's strange fervor for "the memory," Voldemort not being the brightest bulb, why Slughorn thought Lily Evans was brave, and what Dumbledore has in common with Dwight Eisenhower.
Welcome back! I do apologize: as I said last week, I spent four long days in Los Angeles in the audience of “Harry Potter: Hogwarts Tournament of Houses,” a spectacular trivia tournament that will air sometime later this year in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the release of the first movie. Dame Helen Mirren was spectacular. I can’t recommend it enough.
Now I’m back, and so is the newsletter. Today, we cover page 489 of Half-Blood Prince, and get into the fact that sometimes, these characters really don’t make much sense. That, plus Voldemort’s various dumb plans; what’s the deal with “the memory;” Slughorn’s opinions of muggle-borns; and much more. If you enjoy, subscribe for pages like this every week — now let’s begin!
After last week, all I can say is thank goodness: page 489 of Half-Blood Prince starts with a complete sentence. In fact, it’s a brand new paragraph. Slughorn gives a great shudder, but he doesn’t seem able to tear his horrified gaze from Harry’s face. J.K. Rowling does a great job with the imagery of Slughorn’s movements; he always seems like he’s vaguely gelatinous.
We’re in Hagrid’s Hut, if you couldn’t tell; they’ve just buried Aragog, Harry is completely wrecked on Felix Felicis, and now he’s mentally torturing Slughorn into giving him his memory of a conversation with a young Tom Riddle about horcruxes. The thing is, I’m not sure how essential the memory really is.
The whole point of the memory, once Harry and Dumbledore see the full version, is for them to discover that Voldemort made not just one Horcrux, but seven. But as we’ve seen throughout the book, and we’ll continue to see later, Dumbledore already knows a lot of this. He knows that the diary was one horcrux, and he’s already worried, since Voldemort was so cavalier with it that he probably had others. He’s already destroyed the ring, so he knows that’s another, and he’s already seen and fully understood Voldemort’s memory of Hepzibah Smith and her two wizarding heirlooms, so he knows those are two more. He’s even already started thinking about Voldemort’s puzzling level of control over Nagini, and started to realize that she might be a horcrux herself (and a Maledictus to boot, but that’s a whole different story).
Dumbledore, in short, already seems to be aware of the existence of five horcruxes, all but one of the original six that reside outside Voldemort’s body (the Diadem is the only one it looks like he never encounters). On top of that, for good measure, he seems to know — as is revealed in book seven — about the fact that Harry is also a horcrux. He already knows just about all the horcruxes he needs to track down, but instead of just telling Harry what he knows, he puts Harry through this strange, psychologically-complicated initiation. Of course, you can always fall back on the old pro-Dumbledore argument: “of course he already knows it, he was just doing all that to get Harry crucial experience!” But it really does seem like he’s forcing Harry to spend far too much time fixating on the gelatinous, walrus-like potions master.
One fail-safe way to count how many horcruxes there are that Dumbledore doesn’t think of? It’s easy. All he has to do is leak to Voldemort that he’s looking for them. Voldemort, despite being a big evil mega-genius, seems not to be the brightest bulb, because we see this strategy work perfectly in book seven. After the trio escapes from Gringotts with Hufflepuff’s cup, Harry has a vision of Voldemort getting the news from the goblins and realizing that the trio is hunting his horcruxes. For convenience, I’ll summarize his thought process below:
They’re hunting my horcruxes? I’d better think in great detail about the location of each one individually. What? Harry Potter can hear my thoughts? Relax, it’ll be fine.
All Dumbledore has to do to get a comprehensive list of horcruxes is that: somehow let Voldemort know that the horcruxes are in jeopardy, then have Harry observe all the hiding spots he thinks of. But nope: instead, it’s “get the video from the potions master using the borderline illegal luck juice.” Is this crucial experience that Harry will fall back on later when he’s fighting Voldemort? I…don’t think so?
Harry and Slughorn, meanwhile, are talking about Lily. What’s actually happening is that Harry is talking about Lily and Slughorn is trying not to hear, because most of Slughorn’s act is saying “I’m scared of the world, I’ve had a tough life,” but Harry can just pull out the “Voldemort murdered my parents” card and Slughorn looks like an idiot. Harry is telling him how Lily, his favorite student, didn’t have to die; Voldemort told her to get out of the way, and Lily could have just run.
“Oh dear,” Slughorn responds. “She could have...she needn’t...that’s awful...”
“It is, isn’t it?” Harry says. His voice is barely more than a whisper. “But she didn’t move. Dad was already dead, but she didn’t want me to go too. She tried to plead with Voldemort...but he just laughed...”
I wonder: why did Voldemort offer Lily Potter (honestly or not) the chance to live? It’s not like she could have made things more convenient for him by surrendering; he could have tossed her out the window with a little flick of his wand. We’re back on our theme of Voldemort not being the brightest bulb here, because he chooses the single worst option. He could force Lily out of the way, kill Harry, then kill her, and go home happy. Or he could just show up, say nothing, and kill Lily as soon as he sees her.
The one thing he absolutely shouldn’t do — at least, from his strategic point of view he shouldn’t do it; I’m very happy he did — is what he ends up doing. He comes in and gives Lily a ready-made opportunity to sacrifice herself for a cause, which in the wizarding world means your cause gets a step closer to succeeding. If there’s any ambiguity at all about how this complicated branch of life-protection magic works, he gives Lily the chance to avoid all of that, by literally listening to her shout “not Harry, kill me instead!” Again, his thought process is worth spelling out:
Okay, I want to kill her — that’s something I want — but I won’t do it right away. I’ll politely ask her to move aside. I’m Voldemort; I’m known for that. Maybe it can be part of my rebrand. Once I give her the opportunity to move, if she decides to sacrifice herself instead to defend her cause, then I’ll kill her. Shouldn’t cause any problems. i’M tHe WoRlD’s GrEaTeSt MaGiCiAn.
Harry, still high on Felix, continues redirecting the question. Slughorn responds “That’s enough! Really, my dear boy, enough...I’m an old man...I don’t need to hear...I don’t want to hear...” To that, Harry...lies.
“I forgot,” he lies. I love Rowling literally using “to lie” as the strong-verb form of “to say” here. I’m a big fan of strong forms of “to say;” asserted, gesticulated, spat, mumbled, murmured, warbled, trilled, etc. Here, there’s no ambiguity about it: Harry is just making things up to Slughorn in order to get the memory. “You liked her, didn’t you?”
Slughorn can’t imagine, he responds, anybody who met Lily Potter who wouldn’t have liked her. This is one of those rare occasions where I can’t tell whether this is a lot to unpack or just Slughorn saying something ordinary. Slughorn liked Lily for a bunch of reasons; that’s an ordinary thing to say. But when he says he can’t imagine anyone not liking her, he starts to sound naïve and weirdly innocent for an old professor. He’s living in a world jam-packed with bad things happening to good people. There will be dislike. Just accept it.
Slughorn also notes that Lily was “very brave.” I wonder what that’s in reference to? Obviously she and James thrice-defied Voldemort, but Slughorn sounds more like he’s talking about their time at school. Is this a reference to the prejudice Lily faced from people like Snape? Slughorn’s own stance on anti-muggle prejudice is sort of hard to pin down. He insists that he’s not prejudiced, of course, as many people do, but he also has some moments that I think are best described as unintentionally insensitive. He’s surprised, for instance, to hear that a muggle-born student could be the best in the year, but once he meets Hermione, he becomes her biggest fan.
So let’s say Slughorn, during his initial tenure at Hogwarts, heard through the grapevine about some weird greasy-haired kid yelling anti-muggle slurs at his star potions student. That’s a pretty complicated situation for him, and it’s hard for me to tell how he might react. Obviously, two of his favorite students are directly pitted against each other: Snape, a Slytherin and potions superstar, against Lily, his absolute rock star. Slughorn doesn’t like conflict, and he seems pretty much neutral in the wizarding wars until Voldemort’s increasing awfulness and reach forces him to take a side. Would Slughorn describe someone who faced prejudice at school as “brave”? I honestly don’t know the answer. He seems like the kind of person for whom the answer would depend on how much he liked whoever was facing prejudice. Some random Hufflepuff third-year is getting bullied for his hair color? Slughorn’s not interested. But Lily Evans, potions superstar, gets yelled at for her parentage? Slughorn won’t stand for it.
“But you won’t help her son,” Harry responds. “She gave me her life, but you won’t give me a memory.”
Here, finally, we get to what the page is actually about: the memory. That godforsaken memory. I’ve already explained my theory, which is that the memory doesn’t actually have much of a point. The thing is, Slughorn seems to agree, which frankly makes me think that I might be wrong. This is sort of like when Sirius tells Harry and Ron that he thinks rebelling against Umbridge is a great idea, and Hermione basically says “now that we’ve heard from Sirius, I want to reconsider.” Slughorn is one of those characters who you don’t really want to have supporting your point of view. He’s a smart guy, but he’s also pretty oafish, and really needs to be prodded along before he realizes the difference between right and wrong.
He’s also a guy that, for the moment (but not for much longer) agrees with me. “Don’t say that,” he says, tears filling his eyes. “It isn’t a question...if it were to help you, of course...but no purpose can be served...”
Clearly, Slughorn is rationalizing. He knows that Dumbledore (and by extension, Harry) will want to see the memory, and he doesn’t want it seen; that’s why he did that strange iMovie smoke-effect editing before all of this happened. But it’s just not true for him to say that he wouldn’t mind giving up the memory if it was for an important reason, because to say that implies that he doesn’t believe that Dumbledore has a legitimate reason for wanting to see it.
Imagine if General Dwight Eisenhower, in 1945, sent a squad of bombers on a secret mission into France, and one of the pilots said “I would do it, but it won’t serve any purpose.” Putting aside the military legal implications, that pilot would basically be saying that he knew the European theater of the war better than General Eisenhower. It’s not only that he’s wrong; it’s just a clearly fake belief, covering for the fact that he just didn’t want to do it.
And that’s just what Harry says. “It can,” he responds. “Dumbledore needs information. I need information.”
We have a weird situation here. On the one hand, Dumbledore and Harry’s need for the memory is sort of dubious. What are they going to do differently without it? They’re still going to hunt down the horcruxes. They still know a few of them. It’s not that hard to figure out. On the other hand, Slughorn himself has no right to say any of that, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t even really believe what he’s saying. For all he knows, there’s a crucial clue in that message that Harry and Dumbledore absolutely need, otherwise Voldemort will rule the world forever. There’s not — I don’t think — but Slughorn doesn’t know that.
Who’s in the wrong? Nobody, really; it’s one of those situations that was always going to get awkward. Slughorn would have been in the wrong if he’d continued to refuse to hand over the memory; Harry and Dumbledore would have been in the wrong if they’d performed some sort of invasive magical brain surgery on Slughorn for a memory they might not even need. But as things stand, they manage — on the next page, but it’s clear where this is going — to thread the needle. Both characters do the right thing, and we can move on to the content of the memory, which...again, is sort of underwhelming for such a hugely-hyped plot device.
The page ends nice and satisfyingly with a complete sentence, and better yet, a quote. Soon it will be morning, Hagrid and Slughorn will have no idea what happened last night, and Harry and Dumbledore will have everything they need from the memory (which amounts to the number seven). But maybe they need the extra push to get going. If there’s one common theme emerging, it’s that all these main characters — Harry, Dumbledore, Voldemort — they’re not the brightest bulbs.