Harry Demented

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

“There was a rushing in his ears as though of water. He was being dragged downward, the rushing growing louder…

And then, from far away, he heard screaming, terrible, terrifying screaming. He wanted to help whoever it was, he tried to move his arms, but couldn’t… a thick white fog was swirling around him, inside him---

“Harry! Harry! Are you all right?” (PoA 5: The Dementor)

This was supposed to be a description of Harry reliving his worst memories? Really?

Danny-Sparks wrote in the “Harry’s Dead Parents” thread:

I think what bothers me more than Harry believing that he's suffered more than anyone else for losing his parents is that the story is written such that he actually has apparently suffered more than any of his peers. The text "proves" that Harry has suffered the most with the fact that no other student's boggart (that we see anyway) is especially scary and the fact that no other student has such a severe reaction to dementors.




Well. It’s not quite true that the text “proves” that Harry’s uniquely severe reaction to Dementors was due to Harry’s suffering worse horrors than anyone else ever in human history.

If you recall, that had been the explanation offered by Lupin, once he realized that Harry (like Draco, clearly!) subscribed to the theory that the fainting fits showed Harry to be a weakling.

Remus Lupin is notorious for, shall we say, shading the truth according to what he wishes his audience to believe.

“You react worse because you’ve suffered worse” was an undisguised attempt to make Harry feel better about his supposed weakness.

One can see why Harry would prefer that explanation to his own.

But there is no reason on earth why we readers have to buy it.

Think of the children on that train. There was Neville, regularly visiting his tortured-into-insanity parents, and with clear memories of his other relatives repeatedly trying to kill him if he couldn’t perform magic to their specifications. (His Snape-boggart I read as projecting his fear of being killed for magical incompetence onto a more emotionally-acceptable bogeyman than his loving Gran or proud Uncle Algie.) There was Luna, who’d witnessed her mother kill herself in a magical experiment gone wrong. There was Ginny, who’d been possessed by Voldemort, committed multiple assaults and barely, sheer accident, escaped becoming a murderess, and who then almost died herself to feed Voldemort’s return….

Not to mention that the oldest children on that train were five or six years old back when Voldemort was “vanquished”—easily old enough to remember close relatives who were killed either by, or as, Death Eaters.

Then there are the more commonplace horrors—surely among several hundred children and adolescents, a few at least have been raped, molested by relatives, beaten by their parents…. We have never been given cause to think the WW a Utopia, after all!

And not a single one reacts the way Harry does?

Nah, I just can’t buy that Harry reacted uniquely because he had worse memories than anyone else ever. Or even, worse than anyone else currently attending Hogwarts.

However, we do know of one way in which Harry was, at that time, unique. At least, so we most devoutly hope.

He was a human Horcrux, carrying a fragment of Tom Riddle’s soul. A fragment which had been split off by Tom’s bounced Avada Kedavra.

And surely inadvertently killing himself was Tom’s worst memory?

*

The memory of one’s own death must be horrible to revisit, and it is without a doubt unique. No one else on that train (or on any train) could boast of having endured the same!

Moreover, that specific memory of Tom’s was one that his host Harry had a reason to want to experience. It included his parents’ voices.

Which Harry did not, himself, recall.

Remember how ambivalent Harry was about succeeding at the Patronus Charm, because he kept wanting instead to revisit “his” only memory of his parents? The only way he could, by letting Dementors pull forth a nightmarish memory?

*

Hagrid told us that when he was in Azkaban, the Dementors over time forced Hagrid to relive ALL his worst memories—his father’s death, being expelled from Hogwarts, Harry’s taking Norberta away from him….

I hypothesize that when the Dementors pull memories and emotions it’s “worst first” (greedy things!) and that Tom’s experience of his ‘death’ was so much more terrible than anything Harry had endured that it was pulled first, before any of Harry’s. And that Harry at some level recognized what that memory must be and wanted to hear it, to hear his parents. But it wasn’t coming from his own mind, so Harry had to relinquish his own consciousness to allow the alien memory to play unhindered….

I.e., he passed out, listening to voices in a fog.

Harry started exerting some control (over drifting into a voice-filled fog whenever he faced Dementors) only after he’d let the Dementors pull forth both his parent’s voices for storage in his own memory. At which point he no longer needed to abdicate consciousness to let the Dementors evoke that treasured/hated memory, because he could now remember it (at secondhand) for himself.

Eventually, once Harry had Cedric’s murder and his own near death to provide as Dementor-food to rival Tom’s memory of Godric’s Hollow, Harry stopped either hearing his parents or fainting in Dementors’ presence.

As in, now that the Dementors were pulling up Harry’s own emotions and memories to feast on, he stayed conscious for the process. Like everyone else always had, however horrific the emotions and memories being evoked.

Comments

Too young for to form memories? No, just that it couldn't be Harry's worst

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Ah. But you see, when I was 11 my dad shot himself in the head.

Certainly a Dementor-worthy memory, yes? Conscious, in my case.

Except--he didn't do it in front of the family; he had the courtesy to go out on the riverbank in the middle of the night.

So my worst memory (connected with his suicide) is not the moment that he did it, but the one when I REALIZED it. When my mom and the priest sat us kids down and told us what had happened.

Now, I might very well have unconscious memories of hearing a "bang" while I was sleeping that night. The location of his suicide was close enough to the house tht it would have been clearly audible in my bedroom. Maybe I half woke at the time, but slid back into slumber when there was no further disturbance. Or maybe I never woke, and possess this memory at an even deeper level. Or maybe I never shuttled it from short to long-term storage.

But even if I do have that "bang" among my subconscious memories, a Dementor isn't going to pull that memory out of me, because I didn't register at the time that that sensory input had any meaning. So it had absolutely no emotional import at the time I stored it. At the moment of my father's death, I didn't realize there was anything wrong. That bang was meaningless (then), and recorded as such.

The worst memory was the moment that I understood what that unheard, unremembered bang MEANT.

If we accept Tom's version of events, Harry was completely unconscious that there was anything wrong at all until a scary-looking stranger leaned over his crib and caused him pain.

So HIS worst memory surrounding his parents' death would have been the subsequent moment of awful realization. Waking up among the hostile Dursleys, or the moment he realized (to the extent a toddler can) that none of his tantrums or hysterics would suffice to bring Mummy and Daddy to rescue him from Aunt Petunia and Dudley. Like the Palestinian baby, peaceful right up until s/he finally realized Mommy KEPT ON failing to come back.

Actually, for baby Harry, it probably happened in two stages: the first moment of betrayal, when he realized that Mummy and Daddy KEPT ON not showing up to rescue him from those awful strangers no matter HOW loudly Harry registered his disapprobation, and the moment (however long later) when he gave up and realized that they never would.


It was Tom who understood at the time what was going on, who registered his memories of that night as significant as they were happening.

Re: Too young for to form memories? No, just that it couldn't be Harry's worst

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

----If we accept Tom's version of events, Harry was completely unconscious that there was anything wrong at all until a scary-looking stranger leaned over his crib and caused him pain.

Yes, but I'm not sure we should accept Tom's interpretation of what Harry was thinking and feeling. I left a long reply about this in your other post.

Re: Too young for to form memories? No, just that it couldn't be Harry's worst

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

Also, I would think that Tom's absolute worst memory would be the "pain and terror" from the rebounded AK, not Lily Potter screaming.

Re: Too young for to form memories? No, just that it couldn't be Harry's worst

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

But the point is, for Tom, Lily's screams are part of the coherent stream of memories leading up to "Tom''s [ultimate, absolute, impossible-to-trump by anyone ever] worst mermory.

For Harry it'ds differntt-- either he didn't hear Lily scream, or he discounted them because of how often he'd heard them before, or....