Of Pensieves and Memory and Age (oh my!)
I had a discussion in my own journal a day or so ago, asking specifically "Why didn't Harry ever think to use a Pensieve to go over his memories of Godric's Hollow? We know that he has SOME memory of them somewhere, because he was able to hear a running commentary of it when the Dementors were around."
If anyone cares to look at the original discussion, it's here, but I'm going to paraphrase it here).
celisnebula commented:"I think you have to actually have conscious memory of an event to use the pensive. He may have some memory impressions that the Dementors are able to tap into, but I don't honestly think he has a conscious memory of that event -- he was too young and it's been too long a time to extract that sort of thread from his brain.
, and then master_of_one said:" wouldn't count on that. Morfin Gaunt was insane when Dumbledore got to him, but DD still got his memory, remember?
It could be that the gaps would be too great for Harry to make much sense of that memory even in a Pensieve, though."
, and then alwaysthequiet1 said:"I agree that his age at the time might mess up the memory, but otherwise I agree that he should be able to brain fish and pull it out."
I refute all of this with this:
In the Mugglenet interview that Melissa and Emerson had with Jo not long after HBP came out, this very question came up. Here's the relevant excerpt (emphasis in red all mine)MA: One of our Leaky “Ask Jo” poll winners is theotherhermit, she's 50 and lives in a small town in the eastern US. I think this was addressed in the sixth book, but, “Do the memories stored in a Pensieve reflect reality or the views of the person they belong to?”
JKR: It’s reality. It’s important that I have got that across, because Slughorn gave Dumbledore this pathetic cut-and-paste memory. He didn't want to give the real thing, and he very obviously patched it up and cobbled it together. So, what you remember is accurate in the Pensieve.
ES: I was dead wrong about that.
JKR: Really?
ES: I thought for sure that it was your interpretation of it. It didn’t make sense to me to be able to examine your own thoughts from a third-person perspective. It almost feels like you'd be cheating because you'd always be able to look at things from someone else's point of view.
MA:So there are things in there that you haven't noticed personally, but you can go and see yourself?
JKR: Yes, and that's the magic of the Pensieve, that's what brings it alive.
ES: I want one of those!
JKR: Yeah. Otherwise it really would just be like a diary, wouldn’t it? Confined to what you remember. But the Pensieve recreates a moment for you, so you could go into your own memory and relive things that you didn't notice the time. It’s somewhere in your head, which I'm sure it is, in all of our brains. I'm sure if you could access it, things that you don't know you remember are all in there somewhere."
Ok, so, I will admit that I'm perfectly biased (on what in just a moment), but I do believe I can back this up with canon. :)
Granted, Harry's pretty young now and when he was reliving those Dementor moments, it was pretty traumatic and he was even younger. However, one of the main themes throughout the stories has been Harry's desire for a family, and how detached he feels without one, and how much he misses his parents and how close he is to the Weasleys because they accept him as their own. ALL of them, except for Percy, who's a prat.
Harry's been desperate to remember his family, but he doesn't think to go into a Pensieve and retrieve memories, for example, of his parents playing with him in happier times. Granted, some of this might just be him overlooking it, but as many times as he's gone into Pensieves (Dumbledore's memories without permission, Snape's memories without permission, Dumbledore's "lessons"...) you'd think, or, well, I'd think, that, at some point he'd go "hey, I wanna see my mum", or some such.
What I *especially* find compelling about this interview is Jo's own emphasis (which I missed entirely on probably the first fifteen reads of this interview...I literally only noticed it in this discussion now when I was highlighting for emphasis) that "It’s important that I have got that across". Why is that so important? We know that Slughorn's memory was botched, intentionally, but it sounds to me like someone's going to be viewing a memory, soon, that they're going to have difficulty believing.
Here we get to why I'm biased.
I have said, repeatedly, that I think Snape was at Godric's Hollow the night that James and Lily were killed. Many reasons, one being that Voldemort (and apparently none of the Death Eaters) knew where Snape was the night Voldemort fell. Don't believe that? Witness Bellatrix interrogating him for his whereabouts in "Spinner's End", HBP-2. Also, Voldemort himself said in the Graveyard scene in GoF (book...he DIDN'T SAY THIS IN THE MOVIE MUCH TO MY DISGUST) "one, I believe, who has left me forever", and then in that aforementioned scene in HBP, Snape says "Yes, the Dark Lord thought I had left him forever, but he was wrong." (Which I would like to add, seems to be extremely harsh words from Snape against Voldemort in front of lunatic!Bellatrix, but that's aside the point.)
Second, and this can seem really minor here, and may well be wrong, Dumbledore says that James left his invisibility cloak in Dumbledore's possession, and honestly, those things are ridiculously expensive (according to Ron) and terribly rare, so my thought is, the only reason he would leave it to DUMBLEDORE and not to PETER, is to protect the spies Dumbledore had, because *quite clearly*, whoever your Secret Keeper is also needs protection. I will accept that this is fairly far out on a limb, but there we go.
Third, and this is absolutely hard evidence in my opinion, in PoA, Snape comes absolutely unglued, which is extremely unlike him, when he bursts into the Shrieking Shack and discovers Remus, Sirius, and the Golden Trio. His *exact words* were "Like father, like son, Potter! I have just saved your neck; you should be thanking me on bended knee! You would have been well served if he'd killed you! You'd have died like your father, too arrogant to believe you might be mistaken in Black -- "
Now...how does Snape know *exactly* how James died, *specifically* that James refused to believe he'd been betrayed by Sirius (who, up until about three minutes before this scene, *EVERYONE* thought was the Secret Keeper, including his own best friend), unless he was there to see it??? And we have already well established that he was not there with Voldemort...so what, precisely, was he doing there?
Trying to repay his life debt, perhaps?
Back to the original point. Why doesn't Harry view the Pensieve scene? Well, given all this (and honestly, given my novel I'm working on), my unabashedly not so humble and completely biased opinion is that this has to do with Harry's inability to practice Occlumency effectively. I think this is slightly borne out in HBP, immediately before Harry & Dumbledore go Horcrux hunting, and Harry is "boiling with anger at Snape", when Dumbledore says to Harry "Harry, you were never a good Occlumens -", and then, a couple lines later, Dumbledore seems, to me, to be considering telling Harry *exactly why* he trusts Snape, but then thinks better of it, and simply says that he, Dumbledore, trusts Snape completely. Further, again in HBP, during "Flight of the Prince", Snape is shrieking at Harry to learn to close his mind.
I believe, and I believe I will be borne out in this, that while Dumbledore does trust Harry's welfare to Severus Snape, the opposite is not true, and I believe that he does not trust Snape's welfare with Harry with good reason. Until Harry can learn to block out Voldemort intentionally, anything that Harry knows is subject for brain-pickin' by Herr Dark Lord, especially given the fact that they already have that bizaare mental connection. Were Snape to truly have been at Godric's Hollow the night James and Lily were killed, and not on Voldemort's behest, and were Voldemort to have *any* possibility of finding this out (come on now, really, Harry would be going over and over and over and over this in his mind, and dreaming about it incessantly if he were to discover this), Snape would be BRUTALLY tortured and murdered, and *very likely* publically, for his betrayal-and Dumbledore knew this, and so does Snape.
And so, clearly, does Jo.
I am of the opinion that until and unless Harry learns to Occlude his mind properly, either that memory will never be viewed (and probably not any other memories).
If anyone cares to look at the original discussion, it's here, but I'm going to paraphrase it here).
celisnebula commented:"I think you have to actually have conscious memory of an event to use the pensive. He may have some memory impressions that the Dementors are able to tap into, but I don't honestly think he has a conscious memory of that event -- he was too young and it's been too long a time to extract that sort of thread from his brain.
, and then master_of_one said:" wouldn't count on that. Morfin Gaunt was insane when Dumbledore got to him, but DD still got his memory, remember?
It could be that the gaps would be too great for Harry to make much sense of that memory even in a Pensieve, though."
, and then alwaysthequiet1 said:"I agree that his age at the time might mess up the memory, but otherwise I agree that he should be able to brain fish and pull it out."
I refute all of this with this:
In the Mugglenet interview that Melissa and Emerson had with Jo not long after HBP came out, this very question came up. Here's the relevant excerpt (emphasis in red all mine)MA: One of our Leaky “Ask Jo” poll winners is theotherhermit, she's 50 and lives in a small town in the eastern US. I think this was addressed in the sixth book, but, “Do the memories stored in a Pensieve reflect reality or the views of the person they belong to?”
JKR: It’s reality. It’s important that I have got that across, because Slughorn gave Dumbledore this pathetic cut-and-paste memory. He didn't want to give the real thing, and he very obviously patched it up and cobbled it together. So, what you remember is accurate in the Pensieve.
ES: I was dead wrong about that.
JKR: Really?
ES: I thought for sure that it was your interpretation of it. It didn’t make sense to me to be able to examine your own thoughts from a third-person perspective. It almost feels like you'd be cheating because you'd always be able to look at things from someone else's point of view.
MA:So there are things in there that you haven't noticed personally, but you can go and see yourself?
JKR: Yes, and that's the magic of the Pensieve, that's what brings it alive.
ES: I want one of those!
JKR: Yeah. Otherwise it really would just be like a diary, wouldn’t it? Confined to what you remember. But the Pensieve recreates a moment for you, so you could go into your own memory and relive things that you didn't notice the time. It’s somewhere in your head, which I'm sure it is, in all of our brains. I'm sure if you could access it, things that you don't know you remember are all in there somewhere."
Ok, so, I will admit that I'm perfectly biased (on what in just a moment), but I do believe I can back this up with canon. :)
Granted, Harry's pretty young now and when he was reliving those Dementor moments, it was pretty traumatic and he was even younger. However, one of the main themes throughout the stories has been Harry's desire for a family, and how detached he feels without one, and how much he misses his parents and how close he is to the Weasleys because they accept him as their own. ALL of them, except for Percy, who's a prat.
Harry's been desperate to remember his family, but he doesn't think to go into a Pensieve and retrieve memories, for example, of his parents playing with him in happier times. Granted, some of this might just be him overlooking it, but as many times as he's gone into Pensieves (Dumbledore's memories without permission, Snape's memories without permission, Dumbledore's "lessons"...) you'd think, or, well, I'd think, that, at some point he'd go "hey, I wanna see my mum", or some such.
What I *especially* find compelling about this interview is Jo's own emphasis (which I missed entirely on probably the first fifteen reads of this interview...I literally only noticed it in this discussion now when I was highlighting for emphasis) that "It’s important that I have got that across". Why is that so important? We know that Slughorn's memory was botched, intentionally, but it sounds to me like someone's going to be viewing a memory, soon, that they're going to have difficulty believing.
Here we get to why I'm biased.
I have said, repeatedly, that I think Snape was at Godric's Hollow the night that James and Lily were killed. Many reasons, one being that Voldemort (and apparently none of the Death Eaters) knew where Snape was the night Voldemort fell. Don't believe that? Witness Bellatrix interrogating him for his whereabouts in "Spinner's End", HBP-2. Also, Voldemort himself said in the Graveyard scene in GoF (book...he DIDN'T SAY THIS IN THE MOVIE MUCH TO MY DISGUST) "one, I believe, who has left me forever", and then in that aforementioned scene in HBP, Snape says "Yes, the Dark Lord thought I had left him forever, but he was wrong." (Which I would like to add, seems to be extremely harsh words from Snape against Voldemort in front of lunatic!Bellatrix, but that's aside the point.)
Second, and this can seem really minor here, and may well be wrong, Dumbledore says that James left his invisibility cloak in Dumbledore's possession, and honestly, those things are ridiculously expensive (according to Ron) and terribly rare, so my thought is, the only reason he would leave it to DUMBLEDORE and not to PETER, is to protect the spies Dumbledore had, because *quite clearly*, whoever your Secret Keeper is also needs protection. I will accept that this is fairly far out on a limb, but there we go.
Third, and this is absolutely hard evidence in my opinion, in PoA, Snape comes absolutely unglued, which is extremely unlike him, when he bursts into the Shrieking Shack and discovers Remus, Sirius, and the Golden Trio. His *exact words* were "Like father, like son, Potter! I have just saved your neck; you should be thanking me on bended knee! You would have been well served if he'd killed you! You'd have died like your father, too arrogant to believe you might be mistaken in Black -- "
Now...how does Snape know *exactly* how James died, *specifically* that James refused to believe he'd been betrayed by Sirius (who, up until about three minutes before this scene, *EVERYONE* thought was the Secret Keeper, including his own best friend), unless he was there to see it??? And we have already well established that he was not there with Voldemort...so what, precisely, was he doing there?
Trying to repay his life debt, perhaps?
Back to the original point. Why doesn't Harry view the Pensieve scene? Well, given all this (and honestly, given my novel I'm working on), my unabashedly not so humble and completely biased opinion is that this has to do with Harry's inability to practice Occlumency effectively. I think this is slightly borne out in HBP, immediately before Harry & Dumbledore go Horcrux hunting, and Harry is "boiling with anger at Snape", when Dumbledore says to Harry "Harry, you were never a good Occlumens -", and then, a couple lines later, Dumbledore seems, to me, to be considering telling Harry *exactly why* he trusts Snape, but then thinks better of it, and simply says that he, Dumbledore, trusts Snape completely. Further, again in HBP, during "Flight of the Prince", Snape is shrieking at Harry to learn to close his mind.
I believe, and I believe I will be borne out in this, that while Dumbledore does trust Harry's welfare to Severus Snape, the opposite is not true, and I believe that he does not trust Snape's welfare with Harry with good reason. Until Harry can learn to block out Voldemort intentionally, anything that Harry knows is subject for brain-pickin' by Herr Dark Lord, especially given the fact that they already have that bizaare mental connection. Were Snape to truly have been at Godric's Hollow the night James and Lily were killed, and not on Voldemort's behest, and were Voldemort to have *any* possibility of finding this out (come on now, really, Harry would be going over and over and over and over this in his mind, and dreaming about it incessantly if he were to discover this), Snape would be BRUTALLY tortured and murdered, and *very likely* publically, for his betrayal-and Dumbledore knew this, and so does Snape.
And so, clearly, does Jo.
I am of the opinion that until and unless Harry learns to Occlude his mind properly, either that memory will never be viewed (and probably not any other memories).