Deathly Hallows, Chapter 2: In Memoriam, or Dishing the Dirt on Dumbledore, Part 1

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Through his own stupidity and sloppiness, Harry badly cuts his finger on broken glass in the school trunk he hasn’t bothered to thoroughly clean out for six years. I guess I should hope he’s had his tetanus shot, but all I can think is that if he has lockjaw, he won’t be able to whine and pout. (Although usually associated with rusty metal, tetanus is caused by a common bacterium that is found many places. I once read an article written by a woman who got it by stepping on a broken nutshell in her yard.)

Harry then appears to be trapped in a bad sitcom when he steps on and breaks a cup of cold tea right outside his bedroom door, then pauses to throw the broken pieces out before going to the bathroom to tend to his injury. That’s bad enough, but he then admits he’s so incompetent at basic healing charms, he can’t even heal his own cut finger! And it isn’t until now, when he’s planning to go after the Dull Lord, that it occurs to him that might be a problem! Tell me again why we’re supposed to see Snape and Voldemort as bad guys when they deride Harry as a dimwit who succeeds only through authorial fiat luck and the assistance of his more talented friends.

I’m far from a fastidious housekeeper, but even I was grossed out by the description of the literal garbage in the bottom quarter of Harry’s trunk: dead bug parts, used quills and parchment, outgrown socks, and assorted old, useless junk. It’s so grungy, it’s actually referred to as “mulch.” There’s probably food, too, from Molly’s care packages, but the narrator spared our sensibilities by not describing that. No wonder Petunia wants nothing to do with Harry. Would you want to be around somebody that filthy, and who apparently never bathes, if previous books are to be believed? Yet we’re supposed to believe Snape is repulsive. Yeah, greasy hair and crooked, yellow teeth are looking mighty good right now.

Harry had cut his finger on a piece of the magic walkie-talkie mirror Sirius gave him a few books ago. He thinks he sees Albus’s blue eye in it but realizes that can’t be the case. Looking at this shard of glass gives Harry another chance to angst about how sad it is that he’ll never again be “pierced” by Albus Dumbledore’s “twinkling blue eyes.” I’m sorry, Ms. Rowling, but that just sounds dirty.

We also learn Harry’s kept the last month’s worth of newspapers piled in his room. (I obviously mean The Daily Prophet. Muggle newspapers don’t count.) It’s too bad there were no hoarding intervention reality shows in 1997; Harry’s clearly a prime candidate for one.

Hedwig is stuck in her cage, either sleeping or pouting because Harry won’t let her out as much as she wants. Since owls are nocturnal, I’d bet the former. Surely she’s learned by now Harry’s too emotionally dense and self-centered to bother resenting.

Harry begins looking through the papers for a particular excuse for an info dump article. Just in case we’ve forgotten what happened all of four pages ago, there’s a reminder that one Charity Burbage “resigned” from Hogwarts recently. Apparently JKR has spent so much time with Harry, she now thinks her readers are as mentally deficient as her hero.

But that’s just a lead in to the real point of this chapter: dueling articles about how wonderful/horrible Albus Dumbledore was. First we’re nauseated by treated to a five-page eulogy by Albus’s sycophant, Elphias the Stooge, I mean, Doge, complete with an equally vomit-inducing picture of the dead dude. He’s in three-quarter view, gazing soulfully upward with his best fake “benign mentor” look.

Doge tells us he and Dumbledore met when they first attended school and both felt like outsiders, Elphias because of his dragon-pocked and greenish countenance, and Albus because of his family notoriety due to his father’s crimes and incarceration. No doubt we’re supposed to see Albus’s befriending of Elphias as an act of compassion on his part, but knowing Albus was a psychopath, it’s far more likely he saw the other boy as an ideal target for his self-aggrandizing manipulations, an assessment proven by the fact that over a hundred years later, Doge is still carrying a whole tower full of water for his friend. We’re told Albus was always helpful to his friends and loved teaching, but I regard that as just more con artistry on his part, like Ted Bundy volunteering at a crisis hotline during the same period he was most active as a murderer. It should also be remembered that “teaching” and “helping” people can be very effective ways to make them dependent on you. Come to think of it, that’s also what Hermione does--and we know how helpless her “assistance” has made Ron and Harry.

The contention Dumbledore was “the most brilliant student ever seen at the school” would be a lot more impressive if we didn’t know, as Snape put it in a fanfic, that Hogwarts is not “a real school” with demanding courses and academic rigor. (I think it was in Elementary, My Dear Potter, Part 1, by Rannaro, but I’m not sure. I read most of his/her stories in quick succession several months ago, so their details run together in my mind.) That contention is made even more ludicrous and irrelevant by the fact we are never given any other students as a basis for comparison with Albus. It’s easy to be “the best” at anything if you have no competition.

I’m similarly unimpressed by the references to Albus’s “regular correspondence with some of the most notable magical names of the day.” I imagine him pestering these important people with his adolescent maundering, and them repeatedly begging, “PLEASE! LEAVE ME ALONE!” I also wonder if those “learned publications” that published his articles were peer-reviewed journals or vanity publications for a highly specialized audience.

Despite his brilliance, Doge assures us, Dumbledore “never had Ministerial ambitions.” Of course not. Why waste your time in a bureaucratic desk job, dealing with adults who aren’t impressed by you, when you can devote your life to brainwashing a captive audience of gullible children into becoming your private army?

The trashing of Aberforth continues with the depiction of him as a hothead who hexed first and asked questions later. In other words, a typical Gryffindor, like James and Sirius. This may be the only example in HP of an instance when It’s Not Okay If A Gryffindor Does It. Given his later criticalness of his brother, maybe Aberforth was also “sorted too soon,” and should have been in another house. Given his propensity for loyalty and hard work, Hufflepuff might have been a good fit.

Doge generously admits that “it cannot have been an altogether comfortable experience” to have Albus as an older brother because one would have been “continually outshone.” Yeah, that’s one way of describing what it’s like to have a narcissistic psychopath as an older sibling.

Doge gives us a version of the deaths of Kendra and Ariana and the falling-out between Albus and Aberforth. He proves his deluded cluelessness by asserting the two brothers later made up and had “if not a close relationship, then certainly a cordial one.” This is contradicted both by Albus’s cruel “joke” about Aberforth’s being an illiterate goat-shagger, and Aberforth’s trashing of Albus later in DH as a manipulative con artist. At least Aberforth was honest.

In a rare moment of insightful honesty, Harry acknowledges, after reading this hagiography, that he knew very little about Dumbledore, and had cared even less about learning anything about him while the man was alive. He realizes this is because they’d always concentrated on Harry’s plans/feelings/needs, although, poor deluded thing, he doesn’t understand that was all part of the plot to manipulate him into doing Dumbledore’s bidding by making him feel both important to and dependent upon the old man.

Harry finally gets around to reading that day’s paper and sees the interview with Rita Skeeter about her new biography of Albus, The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore. I think better titles would have been: AD’s Life of Lies, or The Life of AD Was a Lie, or The Lies of AD and the Life of the Lying Liar Who Told Them (with thanks to Al Franken).

We’re supposed to believe Rita whipped up her 900-page doorstop in only a month, but I think that’s unlikely. Journalists typically have biographies of famous people ready to go at all times in case someone dies suddenly; these bios require only the latest details of the person’s death to complete them. I can’t believe a slick opportunist like Rita wouldn’t have been working on this book for a long time in secret so she could maximize her profits by having it ready to go as soon as the old man kicked the bucket.

Of course, JKR has to work in yet another dig at Aberforth by bringing up his conviction for misuse of magic fifteen years earlier. I’m sure his brother’s being a highly placed enemy of his had nothing to do with that scandal. A scumbag who runs his own private army and regularly endangers children at his madrasa magic school has to do whatever he can to make himself look like the good guy in the family.

Rita refers to Aberforth as “fiddling around with goats.” Now I’m imagining Aberforth as the conductor of an all-goat orchestra, or maybe as the cello player in a string quartet with magical goat fellow musicians.

We get another bit of delightful, unintentional irony when Rita disparages the relationship between Albus and Harry. She calls it, “unhealthy, even sinister...There is no question Dumbledore took an unnatural interest in Potter from the word go. Whether that was really in the boy’s best interests--well, we’ll see. It’s certainly an open secret that Potter has had a most troubled adolescence.”

Again, this is supposed to show how depraved Skeeter is, but, like Snape and Voldy’s deriding of Harry, it’s all true! It’s proven conclusively by the texts of the books that Dumbledore’s supposedly nurturing interest in Harry was a sham designed to take advantage of a lonely, vulnerable, abused boy for the purpose of turning him into a killer. Harry even obliquely admits this to himself in chapter 34. That cannot be in the best interests of the victim.

Harry has a violent, visceral reaction to this article: “Revulsion and fury rose in him like vomit....” Hey, welcome to the club, kid. Now you know how all of us felt when we read Deathly Hallows.

Harry wanders around his room, so angry and confused he can hardly think. “‘Lies!’ Harry bellowed, and through the window he saw the next-door neighbor, who had paused to restart his lawn mower, look up nervously.” I’d be nervous, too, if somebody near me was yelling apparently random words in an angry tone of voice. You can’t tell what a wacko like that might do. I’m sure this wasn’t the first time the kid next door had behaved erratically, either.

Here again, we’re supposed to take Harry’s side and regard as sadistic meanies, or at least clueless rubes, anybody who questions his behavior, no matter how bizarre. I think this may be my favorite thing about these books: People and actions are presented one way, with the assumption that all right-thinking people must agree that’s the only reasonable and/or moral way to think. In reality, the opposite point of view is the reasonable and/or moral one, yet neither the author nor her characters seem to be aware of that--or if they are, it’s only because they’re bad guys.

Comments

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Isn't that what Voldemort tried to do? Didn't Albus essentially accuse him of wanting to recruit his own private army of schoolchildren when Tom came in for an interview for the DADA post? And Tom never tried for the Minister of Magic post either, probably for the same reasons.

This reminds me of the scene in King's Cross at the end of this book. It's shown to us then that the Big Idea of this whole series is that You Must Accept The Reality Of Death. Sure, Voldemort may be a pseudo-Hitler who is responsible for the death and misery of thousands, and scornful of the power of love to boot, but his *real* moral failing as JK has painted it is that he can't face up to death. That's why he's the tiny, scarred, weak and whining thing caught inbetween two worlds while kamikaze Harry comes out triumphant.

The way Dumbledore sees things, I reckon, is that he must be morally superior to Voldemort because he (Dumbledore) had the sheer, amazing, Gryffindorian nerve to incorporate his own death into his plans for his apotheosis, if I can call it that. Voldemort failed to see the genius in this, and tried to do things in a way that secured his own longevity, therefore he was just a big old coward.