Harry Demented
Nov. 14th, 2011 06:59 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslock“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.
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no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 05:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 06:03 pm (UTC)Brilliant!
no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 07:54 pm (UTC)----And surely inadvertently killing himself was Tom’s worst memory?
I hesitate to agree with this because there's very little evidence elsewhere that the piece of Tom in Harry possesses any memories of its own.
----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.
Are you saying that Harry was too young at the time for it to be his own memory? I don't think that works because he also has subconscious memories of the flying motorbike.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 09:24 pm (UTC)But, once re-embodied, Voldemort can flit in and out of Harry's mind (and vice versa), and even before then the soul fragment responds to Voldemort's intense emotion (or merely his physical presence, unless we are to assume that Quirrelmort had turban-related X-ray vision). At this stage, the link is emotion-based and entirely involuntary, so I think it's feasible that a Dementor's aura could reach into Vapourmort's memories. In fact, learning that Harry had been around Dementors in the same year he kept having flashbacks to his death may have been what alerted Voldemort to the link in the first place.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 11:20 pm (UTC)----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….
If Harry's fainting was caused by his desire to see the whole memory, then the memory need not have come from Tom. It could be the case that he had to lose consciousness in order to see the memory even if it was simply stored in his own subconsciousness.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 11:39 pm (UTC)Yup. That about sums it up. What's odd about the series though is that these other children whom Rowling clearly couldn't care less about seem more like real people than our *wonderful, courageous and loving hero*. Hmm...
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 12:12 pm (UTC)Double whammy
Date: 2011-11-16 09:14 pm (UTC)Secondly, yes, if Harry's own memories are juicy enough, the Dementors have less reason to try to reach through him to Tom's. And we see in OotP that it's the "bow to death" scene that Harry now relives first.
Tom's memories vs Harry's subconscious memories
Date: 2011-11-16 09:46 pm (UTC)Also, we're told that Harry's reaction is unique, so we have to look for a reason for Harry and Harry only to faint like that.
I inferred above that some of the oldest children on that train would have had family tragedies they can consciously remember. But canon STATES that a number of other children have family tragedies they were probably, like Harry, too young to consciously remember. In fact, three of them are in the compartment with Harry when he first faints.
The Weasleys on that train would have ranged from infancy to about age five when Molly's two brothers were killed; Neville was something like 18 months old when he lost his parents and was sent to live with abusive relatives; Draco a little more than that when he lost his aunt and uncles-in-law; Susan about Harry's age when she lost her uncle, aunt, and cousins. Surely some of them would be candidates for fainting, if the Dementors always made people faint when they pulled painful memories from the subconscious?
In fact, were that the explanation, the phenomenon should be well known. Because the prisoners in Azkaban would be fainting left and right when the Dementors reached the subconscious memory level. We know that when you're around Dementors for long enough, they make you relive ALL your worst memories.
And EVERYONE, not just people who suffered being orphaned or abused as toddlers, has childhood experiences that were (at that time) painful enough to appeal to Dementors. The time my guppy died. When my best friend moved away. The time I turned around in the store and mummy wasn't there and I thought she was lost forever! The time I slipped under water in the bathtub and thought I was going to drown! Et cetera.
So if that were the case, it would be known that everyone, sooner or later, faints around even a single Dementor, and Lupin's explanation to Harry would have been, "The Dementors make you faint because they automatically evoke people's worst memories--and anytime they evoke a memory the victim doesn't consciously recall, the victim faints. Would I be correct in assuming, Harry, that you experienced a memory, perhaps, connected with your parents' deaths? Soemthing you hadn't remembered before?"
What Harry consciously remembered
Date: 2011-11-16 09:58 pm (UTC)"He couldn't remember being in the car when his parents had died. Sometimes, when he strained his memory during long hours in his cupboard, he came up with a strange vision: a blinding flash of green light and a burning pain on his forehead." (PS C 2)
So what he consciously remembered, before magical assistance, was specifically the attack on HIM. And the memory had no auditory component at all.
It's only after the Sorting Feast that an auditory element was added, and then only in Harry's dream. A dream which started with Professor Quirrell's turban and ended with "Snape, whose laugh became high and cold." (C7)
So that addition could have been the soul-fragment responding to the prime.
And it's only after Harry sees the Mirror of Erised that he starts having recurrent nightmares of "his parents disappearing in a flash of green light, while a high voice cackled with laughter." (C13)
Re: What Harry consciously remembered
Date: 2011-11-16 10:36 pm (UTC)Re: Tom's memories vs Harry's subconscious memories
Date: 2011-11-16 11:03 pm (UTC)Yeah, I did think about that. I was thinking at the time that this line alone doesn't give us enough evidence that the fragment has its own memories, but maybe it does.
----In fact, were that the explanation, the phenomenon should be well known.
Oh. Good point! So that brings us back to the horcrux somehow causing the fainting....
I guess I just feel like a much simpler explanation would be that having an extra piece of alien soul attached to him makes Harry extra-sensitive to dementors, maybe because getting too close to dementors causes the fragment to start to "shake loose" from its binding to Harry.
Re: Tom's memories vs Harry's subconscious memories
Date: 2011-11-16 11:40 pm (UTC)Too young for to form memories? No, just that it couldn't be Harry's worst
Date: 2011-11-19 06:48 am (UTC)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
Date: 2011-11-19 07:02 am (UTC)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
Date: 2011-11-19 08:00 am (UTC)Re: Too young for to form memories? No, just that it couldn't be Harry's worst
Date: 2011-11-19 12:43 pm (UTC)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....
Re: Tom's memories vs Harry's subconscious memories
Date: 2011-11-19 08:41 pm (UTC)Seriously, though, there is that. You would expect that the Dementors' ability to suck out souls would be somehow important, but all it's ever used for is as a threat for Sirius- oh, and they suck out the soul of fake!Moody, after which point he's never seen or heard-from again.