Order of the Phoenix: Page 756

A weird description of centaurs' arms, the ethics of wanting bad things to happen to bad people in fiction, how the word "doleful" is sort of like Caesar dressing, and why the centaurs hate outsiders.

Welcome back, and happy Friday! Whether rain or shine, sleet or snow, Big 10 or ACC (if you know…), I hope this edition of the newsletter brings insight and happiness. Today we cover page 756 of Order of the Phoenix, in which Harry is lifted up by a weird arm, and then things only get more exciting. There’s also a secret message hidden in this issue; it won’t be hard to find. Enjoy!

Page 756 of Deathly Hallows is one of those pages you just know will be a barn-burner. It starts with a sentence that really can’t miss:

“Now!” roared a voice in Harry’s ear and a thick hairy arm descended from thin air and dragged him upright; Hermione too had been pulled to her feet.

For what it’s worth (approximately $30 a year plus Substack fees), I don’t Ever recall seeing an arm described as “thick and hairy” before. “Hairy” is one thing; sometimes arms are just hairy, try as one might to avoid that. But “thick” just isn’t the kind of adjective you use to describe arms. It’s not that it’s inaccurate; it just doesn’t quite fit what it’s describing. It would be like describing scrambled eggs as “mellifluous,” or a volleyball as “temperamental.”

Instinctively, you think the thick hairy arM belongs to Grawp. I certainly did, at least. But that’s the thing: it’s just a normal human arm. Well, it’s a Centaur arm, but centaurs have normal human arms. At least, I think they do. Do you think instead of things like “human rights,” the Centaurs talk about topics like “Centaur-adjacent being rights”? It’s like that episode of The Office when Jim and Dwight are helping Nellie move into her apartment, and Dwight says a line that’s so spectacular that I’ll never forget It: “Do you think king-sized sheets are called presidential-sized in England? I should have a Tweeter.”

Harry, while we’re distracted by arm semantics, is pulled up and sees Umbridge “being borne away.” She’s screaming nonstop, but her voice grows fainter and fainter until it’s drowned out by the hooves trampling around them. This, frankLy, is where the page starts to get ugly. We all probably know the theories surrounding what happens to Umbridge in the forest, and it’s probably the most adult reference of the series, albeit in a very subtle way that young readers definitely aren’t going to detect. This page itself doesn’t get into it, but when you take out how much readers hate Umbridge, she’s undeniably in a terrifYing situation.

The question is, how much can readers ethIcally savor Umbridge’s terrible fortunes? For the entire book, Umbridge has been completely awful. She’s not just mean: she’s done things like (to name one) force Harry to gouge a message into the back of his hand. So now, when Umbridge finally faces the muSic, readers basically have two choices. They can either A) look at the text from a holistic, wider moral point of view, and recognize that characters are complicated and no one is always right or always wrong, or B) recognize that because this is fiction, they’re allowed to feel emotions about it that aren’t remotely acceptable in real life. Option A) usually seems like the more mature, informed option, but to me, it’s not obvious that it’s the correct one.

The example I always like for this is one of Malfoy’s last moments in the series. The trio is weAring the invisibility cloak through the chaos of the battle of Hogwarts, and they see Malfoy pleading with a Death Eater. They stun the Death Eater, but when Malfoy looks around to see who’s saved him, Ron punches him in the face as hard as he can. In the real world, obviously, you just can’t punch people. But this is fiction and Malfoy has spent seven books being a really terrible person, so in that moment, readers finally get a moment of satisfying closure. If anything, the punch should have been more drawn-out, with more graphic description of how Malfoy fleW backwards as Ron’s punch released seven years of built-up animosity. Not that I’m bitter.

Meanwhile, the centaurs, having gotten rid of Umbridge, have to decide what they’re going to do with Harry and Hermione. Ronan, he of the slow and doleful voice, says that “they are young...we do not attack foals.” This brings up a question: what exactly does “doleful” mean? I assumed it meant sort of sad and melancholy, but sometimes you assume somEthing and it turns out to be the complete opposite. Some words really seem like they should mean something, but actually mean another. 

It’s sort of like Caesar dressing. I’m incredibly excited that I finally get to put this analogy that I came up with a long time ago in print, so stick with me. If you knew nothing about it, you’d probably assume that Caesar dressing had a fairly simple recipe. If you had to guess its’ ingredients, you’d probably say something like “cream, parmesan, and salt.” But in reality, it’s something utterly different and bizarre; the main ingredients are more like “anchovies, lemon juice, egg yolk, and mustard,” or some ridiculous list like that. Sometimes you run into words like that: the finished product suggests one thing, but the actual definition of the word is something completely different.

Fortunately, I’m pleased to report that “doleful” is not one of those words. The definition of “doleful” is “mournful” or “expressing sorrow.” So it pretty much means exactly what I assumed it meant before I looked, but now you have a clever Caesar Dressing analogy to use in your Stories. And it’s yours for only $30 a year. I’ll even throw in a premium Potter Pages subscription as well.

The other Centaurs, unfortunately for Harry and Hermione, aren’t nearly as doleful as Ronan (I have a feeling I might never forget the word “doleful,” and more power to me). The one who’s holding Harry — the one, I suppose, with the thick hairy arm; how quickly we forget — replies that they’re not that young, and what’s more, they brought Umbridge dangerously close to the Centaurs’ home territory. Now, I’m nO Centaur legal theorist, but it seems to me that if a large part of their culture is that they attack anyone who comes near them besides young people, they should at least settle on a uniform definition of how old you can be before you get attacked. Maybe it should be some kind of maturity test — when you encounter a Centaur, they just make a really loud fart noise, and if you laugh, they know you’re not mature enough to be killed. I would thrive. If it’s just a test of how old you look, on the other hand, there are going to be some pretty wildly disparate outcomes. Some people are pretty much fully grown when they’re fifteen; others hit a huge growth spurt between their freshman and sophomore years of high school. It’s a wild experience, but not very centaur-friendly.

The centaurs’ whole thing is that they think they’re way better than the pathetic humans, they’re an older, smarter people to whom huMans can’t hold a candle. I must say, though, it doesn’t help their case that when two strangers show up in their territory, their default response is “argue about whether they’re old enough to kill.”

Hermione doesn’t like where the argument is going, so she decides to disrupt it. She and Harry, she shouts, aren’t like Umbridge; they don’t work for the Ministry; they only came into the woods because they hoped the centaurs would drive Umbridge off. Frankly, this might be as close to a low point in the series as Hermione has. Obviously, the Centaurs will resent being told, in effect, that Hermione just used them as unwitting servants. But there’s a ready-made, fantastically easy alternate story available. Rather than saying what she says, Hermione could simply say something else that’s not even much of a lie:

“We’re sorry! She was torturing us for information, she almost used the Cruciatus curse on us, we led her into the forest because we thought maybe we could find a place to hide!” 

For good measure, she could throw in references to Dumbledore or, especially, Hagrid. Up until Hermione says what she does, it seems like the Centaurs could fairly easily be persuaded to let the two of them go. It’s obvious that there’s a distinction between Umbridge and Hermione and Harry: Hermione and Harry are kids on the edge of adulthood who are in the forest for reasons that aren’t quite clear yet, while Umbridge is a proud, angry oppressor of Centaurs. But by saying what she says, Hermione turns that into a distinction without a difference. Obviously it’s a stressful moment and Hermione can’t be faulted for not thinking perfectly on her feet — but she should have been ready for something like that.

Obviously, the Centaurs are instantly furious. The gray one holding HermionE — there’s an interesting discussion to be had about where Centaurs get their different colors, and how much of that comes from their horse parts versus their human ones, but we’ll save that for another time — throws back his head and starts bellowing: “You see, Ronan? They already have the arrogance of their kind! So we were here to do your dirty work, were we, human girl? We were to act as your servants, drive away your enemies like obedient hounds?”

Hermione instantly backtracks — “No! Please — I didn’t mean that! I just hoped you’d be able to — to help us —” — but as Rowling notes, “she seemed to be going from bad to worse.” There’s still a door open for Hermione and the centaurs to find common ground. After all, they’ve just watched Umbridge attack several of their own, so it shouldn’t take much for Hermione to convince them that they were fighting for their life, Umbridge was torturing them, they were desperate to escape, they’d tried everything, they were wandering around the forest looking for a hiding spot, etc. But instead she sticks to what she’s already said: “I just hoped you’d be able to help us.” Clearly, it’s not landing. 

We’ve talked before about coalition-building in the context of Voldemort and how he’s bad at it, but now it’s a salient topic when it comes to the Centaurs, and in broader contexts, to wizard as they relate to all other intelligent magical creatures. Ultimately, as we see, the Order of the Phoenix/Harry/Dumbledore side ends up allied with most of the different magical creatures (centaurs, house elves, acromantulas, etc). But it’s certainly not because of moments like the one Hermione is having here. Building alliances like those isn’t rocket science, but it also takes at least a tiny bit of effort. In other words, Hermione, just read the room. Of course, Harry’s also at fault: he could jump in at any time with a story that makes them look even slightly less condescending and superior, but he can’t seem to think of one either. 

The centaur — who, interestingly enough, is never named; we know a few centaurs, but this guy isn’t one of them — responds angrily. “We do not help humans!” he snarls. “We are a race apart, and proud to be so...We will not permit you to walk from here, boasting that we did your bidding!”

It makes me wonder: how did Hagrid manage to get on the centaurs’ good side? He gets along well with pretty much everything in the forest, and he’s also not entirely human, so they have that in common, but it still seems like the centaurs are very dead-set on being left alone by everyone besides themselves. The centaurs have been in the forest far longer than Hagrid has, of course; they’ve lived there for what’s strongly implied to be a long, long time, while Hagrid has only been around since he started at Hogwarts. Some people, like Hagrid and Newt, just have that special ability to bond with non- or part-humans, but are centaurs susceptible to that in the same way that other, less-human creatures are? I have a hard time believing, for instance, that the centaurs would ever let Newt live among them to work on his book, and a centaur would certainly never get in Newt’s case. 

One possibility is that this comment — “we are a race apart” — is just hyperbole. It actually seems pretty likely. We’ve seen the centaurs show real respect to two people: Hagrid and Dumbledore. Clearly, they can recognize the good guys among humans, even if they try to stay all aloof and superior. So perhaps the truth is that the whole angry “we’re a race apart” attitude is a defense mechanism: it repels potential threats, but if people can withstand it long enough to prove that they’re good people, as Hagrid and Dumbledore have apparently done, the centaurs drop the charade and bring out their old-fashioned mutual respect. 

Harry and Hermione, though, are left on the outside. They’re not fast enough on their feet to find their way into the centaurs’ good graces, so they’re exactly where they started: alone in the forest, wandless and abandoned, being lifted up by a centaur’s thick, hairy arms.