Oedipus Crouch
In the myth of Oedipus, it was King Laertes’ actions which honed his own child into the weapon that would kill him. Learning of a prophecy that the son would kill the father, Laertes tried (logically, he thought) to avert that fate by destroying his infant son.
But not by killing the child, of course; directly shedding his own blood might call down a blood-curse upon Laertes.
Instead, the clever king sent off his infant to be exposed, to be destroyed by beasts or gods or cold or thirst, whichever fate would take him.
But the king’s sacrificed child was not destroyed but saved, and grew up a stranger to his heritage, and as an angry young man met a stranger at a crossroads….
Oops.
*
Every Potter fan should reread Elkins once in a while, just like everyone should reread Jodel and Swythyv. Even where they were wrong about where JKR would take canon, their very errors illuminate the Potterverse. In her great “Crouch Novenna,”
http://skelkins.com/hp/archives/000171.html
Elkins wrote:
"Don't ask me to pity Crouch, Eileen," Elkins says in a low shaking voice. "I don't pity him. The man set out to destroy his son's sense of self. Ruthlessly. Deliberately. Methodically. He forged the blade that killed him. He did it with his own two hands. It took him ten years, but he did it. He managed it in the end."
And it occurs to me to wonder whether that might not have been more literally true even than Elkins had dared to imagine.
When, exactly, did Junior swear himself irrevocably to the Dark Lord’s service?
It might conceivably have been when Lord Voldemort showed up on Daddy-dearest’s doorstep.
*
Cornelius Fudge thought it perfectly plausible that a man who’d been nearly tortured to death by Dementors on his father’s orders, and who’d then spent a decade imprisoned by that father under the Imperius Curse, might end up a lunatic who could have hallucinated that he was a devoted follower of his father’s worst enemy, and that said lunatic could have killed his own father, and murderously attacked others, following his dead father’s dead enemy’s imaginary orders.
Maybe, instead of dismissing that interpretation out of hand, we should have stopped to remember that the Minister of Magic HAD toured Azkaban, and had listened, rather extensively, to the ravings of its inmates. Quite shocked, he had been, at how normal Black had managed still to sound in comparison.
Er, this would be that Black who muttered monomaniacally in his sleep, “He’s at Hogwarts, he’s at Hogwarts….”
If that seemed normal to Fudge, what typified the ravings of the other inmates?
I mean, of course, of that minority who still could still form words.
*
Elkins’ overall point was that Barty Senior’s specific method of imprisoning his son had been an attempt, not to keep him “safe’, but to brainwash him. To break Junior’s sense of self and re-create him as the perfectly obedient son Senior had wished him to be. And that the brainwashing had been successful-save that the boy retained the tiniest shard of autonomy, and gave his inculcated need to prove himself perfectly obedient to his substitute-father Voldemort, his father’s enemy, rather than to the father who’d broken him.
Here’s Elkins’ argument, for those who haven’t read or don’t remember it:
From the instant that Crouch Jr. described his treatment as his father's prisoner in the veritaserum scene, I instinctively read it as an attempt at indoctrination. Every single thing that we learn about how Crouch saw fit to keep his son seems to me to point unerringly in that direction. Imperius. Invisibility Cloak, yet kept in public view. Presumed dead. Permitted to speak to no one. Watched night and day. Denied sunlight. Denied solitude. Given rewards for good behavior, rewards which went by the degrading name of 'treats.' Encouraged to view his two captors in the dual roles of Merciful Intercessor and Strict Disciplinarian. Frankly, I'm surprised that Crouch didn't think to shave his son's head. It would have been in keeping with everything else that we hear about how he chose to treat his son after he learned that he was unrepentent, all of which reads to me like a textbook case of a direct and deliberate assault on a captive's sense of identity, on his sense of self.
…
Crouch kept his son in a public part of the house, in full sight and yet unseen, even while he slept, in order to make him not only be invisible, but also feel invisible. To turn him into an Unperson. To erode his sense of self. To subvert his sense of identity. To break his will. To turn him into an empty shell, a receptacle ready and waiting to be filled up with whatever it pleased his father to pour back into him.
The dissociated young Crouch that we see in canon is in large part a creation of his father. The reason that he is able to assume another's identity well enough to fool even Dumbledore is because he has precious little left of his own. His father spent over a decade systematically stripping him of his own identity, trying to empty him, to make him hollow, in the hopes of filling him back up with his own essence, of turning his son into a different kind of mirror: a mirror that for once would not reverse that which it reflected, a mirror that Crouch himself would not flinch to look upon.
But he only partially succeeded. The Crouch Jr. that we see in canon is a reflective surface, and he is hollow. But the father that he has invited into himself to fill the void of his raped personal identity is not Barty Senior. Instead, it is Voldemort.
In the end, the metaphor reaches its full completion. Barty Jr. is dementor-kissed. He becomes fully hollow; he loses his very soul.
Ouch. And, unfortunately, it makes sense. Of the Pensieve Four, Bellatrix was the one who, both before and after a decade (and more) of soul-destroying torture, stalwartly and repeatedly kept declaring that her one ambition and greatest pleasure was to serve the Dark Lord. “Throw us into Azkaban; we will wait! … We alone were faithful! We alone tried to find him!” (GoF, 30) [Note that though she claims this proud honor on behalf of her compatriots as well, they none of them chime in to claim it with her.]
Later, we hear Bellatrix aver, “I, who spent many years in Azkaban for him!... If I had sons, I would be glad to give them up to the service of the Dark Lord!” (HBP, 2) “My Lord, it is an honor to have you here, in our family’s house. There can be no higher pleasure.” (DH, 1)
(And what had been done to Bella to make her proud to be enslaved to a madman’s whims? One darkly speculates on the fact that she’s one of the very, very few female Death Eaters, and on what spells a patriarchal society might possibly have come up with over the centuries to ensure a woman’s perfect obedience to her Lord and Master…. Jodel, I think it was, posited that the Imperius might have originally been invented as a merciful spell in a society-Roman-in which slaves, wives, and children were expected to obey the Paterfamilias or have him be expected, by his peers, to torture them to death. Crucify your kids/wife/slaves for disobedience, or slap the Imperius on them so they can’t disobey? )
Barty, in contrast, in the Pensieve scene, kept insisting on his absolute innocence and pleading for his father to believe him and for his mother to save him.
We know that, at the time that Barty’s father consigned his son (“I have no son!”) and son’s companions to Azkaban with the pious hope, “and may they rot there!”(GoF 30) the evidence against Barty was slim and circumstantial.
Dumbledore said judiciously, when asked directly, “The Longbottoms’ evidence was-given their condition-none too reliable.”
“Then Mr. Crouch’s son might not have been involved?” said Harry slowly.
Dumbledore shook his head. “As to that, I have no idea.”(GoF 30)
Sirius went a little further. “Crouch’s own son was caught with a group of Death Eaters who’d managed to talk their way out of Azkaban. Apparently they were trying to find Voldemort and return him to power.”
… “Was his son a Death Eater?” said Harry.
… “No idea… The boy was definitely caught in the company of people I’d bet my life were Death Eaters-but he might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like the house-elf.” (GoF, 27)
But of course we found out in the end that, unlike Sirius and Winky, Barty Jr. had, indeed, been guilty of the crime for which he was condemned. Or at least of being a Death Eater, whether or not he’d committed that crime, or any actual crime.
And how do we know this? Why, Lord Voldemort TOLD his errant “family” so, and surely he would know. In that graveyard, Tommy TOLD the edifying tale of the One Faithful Servant, who’d sent up the Dark Mark last summer and made the faithless ones run, and who’d delivered Harry Potter into Voldemort’s power for the Dark Lord’s resurrection….
Then we have Barty’s corroborative testimony under Veritaserum that after a year of Azkaban, of being tortured by Dementors to the brink of death, “When I had recovered my strength, I thought only of finding my master… of returning to his service.” (GoF,35)
And the young man was stupid enough, and impassioned enough, to tell his father so. So his father responded by keeping him under the Imperius Curse and trying to break his will.
But if you’ll recall, that hadn’t been the case before Barty went in. Barty, unlike Bella, hadn’t been hauled off to Azkaban pledging his unswerving devotion to the Dark Lord.
Was it that Barty had then been too smart, too cagy, to express his true feelings? Did he have hopes perhaps of his father’s pulling strings to release his heir after a limited imprisonment, if Junior continued steadfast in his denials? Were Barty’s desperate appeals to both parents merely an act covering up his determination to go free to seek his master again?
If so, then being tortured by Dementors had made Barty lose his ability to dissemble, so that upon being rescued he was too weak to disguise his true intentions from his father?
Or was it instead the case that spending a year in Azkaban, being tortured literally to the point of death, had changed Barty’s intentions?
I don’t trust everything Lupin said about Dementors, but I do believe that “If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself… soulless and evil. You’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.” (PoA 10)
Sirius informed us that he escaped with his sanity as intact as it was, partly because he could escape the worst by turning into a dog, but mostly because he was sustained by one thought. “I knew I was innocent. That wasn’t a happy thought, so the Dementors couldn’t suck it out of me… but it kept me sane and knowing who I am….”
And it inspired him with such a hatred of Peter (the thought that he, Sirius, was innocent was simultaneously the thought that Peter was guilty) that the sight of Wormtail’s picture, the thought that Wormtail was alive and at Hogwarts with James’s son “lit a fire in my head, and the Dementors couldn’t destroy it…. It wasn’t a happy feeling… it was an obsession…. but it gave me strength, it cleared my mind.”
But if Barty Jr. had entered Azkaban knowing himself to have been innocent, that knowledge would have been a happy thought.
At least initially.
Surely his father wouldn’t let the matter rest there, imprisoning his only child on flimsy evidence? Surely he’d at least have the DMLE continue looking for the truth regarding his only son’s guilt? And further evidence, real evidence, would of course exonerate Barty.
Surely Barty’s mother, at least, could be counted on to force her husband to keep looking for any proof of their child’s innocence?
Surely Barty’s father couldn’t possibly leave his innocent son to rot in prison just to maintain that father’s political position?
A happy thought.
So the Dementors could suck it out. Leaving… what?
The thought that his father WAS leaving his only son rot to death in prison. Letting his son be tortured to death. On evidence that his father knew to be at best strictly circumstantial.
Merely because I’d been taking tea with the Lestranges at the moment the Aurors came to arrest them, and that gave that bitch Bellatrix the bright idea that claiming I was involved would be a good revenge on the head of the DMLE….
She only implicated me to get back at Father.
And Father HAS to know that. He has to know I’m really innocent. But he’s leaving me to rot here.
Why?
For his political advantage. Because he’s afraid if he lets me off, he’ll seem soft on Death Eaters and it might destroy his popularity.
He’s killing me to maintain his political popularity.
I wish I had joined the Death Eaters. His precious son, a Death Eater.
It would have served him right.
*
In Sirius’s case, the conviction of his innocence helped to keep him sane. So he told us.
In Barty’s, it might have had the opposite effect. And might eventually have lit a fire in Barty’s brain, an obsession….
Joining Voldemort’s service… served him right.
*
I kind of like the idea of Barty directly turning his son into the Dark Lord’s devoted follower, rather than indirectly by neglecting his moral education….
Of course, this speculation is directly contradicted by three things in canon.
First, Barty’s own statement above, given under Veritaserum, that his only thought on recovering from Azkaban was to return to his master’s service. But my speculation is that Barty was delusional by the time he was smuggled out; he sincerely believed himself to have been the Dark Lord’s loyal supporter, because that’s what his hated father would most have hated.
(And of course, the flip side of that is: if Mr. and Mrs. Crouch hadn’t fully believed in Barty’s real guilt, why then, smuggling him out of Azkaban was not a truly criminal act, endangering the whole of the WW for the solace of their private emotions, but rather the rescue of an innocent. Or at least of a probable innocent. The private redress of an overzealous public enforcement of justice. Which Mr. Crouch couldn’t indulge publicly because it would ruin him.
(In which case, Barty’s professions of devotion to Voldemort must have come as a very nasty shock indeed to his Daddy.)
Second, Voldmort’s indication that the last space of the six in the largest gap in the circle had belonged to Barty (and his direct assertion that the Death Eater currently in his service at Hogwarts “remains my most faithful servant and has already reentered my service.” [emphasis mine] GoF, 33)
But the other five in that gap were Snape, Karkaroff, and those “three dead in my service.” I pointed out in my essay “All Men are Mortal, All Death Eaters are Slytherin” that if Severus were the only double agent among the branded Death Eaters, his turning over to Dumbledore the names of everyone he recognized would have created the optical illusion that most Death Eaters were Slytherins, because most of the ones he could identify with certainty were his contemporaries and house-mates.
Or, the people in Snape’s own “cell.” All of whom would have been turned in to Dumbles, and many of those names passed on in turn to the Ministry. Like Karkaroff had been. It’s significant that in his bargaining Karkaroff gave mostly names that Snape already had given (as may be inferred by the fact that most of Karkaroff’s names were already known).
Both Karkaroff and Snape “talked”-Karkaroff to Crouch, Snape to Dumbledore. Neither of them fingered Barty. So why then was Barty’s place next to them, in the same cell with the two traitors and the three (possibly betrayed) dead, rather in the gap where would have stood his known companions the imprisoned Lestranges?
As in…
Are we quite sure the fourth absentee wasn’t yet another dead man? Only Snape or Karkaroff could (possibly) have contradicted the assertion that that place had previously been Barty’s, and they weren’t there.
Of course, one hesitates to accuse the Dark Lord of being willing to lie to his devoted followers. Still, one has to admit that the tale of the One Faithful Servant Who Was Still Willing to Risk All to Restore His Master (once said master had rescued him from Durance Vile) has a much better ring to it than:
Not a single person who’d followed me in life was stupid enough to help me return from the dead, once crazy Bella had gotten herself incarcerated. I did manage to gull one “wizard-young, foolish, and gullible-[who had] wandered across my path in the forest I had made my home” (GoF, 33) into risking all to try to restore me. But when that plan failed, “I could not hope that I would be sent another [equally clueless] wizard to possess… and I had given up hope, now, that any of my Death Eaters cared what had become of me….” (GoF, 33) But then cowardly, weak Wormtail showed up because he’d been driven from his last other refuge, and he brought with him Bertha Jorkins. Who had once heard talking another wizard, young, foolish, and gullible, who considered himself a follower of the Dark Order….
Now, Barty’s story about how that happened rather suggests that Bertha had discovered no more than firm proof that Crouch Sr. was hiding someone in his house, and had merely deduced from the evidence presented whom, precisely, that must be.
“But Bertha Jorkins heard Winky talking to me. She came to investigate. She heard enough to guess who was hiding under the Invisibility Cloak.”
In that case, the only reason for Tom to accept Barty Jr. as a loyal Death Eater still, would seem to be that Barty had been one before.
Only… Tom, while he was discorporate and nearly helpless, didn’t show himself terribly willing to put faith in the continued devotion of ANY of his former servants, did he?
We saw that Tom in PS was unwilling, while he was weak, to take the risk of contacting Severus, or any other of his former followers, without proof of their continued loyalty. Just having been a DE wasn’t enough to make Tom assume that someone would help Tom now.
Rather than try to finish him off.
As Tom apparently (and probably correctly) believed Severus might do, or Lucius, or MacNair, if Tom had been stupid enough to approach any of them while still weak enough to seem a potential victim.
Even the fact that Barty’s own father apparently believed the boy to be at risk of defecting to Voldemort (as could be deduced by the conditions of Barty’s imprisonment) wouldn’t be enough to provide absolute assurance.
And I do rather think Tom would require absolute assurance, at this point.
And Tom himself explicitly said that Bertha told him much more than what Barty had indicated she had deduced, which was no more than that Barty was alive and imprisoned by his father. Tom told us, “She told me that she knew of a faithful Death Eater who would be only too willing to help me, if I could only contact him.” (GoF, 33)
Finally, surely the Weasleys’ rat had heard all about that trial. About how Bellatrix Black Lestrange (one of the Blacks! how shocking!) had been dragged off protesting her undying devotion to the Dark Lord’s cause, but the Crouches’ son, poor boy, had kept insisting on his innocence, oh Arthur, is there any chance that he could really have been…?
Not conducive to Tom’s unqualified trust later, no.
We know that Barty was awake enough “from his deep sleep” at least to register that there had been a visitor, and who it had been. And how she had threatened his father, and what his father had done to her, afterwards.
He could recount it perfectly upon compulsion. And nothing that he recounted would have led Bertha to infer, much less tell Tom as a certainty, that Barty Junior was at present a faithful devotee of the Dark Lord.who would be only too willing to risk all to help resurrect him.
So… either Barty lied under Veritaserum, or Tom lied when he told his servants that Bertha had told him she knew of a truly faithful Death Eater. In which case Tom also took the risk of approaching Barty Junior-and the HUGE risk of trying to subdue Barty Senior-on spec that previously-devoted little Barty might still be so.
OR-Veritaserum doesn’t operate like a Pensieve. It doesn’t pull forth “the truth,” including impressions that were within the recaller’s sensory range that were not noticed at the time.
Rather, it compels the victim to answer sincerely. To tell the truth as it appears to them. To tell what registered to the victim as significant.
Elkins took a fine-tooth comb through Barty’s Veritaserum confession, and she established that he spent a lot of time on issues that were emotionally significant to him but tangential to the specific questions Dumbledore was forcing him to answer.
So it seems to be the case that Veritaserum forces the victim to answer “truthfully,” but only offering the truth as the victim perceives it. .
Which is entirely different from telling the truth-as-it-is, as multiple Muggle law-enforcement agencies have found to their (and accused-criminals’) cost. How many people have been consigned to Death Row in America, and then later released, on the basis of utterly-sincere eyewitness condemnation: “this person, this is the one, committed the horrific crime that I witnessed! I SAW HIM!” ?
To be later contradicted by other, irrefutable, evidence. DNA, a proved alibi, the confession of the true criminal….
I think that Veritaserum, when it works (Dumbledore suggested also that there are weaker and stronger versions) can only compel a victim to recount what s/he believes to be true.
Quite different from making someone tell the truth.
Indeed, entirely different.
Since the real truth of any event is something the serum-imbiber might not know-might, indeed, have no possible way of knowing….
Only, the WW uses Veritaserum to confirm the stories it already expects to hear.
We are not talking about chemically-assisted Pensieve-witness here.
We’re talking about the confirmation of …
Well, under the guidance of sufficiently-skilled interrogators, of course….
… about the confirmation of fantasies, delusions, and misperceptions, accepted (because the witness was on Veritaserum, and had to tell the truth, doncha know!) as fact.
(To put this in perspective: had you asked Harry under Veritaserum, after HPB, whether Snape served Dumbledore or Voldemort, what answer would Harry have given? Would it have been accurate, or the “truth” that Harry quite sincerely believed at that time? So it’s a fallacy to accept Veritaserum-witness as truth-it can only, at most, filter out deliberate attempts to lie. It allows infinite misperceptions, delusions, and hallucinations, so long as they are sincerely believed.)
(Hmm. Were those nameless Muggles interrogated about that little dust-up between Sirius and Pete given Veritaserum? Then what they said about Sirius’s guilt must be the truth! Sirius, a la lanterne!)
And then we condemn Fudge for not blindly crediting Barty’s confession, which coincidentally backed up his interrogator’s crazy story that Voldemort had been dead and was now resurrected?
Um. Yes.
Back to Bertha. The Bertha-incident might, indeed, have been the first time that Daddy-Dearest’s control over Barty started to slip. We know that at the QWC, first the sight of a wand within reach, and then later hearing faithless DE’s “making sport of Muggles” “awoke” Barty. Aroused him. Made him “angry” enough, eventually, to override a decade of conditioning to inaction.
Might not the sound and sight of the first outsider in a decade of solitary confinement have done so previously?
Because Bertha had to have heard something more than what Barty told us.
Probably some utterly incriminating interchange between the invisible man and the house-elf. Perhaps his expressions of devotion (to his Lord) and hatred (of his father).
Or possibly Barty Senior told Bertha, directly, before Obliviating her, that his son continued to be stubbornly, unalterably devoted to the Dark Lord’s cause.
She heard something, at any rate, that when Tom tore her mind to shreds and sucked on the bleeding pieces, to Tom constituted absolute proof of little Barty’s loyalty NOW and of his absolute willingness to do anything whatsoever to assist his Lord to return.
If Barty had never been one of Tom’s followers, much less one of Tom’s (vanishingly few) fanatical devotees, how Tom must have laughed.
*
The final canon point that contradicts this crazed speculation is that Dark Mark that Barty conjured at the QWC. According to Arthur Weasley, few wizards(and no elves) knew how to do it. Yet Barty did.
How could Barty have known Morsmordre, if he hadn’t previously been a Death Eater?
Which is actually what originally sparked this crazy speculation: someone (oryx?) speculated that perhaps a rat might have been lurking about the Crouch house helping to, er, strengthen Junior to resist Dad’s Imperius. And possibly placing bright ideas in Winky’s head, and/or encouraging Dad to listen to the elf. (I had thought this was over in Swythyv’s speculations on the Imperius or on Peter, but I didn’t see it there when I looked to review and link to it.)
And possibly even the rat might have been placing suggestions in Junior’s “empty brain.”
It’s certainly the case that it was in Tom’s interests to have the Mark go up at the QWC, especially if he’d heard any rumors that a former lieutenant might be about to try making some noise for his own private benefit but in the name of the DE’s.
Remind them all of their true master, and see if they all scattered in terror or if any came to the implicit call. (Any who came might be presumed either still to be loyal, or to be ambitious and arrogant enough to think they might kill their former Lord and take his place. Which, could be determined later. But no one came. No one, then, in either category. All faithless cravens, to be ruled by terror on Tom’s resurrection.)
But-once one admits the chance that Barty might have been counter-Imperio’ed to steal a wand and cast that Dark Mark if he saw a chance, then he needn’t have known originally how to cast it on his own.
I mean, do you really think Madam Rosmerta knew how to cast the Imperius when she was in her right mind? Really? That’s how she regularly kept the cleaning staff in line? Um, right. And Stan knew how to cast the Killing Curse, uh huh.
Clearly, the caster of the Imperius can impart knowledge along with orders, if necessary.
So if Barty had been Imperio’ed to steal a wand and send up a Mark, he needn’t have been a faithful Death Eater all along.
It’s quite certain that Barty was loyal to Voldemort as of the Last Task, and that he had been loyal at least since, say, the previous September first.
Before that-do we actually have any reliable information?
And it does seem, Bellatrix aside, that only the newest (young, foolish, and gullible) Death Eaters are actually zealous in Tom’s service. Actually believe his grandiose promises of great reward.
The older and/or wiser ones have uniformly learned better. Been taught better, rather, by no-doubt horrific experience.
Not even Crabbe Senior was stupid enough to want to bring about Riddle’s return. Though, equally, he wasn’t quite stupid enough to admit openly to not wanting Tommy back….
(Indeed, might that not have been Bella’s real problem, not the more sinister one I’d previously posited? Naivite? She had just managed to get herself accepted on sufferance among “the boys” when Tom fell. She had seen enough to believe in Tom’s might, and that he might actually have the power to overcome death if he got some help now-well, so had the other Death Eaters. They, however, had also seen enough of how Tom operated not to want him back, on any terms. But Bellatrix hadn’t seen enough yet to understand, as “the boys” did, how empty were Riddle’s promises of great rewards for great sacrifices and great endeavors.
(So Bella bullied her husband and his brother into going along with her, them thinking, “Well, if it works we WILL be temporarily on his good side. He might even go ahead and give us a little reward, just to convince the other newbies that he sometimes does so…. and if we don’t try, someone else might, and if they succeeded we’d be totally up the creek. Plus, if we don’t go along with her now and he DOES ever return, Bella will tell him how we refused to help her. Bloody fucking HELL!” “All right, Bellatrix, what’s your plan?”)
*
Now to the two-vanishingly small, I admit it!-canon points that actually support this twisted interpretation. The first is: if Barty had been among the original Death Eaters, he would have borne (proudly, one assumes) the Mark. If he’d only joined after the QWC, on the other hand, presumably Baby!Mort would have been in no shape to confer that honor on him.
Severus considered the burning of the Mark irrefutable and instantaneous proof of the Dark Lord’s return, did he not? And so did Karkaroff, and apparently so did ALL the marked Death Eaters.
“Snape strode forward, past Dumbledore, pulling up the left sleeve of his robes as he went. He stuck out his forearm and showed it to Fudge, who recoiled.
“There,” said Snape harshly. “There. The Dark Mark. It is not as dark as it was an hour or so ago, when it burned black, but you can still see it. Every Death Eater had the sign burned into him by the Dark Lord. It was a means of distinguishing one another, and his means of summoning us to him. When he touched the Mark of any Death Eater, we were to Disapparate, and Apparate, instantly at his side. This Mark has been growing clearer all year. Karkaroff’s too. Why do you think Karkaroff fled tonight? We both felt the Mark burn. We both knew he had returned. Karkaroff fears the Dark Lord’s vengeance. He betrayed too many of his fellow Death Eaters to be sure of a welcome back into the fold.”
But Barty didn’t seem a party to that certainty shared by Snape, Karkaroff, and the other Death Eaters, even though he’d been in on the plot and had sent Harry off successfully.
But he should have done, had he shared their Dark Mark. Which canon does not establish that he had. That creepily paedophilic line, “Show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” was in the movie, not in the book.
Instead, in the book, Barty’s first anxiety-overriding even his jealousy over how his Lord’s faithless Death Eaters had been received, whether they’d been forgiven or tortured-was to confirm that the Dark Lord was back.
“What happened, Harry?”
… “Cup was a Portkey…. Took me and Cedric to a graveyard… and Voldemort was there… Lord Voldemort….”
…“The Dark Lord was there? What happened then?”
“Killed Cedric… they killed Cedric…”
“And then?”
… “Made a potion… got his body back…”
“The Dark Lord got his body back? He’s returned?”
… “Voldemort’s back, Harry? You’re sure he’s back? How did he do it?”
… Moody let out his breath in a long, low hiss.
“And the Death Eaters? They returned?.... How did he treat them? Did he forgive them?” (GoF 35)
Barty asked FOUR times for confirmation of the Dark Lord’s return, and got Harry to show where his blood had been taken, before he moved on to his next most pressing concern. Why should he press for certainty, if his own Mark had long since assured him it was true?
*
The final point in favor of Barty’s late induction to the Death Eaters is Barty’s list of resemblances between himself and his master. “Both of us, for instance, had very disappointing fathers… very disappointing indeed. Both of us suffered the indignity, Harry, of being named after those fathers. And both of us had the pleasure… the very great pleasure… of killing our fathers to ensure the continued rise of the Dark Order!” (GoF 35)
Um.
We’re invited to understand that Tom confided these facts to Barty in the course of seducing Barty to his cause. Why else would he have given Barty such confidential and incriminating information?
But would Tom really want any of that information at large in 1980 or 1981? These were things he was still keeping hushed up then!
Now, Barty didn’t mention Muggle Tom Riddle’s name. So he might not have been told the exact manner in which the Dark Lord’s father had been “disappointing” to his son. But some of the Death Eaters did know that “Lord Voldemort” had once been known as “Tom Riddle,” before he’d come into his own. Discover that that was his father’s actual name, not a random moniker given him by that Muggle orphanage, and you have Tom’s parentage. Or at least half of it, the wrong half (to Pureblood supremacists).
Death Eaters can read Nature’s Nobility as well as anyone else, you know.
Why would Tom have released the information about his birth to any Pureblood, but least of all to someone who was a companion of the three Lestranges? Especially to someone whose attitude as a Death Eater was the same as Bella’s: “I’m his favorite Death Eater, he trusts me more than anybody, I can prove that he likes me best, he trusts me with things he doesn’t trust to anyone else!”?
Someone with that attitude, trying to one-up smug Bella, would be almost sure to blurt out the information. We SAW that after Harry’s return in GoF, Barty delayed in killing Harry (as he knew his master would wish) in order first to find out from Harry whether his master had punished those other, faithless, inferior-to-Barty Death Eaters. Satisfying his insane jealousy took precedence over fulfilling his master’s wishes.
These “similarities” might have been recruiting points for Barty Jr., who hated his Pureblood father with a mad passion. But among such as the proud Lestranges and Malfoys, the fact that the father had been a Muggle would have had to have been concealed. And for anyone with a shred of decency, family feeling, or conventional moralty, the fact that Tom was a parricide would have had to have been concealed. Can you imagine Regulus, who loved his family, knowingly entering the service of a parricide?
For that matter, Sirius told us in GoF that there were plenty of people who supported Voldemort’s program at first, until they saw what excesses he was willing to commit in support of it. Yet surely no one who knew that at the tender age of sixteen, Tom Riddle had been a remorseless multiple-murderer, could have harbored any delusions that Lord Voldemort would have stopped using violence?
Yet apparently many people were so deluded, and it served Tom to keep them in darkness until he chose to take off the gloves. So why would he let someone know he was a parricide?
Lots of people would have recoiled at joining a parricide’s cause.
One might argue that anyone who was not himself already both evil and a bit insane would recoil at that.
So, no, I don’t think Tom would have told Barty all that in 1981. Even to seduce him.
And indeed, why would Tom have expected Barty to hate his father so much that he would find actual parricide attractive… in 1981?
But in 1995…?
On the one hand, by then Harry, Minerva and at least some of the Weasleys (including their pet rat) had been informed that the dread Lord Voldemort was really Tom Riddle, a Muggle’s son. Lord Voldemort could no longer be certain of keeping that hushed up, though he still tried not to broadcast it.
And by then, the whole WW knew You-Know-Who to be capable of the blackest of crimes-what harm in adding another to his list? Tom no longer had the option of recruiting any more naïve idealists who burned for the repeal of the Statute of Secrecy (but using no more force than the opposition forced them to use, mind!). And Purebloods who were already bonded to Tom, such as Lucius, had no power either to back out now or to withhold their sons, if Tom’s blood status were now made known to them. So they’d be upset at Tom’s betrayal of his own followers, that he had gulled them all along? So what?
(In fact, I rather imagine that Tom had been looking forward to a celebration of his final victory that included making his true birth [and thus, his full betrayal of her] known to proud Bella….)
On the other hand, by 1995 Barty had spent a year in Azkaban, almost dying of Dementor-induced despair. On his father’s orders. He’d then spent the next more-than-decade being held imprisoned by Unforgivable Curses and brainwashed. By his father. And he believed that Barty Sr. smuggled his son out of Azkaban, not out of any lingering love for that son, but because he was compelled to do so by his deathbed promise to his wife, whom he DID love, and who’d sacrificed her own life to save her boy.
By then, yes, Barty was both insane enough and evil (or angry at his father) enough to be ATTRACTED by the idea of parricide.
*
Okay, okay, I know this is really AU to Jo’s intentions. But isn’t it fascinating how well it hangs together, how an initially-innocent Barty could have been seduced to the Dark Side by his own father’s actions?
But not by killing the child, of course; directly shedding his own blood might call down a blood-curse upon Laertes.
Instead, the clever king sent off his infant to be exposed, to be destroyed by beasts or gods or cold or thirst, whichever fate would take him.
But the king’s sacrificed child was not destroyed but saved, and grew up a stranger to his heritage, and as an angry young man met a stranger at a crossroads….
Oops.
*
Every Potter fan should reread Elkins once in a while, just like everyone should reread Jodel and Swythyv. Even where they were wrong about where JKR would take canon, their very errors illuminate the Potterverse. In her great “Crouch Novenna,”
http://skelkins.com/hp/archives/000171.html
Elkins wrote:
"Don't ask me to pity Crouch, Eileen," Elkins says in a low shaking voice. "I don't pity him. The man set out to destroy his son's sense of self. Ruthlessly. Deliberately. Methodically. He forged the blade that killed him. He did it with his own two hands. It took him ten years, but he did it. He managed it in the end."
And it occurs to me to wonder whether that might not have been more literally true even than Elkins had dared to imagine.
When, exactly, did Junior swear himself irrevocably to the Dark Lord’s service?
It might conceivably have been when Lord Voldemort showed up on Daddy-dearest’s doorstep.
*
Cornelius Fudge thought it perfectly plausible that a man who’d been nearly tortured to death by Dementors on his father’s orders, and who’d then spent a decade imprisoned by that father under the Imperius Curse, might end up a lunatic who could have hallucinated that he was a devoted follower of his father’s worst enemy, and that said lunatic could have killed his own father, and murderously attacked others, following his dead father’s dead enemy’s imaginary orders.
Maybe, instead of dismissing that interpretation out of hand, we should have stopped to remember that the Minister of Magic HAD toured Azkaban, and had listened, rather extensively, to the ravings of its inmates. Quite shocked, he had been, at how normal Black had managed still to sound in comparison.
Er, this would be that Black who muttered monomaniacally in his sleep, “He’s at Hogwarts, he’s at Hogwarts….”
If that seemed normal to Fudge, what typified the ravings of the other inmates?
I mean, of course, of that minority who still could still form words.
*
Elkins’ overall point was that Barty Senior’s specific method of imprisoning his son had been an attempt, not to keep him “safe’, but to brainwash him. To break Junior’s sense of self and re-create him as the perfectly obedient son Senior had wished him to be. And that the brainwashing had been successful-save that the boy retained the tiniest shard of autonomy, and gave his inculcated need to prove himself perfectly obedient to his substitute-father Voldemort, his father’s enemy, rather than to the father who’d broken him.
Here’s Elkins’ argument, for those who haven’t read or don’t remember it:
From the instant that Crouch Jr. described his treatment as his father's prisoner in the veritaserum scene, I instinctively read it as an attempt at indoctrination. Every single thing that we learn about how Crouch saw fit to keep his son seems to me to point unerringly in that direction. Imperius. Invisibility Cloak, yet kept in public view. Presumed dead. Permitted to speak to no one. Watched night and day. Denied sunlight. Denied solitude. Given rewards for good behavior, rewards which went by the degrading name of 'treats.' Encouraged to view his two captors in the dual roles of Merciful Intercessor and Strict Disciplinarian. Frankly, I'm surprised that Crouch didn't think to shave his son's head. It would have been in keeping with everything else that we hear about how he chose to treat his son after he learned that he was unrepentent, all of which reads to me like a textbook case of a direct and deliberate assault on a captive's sense of identity, on his sense of self.
…
Crouch kept his son in a public part of the house, in full sight and yet unseen, even while he slept, in order to make him not only be invisible, but also feel invisible. To turn him into an Unperson. To erode his sense of self. To subvert his sense of identity. To break his will. To turn him into an empty shell, a receptacle ready and waiting to be filled up with whatever it pleased his father to pour back into him.
The dissociated young Crouch that we see in canon is in large part a creation of his father. The reason that he is able to assume another's identity well enough to fool even Dumbledore is because he has precious little left of his own. His father spent over a decade systematically stripping him of his own identity, trying to empty him, to make him hollow, in the hopes of filling him back up with his own essence, of turning his son into a different kind of mirror: a mirror that for once would not reverse that which it reflected, a mirror that Crouch himself would not flinch to look upon.
But he only partially succeeded. The Crouch Jr. that we see in canon is a reflective surface, and he is hollow. But the father that he has invited into himself to fill the void of his raped personal identity is not Barty Senior. Instead, it is Voldemort.
In the end, the metaphor reaches its full completion. Barty Jr. is dementor-kissed. He becomes fully hollow; he loses his very soul.
Ouch. And, unfortunately, it makes sense. Of the Pensieve Four, Bellatrix was the one who, both before and after a decade (and more) of soul-destroying torture, stalwartly and repeatedly kept declaring that her one ambition and greatest pleasure was to serve the Dark Lord. “Throw us into Azkaban; we will wait! … We alone were faithful! We alone tried to find him!” (GoF, 30) [Note that though she claims this proud honor on behalf of her compatriots as well, they none of them chime in to claim it with her.]
Later, we hear Bellatrix aver, “I, who spent many years in Azkaban for him!... If I had sons, I would be glad to give them up to the service of the Dark Lord!” (HBP, 2) “My Lord, it is an honor to have you here, in our family’s house. There can be no higher pleasure.” (DH, 1)
(And what had been done to Bella to make her proud to be enslaved to a madman’s whims? One darkly speculates on the fact that she’s one of the very, very few female Death Eaters, and on what spells a patriarchal society might possibly have come up with over the centuries to ensure a woman’s perfect obedience to her Lord and Master…. Jodel, I think it was, posited that the Imperius might have originally been invented as a merciful spell in a society-Roman-in which slaves, wives, and children were expected to obey the Paterfamilias or have him be expected, by his peers, to torture them to death. Crucify your kids/wife/slaves for disobedience, or slap the Imperius on them so they can’t disobey? )
Barty, in contrast, in the Pensieve scene, kept insisting on his absolute innocence and pleading for his father to believe him and for his mother to save him.
We know that, at the time that Barty’s father consigned his son (“I have no son!”) and son’s companions to Azkaban with the pious hope, “and may they rot there!”(GoF 30) the evidence against Barty was slim and circumstantial.
Dumbledore said judiciously, when asked directly, “The Longbottoms’ evidence was-given their condition-none too reliable.”
“Then Mr. Crouch’s son might not have been involved?” said Harry slowly.
Dumbledore shook his head. “As to that, I have no idea.”(GoF 30)
Sirius went a little further. “Crouch’s own son was caught with a group of Death Eaters who’d managed to talk their way out of Azkaban. Apparently they were trying to find Voldemort and return him to power.”
… “Was his son a Death Eater?” said Harry.
… “No idea… The boy was definitely caught in the company of people I’d bet my life were Death Eaters-but he might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like the house-elf.” (GoF, 27)
But of course we found out in the end that, unlike Sirius and Winky, Barty Jr. had, indeed, been guilty of the crime for which he was condemned. Or at least of being a Death Eater, whether or not he’d committed that crime, or any actual crime.
And how do we know this? Why, Lord Voldemort TOLD his errant “family” so, and surely he would know. In that graveyard, Tommy TOLD the edifying tale of the One Faithful Servant, who’d sent up the Dark Mark last summer and made the faithless ones run, and who’d delivered Harry Potter into Voldemort’s power for the Dark Lord’s resurrection….
Then we have Barty’s corroborative testimony under Veritaserum that after a year of Azkaban, of being tortured by Dementors to the brink of death, “When I had recovered my strength, I thought only of finding my master… of returning to his service.” (GoF,35)
And the young man was stupid enough, and impassioned enough, to tell his father so. So his father responded by keeping him under the Imperius Curse and trying to break his will.
But if you’ll recall, that hadn’t been the case before Barty went in. Barty, unlike Bella, hadn’t been hauled off to Azkaban pledging his unswerving devotion to the Dark Lord.
Was it that Barty had then been too smart, too cagy, to express his true feelings? Did he have hopes perhaps of his father’s pulling strings to release his heir after a limited imprisonment, if Junior continued steadfast in his denials? Were Barty’s desperate appeals to both parents merely an act covering up his determination to go free to seek his master again?
If so, then being tortured by Dementors had made Barty lose his ability to dissemble, so that upon being rescued he was too weak to disguise his true intentions from his father?
Or was it instead the case that spending a year in Azkaban, being tortured literally to the point of death, had changed Barty’s intentions?
I don’t trust everything Lupin said about Dementors, but I do believe that “If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself… soulless and evil. You’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.” (PoA 10)
Sirius informed us that he escaped with his sanity as intact as it was, partly because he could escape the worst by turning into a dog, but mostly because he was sustained by one thought. “I knew I was innocent. That wasn’t a happy thought, so the Dementors couldn’t suck it out of me… but it kept me sane and knowing who I am….”
And it inspired him with such a hatred of Peter (the thought that he, Sirius, was innocent was simultaneously the thought that Peter was guilty) that the sight of Wormtail’s picture, the thought that Wormtail was alive and at Hogwarts with James’s son “lit a fire in my head, and the Dementors couldn’t destroy it…. It wasn’t a happy feeling… it was an obsession…. but it gave me strength, it cleared my mind.”
But if Barty Jr. had entered Azkaban knowing himself to have been innocent, that knowledge would have been a happy thought.
At least initially.
Surely his father wouldn’t let the matter rest there, imprisoning his only child on flimsy evidence? Surely he’d at least have the DMLE continue looking for the truth regarding his only son’s guilt? And further evidence, real evidence, would of course exonerate Barty.
Surely Barty’s mother, at least, could be counted on to force her husband to keep looking for any proof of their child’s innocence?
Surely Barty’s father couldn’t possibly leave his innocent son to rot in prison just to maintain that father’s political position?
A happy thought.
So the Dementors could suck it out. Leaving… what?
The thought that his father WAS leaving his only son rot to death in prison. Letting his son be tortured to death. On evidence that his father knew to be at best strictly circumstantial.
Merely because I’d been taking tea with the Lestranges at the moment the Aurors came to arrest them, and that gave that bitch Bellatrix the bright idea that claiming I was involved would be a good revenge on the head of the DMLE….
She only implicated me to get back at Father.
And Father HAS to know that. He has to know I’m really innocent. But he’s leaving me to rot here.
Why?
For his political advantage. Because he’s afraid if he lets me off, he’ll seem soft on Death Eaters and it might destroy his popularity.
He’s killing me to maintain his political popularity.
I wish I had joined the Death Eaters. His precious son, a Death Eater.
It would have served him right.
*
In Sirius’s case, the conviction of his innocence helped to keep him sane. So he told us.
In Barty’s, it might have had the opposite effect. And might eventually have lit a fire in Barty’s brain, an obsession….
Joining Voldemort’s service… served him right.
*
I kind of like the idea of Barty directly turning his son into the Dark Lord’s devoted follower, rather than indirectly by neglecting his moral education….
Of course, this speculation is directly contradicted by three things in canon.
First, Barty’s own statement above, given under Veritaserum, that his only thought on recovering from Azkaban was to return to his master’s service. But my speculation is that Barty was delusional by the time he was smuggled out; he sincerely believed himself to have been the Dark Lord’s loyal supporter, because that’s what his hated father would most have hated.
(And of course, the flip side of that is: if Mr. and Mrs. Crouch hadn’t fully believed in Barty’s real guilt, why then, smuggling him out of Azkaban was not a truly criminal act, endangering the whole of the WW for the solace of their private emotions, but rather the rescue of an innocent. Or at least of a probable innocent. The private redress of an overzealous public enforcement of justice. Which Mr. Crouch couldn’t indulge publicly because it would ruin him.
(In which case, Barty’s professions of devotion to Voldemort must have come as a very nasty shock indeed to his Daddy.)
Second, Voldmort’s indication that the last space of the six in the largest gap in the circle had belonged to Barty (and his direct assertion that the Death Eater currently in his service at Hogwarts “remains my most faithful servant and has already reentered my service.” [emphasis mine] GoF, 33)
But the other five in that gap were Snape, Karkaroff, and those “three dead in my service.” I pointed out in my essay “All Men are Mortal, All Death Eaters are Slytherin” that if Severus were the only double agent among the branded Death Eaters, his turning over to Dumbledore the names of everyone he recognized would have created the optical illusion that most Death Eaters were Slytherins, because most of the ones he could identify with certainty were his contemporaries and house-mates.
Or, the people in Snape’s own “cell.” All of whom would have been turned in to Dumbles, and many of those names passed on in turn to the Ministry. Like Karkaroff had been. It’s significant that in his bargaining Karkaroff gave mostly names that Snape already had given (as may be inferred by the fact that most of Karkaroff’s names were already known).
Both Karkaroff and Snape “talked”-Karkaroff to Crouch, Snape to Dumbledore. Neither of them fingered Barty. So why then was Barty’s place next to them, in the same cell with the two traitors and the three (possibly betrayed) dead, rather in the gap where would have stood his known companions the imprisoned Lestranges?
As in…
Are we quite sure the fourth absentee wasn’t yet another dead man? Only Snape or Karkaroff could (possibly) have contradicted the assertion that that place had previously been Barty’s, and they weren’t there.
Of course, one hesitates to accuse the Dark Lord of being willing to lie to his devoted followers. Still, one has to admit that the tale of the One Faithful Servant Who Was Still Willing to Risk All to Restore His Master (once said master had rescued him from Durance Vile) has a much better ring to it than:
Not a single person who’d followed me in life was stupid enough to help me return from the dead, once crazy Bella had gotten herself incarcerated. I did manage to gull one “wizard-young, foolish, and gullible-[who had] wandered across my path in the forest I had made my home” (GoF, 33) into risking all to try to restore me. But when that plan failed, “I could not hope that I would be sent another [equally clueless] wizard to possess… and I had given up hope, now, that any of my Death Eaters cared what had become of me….” (GoF, 33) But then cowardly, weak Wormtail showed up because he’d been driven from his last other refuge, and he brought with him Bertha Jorkins. Who had once heard talking another wizard, young, foolish, and gullible, who considered himself a follower of the Dark Order….
Now, Barty’s story about how that happened rather suggests that Bertha had discovered no more than firm proof that Crouch Sr. was hiding someone in his house, and had merely deduced from the evidence presented whom, precisely, that must be.
“But Bertha Jorkins heard Winky talking to me. She came to investigate. She heard enough to guess who was hiding under the Invisibility Cloak.”
In that case, the only reason for Tom to accept Barty Jr. as a loyal Death Eater still, would seem to be that Barty had been one before.
Only… Tom, while he was discorporate and nearly helpless, didn’t show himself terribly willing to put faith in the continued devotion of ANY of his former servants, did he?
We saw that Tom in PS was unwilling, while he was weak, to take the risk of contacting Severus, or any other of his former followers, without proof of their continued loyalty. Just having been a DE wasn’t enough to make Tom assume that someone would help Tom now.
Rather than try to finish him off.
As Tom apparently (and probably correctly) believed Severus might do, or Lucius, or MacNair, if Tom had been stupid enough to approach any of them while still weak enough to seem a potential victim.
Even the fact that Barty’s own father apparently believed the boy to be at risk of defecting to Voldemort (as could be deduced by the conditions of Barty’s imprisonment) wouldn’t be enough to provide absolute assurance.
And I do rather think Tom would require absolute assurance, at this point.
And Tom himself explicitly said that Bertha told him much more than what Barty had indicated she had deduced, which was no more than that Barty was alive and imprisoned by his father. Tom told us, “She told me that she knew of a faithful Death Eater who would be only too willing to help me, if I could only contact him.” (GoF, 33)
Finally, surely the Weasleys’ rat had heard all about that trial. About how Bellatrix Black Lestrange (one of the Blacks! how shocking!) had been dragged off protesting her undying devotion to the Dark Lord’s cause, but the Crouches’ son, poor boy, had kept insisting on his innocence, oh Arthur, is there any chance that he could really have been…?
Not conducive to Tom’s unqualified trust later, no.
We know that Barty was awake enough “from his deep sleep” at least to register that there had been a visitor, and who it had been. And how she had threatened his father, and what his father had done to her, afterwards.
He could recount it perfectly upon compulsion. And nothing that he recounted would have led Bertha to infer, much less tell Tom as a certainty, that Barty Junior was at present a faithful devotee of the Dark Lord.who would be only too willing to risk all to help resurrect him.
So… either Barty lied under Veritaserum, or Tom lied when he told his servants that Bertha had told him she knew of a truly faithful Death Eater. In which case Tom also took the risk of approaching Barty Junior-and the HUGE risk of trying to subdue Barty Senior-on spec that previously-devoted little Barty might still be so.
OR-Veritaserum doesn’t operate like a Pensieve. It doesn’t pull forth “the truth,” including impressions that were within the recaller’s sensory range that were not noticed at the time.
Rather, it compels the victim to answer sincerely. To tell the truth as it appears to them. To tell what registered to the victim as significant.
Elkins took a fine-tooth comb through Barty’s Veritaserum confession, and she established that he spent a lot of time on issues that were emotionally significant to him but tangential to the specific questions Dumbledore was forcing him to answer.
So it seems to be the case that Veritaserum forces the victim to answer “truthfully,” but only offering the truth as the victim perceives it. .
Which is entirely different from telling the truth-as-it-is, as multiple Muggle law-enforcement agencies have found to their (and accused-criminals’) cost. How many people have been consigned to Death Row in America, and then later released, on the basis of utterly-sincere eyewitness condemnation: “this person, this is the one, committed the horrific crime that I witnessed! I SAW HIM!” ?
To be later contradicted by other, irrefutable, evidence. DNA, a proved alibi, the confession of the true criminal….
I think that Veritaserum, when it works (Dumbledore suggested also that there are weaker and stronger versions) can only compel a victim to recount what s/he believes to be true.
Quite different from making someone tell the truth.
Indeed, entirely different.
Since the real truth of any event is something the serum-imbiber might not know-might, indeed, have no possible way of knowing….
Only, the WW uses Veritaserum to confirm the stories it already expects to hear.
We are not talking about chemically-assisted Pensieve-witness here.
We’re talking about the confirmation of …
Well, under the guidance of sufficiently-skilled interrogators, of course….
… about the confirmation of fantasies, delusions, and misperceptions, accepted (because the witness was on Veritaserum, and had to tell the truth, doncha know!) as fact.
(To put this in perspective: had you asked Harry under Veritaserum, after HPB, whether Snape served Dumbledore or Voldemort, what answer would Harry have given? Would it have been accurate, or the “truth” that Harry quite sincerely believed at that time? So it’s a fallacy to accept Veritaserum-witness as truth-it can only, at most, filter out deliberate attempts to lie. It allows infinite misperceptions, delusions, and hallucinations, so long as they are sincerely believed.)
(Hmm. Were those nameless Muggles interrogated about that little dust-up between Sirius and Pete given Veritaserum? Then what they said about Sirius’s guilt must be the truth! Sirius, a la lanterne!)
And then we condemn Fudge for not blindly crediting Barty’s confession, which coincidentally backed up his interrogator’s crazy story that Voldemort had been dead and was now resurrected?
Um. Yes.
Back to Bertha. The Bertha-incident might, indeed, have been the first time that Daddy-Dearest’s control over Barty started to slip. We know that at the QWC, first the sight of a wand within reach, and then later hearing faithless DE’s “making sport of Muggles” “awoke” Barty. Aroused him. Made him “angry” enough, eventually, to override a decade of conditioning to inaction.
Might not the sound and sight of the first outsider in a decade of solitary confinement have done so previously?
Because Bertha had to have heard something more than what Barty told us.
Probably some utterly incriminating interchange between the invisible man and the house-elf. Perhaps his expressions of devotion (to his Lord) and hatred (of his father).
Or possibly Barty Senior told Bertha, directly, before Obliviating her, that his son continued to be stubbornly, unalterably devoted to the Dark Lord’s cause.
She heard something, at any rate, that when Tom tore her mind to shreds and sucked on the bleeding pieces, to Tom constituted absolute proof of little Barty’s loyalty NOW and of his absolute willingness to do anything whatsoever to assist his Lord to return.
If Barty had never been one of Tom’s followers, much less one of Tom’s (vanishingly few) fanatical devotees, how Tom must have laughed.
*
The final canon point that contradicts this crazed speculation is that Dark Mark that Barty conjured at the QWC. According to Arthur Weasley, few wizards(and no elves) knew how to do it. Yet Barty did.
How could Barty have known Morsmordre, if he hadn’t previously been a Death Eater?
Which is actually what originally sparked this crazy speculation: someone (oryx?) speculated that perhaps a rat might have been lurking about the Crouch house helping to, er, strengthen Junior to resist Dad’s Imperius. And possibly placing bright ideas in Winky’s head, and/or encouraging Dad to listen to the elf. (I had thought this was over in Swythyv’s speculations on the Imperius or on Peter, but I didn’t see it there when I looked to review and link to it.)
And possibly even the rat might have been placing suggestions in Junior’s “empty brain.”
It’s certainly the case that it was in Tom’s interests to have the Mark go up at the QWC, especially if he’d heard any rumors that a former lieutenant might be about to try making some noise for his own private benefit but in the name of the DE’s.
Remind them all of their true master, and see if they all scattered in terror or if any came to the implicit call. (Any who came might be presumed either still to be loyal, or to be ambitious and arrogant enough to think they might kill their former Lord and take his place. Which, could be determined later. But no one came. No one, then, in either category. All faithless cravens, to be ruled by terror on Tom’s resurrection.)
But-once one admits the chance that Barty might have been counter-Imperio’ed to steal a wand and cast that Dark Mark if he saw a chance, then he needn’t have known originally how to cast it on his own.
I mean, do you really think Madam Rosmerta knew how to cast the Imperius when she was in her right mind? Really? That’s how she regularly kept the cleaning staff in line? Um, right. And Stan knew how to cast the Killing Curse, uh huh.
Clearly, the caster of the Imperius can impart knowledge along with orders, if necessary.
So if Barty had been Imperio’ed to steal a wand and send up a Mark, he needn’t have been a faithful Death Eater all along.
It’s quite certain that Barty was loyal to Voldemort as of the Last Task, and that he had been loyal at least since, say, the previous September first.
Before that-do we actually have any reliable information?
And it does seem, Bellatrix aside, that only the newest (young, foolish, and gullible) Death Eaters are actually zealous in Tom’s service. Actually believe his grandiose promises of great reward.
The older and/or wiser ones have uniformly learned better. Been taught better, rather, by no-doubt horrific experience.
Not even Crabbe Senior was stupid enough to want to bring about Riddle’s return. Though, equally, he wasn’t quite stupid enough to admit openly to not wanting Tommy back….
(Indeed, might that not have been Bella’s real problem, not the more sinister one I’d previously posited? Naivite? She had just managed to get herself accepted on sufferance among “the boys” when Tom fell. She had seen enough to believe in Tom’s might, and that he might actually have the power to overcome death if he got some help now-well, so had the other Death Eaters. They, however, had also seen enough of how Tom operated not to want him back, on any terms. But Bellatrix hadn’t seen enough yet to understand, as “the boys” did, how empty were Riddle’s promises of great rewards for great sacrifices and great endeavors.
(So Bella bullied her husband and his brother into going along with her, them thinking, “Well, if it works we WILL be temporarily on his good side. He might even go ahead and give us a little reward, just to convince the other newbies that he sometimes does so…. and if we don’t try, someone else might, and if they succeeded we’d be totally up the creek. Plus, if we don’t go along with her now and he DOES ever return, Bella will tell him how we refused to help her. Bloody fucking HELL!” “All right, Bellatrix, what’s your plan?”)
*
Now to the two-vanishingly small, I admit it!-canon points that actually support this twisted interpretation. The first is: if Barty had been among the original Death Eaters, he would have borne (proudly, one assumes) the Mark. If he’d only joined after the QWC, on the other hand, presumably Baby!Mort would have been in no shape to confer that honor on him.
Severus considered the burning of the Mark irrefutable and instantaneous proof of the Dark Lord’s return, did he not? And so did Karkaroff, and apparently so did ALL the marked Death Eaters.
“Snape strode forward, past Dumbledore, pulling up the left sleeve of his robes as he went. He stuck out his forearm and showed it to Fudge, who recoiled.
“There,” said Snape harshly. “There. The Dark Mark. It is not as dark as it was an hour or so ago, when it burned black, but you can still see it. Every Death Eater had the sign burned into him by the Dark Lord. It was a means of distinguishing one another, and his means of summoning us to him. When he touched the Mark of any Death Eater, we were to Disapparate, and Apparate, instantly at his side. This Mark has been growing clearer all year. Karkaroff’s too. Why do you think Karkaroff fled tonight? We both felt the Mark burn. We both knew he had returned. Karkaroff fears the Dark Lord’s vengeance. He betrayed too many of his fellow Death Eaters to be sure of a welcome back into the fold.”
But Barty didn’t seem a party to that certainty shared by Snape, Karkaroff, and the other Death Eaters, even though he’d been in on the plot and had sent Harry off successfully.
But he should have done, had he shared their Dark Mark. Which canon does not establish that he had. That creepily paedophilic line, “Show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” was in the movie, not in the book.
Instead, in the book, Barty’s first anxiety-overriding even his jealousy over how his Lord’s faithless Death Eaters had been received, whether they’d been forgiven or tortured-was to confirm that the Dark Lord was back.
“What happened, Harry?”
… “Cup was a Portkey…. Took me and Cedric to a graveyard… and Voldemort was there… Lord Voldemort….”
…“The Dark Lord was there? What happened then?”
“Killed Cedric… they killed Cedric…”
“And then?”
… “Made a potion… got his body back…”
“The Dark Lord got his body back? He’s returned?”
… “Voldemort’s back, Harry? You’re sure he’s back? How did he do it?”
… Moody let out his breath in a long, low hiss.
“And the Death Eaters? They returned?.... How did he treat them? Did he forgive them?” (GoF 35)
Barty asked FOUR times for confirmation of the Dark Lord’s return, and got Harry to show where his blood had been taken, before he moved on to his next most pressing concern. Why should he press for certainty, if his own Mark had long since assured him it was true?
*
The final point in favor of Barty’s late induction to the Death Eaters is Barty’s list of resemblances between himself and his master. “Both of us, for instance, had very disappointing fathers… very disappointing indeed. Both of us suffered the indignity, Harry, of being named after those fathers. And both of us had the pleasure… the very great pleasure… of killing our fathers to ensure the continued rise of the Dark Order!” (GoF 35)
Um.
We’re invited to understand that Tom confided these facts to Barty in the course of seducing Barty to his cause. Why else would he have given Barty such confidential and incriminating information?
But would Tom really want any of that information at large in 1980 or 1981? These were things he was still keeping hushed up then!
Now, Barty didn’t mention Muggle Tom Riddle’s name. So he might not have been told the exact manner in which the Dark Lord’s father had been “disappointing” to his son. But some of the Death Eaters did know that “Lord Voldemort” had once been known as “Tom Riddle,” before he’d come into his own. Discover that that was his father’s actual name, not a random moniker given him by that Muggle orphanage, and you have Tom’s parentage. Or at least half of it, the wrong half (to Pureblood supremacists).
Death Eaters can read Nature’s Nobility as well as anyone else, you know.
Why would Tom have released the information about his birth to any Pureblood, but least of all to someone who was a companion of the three Lestranges? Especially to someone whose attitude as a Death Eater was the same as Bella’s: “I’m his favorite Death Eater, he trusts me more than anybody, I can prove that he likes me best, he trusts me with things he doesn’t trust to anyone else!”?
Someone with that attitude, trying to one-up smug Bella, would be almost sure to blurt out the information. We SAW that after Harry’s return in GoF, Barty delayed in killing Harry (as he knew his master would wish) in order first to find out from Harry whether his master had punished those other, faithless, inferior-to-Barty Death Eaters. Satisfying his insane jealousy took precedence over fulfilling his master’s wishes.
These “similarities” might have been recruiting points for Barty Jr., who hated his Pureblood father with a mad passion. But among such as the proud Lestranges and Malfoys, the fact that the father had been a Muggle would have had to have been concealed. And for anyone with a shred of decency, family feeling, or conventional moralty, the fact that Tom was a parricide would have had to have been concealed. Can you imagine Regulus, who loved his family, knowingly entering the service of a parricide?
For that matter, Sirius told us in GoF that there were plenty of people who supported Voldemort’s program at first, until they saw what excesses he was willing to commit in support of it. Yet surely no one who knew that at the tender age of sixteen, Tom Riddle had been a remorseless multiple-murderer, could have harbored any delusions that Lord Voldemort would have stopped using violence?
Yet apparently many people were so deluded, and it served Tom to keep them in darkness until he chose to take off the gloves. So why would he let someone know he was a parricide?
Lots of people would have recoiled at joining a parricide’s cause.
One might argue that anyone who was not himself already both evil and a bit insane would recoil at that.
So, no, I don’t think Tom would have told Barty all that in 1981. Even to seduce him.
And indeed, why would Tom have expected Barty to hate his father so much that he would find actual parricide attractive… in 1981?
But in 1995…?
On the one hand, by then Harry, Minerva and at least some of the Weasleys (including their pet rat) had been informed that the dread Lord Voldemort was really Tom Riddle, a Muggle’s son. Lord Voldemort could no longer be certain of keeping that hushed up, though he still tried not to broadcast it.
And by then, the whole WW knew You-Know-Who to be capable of the blackest of crimes-what harm in adding another to his list? Tom no longer had the option of recruiting any more naïve idealists who burned for the repeal of the Statute of Secrecy (but using no more force than the opposition forced them to use, mind!). And Purebloods who were already bonded to Tom, such as Lucius, had no power either to back out now or to withhold their sons, if Tom’s blood status were now made known to them. So they’d be upset at Tom’s betrayal of his own followers, that he had gulled them all along? So what?
(In fact, I rather imagine that Tom had been looking forward to a celebration of his final victory that included making his true birth [and thus, his full betrayal of her] known to proud Bella….)
On the other hand, by 1995 Barty had spent a year in Azkaban, almost dying of Dementor-induced despair. On his father’s orders. He’d then spent the next more-than-decade being held imprisoned by Unforgivable Curses and brainwashed. By his father. And he believed that Barty Sr. smuggled his son out of Azkaban, not out of any lingering love for that son, but because he was compelled to do so by his deathbed promise to his wife, whom he DID love, and who’d sacrificed her own life to save her boy.
By then, yes, Barty was both insane enough and evil (or angry at his father) enough to be ATTRACTED by the idea of parricide.
*
Okay, okay, I know this is really AU to Jo’s intentions. But isn’t it fascinating how well it hangs together, how an initially-innocent Barty could have been seduced to the Dark Side by his own father’s actions?