Sectumsempra and denial
Mar. 25th, 2018 04:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanStill feeling somewhat grumpy and disappointed by the current JKR sitch, but also whatever, the text exists outside the author and I do think this is cool:
For some reason I don’t think I’ve ever posted about this theory of mine, so here goes: Harry is much, much more affected by the Sectumsempra scene and what he almost did to Draco Malfoy than he seems. Lest we forget, in the book he moves on amazingly quickly: Snape sends him to get the Prince’s potions book, Harry hides his real one and brings Ron’s, and Snape gives him detention. Harry at this point is literally covered in Draco’s blood, but he’s not thinking about that: he resists getting detention (and feels it’s unfair of Snape to give it to him!) for eviscerating a classmate, because of Quidditch. Even after that, there’s never any indication that Harry feels particularly guilty. He’s upset that the Prince has led him down this path - “as if a beloved pet had turned suddenly savage - what had [the Prince] been thinking” - but that’s not at all the same. He gets a twinge of conscience when someone brings up Draco’s injury but that’s it. It’s definitely not what we’d expect from a hero who’s just committed a very messy near-murder, even if it was unintended.
But this is not a criticism of Harry! Or indeed the book. Because I don’t think this is Harry being callous. I think it’s Harry being kind of damaged already and then almost killing a classmate in bloody fashion (with a spell that’s for enemies, and Harry would’ve said Malfoy was his enemy but he didn’t mean this.) I think this is, canonically and concretely, Harry going into complete and utter denial.
The denial reading makes sense of what is otherwise a weird lack of guilt. Like, even if you as a reader think Harry is 0% culpable for what happens and could have happened, that’s different from the experience as a person of “I did this thing and then HIS FACE AND BODY WERE SLASHED OPEN AND THERE WAS BLOOD EVERYWHERE.” Especially from a person who often feels guilty for deaths he actively tried to prevent! The Sectumsempra scene is by far the bloodiest in the books, and while Harry’s been through a lot, that’s the first time he ever sees violent injury on that level. But it doesn’t overtly affect him.
Draco disappears from his consciousness after the Sectrumsempra scene in a way that’s really weird. We don’t see Draco coming back to class. (We saw that after Buckbeak, so why not now?) We don’t see the first time he and Harry lay eyes on each other after that spell; we don’t know anything about how Draco reacts. No patented Harry-and-Malfoy glares across the House tables at meals. Literally the next time Draco appears in the text after Sectumsempra is the Tower scene, and after a book in which Harry has become “obsessed with Draco Malfoy” that is such a sharp change.
But it makes sense: Harry is unable to cope with what happened so he’s just ignoring it ferociously. There’s mention of “Slytherin taunts” but no description of what they’re saying. (“Stay away from us, psycho! You finally snapped!” perhaps? I mean, they genuinely have zero reason to think Harry isn’t a stone-cold killer, unless Draco was aware enough in the middle of all the bleeding out to hear Harry’s horrified reaction, which I truly doubt.) Harry feels his punishment is a deeply unfair targeting by Snape, and Pansy “lost no time in vilifying Harry far and wide”, apparently. As if she doesn’t have good reason to think him a villain!
Ginny, on the other hand, is defending Harry to the hilt and saying Hermione “should be glad he had something good up his sleeve”. That conversation is telling in itself: the climax of Hermione and Ginny debating what Harry did is them snapping at each other and Harry wondering about that - aren’t they friends? - rather than about the subject of discussion, i.e. how he accidentally ripped someone up. And honestly, while it’s also about Ginny’s feelings of success and has been building for a while, I do kind of think Harry gets over himself and goes for it with Ginny so fast - within the same chapter! - partly to avoid thinking about Sectumsempra.
There’s a suggestion of the feelings under the surface in how Harry’s feelings about Quidditch - a peripheral concern he thinks about FAR more than what he did to Malfoy - are described. The last line of the scene is Harry being left “to stare at himself in the cracked mirror feeling sicker, he was sure, than Ron had ever felt in his life.” The lines immediately preceding it were about villainous Snape and his yellow-toothed smile, whispering about “poor Gryffindor… fourth place this year, I fear…” That and the reference to Ron (who feels sick specifically over Quidditch) indicates the sickness is about the House Cup. But the natural reading for a lot of us, I’d think, is that he’s really feeling sick over Malfoy.
That’s especially true because the end of the scene is him looking into a “cracked mirror”. Sectumsempra began with Malfoy looking into that mirror and crying, and their eyes meeting in the mirror. Harry and Malfoy were always mirror images, opposite yet parallel, and in this scene Harry sees his shadow-character is actually a person, vulnerable and human, and freaks out in a way that only proves how human Malfoy actually is: he can see him bleeding the same red Harry does - all over the bathroom floor. My love for this scene as a Gothic moment of mirrored characters is another post, but the boys as “cracked mirrors”, and the ways they do and don’t reflect each other, is allllll over this scene and the mirror-image (pun intended) opening and closing of the passage is 100000% not a coincidence. Quidditch ain’t really about Quidditch.
Harry also thinks he’s “having a bad enough time without Hermione lecturing him; the looks on the Gryffindor team’s faces when he had told them he would not be able to play on Saturday had been the worst punishment of all”. He even describes the thought of Ginny and Dean getting back together in their post-match euphoria as “like a cold knife”. As what could slice you up in a bathroom, perhaps? Insensitive dickhead or, as is not exactly unusual for this competitive boy in their long rivalry, putting all of his Malfoy-related feelings into Quidditch?
In the middle of a book that’s about how killing tears your soul apart, and about how Malfoy himself is basically having a nervous breakdown because he’s being asked to do it, an almost-murder from our hero is a particularly big deal. And of course it’s the spell Snape invented when he was an angry young teenager like Harry, that comes smack back to haunt him, in the same book that climaxes with perhaps Snape’s most brutal punishment for having been a Death Eater: having to kill his mentor. “And my soul, Dumbledore? Mine?” Snape saves Malfoy too, healing the damage still being caused by his past, as he’s doing overall. Meanwhile Harry goes from shock to peripheral concerns (Quidditch, the Potions book) to ignoring it completely.
But all of that is significant, I think, but not THE reason why I think denial is the only reading that makes sense. Harry spends most of HBP telling anyone who’ll listen - Arthur Weasley, Lupin, Ron and Hermione, Dumbledore - that Draco Malfoy has become a Death Eater. They all dismiss him. What Harry hears in that bathroom proves that Malfoy has been threatened all year by a man Malfoy believes can kill him, and that he’s working on a project for that threatening person. GEE I WONDER WHO THAT COULD BE. And Harry doesn’t tell anyone!
WHAT?
That really only makes sense if Harry is in deep denial, because he’s a bright boy. In every previous book Harry’s put together clues and worked out the evil scheme being plotted by someone within Hogwarts (until OotP, where Voldemort used that ability against him). This is absolutely the moment that Harry should’ve - would’ve - worked it out. Except that the shock of Malfoy “crying - actually crying” and then Sectumsempra seems to have shut down that part of his brain. And then Harry, too late, gets the extra clue from Trelawney that’s the first time he’s thought about Malfoy since the bathroom, and can’t fix it.
Which also fits, because this is the book where the mentor dies. The book where the horror of killing someone gets explored. It’s all ramping up for the last book, where Harry will decide whether to go for power and killing Voldemort. (I have some opinions about how that plays out, but that’s another post.) And it’s also about the way that horrors and wars get passed on to the next generation - probably as much as PoA is about that - so yeah. “Sectumsempra” - a spell that translates to always cutting, passed on from the previous generation of angry Hogwarts orphans, used against the boy who’s being weaponised by the original. Will Harry’s generation overcome all that and stop cutting, or not?
I mean, in the film Dumbledore makes those themes pretty explicit with the welcome-feast speech about how the students themselves are Voldemort’s best weapons. Draco and Snape and Harry are the locus of it all - so yeah, this is the part where the horror of almost killing someone, and the weight of enmity, not only is brought home to Harry but actually interferes with his previous ability to solve the mystery and save the day. He’s not able to stop the Death Eater invasion in part, I suspect, because his denial stops him from enlisting Ron and Hermione (and Ginny) in fighting whatever Draco’s doing, now he’s got such good evidence Draco is indeed doing something.
This is NOT to blame Harry for not stopping the Death Eaters invading Hogwarts, obvs. But normally he’s able to do that hero stuff, so it’s worth examining why and how he isn’t this time.
Ginny even brings up Draco’s attempted use of Cruciatus as a reason he should be taken seriously as a threat, and that it’s acceptable for Harry to have reacted that way. Harry has spent the whole book up to this point trying to convince people that Draco’s a serious threat, while the others - Ron and Hermione especially - doubted that Voldemort would have made Malfoy a Death Eater. Now there’s explicit discussion about Draco’s use of an Unforgivable - who trained him to do that, hmm? - and whether Draco should be treated as a real threat. And yet in this conversation, Harry somehow doesn’t bring up how he heard Draco actually say that he’s trying to do something, and his life has been threatened if he doesn’t do it! They never even ask Myrtle about it!!!
DENIAL.
For some reason I don’t think I’ve ever posted about this theory of mine, so here goes: Harry is much, much more affected by the Sectumsempra scene and what he almost did to Draco Malfoy than he seems. Lest we forget, in the book he moves on amazingly quickly: Snape sends him to get the Prince’s potions book, Harry hides his real one and brings Ron’s, and Snape gives him detention. Harry at this point is literally covered in Draco’s blood, but he’s not thinking about that: he resists getting detention (and feels it’s unfair of Snape to give it to him!) for eviscerating a classmate, because of Quidditch. Even after that, there’s never any indication that Harry feels particularly guilty. He’s upset that the Prince has led him down this path - “as if a beloved pet had turned suddenly savage - what had [the Prince] been thinking” - but that’s not at all the same. He gets a twinge of conscience when someone brings up Draco’s injury but that’s it. It’s definitely not what we’d expect from a hero who’s just committed a very messy near-murder, even if it was unintended.
But this is not a criticism of Harry! Or indeed the book. Because I don’t think this is Harry being callous. I think it’s Harry being kind of damaged already and then almost killing a classmate in bloody fashion (with a spell that’s for enemies, and Harry would’ve said Malfoy was his enemy but he didn’t mean this.) I think this is, canonically and concretely, Harry going into complete and utter denial.
The denial reading makes sense of what is otherwise a weird lack of guilt. Like, even if you as a reader think Harry is 0% culpable for what happens and could have happened, that’s different from the experience as a person of “I did this thing and then HIS FACE AND BODY WERE SLASHED OPEN AND THERE WAS BLOOD EVERYWHERE.” Especially from a person who often feels guilty for deaths he actively tried to prevent! The Sectumsempra scene is by far the bloodiest in the books, and while Harry’s been through a lot, that’s the first time he ever sees violent injury on that level. But it doesn’t overtly affect him.
Draco disappears from his consciousness after the Sectrumsempra scene in a way that’s really weird. We don’t see Draco coming back to class. (We saw that after Buckbeak, so why not now?) We don’t see the first time he and Harry lay eyes on each other after that spell; we don’t know anything about how Draco reacts. No patented Harry-and-Malfoy glares across the House tables at meals. Literally the next time Draco appears in the text after Sectumsempra is the Tower scene, and after a book in which Harry has become “obsessed with Draco Malfoy” that is such a sharp change.
But it makes sense: Harry is unable to cope with what happened so he’s just ignoring it ferociously. There’s mention of “Slytherin taunts” but no description of what they’re saying. (“Stay away from us, psycho! You finally snapped!” perhaps? I mean, they genuinely have zero reason to think Harry isn’t a stone-cold killer, unless Draco was aware enough in the middle of all the bleeding out to hear Harry’s horrified reaction, which I truly doubt.) Harry feels his punishment is a deeply unfair targeting by Snape, and Pansy “lost no time in vilifying Harry far and wide”, apparently. As if she doesn’t have good reason to think him a villain!
Ginny, on the other hand, is defending Harry to the hilt and saying Hermione “should be glad he had something good up his sleeve”. That conversation is telling in itself: the climax of Hermione and Ginny debating what Harry did is them snapping at each other and Harry wondering about that - aren’t they friends? - rather than about the subject of discussion, i.e. how he accidentally ripped someone up. And honestly, while it’s also about Ginny’s feelings of success and has been building for a while, I do kind of think Harry gets over himself and goes for it with Ginny so fast - within the same chapter! - partly to avoid thinking about Sectumsempra.
There’s a suggestion of the feelings under the surface in how Harry’s feelings about Quidditch - a peripheral concern he thinks about FAR more than what he did to Malfoy - are described. The last line of the scene is Harry being left “to stare at himself in the cracked mirror feeling sicker, he was sure, than Ron had ever felt in his life.” The lines immediately preceding it were about villainous Snape and his yellow-toothed smile, whispering about “poor Gryffindor… fourth place this year, I fear…” That and the reference to Ron (who feels sick specifically over Quidditch) indicates the sickness is about the House Cup. But the natural reading for a lot of us, I’d think, is that he’s really feeling sick over Malfoy.
That’s especially true because the end of the scene is him looking into a “cracked mirror”. Sectumsempra began with Malfoy looking into that mirror and crying, and their eyes meeting in the mirror. Harry and Malfoy were always mirror images, opposite yet parallel, and in this scene Harry sees his shadow-character is actually a person, vulnerable and human, and freaks out in a way that only proves how human Malfoy actually is: he can see him bleeding the same red Harry does - all over the bathroom floor. My love for this scene as a Gothic moment of mirrored characters is another post, but the boys as “cracked mirrors”, and the ways they do and don’t reflect each other, is allllll over this scene and the mirror-image (pun intended) opening and closing of the passage is 100000% not a coincidence. Quidditch ain’t really about Quidditch.
Harry also thinks he’s “having a bad enough time without Hermione lecturing him; the looks on the Gryffindor team’s faces when he had told them he would not be able to play on Saturday had been the worst punishment of all”. He even describes the thought of Ginny and Dean getting back together in their post-match euphoria as “like a cold knife”. As what could slice you up in a bathroom, perhaps? Insensitive dickhead or, as is not exactly unusual for this competitive boy in their long rivalry, putting all of his Malfoy-related feelings into Quidditch?
In the middle of a book that’s about how killing tears your soul apart, and about how Malfoy himself is basically having a nervous breakdown because he’s being asked to do it, an almost-murder from our hero is a particularly big deal. And of course it’s the spell Snape invented when he was an angry young teenager like Harry, that comes smack back to haunt him, in the same book that climaxes with perhaps Snape’s most brutal punishment for having been a Death Eater: having to kill his mentor. “And my soul, Dumbledore? Mine?” Snape saves Malfoy too, healing the damage still being caused by his past, as he’s doing overall. Meanwhile Harry goes from shock to peripheral concerns (Quidditch, the Potions book) to ignoring it completely.
But all of that is significant, I think, but not THE reason why I think denial is the only reading that makes sense. Harry spends most of HBP telling anyone who’ll listen - Arthur Weasley, Lupin, Ron and Hermione, Dumbledore - that Draco Malfoy has become a Death Eater. They all dismiss him. What Harry hears in that bathroom proves that Malfoy has been threatened all year by a man Malfoy believes can kill him, and that he’s working on a project for that threatening person. GEE I WONDER WHO THAT COULD BE. And Harry doesn’t tell anyone!
WHAT?
That really only makes sense if Harry is in deep denial, because he’s a bright boy. In every previous book Harry’s put together clues and worked out the evil scheme being plotted by someone within Hogwarts (until OotP, where Voldemort used that ability against him). This is absolutely the moment that Harry should’ve - would’ve - worked it out. Except that the shock of Malfoy “crying - actually crying” and then Sectumsempra seems to have shut down that part of his brain. And then Harry, too late, gets the extra clue from Trelawney that’s the first time he’s thought about Malfoy since the bathroom, and can’t fix it.
Which also fits, because this is the book where the mentor dies. The book where the horror of killing someone gets explored. It’s all ramping up for the last book, where Harry will decide whether to go for power and killing Voldemort. (I have some opinions about how that plays out, but that’s another post.) And it’s also about the way that horrors and wars get passed on to the next generation - probably as much as PoA is about that - so yeah. “Sectumsempra” - a spell that translates to always cutting, passed on from the previous generation of angry Hogwarts orphans, used against the boy who’s being weaponised by the original. Will Harry’s generation overcome all that and stop cutting, or not?
I mean, in the film Dumbledore makes those themes pretty explicit with the welcome-feast speech about how the students themselves are Voldemort’s best weapons. Draco and Snape and Harry are the locus of it all - so yeah, this is the part where the horror of almost killing someone, and the weight of enmity, not only is brought home to Harry but actually interferes with his previous ability to solve the mystery and save the day. He’s not able to stop the Death Eater invasion in part, I suspect, because his denial stops him from enlisting Ron and Hermione (and Ginny) in fighting whatever Draco’s doing, now he’s got such good evidence Draco is indeed doing something.
This is NOT to blame Harry for not stopping the Death Eaters invading Hogwarts, obvs. But normally he’s able to do that hero stuff, so it’s worth examining why and how he isn’t this time.
Ginny even brings up Draco’s attempted use of Cruciatus as a reason he should be taken seriously as a threat, and that it’s acceptable for Harry to have reacted that way. Harry has spent the whole book up to this point trying to convince people that Draco’s a serious threat, while the others - Ron and Hermione especially - doubted that Voldemort would have made Malfoy a Death Eater. Now there’s explicit discussion about Draco’s use of an Unforgivable - who trained him to do that, hmm? - and whether Draco should be treated as a real threat. And yet in this conversation, Harry somehow doesn’t bring up how he heard Draco actually say that he’s trying to do something, and his life has been threatened if he doesn’t do it! They never even ask Myrtle about it!!!
DENIAL.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-25 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-30 09:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-25 07:27 pm (UTC)Sounds like Harry went through some serious counseling once the war ended.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-30 09:26 am (UTC)Yeah - I mean CC!Harry's damaged for sure, but I think rather less than HBP!Harry.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-26 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-30 09:31 am (UTC)Yeah, I actually love this section of the books, but only because the denial reading makes so much sense to me. Otherwise it's just incredibly weird.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-26 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-30 09:38 am (UTC)I don't think fic is coming, sadly. But there SHOULD be fic about this!!!! It's so ripe for H/D and there's so much H/D fic, I don't know why I've never seen it.