Prisoner of Azkaban: Page 315
A cooling pillow goes to Hogwarts, the music that muggle-borns listen to, Professor McGonagall's bad choice, and a deep dive on Professor Trelawney's psyche.
Welcome back — to an issue that’s out on time! I hope everyone is enjoying their Friday morning, or early afternoon across the pond. Today we cover page 315 of Prisoner of Azkaban, and for the most part, talk a lot about jokey nonsense. My favorite kind. Enjoy! Subscribe if you do!
You know how some Potter Pages (Ah! He said it!) start in extremely satisfying ways? They start with a full sentence, or better yet, a quote? Page 315 of Prisoner of Azkaban (the British edition, remember) isn’t like that. It starts with two words at the end of a sentence: “a pillow.” As tempting as it is, I’m going to ignore the temptation to get into the rest of the sentence on the previous page. We don’t know anything else about a pillow. It’s just a pillow. Sometimes everyone needs a pillow. The pillow is cut off from its context on the previous page, and now it’s just a free-floating pillow, available for any character that needs to lay their head down.
Do you think fancy pillows work at Hogwarts? We all remember Hermione’s speech (in book four, I believe) about how modern muggle technology — “electricity, computers, and radar” — doesn’t work at Hogwarts, since “there’s just too much magic in the air.” But what about technology that’s not electrical or digital, but is still advanced? I have the most amazing pillow. It’s gel-infused, one side automatically stays cold no matter what you do, and it’s somehow simultaneously perfectly firm and chinchilla-soft. Obviously, that’s a far cry from ordinary muggle pillows, which are basically just bags filled with feathers. It probably took several computer processes in a factory to design and manufacture. Would my cooling pillow work at Hogwarts?
I think it would, because it’s not like there are any processes going on that would be disrupted by magic flowing through the air. There’s no electricity or radar waves for magic to send haywire. But I have to wonder: what’s the line where muggle technology stops working at Hogwarts?
5G service on an iPhone, of course, wouldn’t work; there’s no way 5G waves are getting through all the magic in the air. An ordinary telephone wouldn’t work either. Even if you had a wired landline, clearly magic can mess with things flowing through wires. So muggle communication from inside the school to outside it, or vice versa, is a no-go. Even within the school, it’s not going to work. But what if you had, for instance, an E-Reader? No internet connection; books already downloaded; no interaction with the outside world. If I pressed the power button on my Kindle at Hogwarts, would it turn on? We don’t know, but it’s certainly more of a question than an iPhone, leading to the inexorable conclusion that there’s a line somewhere on the spectrum of complicatedness, on one side of which technology will work, on the other side of which it won’t.
Where I’m going with this, if you can’t already tell, is the idea that the way to find muggle technology that works at Hogwarts is probably to use old technology that’s not fancy enough to be disrupted by magic. If a muggle-born student wants to listen to music, iPods haven’t been invented yet (the story takes place in 1993; also they wouldn’t work at Hogwarts anyway), and CDs and cassettes are also probably too technological to work in the midst of so much magic. But a record player (assuming it was battery-powered, since there’s no electrical power that we know of, and electricity is actually one of the things that Hermione mentions doesn’t work) would probably be fine. If muggle-born students get tired of hand-writing entire assignments and want to type them instead, what are they using? A typewriter. And not the fancy digital kind either: an old one, from way back when, before they had even the tiny screen.
Muggle-born students clacking away on typewriters is funny enough (Justin Finch-Fletchley: “How the hell do you type an exclamation point on these things, anyway?” Dean Thomas: “I know, it’s stupid, it’s apostrophe-backspace-period.” (that’s actually true, it’s ridiculous). Justin Finch-Fletchley: “These goddamn muggles, man!”). But here’s the thing about vinyl records in particular: the way I understand it, it was only recently that they made their big comeback, and record companies started pressing new albums onto vinyl again. Back in 1994, muggles got their current pop hits on the radio, on cassette, and on CD. If vinyl was your only option, what did you have? I’ll bet you could find contemporary music if you worked hard at it (though it’s not like there were any specialty record stores near Hogwarts), but more likely, you had your parents’ collection from the ‘60s and ‘70s. So — this is pretty much canon — muggle-born students, if they wanted to listen to music, were probably stuck listening to KC and the Sunshine Band. I’ll bet there was one muggle-born student who had some sort of record connection — he knew a guy who could get the records the muggle-borns wanted, or something like that — and muggle-born students flocked to him like Red in The Shawshank Redemption. And the wizarding students, meanwhile, were thoroughly confused. And boy oh boy, have we gotten off track here or what?
So anyway: Ron tells Hermione that she’s cracking up under stress, trying to do too much. That’s not exactly what you want to hear. Hermione responds “No, I’m not! I just made a mistake, that’s all!” But here — and you don’t hear this very often — Ron is far more right than Hermione is. Later in this book, we’ll see Hermione return her time-turner and say that she just didn’t like it, it was too much work, it wasn’t fun, she didn’t have time for all of it...but all this time travel for extra homework isn’t just inconvenient: it’s taking a real toll on Hermione’s mental state. Frankly, you’d think Professor McGonagall would recognize that and deny her the time-turner in the first place. While it would cause big problems for the plot of this book, it’s undoubtedly the right educational decision. If Professor McGonagall is making her pedagogical decisions based on providing plot devices for Harry’s various wacky hijinks (try saying that five times fast), she has an ethical issue to resolve.
Seriously: what’s the upside for Professor McGonagall here? She gets to convince the Ministry to hand a 13-year-old girl a time machine so that Hermione Granger gets to take Divination — a subject that McGonagall already regards as an utter joke — and Muggle Studies — which Hermione has literally grown up in for 11 years — in addition to her other nine classes? I just don’t see any way that this turns out to be a good move in McGonagall’s part. When Hermione comes in and says “I want to take all the classes, I just wish there was more time in the day for me to spend in class,” Professor McGonagall could take the opportunity to let Hermione learn about prioritizing important things, giving herself time to relax and have fun, and focusing on what’s really interesting to her. Instead, she just says, “okay, here’s some extra time.” Hermione has been slowly cracking up all year because Professor McGonagall decided to give her a time machine instead of teaching her to narrow down a group of choices.
Hermione goes to see Professor Flitwick and apologize (she’s missed his class, wherein Harry and Ron practiced Cheering Charms); Harry and Ron go to Divination, where Hermione later joins them. It’s an important Divination class: they’re starting their unit on the Crystal Ball.
Now, there’s a deeper conversation to be had at a later date (or perhaps later on this very date) about Professor Trelawney, how much she knows, how much she actually predicts, how much of her character is complete nonsense designed to entrance gullible students, and how much — if any — of the stuff they learn in Divination is real or valuable. Of all the different methods of fortune-telling they study, however, the Crystal Ball stands out for its sheer ridiculousness. Here’s how the Crystal Ball works: you look at it, and it shows you a little fog-based video of the future. That’s it. There’s no decrypting or translation; you don’t have to know anything. You just look and see what’s going to happen.
It’s amazing that Divination is so widely accepted in the Wizarding World — there’s an OWL exam on it and everything — but it’s especially ridiculous that the Crystal Ball is somehow an approved, mainstream way of telling the future. It’s literally not functionally different from a Magic 8-ball; it’s dressed up to look nice and magical, but that’s it. It’s a glass ball filled with randomly moving smoke and light that some charlatans have sold to gullible passersby as a vision of the future. The fact that it’s become a scholastic subject...it’s as if there was an SAT Subject Test on The Ouija Board. The fact that they’re starting the Crystal Ball, Harry reminds Ron, does have a silver lining: it means they’ve finished Palmistry, which is its own whole can of worms.
Suddenly, Professor Trelawney makes her usual entrance out of the shadows. Obviously, a lot of what Professor Trelawney does is an act designed to be impressive and mysterious. The question is, how much of it is self-consciously ridiculous to Trelawney, and how much of it has wormed its way into her actual personality? I remember seeing a Tweet a few weeks ago that went something like this: “Okay, I admit it: I can’t tell what’s my personality and what’s me doing a bit.” Is Professor Trelawney just a really committed actress? Or is she convinced that she’s a visionary prophet, and she’s only acting the way a visionary prophet should? Is she doing a bit, or is that her actual personality?
It’s probably (as it always is) somewhere in-between, but I think it pretty definitively lies closer to the latter. Professor Trelawney is very convinced of her own abilities, even though most of the time she has to lie about them. In book six, for instance, we see her wandering around the castle unaware that anyone else notices her, trying to predict the future from a deck of cards. Why would she do this if her whole fortune-teller aesthetic was just an act? Obviously, a lot of what she says is nonsense and lies, but paradoxically, that might indicate that she actually completely believes in herself. When Harry gets on her good side in book five and she suddenly predicts that he’ll live to a ripe old age, become Minister of Magic, and have 12 children, we can tell she’s being ridiculous. But the way she sees herself is different. We know she doesn’t see herself as a joke: if she did, she’d change the way she acted, in order to not be seen as someone so ridiculous. So whatever she’s doing, she’s convinced that it’s working.
Professor Trelawney, in other words, believes that she’s a deeply impressive figure within Hogwarts. She thinks that students are awed by her predictions and fully believe in her powers. Now, why would she think that? Either A) she believes that strongly in her powers herself, or B) she thinks she’s doing such a good job of acting like a seer that students see her as one. If it’s A) then obviously she has fully bought into her own creation myth, and believes that she can actually see the future. If it’s B), meanwhile, she’s also sort of started to believe it herself. If she wholeheartedly believes that she’s putting on an unassailable performance in the part of the seer, there almost has to be at least some part of her that believes it’s all true. In some moments where it wouldn’t make sense for her to still be in character — when she’s wandering the castle alone, for instance, or when she’s drunk at Slughorn’s party — she remains deeply committed to the whole divination scene, suggesting that it can’t just be an act. She really believes in what she’s doing.
Professor Trelawney is ridiculous and mostly incompetent, but I don’t think she’s a liar. Or rather, she does lie fairly often, but she’s lying in service to something she believes is a deeper cause that’s true. She’s lying — making nonsense predictions, always seeing The Grim, predicting students’ death sixteen years in a row — to convince her students that she’s a true seer, because in her mind, she is a true seer, and she has the right to be believed about that.
Whew. That was a lot of talk about Professor Trelawney. And somehow, a lot of talk about pillows and vinyl records. Even on the slower pages, we at Potter Pages always find something to talk about. Like Trelawney’s living quarters. Do you think they’re decorated like her classroom, or like an ordinary teacher’s apartment? Here’s another point in favor of the “Trelawney really believes in herself” hypothesis: I can only imagine her living in a mystical, shadowy quarters just like her classroom. If she was just acting a part, she wouldn’t need to maintain her private living space like that, but somehow, I’m sure she does. I just can’t see her turning her whole personality off when the workday ends and spending nights and weekends as an ordinary, non-seer person. She’s full of nonsense, but she’s not a knowing charlatan; she’s just wrong.
The page, anyway, comes to an end soon after Trelawney enters. She believes in herself. Harry and Ron don’t. Hermione doesn’t believe in The Grim. I believe strongly in the goodness of my pillow. In a way, aren’t we all acting out parts on the grand stage of life?