Order of the Phoenix: Page 779
How fiction works, a major inflection point in the series, Harry's very relatable situation, and the problem with the Hall of Prophecy.
Hello! I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving; I enjoyed mine so much that the newsletter took a week off. But this week we dive back into it with an action-packed page. The trio is in the middle of the Department of Mysteries, and they have absolutely no idea what’s going on. Enjoy!
Generally, the way fiction works is that a piece of writing spends most of its time building up to big moments, then the big moments happen, whatever came out of the big moments gets figured out in whatever way the author wants, and things get wrapped up by the time the book ends. These can come in all kinds of ways: in thrillers, you get lines like “he’s not just targeting the factory — he’s targeting the entire world!” In literary fiction, on the other hand, big moments look more like “I haven’t eaten beef lo mein since the day my father walked out the door” or “grandpa’s watch factory was always going to close...that’s the way of the world.” But regardless of how they come, the basic structure remains the same: lots of buildup, short big moments, cool down and prepare for the next cycle.
Most readers, of course, live for the big moments; they’re the best part. But you can’t just say “people get excited about the big moments, so I’m going to add some more,” because the more big moments you have, the less big they are. Even if you’re writing an action-packed book about a secret agent chasing a terrorist across the world at breathtaking speed, the entire book can’t be the chase sequence. You need variety in pacing, tone, characters, etc, so that the action is recognizable as action. When big moments hit, you want readers to know that they’re big moments.
Which brings us to the first line of page 779 of Order of the Phoenix:
“I...I don’t think Sirius is here.”
My goodness...can’t you feel the absolute weight of that line? Even though this is a strictly textual newsletter, doesn’t it feel as though the room just went silent? With those seven words (one of which is just the same word repeated!), the entire timbre of the book and the series changes. Maybe it’s just because I’ve read the series before (haven’t we all?), but those words sort of feel like an inflection point in the series, when Harry goes from a kid who is just doing his own thing and runs into Voldemort occasionally to someone who is in constant danger and is about to find himself on the front lines of a war that won’t be easy.
Those seven words are especially important, and mark a turning point in the series, because of what they imply. Up to this point, Harry has basically succeeded by always being brave and doing the right thing. He thinks Snape is threatening the Sorcerer’s Stone, so he goes to the rescue; it turns out not to be Snape, but sure enough, the stone is being threatened, and Harry saves it. He hears that Ginny has been taken into the Chamber of Secrets, so he goes down to the chamber and rescues her. He and Hermione know that Sirius and Buckbeak are innocent, so they go back in time and save both of them. Goblet of Fire is a little more complicated, because there’s a nagging sense the whole book that some kind of deception is going on and we’re just waiting to see that the mystery villain is up to; Harry doesn’t have any control over the climactic scene (he just grabs the Triwizard Cup and gets whisked away), so he barely counts as an active participant at all.
Here, though, we see something else. For the first time, Harry isn’t just going head-to-head with an opponent at a given task; he’s been deceived about the nature of the task itself. Imagine if Harry went to protect the Sorcerer’s Stone, but got there and the stone wasn’t there and it turned out to have all been a trap...or if he’d gotten down to the Chamber of Secrets and Ginny wasn’t there and the whole “Heir of Slytherin” thing had been a completely fake way to lure him down. It’s no longer enough for Harry to go out and try to right the wrongs; now he’s not even sure what the wrongs even are.
The hesitant admission that Sirius might not even be there also brings the setting itself into stark relief. On the way in, the group (along with readers) have had to hurry through the Department of Mysteries, under the impression that they’re trying to rescue Sirius before Voldemort kills him. Now, though, it’s like the camera suddenly zooms out. The six Hogwarts students are in the middle of completely unfamiliar territory, and they have no idea what’s going on. Their objective for being there has just evaporated. They’ve basically just been hit square in the face by the real world, and they’re not ready for it at all.
The atmosphere in the group, of course, mirrors what readers are feeling. In fact, that’s probably why we’re feeling it. No one is speaking; Harry doesn’t want to make eye contact; everyone is completely dumbfounded. Harry then does something very relatable: he starts trying to find order in the chaos. He runs around looking for clues, and obviously sees nothing. Then Ron breaks the silence and calls his name. At first, Harry doesn’t want to hear it; he just wants to sulk. But then Ron asks, “have you seen this?”
This is a classic solution to the problem of utter chaos: Ron has found a specific. “The specific is terrific,” one of my old college professors used to say, and never is that more true than when you find yourself so lost that you don’t even know what problems you’re supposed to be solving. Everyone has been in this situation: you’ve gotten completely over your head into something that you don’t understand. Getting a specific task to accomplish can be an enormous relief, even if the task is really just a specific thing that you don’t understand. Say you’re suddenly called upon, for instance, to teach an emergency calculus class, and you don’t know calculus. It’s easy to stand at the front of the class dumbfounded. But if you realize that the first step is to turn on the projector and pull up the homework assignment, you can now get laser-focused on figuring out how to turn on the projector and where to find the homework, and suddenly you’re no longer in the middle of no-man’s-land.
Harry, of course, feels this. “It had to be a sign that Sirius had been there, a clue,” he thinks to himself. He strides over, but isn’t sure what he’s seeing; Ron is just staring at the row of dusty old spheres, which looks the same as all the other dusty old spheres. But then Ron piques (great word) Harry’s attention.
“It’s — it’s got your name on it,” he says.
If “I don’t think Sirius is here” is an inflection point in the series, “it’s got your name on it” is another. To this point, Harry has just been a kid who’s vaguely important because Voldemort tried to kill him and failed. We’ve known that there’s something important about the reason Voldemort wanted to kill Harry in the first place — Dumbledore refuses to explain it to Harry in book one, which just makes us more curious — but we’ve never understood why. Now, though, we’re seeing that Harry is at the heart of something vast and complicated. He’s brought his friends to this enormous, dark room in the bowels of the Ministry of Magic looking for Sirius, and instead, he’s found an old, dusty orb with his name on it. It’s like...I don’t know, analogies to non-wizarding characters are pretty difficult sometimes, but I’ll come up with one. Imagine if Dr. House was called to a government building to diagnose a top-secret patient (in fact, this actually happens), but instead, he finds himself in a dark basement full of old filing cabinets...then he sees a drawer labeled “Gregory House.” At this moment, Harry and readers have learned that something much bigger than a personal grudge is going on. The government is involved, and has been for years. Folks, this thing goes higher than we thought.
On a separate note, I have to wonder about the Hall of Prophecy as a practical location. For one, why are there so many prophecies? How are there so many prophecies? The Ministry of Magic was founded in 1707, replacing the Wizards’ Council, which had existed for hundreds of years. Let’s be charitable and say that the Wizard’s Council collected prophecies in glass spheres, and turned them over to the Ministry when it became the new governing body. All we know about the Wizards’ Council is that it was founded before 1269; let’s say that combined, the Ministry and the Wizards’ Council have been around for 1000 years in 1996, when this scene takes place.
So, 1000 years of collecting prophecies. That’s a lot of years...but this room is humongous. We know there are at least 97 rows, and probably many more, since there’s no indication that the trio is anywhere near the end of the room. But charitably, let’s say there are only 100 rows. The rows themselves are also humongous; they’re long enough to spring down, and they also seem at least several ordinary stories (is it “storeys” in British English? I think it is. Gotta love it) high. There have to be what, 500 prophecies in each row? More? These are glass balls about the size of tennis balls, and there are enough of them to stack up to a church-like ceiling and down a row so long you can barely see one end of it from the other, so the number of prophecies in a row can’t be understated.
Let’s say it’s 500, which still seems a little low. 500 prophecies in a row (low), 100 rows (probably more)...that gives us 50,000 prophecies in this room, minimum. If various governments have been collecting prophecies for 1000 years (and that itself is a generous assumption, given that the Ministry itself has only existed since 1707, so for that figure to be true, the Wizards’ Council would have had to have collected prophecies itself, then turned them over when the Ministry was founded), that comes out to 50 prophecies a year.
Who is making all these prophecies?
In the entire Harry Potter series, we see Professor Trelawney make exactly two prophecies. We don’t see any — count ‘em, any — other prophecies. Unless I’m wrong, the only other seer we hear about within the seven books is Professor Trelawney’s great-great-grandmother Cassandra Trelawney. I’m sure there are others in the various video games and on Pottermore (RIP) and all that...there was some lady in 1361 in Wales named Bugglis Glubbin or something, and she was a revolutionary figure in divination. But still, there just can’t be that many seers, because if there were, you have to figure we would have heard a lot more about them in the books themselves. Harry Potter Wiki lists only 11 “known seers” from all of wizarding history, and two of them are just “male seer” and “female seer.”
So where in the world are all these prophecies coming from? Remember, there have got to be at least fifty thousand prophecies in that room. Who’s making all of them? Maybe it’s a simple calculation error on J.K. Rowling’s part, like the time she said there were 1000 students at Hogwarts when clearly, that didn’t make sense. The only other possibility is that prophecies are wayyyyy more common than we thought. Our only experience with prophecies in the series treats them as giant, earth-shaking events; maybe a lot of the prophecies in the Hall of Prophecy are more like “salmon will be on sale today.”
Separate question: how is the hall kept up-to-date? Later, we see Dumbledore refer to “the keeper of the Hall of Prophecy,” so it’s not just magic that keeps the room maintained; there’s someone (or a group of people) actually stocking the shelves and writing the labels. How do you put a prophecy inside a glass ball? Dumbledore was the only person who heard the entirety of Professor Trelawney’s prophecy; did the keeper of the hall have to extract his memory, then somehow create a tiny pensieve-like atmosphere inside the glass ball? Harry himself was the only person who heard Professor Trelawney’s prediction about the Dark Lord rising, greater and more terrible than before; assuming a record of that prophecy is also kept somewhere in the hall, we know Harry didn’t donate his memory of the prediction, so where did the record come from?
Another problem with the hall is that, as we’ll learn later, until the battle that takes place there, the Ministry hasn’t even acknowledged that the Hall of Prophecy exists. So it’s the opposite of common knowledge. Thus, it seems impossible that any of the hall’s record-keeping process can involve public investigation or recording; they won’t even tell the public that the place exists. However the hall works, one thing its record-keepers can’t do is go around asking people about prophecies they’ve heard, or recording their memories. The hall’s records have to come from somewhere else.
Basically, it has to be sort of like “the trace” or “the taboo.” There’s no way around it. There must be a spell that monitors the entire British wizarding population, activates any time it detects a prophecy being made, and creates an orb containing that prophecy, along with what amounts to wizarding metadata. Think about that: the orb containing Professor Trelawney’s prophecy about Harry was labeled, not only with the person who made it (easy, the charm detects that) or the people who it was about (also easy; you can tell by listening to it), but also with the other person in the room. When Dumbledore was sitting there listening to the prophecy, a spell in the basement of the Ministry — and, presumably, the record-keepers who monitor that spell’s output — knew he was listening. I assume the same was true when Harry heard Professor Trelawney’s prediction about Voldemort coming back.
The implications of that — they’re terrifying! The Ministry knows all the prophecies that are being made, and who’s listening to them. I assume they don’t get that information instantly, otherwise they would have known all the stuff about Voldemort being defeated and later coming back...then again, though, maybe it is instantaneous, but most of the prophecies are like “Jim will be home fifteen minutes late from work today,” so the Ministry never thought it was particularly important to establish a prophecy reporting process. Nine years later, the Ministry was doing a self-audit, and someone ran across records from one day in the ‘90s that said “Voldemort’s servant will return to him tonight,” and one guy turned to the other and said, “did we...did we know about that?”
Anyway, that’s where the page ends: Harry and the rest of the gang are in perhaps more danger than they’ve ever been, and perhaps even more terrifying, they have no idea what’s going on. Soon the fight will begin, and they’ll have an immediate goal, which will probably be something of a relief; at least they’ll know what to do next. For now, though...nothing. They can’t even eat beef lo mein or close their grandpa’s watch factory.