Of tower passwords, Luna Lovegood, and Ravenclaw ambivalence
Remember how, in Deathly Hallows, Harry paid a token visit to the Ravenclaw common room in search of information on the diadem Horcrux? We saw then the special torture honor that Hogwarts bestows on those students whose wit is their greatest treasure: a system for gaining common room entry that is unique among the houses. While Slytherins, Gryffindors, and (presumably) Hufflepuffs have only to remember a simple password to access their dormitories, Ravenclaws must grapple with Sphinxlike riddles and philosophical conundrums, and produce answers that are acceptable to the eagle doorknocker that bars the way, before they can get in to do their all-important Ravenclaw homework or just go to bed. McGonagall, you’ll recall, was asked by the doorknocker where Vanished objects go, and responded, “Into Nonbeing, which is to say, everything.” The doorknocker really liked this answer (fifty points to Gryffindor!), and let McGonagall in immediately. Luna Lovegood also met with the knocker’s approval when she responded to the question “Which came first, the Phoenix or the flame?” with “A circle has no beginning.” Luna, characteristically, appeared totally matter-of-fact and unfazed about being tested in this manner.
I’ll take the Fat Lady for $500, Alex! Any day of the week!
I, however, did not find these episodes reassuring; in fact, I believe my exact words after reading them were “Jesus Christ, but that is fucked up.” If you don’t immediately see what I mean, imagine being a Ravenclaw at Hogwarts, and forgetting your scales for Potions class one day. (The idea of a Ravenclaw ever being unprepared for class taxes credibility, I know, but just play along with me here.) With only a few minutes to spare after Advanced Runes, you run back to Ravenclaw tower, hoping to quickly retrieve the scales and sprint down to the dungeon before Snape can make a crack about how Ravenclaws are clearly too preoccupied with lofty questions of being (and Nonbeing) to have ever learned to tell time. Hopefully you’ll get lucky and the knocker’s question will be an easy one: “What color was Merlin’s white beard?” or “Who is buried in Gryffindor’s tomb?”
But no: the knocker asks, “If the Hogwarts Express leaves Hogsmeade at three thirty a.m. with ten first-years and seven fourth-years on board, while two sixth-years simultaneously attempt to illegally Apparate from Diagon Alley to Ottery St. Catchpole, which group of students will be happiest upon reaching their destination?”
I mean, fuck me. Maybe you could attempt to bypass the question altogether by refuting its terms on philosophical grounds, á la Luna: “Happiness cannot be measured quantitatively, thus the question cannot be answered.” Or maybe on technical ones: “The Magical Fuel Conservation Act of 1974 prevents all operation of magical public transportation between the hours of three and four a.m., therefore the entire scenario is impossible.” Or on simultaneously philosophical and technical grounds: “Without confirmation of the train’s destination, it is impossible to assess the passengers’ resultant happiness. We should not assume that because the Hogwarts Express has historically terminated at King’s Cross, it will not randomly decide to continue on to Dover one day. Therefore…etc., etc.” Maybe the doorknocker would give you points for procedural one-upmanship and let you in, like a judge releasing a prisoner who hadn’t been read her Miranda rights.
Or maybe I’m overestimating the doorknocker’s standards here. I have a feeling its decisions are heavily informed by its mood, and that its mood is pretty changeable. So perhaps it would be responsive to a simpler, more direct approach. Perhaps if you kissed its figurative ass and said, “None of them would be as happy as I will be if you let me in,” or threw up your hands in exasperation and shouted, “I don’t care, open the goddamn door!” it would respond, “Flattery…er…persuasion is a valid intellectual skill,” or “Righteous anger has an intellectual power of its own,” and let you in.
But the danger remains great that you’d be standing there arguing with the doorknocker, saying shit like “The first years would be happiest, because they’re the most innocent,” or “The sixth years would be happiest, because they got away with flouting the rules,” or “The fourth years would be happiest by default, because the first-years would all be asleep at the end of the trip and the sixth-years would probably have splinched themselves in two,” and on and on while time slipped away and Snape began gleefully pondering how many points he could take from Ravenclaw for each minute you were late.
Yes, I’m a Ravenclaw, and yes, I enjoyed thinking up the questions and answers above. Does that mean that my access to privacy, community, good personal hygiene and sleep should depend on my ability to do so? And if said ability should desert me, either momentarily or over a longer term, what then? Am I to be locked out of house and home, and thrown upon public facilities for the provision of all my physical and mental needs? (I’m reminded of the month or so I spent in a roach-infested 5-by-10-foot cubicle hotel room in 1996 while waiting for my next apartment to become vacant; the shared shower facilities were so frightening that I went to a local gym to get ready for work every day. It is not a period of life I’m all that anxious to relive.) I suspect that, given the unreasonable demands of their tower password system, Ravenclaw students must tend to discover the Room of Requirement very early in their Hogwarts careers: the alternative is sleeping in the hall and not brushing your teeth or bathing.
The Hotel Riverview, NYC (right), scene of my roach-filled residence fourteen years ago. At least I can claim to have once lived in the West Village!
The pressure this system places on its inmates house members frankly discourages spontaneity and risktaking: Every time Ravenclaws venture out of their common room to socialize with friends from other houses, send an owl, or go down to the Great Hall for dinner, they risk being found intellectually unworthy of re-entry. Can you imagine a Ravenclaw, uncertain of admittance on returning and without backup from fellow intellects, embarking on a fraction of Harry, Ron and Hermione’s nighttime adventures in the halls and grounds of Hogwarts? No. And the adventurous, risktaking aspects of our personalities are exactly those that, for many Ravenclaws, are already undercultivated.
Do you know another reason I dislike the Ravenclaw password system so much? It’s a perfect microcosm of academia, where you are valued conditionally on your ability to jump through certain predetermined and not necessarily meaningful intellectual hoops, and keep jumping, year after year, stopping only to ask, “How high for the next degree, how high?” If one day you find yourself too tired or disillusioned to jump high enough, or at all, you’ll perhaps be allowed a certain grace period, a temporary benefit of the doubt; after that, figurative and possibly literal homelessness will await you.*
Like academia, the house of Ravenclaw mocks and punishes students who take too much delight in thinking by making that activity the sole marker of their worth. In inventing the Ravenclaw password system and allowing its operation to pass without comment, Jo Rowling suggests that she likewise feels a certain contempt for those whose best energies manifest themselves in thought instead of action. Being kept from their beds by riddles, she seems to be saying, is exactly what such people deserve.
Want a further clue as to Jo’s true feelings about the house of Ravenclaw? Let’s go back to Luna Lovegood for a moment. For a long time there’s been a subtle something that bothered me about every Potterhead’s favorite space case, but before you get out your brickbats, please let me say that I like Luna perfectly well as a character. It’s as a representation of Ravenclaw - the most important representation in the books - that I have a problem with her.
Ravenclaws Represent (?)
Why is Luna in Ravenclaw? What is the particular nature of the intelligence that’s placed her there? It certainly isn’t a firm grasp of the scientific method or the Socratic one, neither of which is terribly compatible with a belief in the existence of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks or Blibbering Humdingers. She’s good at providing answers to abstract philosophical questions, that’s certainly true. And she’s great in any situation that involves Thestrals, her knowledge about which actually does provide concrete, Hermione-style real-world assistance when the D.A. can’t get off the grounds of Hogwarts near the end of Order of the Phoenix.
I’d argue, though, that intellect, in the conventional sense, is not really what makes Luna Luna, nor is it the reason readers love her. We love her for honesty in the face of unpopularity, unfailing loyalty to her friends - indeed, she’s loyal to Harry even before he befriends her - dependability in a pinch, and basic kindness and empathy. As much as or more than intellectual intelligence, Luna has what you might call a high emotional IQ. She notices that her theoretical friend Ron isn’t always a terribly nice guy, she grasps instinctively when Harry is feeling low and why, and she’s wise on the subjects of family and death. There’s a house associated with many of these qualities, but it isn’t the one she belongs to. Weirdly enough, the series’ number-one Ravenclaw isn’t a quintessential Ravenclaw at all: she’s a Hufflepuff with an overlay of dreamy philosophical mysticism.
Luna in her element.
It’s almost as if Jo doesn’t want to create a Ravenclaw that people might really like - perhaps because Jo herself doesn’t much like the House That Rowena Built. It’s hardly that Jo takes exception to intellectual ability or to people who do well in school per se. As satricially as she sometimes treats Hermione, the latter’s diligence and the sheer scope of her knowledge have meant the difference between life and death more than once in the books, and among the characters who are Snape’s generation or older, there is even more of a correlation between intellectual ability and real-world power (which I’m sure is part of the reason I like them better than Harry’s generation).
It’s the good students who fail to make their intellects felt in the world - and Jo has a fairly particular idea of what that means - who arouse her condescension. And those are the students who, by her lights, belong in Ravenclaw, whose fates are fixed there - deservedly, as Jo suggests - by the Sorting Hat at age eleven. Without fail in the books, by contrast, smart kids whose smarts are destined to mean something to the world are sorted away from Ravenclaw: Hermione, McGonagall, the Potters, Lupin, and Dumbledore (probably) into Gryffindor, Voldemort and Snape into Slytherin.
Smart enough for Ravenclaw, but in the end, too good for it.
And here we get to the crux of the matter: Luna fits in Ravenclaw precisely because her intelligence is so fanciful, so impractical, so downright specious at times. Her intellect is sufficiently blunted by its own whimsy, abstraction and passivity that it has no real power in the world at large. This, to Jo, is what it means to be a Ravenclaw: intellect too rarefied for use and for earth too dear.
I sound madder at Jo about this than I actually am; such attitudes are pretty old news to me, and if I’d made a point of getting pissed at everyone in the world who undervalued my tribe, I’d be a major heart attack risk by now. Furthermore, part of me actually agrees with her. After all, isn’t my own uselessness in the world at the root of my unhappiness with my life? Doesn’t the Ravenclaw tower business set off my bullshit detector precisely because I don’t buy into the whole Ravenclaw ethos myself?
If I were at Hogwarts I’d never make it into Gryffindor or Slytherin, but I can tell you one thing: I’d be the one putting my Ravenclaw brain into action petitioning and protesting against that fucking “password” system, just for starters. All the arguments I just laid out, I’d be writing down in a neat scholarly hand on a nice crisp piece of parchment and marching them into Dumbledore’s office for his perusal, saying, “WTF, sir?! We Ravenclaws are idiot savants, yes, but not idiots. This riddling thing needs to be Avada Kedavra’ed, stat.”
Ravenclaw to the core, baby.
And if Dumbledore, laissez-faire bastard that he is, wouldn’t lift a finger to change it, I’d just move into friggin’ Hufflepuff already. The place might be dumbed-down, but at least it’s democratic. And anyway, I’ve never looked good in blue.
*My anger toward the American educational system is as deep and enduring, and possibly as blind, as Snape’s anger toward James Potter. Nevertheless, I cannot deny that our schools and universities provide gainful (if very inadequately compensated) employment for a good number of people whom I genuinely like and value, including several of you on my friends list. I deal with my conflicting feelings about this as I deal with life’s problems in general: by compartmentalizing unto the point of psychosis.
I’ll take the Fat Lady for $500, Alex! Any day of the week!
I, however, did not find these episodes reassuring; in fact, I believe my exact words after reading them were “Jesus Christ, but that is fucked up.” If you don’t immediately see what I mean, imagine being a Ravenclaw at Hogwarts, and forgetting your scales for Potions class one day. (The idea of a Ravenclaw ever being unprepared for class taxes credibility, I know, but just play along with me here.) With only a few minutes to spare after Advanced Runes, you run back to Ravenclaw tower, hoping to quickly retrieve the scales and sprint down to the dungeon before Snape can make a crack about how Ravenclaws are clearly too preoccupied with lofty questions of being (and Nonbeing) to have ever learned to tell time. Hopefully you’ll get lucky and the knocker’s question will be an easy one: “What color was Merlin’s white beard?” or “Who is buried in Gryffindor’s tomb?”
But no: the knocker asks, “If the Hogwarts Express leaves Hogsmeade at three thirty a.m. with ten first-years and seven fourth-years on board, while two sixth-years simultaneously attempt to illegally Apparate from Diagon Alley to Ottery St. Catchpole, which group of students will be happiest upon reaching their destination?”
I mean, fuck me. Maybe you could attempt to bypass the question altogether by refuting its terms on philosophical grounds, á la Luna: “Happiness cannot be measured quantitatively, thus the question cannot be answered.” Or maybe on technical ones: “The Magical Fuel Conservation Act of 1974 prevents all operation of magical public transportation between the hours of three and four a.m., therefore the entire scenario is impossible.” Or on simultaneously philosophical and technical grounds: “Without confirmation of the train’s destination, it is impossible to assess the passengers’ resultant happiness. We should not assume that because the Hogwarts Express has historically terminated at King’s Cross, it will not randomly decide to continue on to Dover one day. Therefore…etc., etc.” Maybe the doorknocker would give you points for procedural one-upmanship and let you in, like a judge releasing a prisoner who hadn’t been read her Miranda rights.
Or maybe I’m overestimating the doorknocker’s standards here. I have a feeling its decisions are heavily informed by its mood, and that its mood is pretty changeable. So perhaps it would be responsive to a simpler, more direct approach. Perhaps if you kissed its figurative ass and said, “None of them would be as happy as I will be if you let me in,” or threw up your hands in exasperation and shouted, “I don’t care, open the goddamn door!” it would respond, “Flattery…er…persuasion is a valid intellectual skill,” or “Righteous anger has an intellectual power of its own,” and let you in.
But the danger remains great that you’d be standing there arguing with the doorknocker, saying shit like “The first years would be happiest, because they’re the most innocent,” or “The sixth years would be happiest, because they got away with flouting the rules,” or “The fourth years would be happiest by default, because the first-years would all be asleep at the end of the trip and the sixth-years would probably have splinched themselves in two,” and on and on while time slipped away and Snape began gleefully pondering how many points he could take from Ravenclaw for each minute you were late.
Yes, I’m a Ravenclaw, and yes, I enjoyed thinking up the questions and answers above. Does that mean that my access to privacy, community, good personal hygiene and sleep should depend on my ability to do so? And if said ability should desert me, either momentarily or over a longer term, what then? Am I to be locked out of house and home, and thrown upon public facilities for the provision of all my physical and mental needs? (I’m reminded of the month or so I spent in a roach-infested 5-by-10-foot cubicle hotel room in 1996 while waiting for my next apartment to become vacant; the shared shower facilities were so frightening that I went to a local gym to get ready for work every day. It is not a period of life I’m all that anxious to relive.) I suspect that, given the unreasonable demands of their tower password system, Ravenclaw students must tend to discover the Room of Requirement very early in their Hogwarts careers: the alternative is sleeping in the hall and not brushing your teeth or bathing.
The Hotel Riverview, NYC (right), scene of my roach-filled residence fourteen years ago. At least I can claim to have once lived in the West Village!
The pressure this system places on its inmates house members frankly discourages spontaneity and risktaking: Every time Ravenclaws venture out of their common room to socialize with friends from other houses, send an owl, or go down to the Great Hall for dinner, they risk being found intellectually unworthy of re-entry. Can you imagine a Ravenclaw, uncertain of admittance on returning and without backup from fellow intellects, embarking on a fraction of Harry, Ron and Hermione’s nighttime adventures in the halls and grounds of Hogwarts? No. And the adventurous, risktaking aspects of our personalities are exactly those that, for many Ravenclaws, are already undercultivated.
Do you know another reason I dislike the Ravenclaw password system so much? It’s a perfect microcosm of academia, where you are valued conditionally on your ability to jump through certain predetermined and not necessarily meaningful intellectual hoops, and keep jumping, year after year, stopping only to ask, “How high for the next degree, how high?” If one day you find yourself too tired or disillusioned to jump high enough, or at all, you’ll perhaps be allowed a certain grace period, a temporary benefit of the doubt; after that, figurative and possibly literal homelessness will await you.*
Like academia, the house of Ravenclaw mocks and punishes students who take too much delight in thinking by making that activity the sole marker of their worth. In inventing the Ravenclaw password system and allowing its operation to pass without comment, Jo Rowling suggests that she likewise feels a certain contempt for those whose best energies manifest themselves in thought instead of action. Being kept from their beds by riddles, she seems to be saying, is exactly what such people deserve.
Want a further clue as to Jo’s true feelings about the house of Ravenclaw? Let’s go back to Luna Lovegood for a moment. For a long time there’s been a subtle something that bothered me about every Potterhead’s favorite space case, but before you get out your brickbats, please let me say that I like Luna perfectly well as a character. It’s as a representation of Ravenclaw - the most important representation in the books - that I have a problem with her.
Ravenclaws Represent (?)
Why is Luna in Ravenclaw? What is the particular nature of the intelligence that’s placed her there? It certainly isn’t a firm grasp of the scientific method or the Socratic one, neither of which is terribly compatible with a belief in the existence of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks or Blibbering Humdingers. She’s good at providing answers to abstract philosophical questions, that’s certainly true. And she’s great in any situation that involves Thestrals, her knowledge about which actually does provide concrete, Hermione-style real-world assistance when the D.A. can’t get off the grounds of Hogwarts near the end of Order of the Phoenix.
I’d argue, though, that intellect, in the conventional sense, is not really what makes Luna Luna, nor is it the reason readers love her. We love her for honesty in the face of unpopularity, unfailing loyalty to her friends - indeed, she’s loyal to Harry even before he befriends her - dependability in a pinch, and basic kindness and empathy. As much as or more than intellectual intelligence, Luna has what you might call a high emotional IQ. She notices that her theoretical friend Ron isn’t always a terribly nice guy, she grasps instinctively when Harry is feeling low and why, and she’s wise on the subjects of family and death. There’s a house associated with many of these qualities, but it isn’t the one she belongs to. Weirdly enough, the series’ number-one Ravenclaw isn’t a quintessential Ravenclaw at all: she’s a Hufflepuff with an overlay of dreamy philosophical mysticism.
Luna in her element.
It’s almost as if Jo doesn’t want to create a Ravenclaw that people might really like - perhaps because Jo herself doesn’t much like the House That Rowena Built. It’s hardly that Jo takes exception to intellectual ability or to people who do well in school per se. As satricially as she sometimes treats Hermione, the latter’s diligence and the sheer scope of her knowledge have meant the difference between life and death more than once in the books, and among the characters who are Snape’s generation or older, there is even more of a correlation between intellectual ability and real-world power (which I’m sure is part of the reason I like them better than Harry’s generation).
It’s the good students who fail to make their intellects felt in the world - and Jo has a fairly particular idea of what that means - who arouse her condescension. And those are the students who, by her lights, belong in Ravenclaw, whose fates are fixed there - deservedly, as Jo suggests - by the Sorting Hat at age eleven. Without fail in the books, by contrast, smart kids whose smarts are destined to mean something to the world are sorted away from Ravenclaw: Hermione, McGonagall, the Potters, Lupin, and Dumbledore (probably) into Gryffindor, Voldemort and Snape into Slytherin.
Smart enough for Ravenclaw, but in the end, too good for it.
And here we get to the crux of the matter: Luna fits in Ravenclaw precisely because her intelligence is so fanciful, so impractical, so downright specious at times. Her intellect is sufficiently blunted by its own whimsy, abstraction and passivity that it has no real power in the world at large. This, to Jo, is what it means to be a Ravenclaw: intellect too rarefied for use and for earth too dear.
I sound madder at Jo about this than I actually am; such attitudes are pretty old news to me, and if I’d made a point of getting pissed at everyone in the world who undervalued my tribe, I’d be a major heart attack risk by now. Furthermore, part of me actually agrees with her. After all, isn’t my own uselessness in the world at the root of my unhappiness with my life? Doesn’t the Ravenclaw tower business set off my bullshit detector precisely because I don’t buy into the whole Ravenclaw ethos myself?
If I were at Hogwarts I’d never make it into Gryffindor or Slytherin, but I can tell you one thing: I’d be the one putting my Ravenclaw brain into action petitioning and protesting against that fucking “password” system, just for starters. All the arguments I just laid out, I’d be writing down in a neat scholarly hand on a nice crisp piece of parchment and marching them into Dumbledore’s office for his perusal, saying, “WTF, sir?! We Ravenclaws are idiot savants, yes, but not idiots. This riddling thing needs to be Avada Kedavra’ed, stat.”
Ravenclaw to the core, baby.
And if Dumbledore, laissez-faire bastard that he is, wouldn’t lift a finger to change it, I’d just move into friggin’ Hufflepuff already. The place might be dumbed-down, but at least it’s democratic. And anyway, I’ve never looked good in blue.
*My anger toward the American educational system is as deep and enduring, and possibly as blind, as Snape’s anger toward James Potter. Nevertheless, I cannot deny that our schools and universities provide gainful (if very inadequately compensated) employment for a good number of people whom I genuinely like and value, including several of you on my friends list. I deal with my conflicting feelings about this as I deal with life’s problems in general: by compartmentalizing unto the point of psychosis.