Essay: Expecto Quidditch
While
games—mock battles—segueing into genuine battles is a theme throughout the
seven-book Harry Potter series, Harry’s
third year in school is set apart as the only one in which he plays a complete
Quidditch season. Harry grows to see Quidditch—his chief metaphorical war—and learning
to conjure a Patronus—something he needs to fight a genuine war—as essentially
interchangeable. One contributes to success in the other in an infinite magical
feedback loop.
After
Christmas, Oliver Wood talks to Harry about whether he will be fit to play
Quidditch, since Harry fell to Dementors in the previous match. Harry assures
him that Lupin is teaching him to ward off Dementors, reinforcing the idea that
Harry is training for battle. He
specifically frames the anti-Dementor lessons as something to succeed at
Quidditch, metaphorical war.
During
these lessons, Harry must use a happy memory to conjure a Patronus, no mean
feat for someone with his history. Lupin tells him that he fears fear itself,
but it isn’t quite so simple. A dementor is a divisive entity and so is fear,
making it diametrically opposed to the unified and integrated Harry. Lupin
tells Harry that he understands if he wants to stop and Harry frames the
situation in terms of Quidditch again:
“What if
the dementors turn up at our match against Ravenclaw? I can’t afford to fall
off again. If we lose this game we’ve
lost the Quidditch Cup!”
When
it really counts, Harry doesn’t conjure a Patronus in a mock-war but in a real battle against an army of
dementors. Then, after Harry is “armed” for the next match by being able to
conjure a Patronus, in case dementors again appear, he is rearmed physically:
he gets his new broom back. Following this, Harry and Ron witness Neville in a
disagreement with Sir Cadogan over losing the passwords for Gryffindor tower. Neville’s
lack of success at this game, which represents a serious part of war—keeping
the enemy out of your camp—will soon lead to another security breach.
As if
foreshadowing the next breach, “Scabbers” forces a draw in the cat-and-rat game
in which he’s been an unwilling participant: he fakes his death, effectively mocking death, something very serious,
by treating it as a game, as he did years earlier when he also faked his death,
framed Sirius, and sent an innocent man to prison. Ron believes that Hermione’s
cat has murdered his rat. Despite Ron not being overly fond of Scabbers, this
looks like the end of his and Hermione’s friendship. Peter’s
treachery again divides friends and creates a misleading picture of what really
happened.
The first
Quidditch match pitted Harry against Cedric Diggory, but once he gets his
broom/weapon/masculinity back (his broom is unmistakably phallic here) Harry
plays against the Ravenclaw Seeker, Cho Chang, whose prettiness makes Harry sit
up and take notice. This almost costs him the match when she tries to draw his
attention to false dementors who are really Draco Malfoy and his friends in
disguise. In other words, the matches in Harry’s third year don’t just involve
war but also love. Harry has a negative impression of Cedric at first, before
learning that Cedric was the only one who didn’t think the match Harry lost was
fair (because of the dementors). In the next book, Cedric becomes his romantic
rival, but also a comrade in the Tournament, while Cho Chang becomes his
romantic goal but eventually loses her appeal for Harry in Order of the Phoenix due to her friendship with Marietta-the-spy
(spying being another part of war).
Harry
has the same “rank” as Cedric and Cho: Seeker. Oliver Wood is concerned that
she’s distracting Harry so he tells him it’s no time to be a “gentleman”. Harry
focuses on his job, closing in on the Snitch as the false dementors come onto
the pitch. He conjures a Patronus, his pre-battle training with Lupin having
been a success, followed by Harry catching the Snitch. McGonagall calls the
Slytherins’ actions “sabotage”, which is another war term. As he did earlier
with Buckbeak, Draco has again treated something serious cavalierly: dementors.
Ironically, Draco’s father will go to Azkaban and find out how much of a
laughing matter dementors are not.
On the
heels of this victory is a perceived genuine attack: Ron awakes in the night to
find Sirius Black standing over his bed with a knife. Crookshanks was able to
steal a parchment with the passwords from Neville’s bedside table but is unable
to communicate adequately to Sirius that Scabbers is no longer with Ron. There’s
been another breach, a breakdown in the password game. The metaphorical war has
again segued into a literal one.
The next
game Harry plays is another “stolen” Hogsmeade trip. This isn’t more successful
than the first, but instead of learning disturbing news (Sirius betraying James
& Lily) Harry battles Draco Malfoy near the Shrieking Shack, playing dirty
by abusing his Invisibility Cloak. He and Ron find the game hilarious until the
cloak slips and Draco sees Harry.
Snape,
however, knows about some of Harry’s father’s “toys”, such as the Invisibility
Cloak, and compares Harry to James when he summons him to his office, specifically
mentioning James’ “small amount of talent on the Quidditch pitch” as a reason
that he had a big head. This again refers to a mock-war. Snape says to him:
“Strutting around the place with his friends and admirers... the
resemblance between you is uncanny.”
“My dad
didn’t strut,” said Harry, before he could stop himself. “And neither do I.”
“Your
father didn’t set much store by rules, either,” Snape went on, pressing his
advantage, his thin face full of malice. “Rules were for lesser mortals, not
Quidditch Cup winners.”
This
could foreshadow Harry winning the
Cup later, but Snape might as well refer to James as a war hero. Harry tells
him his father was a real hero for
saving Snape’s life, which Snape calls a “joke” that James and his friends played
on him that could have killed him if James “hadn’t got cold feet at the last
moment.”
Snape
finds a blank parchment in Harry’s pockets: the Marauder’s Map. He doesn’t have
the best sense of humor but Snape does not
discount things he thinks may be jokes, toys or games. He’s highly suspicious
of them, since he knows that they can prove dangerous or deceptive. (He only seems to regard them as weapons for
war.) Assuming that there’s something going on with the parchment, he attempts
to ferret out what it is but ends up being insulted by it. They aren’t
physically present, but the Marauders are still able to have a joke at Snape’s
expense.
Snape
seems to recognize one or more of the Marauders’ nicknames and takes the
parchment to Lupin, implying that Harry received it from him, while Lupin
dismisses the idea that it’s dangerous and “full of Dark Magic.” He calls it
“childish, but surely not dangerous?” Once Lupin and Harry are alone
he tells Harry that he doesn’t believe that it’s not dangerous and equates
Harry having the map with “the last time a student left information about the
castle lying around”—which was when Neville lost his list of passwords to
Gryffindor tower. Lupin knows perfectly well what the parchment is and that
Sirius would also know, if he were to find it. Remus Lupin knows it’s not a toy,
though it was used this way by Lupin and his friends and this is also how Harry
uses it.
As the
Quidditch final approaches, Hermione learns that the war to save Buckbeak the
Hippogriff is lost, a war that grew out of a “game” Draco Malfoy played that
turned out badly because he treated
it as a game and shouldn’t have. This ends
another war: Ron offers to help with Buckbeak’s appeal and after Hermione
flings her arms around him she apologizes for Scabbers and Ron accepts her
apology.
The
night before the Quidditch final Harry has a dream in which he misses the game
and Wood demands, “Where were you? We
had to use Neville instead!” This could refer to Neville’s inability to hold
onto his Remembrall, which got Harry onto the team, making Neville an
anti-Seeker. Harry also uses Neville’s name as his alias on the Knight Bus, and
either Harry or Neville could have fulfilled Trelawney’s first prophecy, which
we learn about in Order of the Phoenix,
in which Neville fails to keep a grip
on the small Snitch-like orb in the Department of Mysteries that holds the
prophecy.
Following
this Quidditch dream Harry looks out a window and sees Crookshanks near the stationary
Whomping Willow. With Crookshanks is the large black dog that Harry saw before.
Right after dreaming about metaphorical war Harry witnesses Sirius and
Crookshanks together, allies in the real war against Peter Pettigrew.
Like
the earlier matches that Harry plays, JK Rowling gives the Quidditch final its
own chapter, reinforcing that Prisoner of
Azkaban is built around metaphorical war. The time leading up to the Quidditch
final is busy. Harry must “fit in his homework around Quidditch practice every
day” and Wood engages in “endless discussion of tactics”. The match is a
postponed confrontation between Harry and Draco so the game is nothing short of
all-out war, players smashing into each other, grabbing heads, and committing
numerous fouls that make it seem like “the dirtiest game Harry had ever played
in”.
After
the victory Rowling writes: “Harry felt
like he could have produced the world’s best Patronus.” He works on
conjuring a Patronus for the metaphorical war, Quidditch, but now feels that
the euphoria from winning that metaphorical war may in turn help him to conjure
a Patronus, which he’ll soon need to do. Rowling doesn’t have him use this
thought later to create a Patronus, but goes out of her way here to again link
Quidditch and this weapon.
Following
the match, the students engage in the more serious activity of final exams. Ron
and Harry still consider Divination a joke and cheating on homework like a
game. At Harry’s Divination final he sees nothing in his crystal ball so he
makes up something: a Hippogriff flying safely away, which becomes true. Then Trelawney goes “rigid in her armchair” as she
intones:
“The Dark
Lord lies alone and friendless, abandoned by his followers. His servant has
been chained these twelve years. Tonight, before midnight, the servant will
break free and set out to rejoin his master. The Dark Lord will rise again with
his servant’s aid, greater and more terrible than ever before. Tonight...
before midnight... the servant... will set out... to rejoin his master...”
The Ministry
Executioner for Buckbeak comes to Hogwarts with Fudge and another enemy: Lucius
Malfoy, whose influence probably led to Buckbeak’s appeal being lost (and the
case being pressed in the first place). Soon another enemy reappears: Peter
Pettigrew, as Scabbers, who’s been hiding in Hagrid’s hut “playing dead”.
Peter-as-Scabbers,
now back in Ron’s possession, plays the cat-and-rat game again. This becomes a
dangerous battle for Harry, Ron and Hermione when Sirius appears in his dog
form and drags Ron, still holding Peter/Scabbers, under the Whomping Willow,
forcing Harry and Hermione to battle the tree in order to follow him.
In the
Shrieking Shack, Harry, Ron and Hermione together disarm Snape, knocking him
out, thereby preventing him from hearing that Peter, the real Secret Keeper, is the one who betrayed James and Lily Potter.
It’s no coincidence that Snape finds them in the Shack through two things that
Harry uses as toys: the Marauder’s Map, which he found on Lupin’s desk, and the
Invisibility Cloak, which Harry dropped near the tunnel’s entrance while
battling the Whomping Willow.
Snape
and Fudge later disregard the children’s
story about what occurred, ruling that they are “Confunded”. Snape calls their
version “a fairy tale”, though he knew that the parchment that insulted him
wasn’t a “toy” and he nearly lost his life to a “joke” when he was in school.
Unlike Fudge, Dumbledore finds “fairy tales” instructive. He tells Harry and
Hermione that there’s nothing they can say to change Fudge’s mind and that they need more time. Hermione gets the hint and
finally uses the Time-Turner “toy” as a weapon. Nearly all of the toy-like
objects in this book, from broomsticks to the map to the Sneak-o-Scope to the
Invisibility Cloak are in a battle at some point. The Time-Turner is no
different.
While time-traveling Harry finally realizes that he conjured the Patronus that he thought
his father had created and he successfully drives off the dementors. What
begins as a Quidditch strategy evolves into a life-saving, unifying skill,
completing the book’s story arc, from metaphorical war to genuine war, from the
cold despair and divisiveness of the dementors to the unifying power of a
Patronus.
As I’ve
written in previous essays, each of the seven obstacles to the Philosopher’s
Stone in the first book of the series aligns with one of the books. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 11: Wargames and Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina.)
The third obstacle, which aligns with the third book, is the only one
resembling a Quidditch match, or rather, the part that Harry plays as Seeker. The
third book is also the only one built around a complete Quidditch season at
Hogwarts. This is why this obstacle involves flying on a broom to catch a key. As
much as Rowling seemed to love creating one variation after another on
Quidditch throughout the seventh book, which otherwise lacks literal Quidditch, this obstacle is the only one resembling the most popular
game in the wizarding world. In the only book in which Harry plays a full
Quidditch season and whose structure is built around Quidditch, Harry learns an
important life-skill—conjuring a Patronus—in order to succeed at Quidditch—and the third obstacle to
the Philosopher’s Stone involves using his Seeker skills to catch a flying,
Snitch-like object.
In
addition to the parallel between a Quidditch-oriented book and Quidditch-like
obstacle, Harry catches a key to move
closer to the Philosopher’s Stone, which is related to this book’s title: The Prisoner of Azkaban. With this
key/Snitch Harry unlocks a door and moves closer to the Philosopher’s Stone,
while in the third book a skill he learns for
Quidditch (conjuring a Patronus) helps him to unlock Sirius’s “cell”.
Harry plays two matches in the first book of the
series, against Slytherin and Hufflepuff. The only house Harry doesn’t get to
play literal Quidditch against is Ravenclaw—but this obstacle, provided by the
head of Ravenclaw, Professor Flitwick, is his way of playing a virtual match against that house, and,
this being Harry, of course he wins and catches the key.
The flying key obstacle provided by Flitwick creates
another love-connection to the wargames that Harry plays to reach the
Philosopher’s Stone, since it’s in the third book that Harry notices Cho Chang,
the Ravenclaw Seeker, while playing a Quidditch match. Time and again, love
and war are partners in Rowling’s books, and the third obstacle to the Stone
illustrates this once more.
Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 16: The Seeker, Copyright 2017-2018 by Quantum
Harry Productions and B.L. Purdom. See other posts on this blog for direct
links to all episodes of Quantum Harry.
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