Sorcerer's Stone: Page 307
Hogwarts hat policy, why Professor Snape is sort of like the New York Knicks, and an aside about the trace.
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Page 307 of Sorcerer’s Stone starts at a sort of unfortunate place: Gryffindor has just won the House Cup on the strength of Neville’s 10 points for standing up to his friends, but we don’t see that on the page. What we do see is Snape shaking Professor McGonagall’s hand “with a horrible, forced smile.” Then there’s a sort of weird sequence:
He caught Harry’s eye and Harry knew at once that Snape’s feelings toward him hadn’t changed one jot. This didn’t worry Harry. It seemed as though life would be back to normal next year, or as normal as it ever was at Hogwarts.
There’s a lot to unpack there.
For one, there’s no reason for Harry to suspect that Snape’s feelings toward him had changed at all. All he’s learned about Snape so far is that Snape wasn’t the one with Voldemort sticking out the back of his head, which, even for Hogwarts, is a pretty low bar to clear. In fact, it’s kind of ridiculous that this is an actual question that would make sense for Dumbledore to ask in an interview:
Dumbledore: “Now pay close attention, because this question is really important. Do you have Voldemort sticking out of the back of your head?”
Applicant: “For all my other faults, no, I do not.”
Dumbledore: “Well, that’s exactly what we were looking for. We’ll send you an owl in the next week or so, and I think you’ll like what you hear.”
Come to think of it, that’s probably how Lockhart was able to get the job. It’s amazing the kind of ridiculous people it seems okay to hire after the previous person in a given job had Voldemort sticking out the back of his head. Which makes me wonder: do you think that after Quirrell left, Dumbledore initiated a school-wide crackdown on hat policy? Obviously, in hindsight Quirrell’s turban was pretty absurd, but theoretically, even a more mainstream hat could have done the job. It might have made for some awkward conversations. Say some sweet, innocent first-year Ravenclaw came back from Christmas vacation with a brand new genuine fur hat that they’d gotten from a beloved Scandinavian relative, a hat they loved so much that they wore it everywhere. I can just imagine Professor Sinistra wandering by, taking a look, then walking over to Professor Flitwick, confused expression on her face, clearly not sure what she’s supposed to say.
“Say, Filius,” she could say to Professor Flitwick, “so, elephant in the room here, and I’m not quite sure how to say this...but should we...should we check whether Voldemort is under that hat?”
Anyway, the other strange thing about this sequence of Harry realizing that things are going to go back to normal next year — which they’re not, obviously — is that Harry has absolutely no idea what normal looks like, even at Hogwarts. He’s just spent about 90% of his first year engaging in various Sorcerer’s Stone-related hijinks. Most of the school year has been getting Hagrid to say things he shouldn’t have said, flipping through one library book after another looking for Nicolas Flamel, wandering around the castle at night for various reasons, trying to get Hagrid to get rid of the dragon he just hatched, looking for a dead unicorn during detention, rescuing Hermione from the troll, etc. So when Harry points out to himself — in a positive way — that things will be back to normal next year, what is he actually talking about?
What he wants, of course, is all the good parts of Hogwarts without any of the life-threatening ones. But honestly, would Hogwarts be nearly as much fun without the ridiculous stuff that the trio gets up to? Harry’s natural inclination is to have adventures and do crazy things. Would he really enjoy the “back to normal” that he’s describing, wherein you get to do magic during the day, but besides classes, quidditch, and mealtimes, there’s basically nothing going on? Literally seconds before Harry has this thought, Gryffindor has won the House Cup because of a 170-point infusion from Dumbledore, all based on the trio and Neville’s actions on a night that’s far beyond the bounds of “back to normal, or as normal as it ever was at Hogwarts.” The short way of saying this is that while Harry may think that he’d love it if he could just have a normal year at Hogwarts, in hindsight it seems like that normalcy would be far less exciting than the status quo, obviously for readers of the series but also for Harry himself.
We actually see this emphasized in the very next paragraph. Winning the House Cup, Harry thinks to himself, has made this the best night of his life — “better than winning at quidditch, or Christmas, or knocking out mountain trolls.” Two of those three great experiences — Christmas (wandering the castle at night and finding the mirror of Erised) and knocking out mountain trolls — aren’t part of “normal at Hogwarts” at all, yet they’ve just provided some of the best nights of Harry’s life. He’s far too quick to wish them away in favor of a safer, “normal” year (which, of course, he’ll never actually have).
Finally within this strange segment, there’s the fact that Harry is expressing his relief at things hopefully going back to normal based on something negative: Snape hating him. It’s sort of like the feeling that fans of bad teams get when their seasons finally start again, and their teams are still bad, so they know everything is okay. It’s basically the Harry Potter version of “The Knicks are missing free throws again...nature is healing.” Harry is drawing comfort from the return of normalcy, but the normalcy in question is pretty bad, which just goes to show you how shaken and disturbed he must have been by the whole “Voldemort sticking out the back of the head” thing.
From there, the story jumps ahead to exam results coming out. It’s pretty much as you expect: Harry and Ron do pretty well, Hermione is the best in the class, Neville and Crabbe and Goyle eke their way through to second year. I’m no expert on the British elementary education system, but it strikes me as strange that 11-year-olds have to pass a series of exams, and if they fail they’re either held back a year or just thrown out. 11 just seems too young for that, and as proof, look no further than Neville, who eventually becomes a very formidable wizard — and, in fact, a Hogwarts professor — but who comes dangerously close to failing out in first year, simply because he develops as a wizard later than everyone else does. I don’t have a perfect solution...well, actually, I think I do: “Even if you want to give exams to 11-year-olds, at least give them another year or two before you use those exams to make life-changing academic decisions on their behalf.” But regardless, fortunately everyone passes, and we go on to happier things.
Suddenly, the story zooms ahead. In a single paragraph, we go from “suddenly, their wardrobes were empty” to “pulling into platform nine and three-quarters at Kings Cross Station.” It’s starkly different from later books, in which the journey home often provides either big revelations (think “Rita Skeeter is a beetle,” then try saying that ten times fast) or comic relief (Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle trying to ambush the trio and seeing themselves hit with about nine jinxes at once). Here, it seemed like Rowling simply ran out of story to tell. This isn’t a complaint, since overwriting is as bad as underwriting; it’s just that this is the first book of the series, and there wasn’t that much material to refer back to that could make the journey home interesting. Which, again, is fine; it’s just different. Reading Sorcerer’s Stone, you start noticing that the book isn’t just shorter because less happens; there’s also less description of what is happening. Chase scenes that could cover a page or two in a later book will cover only a few lines, or a paragraph at most. Which makes sense: Rowling was still finding her voice and her confidence, and once she got there, the books started to get longer.
There are also a few tidbits from this last zooming paragraph worth pointing out. Trevor, Neville’s toad, is found in a corner of the bathroom; how did he survive so long? What did he eat? Why is he so against staying put with Neville? I suppose the real answers to the first two questions are “it doesn’t matter, he’s a magical toad,” in which case I can’t help but wonder about Trevor: is there more to him than meets the eye? Probably not, since, you know, the series is over and Trevor never ends up doing anything, but still, it could be interesting to see these long absences from Trevor’s point of view, if only to finally understand where his comprehension level has been for all this time, and what thoughts, if any, are going through his head. Then again, I suppose that doesn’t have anything to do with Harry Potter or magic or Hogwarts; it could be interesting to see something from a normal, non-magical toad’s perspective, just because it could be interesting to get inside the mind of any old toad.
In this paragraph, we also see the first official (i.e. non-Hagrid) mention of Hogwarts students not being allowed to use magic outside of school. Notes are handed out warning them that it’s not allowed (pardon the passive voice; I’d love to know who handed the notes out, but that passivity comes from the text itself, because Rowling doesn’t tell us). “I always hope they’ll forget to give us these,” Fred says sadly.
At first, my thought was “don’t the Weasleys know about the trace? Don’t they know they’ll get in trouble whether they’ve gotten the notes or not?” But then I realized: no they won’t. The Weasleys live in a wizarding household; the trace simply doesn’t apply. They can do all the magic they want, and because they’re almost always in the vicinity of Molly or Arthur, it won’t be traced back to them. This gets at my theory of how the trace works (which I’ll have much more to say about later): basically, it’s a two-factor system, sort of like Duo authentication except less annoying.
Here’s the theory: the Ministry tracks all adult wizards, but blindly and indirectly, so if magic happens around an underage wizard, they can search the area for of-age wizards who could have been the source. It has to be blind tracking, meaning the ministry can sense whether an of-age wizard is there but not which of-age wizard it is. If the tracking wasn’t blind, and the Ministry could know which wizard was where at any moment, I have a feeling they would be asking a lot of questions like “what is Mad-Eye Moody doing in Little Whinging?” It also has to be indirect — by which I mean, the tracing alarm, or whatever the system is, only gets activated when there’s already been a breach of the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery. If any and all magic around underage wizards required ministry personnel to manually investigate potential of-age wizards nearby, the Ministry would simply be overtaxed, plus they could still ask questions like “what are all these of-age wizards doing around Harry, Hermione, and the Weasleys at this house on Grimmauld Place? Someone should check that out!”
Anyway, this has been “The Trace: A Study of Methods, Mechanics, and Modalities.” Exciting stuff. Tune in next week: we’ll discuss the physics of quidditch, and just how hard the Golden Snitch has to flap. I’m kidding, I hope. Invigorating stuff from the Wizarding World. Until next week!