Harry's homework: the new Slytherin ethos in HBP (SPOILERS)
There were many things I loved about the new HP book. My Inner Hufflepuff is beaming and baking cookies for everyone, my Inner Ravenclaw is contemplating an abstruse treatise on the nature of love, and my Inner Gryffindor is making the satisfied grunts by which it generally signifies contentment. But now that my initial period of incoherent squee is over, I've had the leisure to realize that my Inner Slytherin, always the picky girl in the family, is very happy too, because at last, at long last, she's satisfied that Rowling has come across with a portrait of a Slytherin that she can believe in -- and this Slytherin proves incredibly important to Dumbledore's plans for Harry. It's not Snape, and not Draco, though I love them both. It's a character, curiously, who looks to a lot of people like comic relief, but who is the subject of Harry's first and only homework assignment from Dumbledore. Now, Dumbledore assigns this homework in part because he's got a very pragmatic goal in mind, but that goal at the moment doesn't interest me. I think the homework was, besides a plot device, real homework: it was meant to teach Harry something, namely, how to find -- and use -- his REAL inner Slytherin.
The model Slytherin I'm referring to is of course Horace Slughorn. Yes, he's fat. Yes, he's short. Yes, he's genial. Yes, he was apparently tricked by Harry, twice. But of all the people we've met so far in the HP series, this is the only one I would actively try NOT to cross if I met him in real life, because Slughorn shows us a Slytherin boiled down to its essence.
The two most prominent Slytherins in canon, Snape and Draco, are complex and fascinating characters. But they have one thing in common, at least on the surface: they can be actively and publicly unpleasant, at least to their enemies. This disqualifies them, in my opinion, as poster boys for the qualities that a Slytherin would most need to have. It may help at this point for me to explain what I mean by Slytherin. Slytherin is not, of course, the designated House for People Who Torture Poodles. The Gryffindors may treat it that way, but the voice of authority in the HP universe on this issue, the Sorting Hat, doesn't tell people to go to Slytherin if they torture poodles. It tells them to go there if they have "great ambition" (OotP) or if they use cunning minds to achieve almost any end. (SS/PS) Okay. What does this mean in practice? How do ambitious, cunning people succeed?
Well, in the real world? There are basically two ways. First, you can follow the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and eventually everything will work out.
(Please keep in mind that the rest of this post is being written by my Inner Slytherin, who thought I was messing it up.)
One way to succeed is to be indispensable: to be so damn good at what you do that people will do anything to get you, and once they've got you, they will put up with just about any insane behavior you care to exhibit. I imagine, though, that most of those people get sorted into Gryffindor, if what they do is physical work, or into Ravenclaw, if what they do is intellectual work. They may very well achieve their ends, but their success is often an accident, because frankly? They don't care. They're too caught up in what they're doing to care about succeeding at it. But they certainly can succeed, particularly if they are married to, or employed by, some Slytherin who looks after them.
What if you're just not that good or that smart? This is where strategies that succeed in the schoolyard don't work particularly well in the real world. It's tempting for non-Slytherins to think that Slytherins should be vicious, and I've seen fics occasionally that stop the characterization right there. But in the real world, you don't achieve your ends, generally, by being vicious; at best it isolates you, at worst it gets you arrested. Viciousness is of course invaluable at exactly the right time, but in general? It seems to me that the distinguishing characteristic of truly effective real-world Slytherins would be this:
They would be nice.
Real-world Slytherins: people who use cunning to attain their ends. With the exception of Slughorn I haven't seen them in Rowling, so let me describe them in real life. You couldn't meet a nicer bunch of people, really. So pleasant, so congenial. So ready to enter into your views. So nice to each other, and while yes, they do stab each other in the back when they must, it's far more important to them, most of the time, to be able to Play Well With Others. Charm, my dear children, is the Vaseline of social intercourse, and good Slytherins are never without their lube.
They're so delightfully clever, too, though with none of that anti-social, unthinkingly arrogant, inner-directed edge to their intelligence that can make geniuses such unpleasant company at dinner. After all, they're NOT Ravenclaws. Ravenclaws study history, spin theories in rooms piled high with books; Slytherins go to law school. Ravenclaws study mathematics; Slytherins go to one of the four or five top business schools in the world (I can see Pansy Parkinson at Kellogg, and Blaise Zabini at Sloane) and they emerge as sleek and contented and amoral as cats. No, they're not Ravenclaws. They employ Ravenclaws. And if the Slytherins do their job right, the Ravenclaws love them for it.
The fact that we are finally seeing a Slytherin who embodies this ethos of pleasant exploitation signifies -- more than the new girlfriend, more than the disappearance of capslock -- that Harry is growing up at last, that he's facing the kind of moral dilemma that grownups really have to face.
Horace Slughorn wants to "collect" Harry, make him a part of Slughorn's little personal network of influential people. If you've ever been the object of such a collector's interest, you know the experience is mildly flattering, mildly repugnant, potentially useful and -- and this is what makes it truly seductive for the kind of person the Slughorns of this world collect -- fun. Why fun? Not necessarily because of Slughorn. Slughorn himself merely reflects people's interests back at them -- delightful for a while, but it palls. But the other people in the collection are fascinating in themselves. So if Slughorn does his work right, then yes, the parties would be fun -- one of the finest pleasures adult life has on offer, and one of pleasures most difficult to explain to outsiders. Have you ever wondered why some brilliant author or intellectual you admire allowed their talents to be used for some purpose quite at variance with their moral views? Depend on it: there was a Slughorn somewhere in their lives.
Harry avoids Slughorn, but he never quite turns Slughorn down the way he turns Scrimgeour down. Perhaps that's because Slughorn seems too weak and silly to be a threat. Possibly Slughorn genuinely is not dangerous, or possibly his appearance of harmlessness results from excellent planning on his part. (I for one am not going to try to make that call until book seven, when we may find out more about his motives and actions in book six).
In any case, Dumbledore doesn't want Harry to turn Slughorn down. For one thing, Dumbledore needs to get his paws on that memory. But I strongly suspect that there are other reasons as well. Harry's homework teaches him a very particular kind of lesson: To deal with Slughorn, he has to become him.
In part, Slughorn's kind of trickery comes naturally to Harry. We know Harry has a strong Slytherin component to his personality -- the Sorting Hat told him that, to his horror, long ago. So Harry is perfectly capable of doing things like tricking his friends in a good cause. He does this when he tells Ron that he'd given him the Felix Felicis potion. The key to Harry's success here is that he knows exactly what Ron needs. And lo and behold, like the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz, Ron finds his courage -- and his hand-eye coordination, too, which is even more useful under the circumstances.
But in Ron's case Harry is still in vaguely Gryffindor territory. His inner Slytherin stuck its nose out the door, but in effect, all Harry did was promise Ron he was going to be lucky, and tell one lie to make that promise seem likely. He was manipulating Ron so that Ron could do something Ron himself desperately wanted to do. What Harry does in pursuit of Slughorn's memory is much more slippery in moral terms: he has to understand other people's emotional and pragmatic needs, and fulfill these needs by any means necessary -- all in pursuit of some goal of his own, not for the good of those he's manipulating.
So, here's a brief list of what Harry does to get that memory:
* Harry deploys Slughorn's greed against him, agreeing to help Slughorn rob the body of Hagrid's friend.
* Needless to say, Hagrid, who is Harry's oldest friend in the magical world, does not know this is happening. Harry knows that Hagrid always assumes that people care for his creatures as much as he does, and Harry takes advantage of this (correct) assessment of Hagrid's weaknesses to insinuate a grave-robber into Hagrid's home.
* Harry gets both Slughorn and Hagrid completely plastered.
* Harry -- and this is where my Inner Gryffindor's jaw dropped -- tells the story of his parents' death in deliberately melodramatic way, for the specific purpose of getting Slughorn to hand over the memory. In doing this Harry does two things. First, Harry takes advantage of Slughorn's one apparent unambiguous good quality -- a genuine attachment to some of his former students. Second, Harry uses the story of his parents' death to get something for himself. That use of his parents' death, of his own tragic past, is something that Draco, for instance, might have accused Harry of doing, but that Harry never actually has done. Until now, when Dumbledore tells him it's necessary.
* Harry also appeals to Slughorn's self-interest and sense of importance by asserting that he is "the Chosen One" -- a title he has rejected thus far -- and that he needs the memory.
* Harry does all this knowing that Slughorn is too drunk to remember what happened.
No wonder Harry can do all this only under the influence of Felix felicis. I've done something tricky in the above list: I've phrased my summary of Harry's behavior as if Harry consciously considered and intended each step. Did he? That is very difficult to say.
Rowling seems to be going out of her way to reduce our sense that Harry is fully responsible for what he does. At least, the fact that he was under the influence reduces any moral discomfort the reader might feel at the sight of Harry telling a version of Lily's story that would put Rita Skeeter to shame. Also, Harry did not even come up with the idea of using the potion: it was Ron's suggestion -- and Slughorn's own potion. (I will be very interested to see if Book Seven has anything to tell us about just how that potion really ended up in Harry's hands.)
The end result is a narrative in which Harry sounds like he's entered a dream-state. He's transformed from a dogged Gryffindor fighter to a trickster figure from a fairy tale, a Puck, an Ariel, a mischievous, amoral spirit. But he's a trickster with a firm purpose. He accomplishes it, and like Ariel, like Puck, he bears the fruit of his victory to his master.
Hmmm. It was just the potion, right? Well, not entirely. The potion had to draw on knowledge of people's characters and motives, knowledge that Harry possessed. Underneath what Hermione calls that fanciable exterior, it turns out there's a cunning little mind taking a good hard look at people and noting their more usable qualities. And when push came to shove, Harry tried very hard to win the potion, and agreed to use it. And he certainly showed no remorse afterwards: when the potion's effects wore away, he was delighted to be able to report his success to Dumbledore.
Furthermore, it seems entirely likely that Dumbledore DID mean for Harry to do something of this kind all along. Dumbledore tells Harry that Slughorn "has his weaknesses like the rest of us, and I believe that you are the one person who might be able to penetrate his defenses." The one person. What does this mean? Possibly it means only that Harry possesses qualities that appeal to Slughorn -- he IS Lily's son, and he IS the boy who lived. But Slughorn already knows all that. Dumbledore can only mean that Harry has to present those qualities to Slughorn as a form of persuasion. Help me, he has to say, and you help my mother, whom you loved. Help me, and help the Chosen One. With or without the dead spider and grave robbery, Harry has to steel himself to make those emotional appeals. Lily's dying screams have haunted him since he was a child. Now he has to be willing to use them.
Is this bad? That depends on who you ask. Personally? I think not. There is nothing in the book to suggest that it's not all in a good cause. At any rate, it's a cause that Harry believes in: Dumbledore's cause, and Harry is, as he says twice in the book, Dumbledore's man. Oh, I do think that Dumbledore is acting on the side of the angels, but: he is not above methods that on occasion resemble Slughorn's.
There is a reason why Slytherin is NOT the House of Evil Poodle-killers, why Slytherin is presented to us as a House on a par with all the others. Slytherin House embodies a set of skills that is necessary to survival in the real world. If Harry is ever to become a leader in Dumbledore's mold, he needs to act like a Slytherin at times. Hence this homework assignment, the only homework Dumbledore ever gives him. Dumbledore can and does identify, and use, other people's wants and needs. In this case Dumbledore does it to Harry so that Harry will do it Slughorn: think of Harry squirming miserably in his seat in HBP when Dumbledore makes clear that he's disappointed in him; think of how determined Harry becomes to do anything to keep Dumbledore from being disappointed in him ever again. Yes, Harry is Dumbledore's man, and by learning the Slughorn lesson, Harry becomes more so, not less. Harry is growing up. He's been collected.
The model Slytherin I'm referring to is of course Horace Slughorn. Yes, he's fat. Yes, he's short. Yes, he's genial. Yes, he was apparently tricked by Harry, twice. But of all the people we've met so far in the HP series, this is the only one I would actively try NOT to cross if I met him in real life, because Slughorn shows us a Slytherin boiled down to its essence.
The two most prominent Slytherins in canon, Snape and Draco, are complex and fascinating characters. But they have one thing in common, at least on the surface: they can be actively and publicly unpleasant, at least to their enemies. This disqualifies them, in my opinion, as poster boys for the qualities that a Slytherin would most need to have. It may help at this point for me to explain what I mean by Slytherin. Slytherin is not, of course, the designated House for People Who Torture Poodles. The Gryffindors may treat it that way, but the voice of authority in the HP universe on this issue, the Sorting Hat, doesn't tell people to go to Slytherin if they torture poodles. It tells them to go there if they have "great ambition" (OotP) or if they use cunning minds to achieve almost any end. (SS/PS) Okay. What does this mean in practice? How do ambitious, cunning people succeed?
Well, in the real world? There are basically two ways. First, you can follow the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and eventually everything will work out.
(Please keep in mind that the rest of this post is being written by my Inner Slytherin, who thought I was messing it up.)
One way to succeed is to be indispensable: to be so damn good at what you do that people will do anything to get you, and once they've got you, they will put up with just about any insane behavior you care to exhibit. I imagine, though, that most of those people get sorted into Gryffindor, if what they do is physical work, or into Ravenclaw, if what they do is intellectual work. They may very well achieve their ends, but their success is often an accident, because frankly? They don't care. They're too caught up in what they're doing to care about succeeding at it. But they certainly can succeed, particularly if they are married to, or employed by, some Slytherin who looks after them.
What if you're just not that good or that smart? This is where strategies that succeed in the schoolyard don't work particularly well in the real world. It's tempting for non-Slytherins to think that Slytherins should be vicious, and I've seen fics occasionally that stop the characterization right there. But in the real world, you don't achieve your ends, generally, by being vicious; at best it isolates you, at worst it gets you arrested. Viciousness is of course invaluable at exactly the right time, but in general? It seems to me that the distinguishing characteristic of truly effective real-world Slytherins would be this:
They would be nice.
Real-world Slytherins: people who use cunning to attain their ends. With the exception of Slughorn I haven't seen them in Rowling, so let me describe them in real life. You couldn't meet a nicer bunch of people, really. So pleasant, so congenial. So ready to enter into your views. So nice to each other, and while yes, they do stab each other in the back when they must, it's far more important to them, most of the time, to be able to Play Well With Others. Charm, my dear children, is the Vaseline of social intercourse, and good Slytherins are never without their lube.
They're so delightfully clever, too, though with none of that anti-social, unthinkingly arrogant, inner-directed edge to their intelligence that can make geniuses such unpleasant company at dinner. After all, they're NOT Ravenclaws. Ravenclaws study history, spin theories in rooms piled high with books; Slytherins go to law school. Ravenclaws study mathematics; Slytherins go to one of the four or five top business schools in the world (I can see Pansy Parkinson at Kellogg, and Blaise Zabini at Sloane) and they emerge as sleek and contented and amoral as cats. No, they're not Ravenclaws. They employ Ravenclaws. And if the Slytherins do their job right, the Ravenclaws love them for it.
The fact that we are finally seeing a Slytherin who embodies this ethos of pleasant exploitation signifies -- more than the new girlfriend, more than the disappearance of capslock -- that Harry is growing up at last, that he's facing the kind of moral dilemma that grownups really have to face.
Horace Slughorn wants to "collect" Harry, make him a part of Slughorn's little personal network of influential people. If you've ever been the object of such a collector's interest, you know the experience is mildly flattering, mildly repugnant, potentially useful and -- and this is what makes it truly seductive for the kind of person the Slughorns of this world collect -- fun. Why fun? Not necessarily because of Slughorn. Slughorn himself merely reflects people's interests back at them -- delightful for a while, but it palls. But the other people in the collection are fascinating in themselves. So if Slughorn does his work right, then yes, the parties would be fun -- one of the finest pleasures adult life has on offer, and one of pleasures most difficult to explain to outsiders. Have you ever wondered why some brilliant author or intellectual you admire allowed their talents to be used for some purpose quite at variance with their moral views? Depend on it: there was a Slughorn somewhere in their lives.
Harry avoids Slughorn, but he never quite turns Slughorn down the way he turns Scrimgeour down. Perhaps that's because Slughorn seems too weak and silly to be a threat. Possibly Slughorn genuinely is not dangerous, or possibly his appearance of harmlessness results from excellent planning on his part. (I for one am not going to try to make that call until book seven, when we may find out more about his motives and actions in book six).
In any case, Dumbledore doesn't want Harry to turn Slughorn down. For one thing, Dumbledore needs to get his paws on that memory. But I strongly suspect that there are other reasons as well. Harry's homework teaches him a very particular kind of lesson: To deal with Slughorn, he has to become him.
In part, Slughorn's kind of trickery comes naturally to Harry. We know Harry has a strong Slytherin component to his personality -- the Sorting Hat told him that, to his horror, long ago. So Harry is perfectly capable of doing things like tricking his friends in a good cause. He does this when he tells Ron that he'd given him the Felix Felicis potion. The key to Harry's success here is that he knows exactly what Ron needs. And lo and behold, like the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz, Ron finds his courage -- and his hand-eye coordination, too, which is even more useful under the circumstances.
But in Ron's case Harry is still in vaguely Gryffindor territory. His inner Slytherin stuck its nose out the door, but in effect, all Harry did was promise Ron he was going to be lucky, and tell one lie to make that promise seem likely. He was manipulating Ron so that Ron could do something Ron himself desperately wanted to do. What Harry does in pursuit of Slughorn's memory is much more slippery in moral terms: he has to understand other people's emotional and pragmatic needs, and fulfill these needs by any means necessary -- all in pursuit of some goal of his own, not for the good of those he's manipulating.
So, here's a brief list of what Harry does to get that memory:
* Harry deploys Slughorn's greed against him, agreeing to help Slughorn rob the body of Hagrid's friend.
* Needless to say, Hagrid, who is Harry's oldest friend in the magical world, does not know this is happening. Harry knows that Hagrid always assumes that people care for his creatures as much as he does, and Harry takes advantage of this (correct) assessment of Hagrid's weaknesses to insinuate a grave-robber into Hagrid's home.
* Harry gets both Slughorn and Hagrid completely plastered.
* Harry -- and this is where my Inner Gryffindor's jaw dropped -- tells the story of his parents' death in deliberately melodramatic way, for the specific purpose of getting Slughorn to hand over the memory. In doing this Harry does two things. First, Harry takes advantage of Slughorn's one apparent unambiguous good quality -- a genuine attachment to some of his former students. Second, Harry uses the story of his parents' death to get something for himself. That use of his parents' death, of his own tragic past, is something that Draco, for instance, might have accused Harry of doing, but that Harry never actually has done. Until now, when Dumbledore tells him it's necessary.
* Harry also appeals to Slughorn's self-interest and sense of importance by asserting that he is "the Chosen One" -- a title he has rejected thus far -- and that he needs the memory.
* Harry does all this knowing that Slughorn is too drunk to remember what happened.
No wonder Harry can do all this only under the influence of Felix felicis. I've done something tricky in the above list: I've phrased my summary of Harry's behavior as if Harry consciously considered and intended each step. Did he? That is very difficult to say.
Rowling seems to be going out of her way to reduce our sense that Harry is fully responsible for what he does. At least, the fact that he was under the influence reduces any moral discomfort the reader might feel at the sight of Harry telling a version of Lily's story that would put Rita Skeeter to shame. Also, Harry did not even come up with the idea of using the potion: it was Ron's suggestion -- and Slughorn's own potion. (I will be very interested to see if Book Seven has anything to tell us about just how that potion really ended up in Harry's hands.)
The end result is a narrative in which Harry sounds like he's entered a dream-state. He's transformed from a dogged Gryffindor fighter to a trickster figure from a fairy tale, a Puck, an Ariel, a mischievous, amoral spirit. But he's a trickster with a firm purpose. He accomplishes it, and like Ariel, like Puck, he bears the fruit of his victory to his master.
Hmmm. It was just the potion, right? Well, not entirely. The potion had to draw on knowledge of people's characters and motives, knowledge that Harry possessed. Underneath what Hermione calls that fanciable exterior, it turns out there's a cunning little mind taking a good hard look at people and noting their more usable qualities. And when push came to shove, Harry tried very hard to win the potion, and agreed to use it. And he certainly showed no remorse afterwards: when the potion's effects wore away, he was delighted to be able to report his success to Dumbledore.
Furthermore, it seems entirely likely that Dumbledore DID mean for Harry to do something of this kind all along. Dumbledore tells Harry that Slughorn "has his weaknesses like the rest of us, and I believe that you are the one person who might be able to penetrate his defenses." The one person. What does this mean? Possibly it means only that Harry possesses qualities that appeal to Slughorn -- he IS Lily's son, and he IS the boy who lived. But Slughorn already knows all that. Dumbledore can only mean that Harry has to present those qualities to Slughorn as a form of persuasion. Help me, he has to say, and you help my mother, whom you loved. Help me, and help the Chosen One. With or without the dead spider and grave robbery, Harry has to steel himself to make those emotional appeals. Lily's dying screams have haunted him since he was a child. Now he has to be willing to use them.
Is this bad? That depends on who you ask. Personally? I think not. There is nothing in the book to suggest that it's not all in a good cause. At any rate, it's a cause that Harry believes in: Dumbledore's cause, and Harry is, as he says twice in the book, Dumbledore's man. Oh, I do think that Dumbledore is acting on the side of the angels, but: he is not above methods that on occasion resemble Slughorn's.
There is a reason why Slytherin is NOT the House of Evil Poodle-killers, why Slytherin is presented to us as a House on a par with all the others. Slytherin House embodies a set of skills that is necessary to survival in the real world. If Harry is ever to become a leader in Dumbledore's mold, he needs to act like a Slytherin at times. Hence this homework assignment, the only homework Dumbledore ever gives him. Dumbledore can and does identify, and use, other people's wants and needs. In this case Dumbledore does it to Harry so that Harry will do it Slughorn: think of Harry squirming miserably in his seat in HBP when Dumbledore makes clear that he's disappointed in him; think of how determined Harry becomes to do anything to keep Dumbledore from being disappointed in him ever again. Yes, Harry is Dumbledore's man, and by learning the Slughorn lesson, Harry becomes more so, not less. Harry is growing up. He's been collected.