Draco's Polyjuiced Friends

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

In CoS, Harry and Ron, in the throes of transforming from Polyjuice back to their natural forms, fled from the Slytherin common room in the innocent belief that they’d succeeded in deceiving all the Slytherins.

A long time back, I wrote positing that they had not. That Draco had clued in somewhere along the way to the fact that his two supposed friends were really Polyjuiced imposters, and that Draco in this scene had been stringing them along, deliberately deceiving them, feeding them misinformation

But now I’ve decided I was still not giving Draco enough credit.

*


Really. Start by looking at the canon relationship between Draco and his two cronies as of when the three brats started Hogwarts. They were buddies, tight, with Draco as the brains and the “gorillas” as the brawn.

You know, like Hermione’s role in the Trio. Well, sort of.

When Hermione spots something in her reading that she thinks Harry and Ron should know, does she usually hand the boys her written source, without commentary, to have them read it too?

Or does she read it to them?

Or does she summarize?

The first time, first year, Hermione handed Harry and Ron her book. After that, she didn’t bother trying; she summarized.

Yet Ron and Harry are neither functionally illiterate nor stupid, just (terminally) intellectually lazy.

*

So.

How long did it take Ron and Harry to drug Crabbe and Goyle, lock them in that closet, pull out their hairs (excuse me, “bristles,” like a hog would have—we wouldn’t want the reader to be reminded too strongly that the assault victims here were twelve-year-old children), run to Myrtle’s loo, and finish the potion before they drank it?

In short, how long were Vince and Greg missing before the Polyjuice was even complete?

Plus the twenty minutes, timed, after Harry and Ron had taken the completed potion before, in their clueless wanderings through the dungeons, they finally heard a movement ahead of them.

Whereupon Ron said what?

“Ha! There’s one of them now!”

But it wasn’t; it was Percy. What did Ron say in acknowledgment? “What’re you doing down here?”

Not, who are you? And undoubtedly in tones of surprise rather than anger and suspicion.

And what did Ron say when his big brother asked if Ron-Polyjuiced were Crabbe?

“Wh—oh, yeah.”



Jesus. How thick can you get?


At which point Draco suddenly strolled up from behind the pair and drawled, “There you are. Have you two been pigging out in the Great Hall all this time? I’ve been looking for you: I want to show you something really funny.”

How long had Draco been trailing after the pair, watching and listening?

And, really, show them? A newspaper article? Not tell them about it? Because they’re such avid readers, right? Brandishing it before their admiring eyes as proof, maybe, but having them read it? Adult Vince couldn’t pronounce polysyllabic words like “Disillusion” and “diadem.” Do we really credit that as a twelve-year-old he could have easily read such big words as “artifacts” and “resignation,” or even know what they meant? Or that a good friend, who’d known him for years, would have expected him to?

Because what did Draco do with the pair, once he’d collected them? First, he miscalled Percy, Peter, and let himself be corrected by “Crabbe.” Next, he dragged them to the Slytherin common room, where he left them there —under guard by older students—while he went alone off to the dorm room to get the promised “something funny.”

To the dorm room he shared with Vince and Greg.

Stop a minute and translate this into more familiar terms. So, Harry wants to show Ron something—a private joke he thinks Ron will appreciate—that he’s left up in their dorm room. He insists that Ron wait down in the common room with a couple of older students (not, note, people he intends to share the joke with) while he finds it and brings it back, rather than having his best friend and dormmate just come up and chat with him while he rummages.

The sense, it makes?

Of course, the “something really funny” turns out to be an article about Ron’s dad being caught and punished for his egregious violation, not just of any old Wizarding regulations, but of the laws Arthur’s office was specifically created to enforce. And caught, though the newspaper does not stress this, because Arthur’s son Ron at Hogwarts misbehaved in a manner that directed the authorities’ attention to his dad’s transgressions.

And Draco made the pair read this. Prodded them to laugh at it. And proceeded with a host of additional provocative comments and insults, reminding his two guests repeatedly that they were supposed to be agreeing with and seeming to enjoy everything he was saying.

And then, when the two spies were too stupid to leave before they visibly started to turn back, Draco and the older Slytherins let them go unmolested, imagining that their deception had gone utterly undetected.

To instruct Arthur Weasley to disgrace himself further by insisting on another raid on Malfoy Manor, to tear up the basements beneath the drawing room. Which raid accomplished, of course, exactly nothing. Except to make Arthur look even more the (rabidly Malfoy-hating) fool.

Good work, Ron and Draco. Nice instance of inter-House teamwork, even if the Gryff didn’t realize it.

And, when the reader looks closely, Draco had even figured out to give the clipping to “Crabbe” first, as the one who’d hate it more.

*

But, see, I don’t think Jo ever meant this.


This is what drive me CRAZY about JKR. The disconnect between the surface reading, what she seems to be saying and WHICH SHE SEEMS TO WANT TO MEAN, and what she actually writes.

Because, really? If you asked me to take my best guess as to authorial intent in this chapter, I’d say: Jo thinks she’s giving Harry and Ron an insider tour of Draco’s vile, bigoted, racist and classist little musings on what’s been happening this year. I think she wrote this expecting the reader to credit that Draco fully means every last rotten thing he says.

But what she actually WROTE, the words on the page, are 100% consistent with the reading that Draco had spotted “Crabbe” and “Goyle,” as being really the Polyjuiced Potter and Weasley. And that therefore everything he said after spotting them was a deliberate provocation, an attempt to get their goats, not Draco’s real uncensored thoughts.

Only I don’t think JKR really ever meant anyone to think that.

This is just like the “poisoning Trevor” scene in PoA. I do think that Jo really meant there to show Snape to be an evil, nasty, sadistic bastard delighted at the thought of slaughtering a little boy’s pet before the owner’s horrified eyes. (Even though Jo had also planned eventually to reveal Snape as devoted to the Light, if for questionable motives.)

But what she actually wrote, once you look at it closely enough, is more consistent with someone required to prove himself, utterly convincingly, to be an Evil Nasty Sadist Who’d Love to Kill Kids’ Pets Before Their Eyes (the spy preparing to return to Voldemort with badass credentials), but who was desperate to establish that reputation without actually doing anything remotely violent.

If I thought she was doing all that consciously, I’d hail her as an utter genius. Only I don’t think she did. I think that, throughout, she intended her surface meanings.

So how did she so consistently write things that can be read as the opposite of what she seemed to want?

It would have taken one tiny tweak to the poisoning Trevor scene to prevent its being turned on its head—have Hermione reassure Neville privately that she knew how to correct his error. Rather than what Jo did write: Hermione saying so to Snape, who responded by announcing he’d test Neville’s potion on Trevor at the end of the class, and who then left Hermione to help Neville while he stayed assiduously on the far side of the classroom.

In the Polyjuice scene, three tweaks would have done it: put a little time between Ron’s betraying conversation with Percy and Draco’s appearance, make Harry and Ron a little better actors while listening to Draco, and, most importantly, have them scram before Ron’s hair turned red again.

Or at least exit, pursued by bears.

I mean, seriously. Your two best friends have been acting off for half an hour, and then they start changing shape before your eyes, and you just let them plead indigestion and run away? If Draco had been too stupid to remember Polyjuice, he should have been worried something was wrong.

But I don’t think Jo meant this reading. Whereas I do think she deliberately inserted all the animalistic touches in her descriptions of the Slytherins in this chapter: Goyle’s bristles instead of hair, Crabbe’s grunts and gorilla-like arms…. Consider even the Polyjuice—if Hermione’s portion had been noticeably a different color than the other two, she might have looked stupid (or at least rash) for drinking it anyway. But no—we see five completed Polyjuice potions in canon. In DH, the one made with Mafalda Hopkirk’s hair (the bureaucrat who’d signed Harry’s expulsion notice in book 5) turned a “pleasant heliotrope.” That made with Harry’s hair, of course, was gorgeous: “clear, bright gold.”

The cat hair turned the potion “a sick sort of yellow,” while Greg’s turned it “the khaki color of a booger” and Vincent’s “a dark, murky brown.”

See? One-quarter of the Wizarding population really is literally subhuman!

I think Jo meant that portrayal, and didn’t mean to write scenes that could be turned exactly on their heads.

So how the heck did she keep doing so?

Comments

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Hee! That's a much more charitable interpretation, but I think it goes against authorial intent (she says with a great air of piety). I mean, all her other descriptions of Greg and Vince in that scene are unflattering and animalistic....

Of course, I am perhaps not the right person to cite authorial intent as a reason to choose one interpretation over another....