Snape and Dumbledore

I was trying to say something very brief about Snape in an IM, but it became massive. Amber expertly observes, “stuff involving him goes that way I think.”

You get to thinking about just how sympathetic Snape was in the end, how difficult the decisions he had to make were and how cruelly he was treated, but that eventually brings you to a deeper understanding of his still, in spite of all that, having been an awful, arrogant person with evil beliefs.

He really couldn’t help developing that dichotomous personality. Being troubled already, he let himself be defined early on by James on the one hand and Lily on the other, and maybe he could have let that go later in life when they married and had a kid, but wow did it ever not work out like that. It’s not a revolutionary observation, just a more complicated way of saying what’s obvious, but his relationships with James and Lily form a Hegelian dialectic, the synthesis of which being his schizo approach to Harry Potter. Snape carries on a schoolyard grudge through his long dead enemy’s orphaned 11 year old son, but spends immense effort, making the largest possible sacrifices, for the same boy.

Which of course was engineered by Dumbledore. Dumbledore is Snape inverted: he really was warm and insightful, but not just insightful, there was ruthless, stony calculation, willingness to ask agonizing sacrifices of anyone he could leverage into making them, and even, it would appear, intricate, willful manipulation of the people who trusted him. To me, it’s only his *need* for Harry Potter, and the vastness of what he knew he’d one day expect Harry to do, that explains and excuses the constant nepotism. When you’re gonna ask a seventeen year old boy to literally, definitely die for you, you goddamn well better try to do something nice for him first.
The crucial revelation about Snape also serves as a microcosm of him. When he becomes a redoubled agent for Dumbledore, he didn’t suddenly see the light and change his ways, he went against his own beliefs to protect Lily Potter.

Dumbledore’s response when Snape goes to him is telling too. I had to look this one up. Snape begs Dumbledore to keep the Potters safe, and Dumbledore says “and what will you give me in return, Severus?” Reasonable, he’s talking to an enemy agent, but not the words of a friendly headmaster so much as a tactician fighting a losing battle.

I love Snape and Dumbledore for being such adults, and for not developing into those roles so much as occupying them from the start, waiting to reveal that depth as Harry Potter becomes able to recognize it. The level of complexity in their portrayal is tied to how much of them Harry can figure out, but the bare facts of their actions, removed from Harry Potter’s emotions and interpretations thereof, shows such complexity.

The very short thing I meant to say was that even though the last book’s revelations about Snape are redeeming, they crucially don’t erase what’s been bad about him all through Harry’s years at Hogwarts. The revelations add to him, showing why he did some of the things he did while leaving the cruel pettiness of others intact. They don’t overwrite him. I think that’s an extremely good thing. The counterpart revelations about Dumbledore do something different, causing everything you’ve seen the character do to shift unnervingly. But crucially, it only makes the things that were familiar and endearing about him muddy and complicated, never fully invalidating them. He really did care about the people he appeared to care about, and many more people, which is precisely the motivation behind his Machiavellian calculations.

The same way thinking about Snape’s positive traits makes me circle back around to his flaws, Dumbledore’s secrets lead back to what made him a good man. A thirst for knowledge is one of the first things Harry Potter learned from (and about) Albus Dumbledore, and it comes back to the surface during their postmortem conversation in the form of a question. Referring to his effort to gain power by collecting the Deathly Hallows with Gillert Grindlewald, he asks Harry if he was ultimately any better than Voldemort. It showed the wholeness of Dumbledore’s regret and contrition, but it also showed him to be seeking understanding. 115 years old and dead, Dumbledore still wanted to know more fully the impact of his own actions.