Essay: Quidditch Interruptus

Despite Order of the Phoenix being JK Rowling’s version of an historical event, a victory over rebels that is distinguished by fun and games in the contemporary celebrations of it, she doesn’t neglect her usual pattern of games and play segueing into war in the fifth book, as well as giving us battles that take on game-like overtones. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 20: The Order of the Rebel and Episode 21: Remember, Remember.)

This first occurs early in the book, without a specific game being involved. Harry is brooding, just hanging out on a playground, sitting on the only swing left undamaged by Dudley and his gang, quickly establishing that this setting for children to play can be a dangerous place. The sidelined metaphorical soldier—Harry—hangs about on a metaphorical abandoned battlefield.

Harry isn’t alone for long; Dudley and his gang soon show up. Like Harry, Dudley has been training as a metaphorical soldier; he’s taken up boxing and has racked up an impressive number of victories. He spends his holiday preying on younger children, abusing power and reminding us that Harry has always lived in a war zone, even before Hogwarts. Harry knows he cannot engage Dudley and his friends in an actual battle, so he leaves the playground/battlefield.

Rowling’s patterns being what they are, soon after Harry is on a metaphorical battlefield he has to fight a real battle when he and Dudley encounter the Dementors that Dolores Umbridge has sent to Little Whinging. Harry conjures a Patronus to protect him and Dudley, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory, like all of his victories in the fifth book, in which, time and again, Harry is not permitted a “clean win”—each is tainted in some way or becomes a defeat.

Emphasizing the wartime political climate, even if the Ministry refuses to acknowledge it, the chapter in which Harry leaves Little Whinging and goes to London is called “The Advance Guard”, which is a military term. Harry and the members of the Order who accompany him have broomsticks for their chief weapons. Harry first receives a broomstick to play a game but he also uses brooms for genuine battles, such as catching the flying key to reach the Philosopher’s Stone, getting a golden egg from a dragon (both a metaphorical battle and a very real battle), catching Neville’s Remembrall, and spying on Snape’s conversation with Quirrell after his second Quidditch match in his first year, just to name a few.

Harry’s London destination, number twelve, Grimmauld Place, Sirius Black’s home, is hardly a place of sweetness and light. Hermione, Ron and the rest of the Weasleys have been waging a war against filth and magical objects in the house. Fred and George use some of the items they find for their Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes products, which can appear to be innocuous sweets, like the Nosebleed Nougats, or toys, like the Extendable Ears, but are also useful for spying and other war-related activities.

The first reversal of the usual mock-war-to-real-war pattern in the fifth book comes in a courtroom that resembles an arena, a place for games, with rows of seats leading down to the prisoner’s chair. Harry first sees this arena in Dumbledore’s Pensieve in Goblet of Fire. His reaction to the prisoner’s chair hints that he’ll be on trial at some point. That foreshadowing quickly comes to fruition here.

It’s fitting that Harry is in an arena for the hearing, not an office, as originally planned. The venue is changed by Dolores Umbridge and the new setting makes it easy to see that Harry is entering into a battle with the whole Ministry—especially Umbridge. It’s a game-like battle in a courtroom that looks like an arena. Harry meets Umbridge in a war-like situation masquerading as a simple legal proceeding that’s been escalated into a serious trial before the full court. His continued existence in the wizarding world is at stake. Umbridge is trying to kill “wizard” Harry by expelling him from Hogwarts but she is defeated by the very bureaucracy she wields like a bludgeon, since this is only the purview of the Hogwarts headmaster. Her defeat, coupled with her co-opting Dumbledore’s prerogative to address students at the Welcoming Feast, telegraph that she will pursue his job for herself.

One rule of the magic game is that you cannot perform magic where Muggles will see it. Another rule is that no one under the age of seventeen is permitted to perform magic except for students, while they’re at Hogwarts. However, another rule is that those rules can be broken, if necessary, for self-defense. Breaking them without good reason, as Harry is accused of doing, makes him a traitor to the magical world, according to Umbridge, risking its discovery, even though the Dursleys know about magic, and in Goblet of Fire, Arthur Weasley does magic in full view of the Dursleys in their living room after he almost destroys it, since he needs to fix it again.

If Umbridge’s plans had gone as she intended, Harry’s wand would have been broken, he’d have been expelled from Hogwarts and he might have been evicted from the magical world at best or sent to Azkaban at worst. Dumbledore, already considered a traitor to the Ministry, convinces the court that Harry acted in self-defense. He does this with the aid of Mrs. Figg’s testimony.

Fudge has to ask whether Squibs can see Dementors because he doesn’t know. Evidently no one else on the court knows either, or if they do, they don’t want to reveal that they know that Mrs. Figg is lying. Dumbledore gambles that anyone who knows enough about Squibs to spot the lie is likely to know because they’re in sympathy with Squibs—and with Harry and Dumbledore.

Harry first sees Dolores Umbridge at his trial but she isn’t named until the Welcome Feast, when she interrupts Dumbledore just as he’s saying, “Tryouts for the house Quidditch teams will take place on the—” He never finishes his sentence, just as Harry does not remain on the Quidditch team. Both are because of Umbridge.

In Harry’s first Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson, Umbridge says, “Wands away and quills out, please,” showing that they are putting traditional “weapons” aside. However, for Umbridge, quills are weapons. Hermione is concerned by Umbridge’s course aims, since none of them involve learning to use defensive spells. Despite not being much of a game-player, practicing spells, like logic puzzles, is a game Hermione understands well and her training with Harry in the fourth book helped him to stay alive during the Triwizard Tournament. Mock-battles will technically not occur in Umbridge’s lessons (and in her detentions). The truth is that the battles in her classroom and her office are all real and dangerous.

At one point, Umbridge asks Dean Thomas, “Do you expect to be attacked during my classes?” Even though the expected answer is “no”, she does in fact attack the students repeatedly. The lessons for this subject are intended to be mock-wars, training for the real world, but with safeguards in place. Instead, any encounter with Dolores Umbridge is a real battle that she tries to cloak in the innocuous respectability of a school lesson, or a detention.

Hermione is cross with Fred and George for testing their products on students, but she’s at a loss for how to punish them. When Fred suggests detention and George adds that she might have them “write lines”, it’s clearly because they consider both ideas laughable, a trivial punishment. Rowling almost always sets up something to be deadly serious by having someone dismiss it first, laugh at it, and she maintains this pattern with the punishment of writing lines. Harry soon finds that Umbridge has a way to turn this activity into painful torture; it is no longer trivial or child’s play in her hands.

During his detentions, Harry is, in essence, a prisoner of war, despite the seemingly-innocuous punishment, and he refuses to tell others about this torture. When he finds out, Ron’s reaction is, “The old hag!” and “She’s sick!” He rightly sees it as a violation. Umbridge’s behavior paves the way for the even more appalling Amycus Carrow as the Dark Arts teacher in the last book, when “Defense” is no longer part of the job title. Carrow orders students to torture each other, and they’re punished if they refuse.

In the first Quantum Harry essays, I wrote about both Vernon Dursley and Umbridge dismissing children and anything linked to children. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode I: The Kids’ Table.) The similar atmosphere at Hogwarts and at the Dursleys’ house during Harry’s fifth year due to the similarities between Umbridge and Vernon make Harry unenthusiastic about returning to school after he spends Christmas with the Weasleys.

Harry’s pre-Hogwarts life was lived in a war-zone, due to the oppressive atmosphere fostered by his aunt and uncle and Dudley’s constant bullying. He received a respite from this when he went to Hogwarts, before becoming embroiled in a real war. Now Hogwarts is a war-zone to an even worse degree. In the fifth book, a battle-weary Harry grows more and more agitated, until the shell-shocked soldier erupts in Dumbledore’s office after Sirius’s death. Dumbledore takes it with equanimity, understanding Harry’s battle-fatigue. 

Sirius speaks to Harry and confirms that Umbridge and Fudge consider classroom work in Defense Against the Dark Arts to be combat training, which the Ministry doesn’t want students to have. “What does he think we’re doing here, forming some sort of wizard army?” Harry says. He’s being sarcastic, but soon they are doing this. Since Fudge thinks Dumbledore wants to “take on the Ministry”, he’s willing to believe that this is exactly what’s happening when he’s presented with the DA register that calls the group “Dumbledore’s Army”.

Games are mock-wars in Harry Potter and so are the OWLs, which is why the students need proper training. However, a mock-war again segues into a real one during Harry’s Astronomy exam. Hagrid flees Ministry officials who have come to apprehend him, on Umbridge’s orders. Professor McGonagall is cursed multiple times while coming to his defense. Then Harry’s History of Magic exam also segues from a mock-war to a real one when Voldemort sends Harry a fake vision of Sirius in danger. Harry no longer cares about his exams. This is life and death. This is war.

Quidditch, as metaphorical war and sometimes a metaphorical competition for love, is also used by Rowling for gauging allegiances. Ron puts Cho’s fidelity in terms of Quidditch: he wants to know if she is suddenly supporting the Tornados after they started doing well. It seems possible that Ron is uneasy about her loyalties but lacks the nerve to ask, “Are you just supporting Harry because it’s ‘in’?” 

It’s significant that this comes from Ron, to whom both loyalty and Quidditch are important. Hermione doesn’t understand what’s behind his hostility. She thinks he’s being rude and obnoxious, further evidence that Quidditch is, in all ways, a blind spot for her. She’s more attuned to Cho and her “issues”, while Ron is concerned about Cho being the “right girl” for Harry and what makes Harry happy. Quidditch does double duty here: Ron raises a red flag concerning Cho’s loyalty to Harry as a love interest and where she stands in the war. 

Hermione’s anti-Quidditch stance appears again when she’s cool to Harry and Ron for going to Quidditch practice, rather than doing homework. She’s being pragmatic; rather than the mock-war of Quidditch she wants them to prepare for a mock-war that affects the rest of their lives, the OWLs, though Harry’s reluctance to give up his last vestige of “play” is understandable, as he is embroiled in a constant war with Umbridge. Further, a Seeker catching a Snitch is re-enacted symbolically in Deathly Hallows every time Harry captures a Horcrux, so whenever Harry practices Quidditch he is, in essence, preparing to defeat Voldemort.

Hermione has it the wrong way around when she proposes that Quidditch causes problems between houses:

“That’s the trouble with Quidditch,” said Hermione... “it creates all this bad feeling and tension between houses.”

She...caught Fred, George and Harry all staring at her with expressions of mingled disgust and incredulity on their faces.

“Well, it does!” she said impatiently. “It’s only a game, isn’t it?”

“Hermione,” said Harry, shaking his head, “you’re good on feelings and stuff, but you just don’t understand about Quidditch.”

Hermione doesn’t grasp the role this game plays in students’ lives and the near-religious fervor they bring to it. Ginny also refers to Hermione’s non-understanding of Quidditch during a cryptic quarrel soon before she and Harry become a couple. Matches help to vent tension between the houses and provide a scaled-down mock-war without the casualties and fatalities, ideally, of a real war. Matches themselves are not a source of conflict. The House Cup competition also contributes to house rivalries, but Hermione doesn’t seem to find this problematic. Similarly, when James plays idly with a Snitch in the chapter of the fifth book called “Snape’s Worst Memory”, we see this as a symptom of his arrogance, not the cause of it.

In Ginny’s first match as a Seeker, she echoes Krum’s actions in the World Cup: she catches the Snitch even though Gryffindor will lose so everyone (especially Ron) is spared a prolonged match. Harry must do the equivalent of this at the end of Deathly Hallows, another sign of Ginny’s being his equal. No other female character has as many parallels to Harry.

Harry’s first detention with Umbridge is also the first Quidditch interference he experiences because of her. He was to attend the Keeper trials, but because of the detention, he cannot. In his absence, Ron becomes the new Keeper and is officially one of Harry’s comrades-in-arms. But the opposition shakes Ron’s confidence and tries to make him quit before his first match. He must withstand “a relentless campaign of insults, jeers and intimidation” before the match. “Campaign” is originally a war term, but it’s fitting here, as they do wage a battle of jokes and teasing against him, which is highly effective in rattling Ron.

Umbridge attempts to stop Dumbledore’s Army before it starts by disbanding all school clubs, the leaders of which must now ask her permission to re-form, including Quidditch teams, which have become collateral damage in her campaign to take control of the school, the metaphorical state church. Every time Umbridge passes another new rule she is circumventing the “real” game rules and creating her own.

The only match Harry plays in his fifth year is the first one, Gryffindor v. Slytherin. Although he catches the Snitch it is another Pyrrhic victory for him. Immediately after the match Draco Malfoy hurls one insult after another against the Weasleys, especially Molly, and then Harry’s mother. When he hears this, Harry stops restraining George, who had been trying to attack Draco, and Harry punches Draco with the Snitch he caught still in his fist. He is entangled with a Snitch in his first match and here it basically is Harry. Rowling writes:

Harry became aware that something was still struggling in his right hand, the knuckles of which he had bruised against Malfoy's jaw. Looking down, he saw the Snitch’s silver wings protruding from between his fingers, struggling for release.

Harry is as trapped as the Snitch. Umbridge bans him and the twins from Quidditch (though Fred did nothing). The DA becomes Harry’s substitute mock-war and the twins will soon wage an all-out guerilla war against Umbridge. She attempts to sideline three soldiers from a metaphorical war but cannot keep them from real battle.

Ginny takes Harry’s place as Gryffindor Seeker, giving her the same battle rank that he has. Ginny also has the distinction of giving the DA its name: Dumbledore’s Army. This allows Dumbledore to take the fall for Harry, so that he avoids expulsion, just as Harry helped Ginny to avert expulsion in the second book. Now Ginny has equal battle status with Cho Chang, the girl Harry fancies. However, Cho’s proposal of “Defense Association” for a name doesn’t stick; the group uses Ginny’s name, and this is what saves Harry.

Rowling consistently sets real battles where mock battles have occurred and also sets love-related events in these arenas. Harry and Cho kiss under mistletoe in the Room of Requirement, where the DA meets, despite mistletoe hanging all over the castle. Ginny and Cho are contrasted again in the Quidditch final when Ginny catches the Snitch (a symbolic Harry) from under Cho Chang’s nose.

Soon after he kisses Cho in the Room of Requirement, Harry has a dream that he’s back in the Room of Requirement, where Cho accuses him of “luring her ...under false pretenses”, claiming that he was to give her one-hundred fifty Chocolate Frog Cards.

Since a Quidditch side gets one-hundred fifty points when their Seeker catches the Snitch, this sounds like a request for a Quidditch victory, though Harry no longer plays. She says that Cedric gave her “loads of Chocolate Frog Cards”, also called Famous Wizard Cards. Perhaps Harry fears (like Ron) that her loyalties are not completely sincere. Cedric is a famous wizard during the Tournament and Harry has always been famous. Cho has now been linked to the two most famous young men at Hogwarts and Harry may wonder whether she’s attracted to the fame, just as Ron suspected her support for a Quidditch team that was suddenly doing well.

In the dream Hermione declares that he “promised” Cho. (What he promised is unclear.) Hermione suggests he that give Cho his Firebolt instead, which is an even clearer phallic symbol here than when Umbridge confiscates it, which symbolically emasculates him. This is true every time his broom is taken from him. Harry reminds Cho, in the dream, that Umbridge has his broom, which could mean that he’s unable to participate competently in a romance just now.

This game-focused dream, which includes Quidditch, brooms, and Chocolate Frog Cards, segues to an attack on Arthur Weasley by Voldemort’s snake, Nagini. Harry sees the attack in his mind’s eye due to his having a piece of Voldemort’s soul in him, like Nagini. When Rowling does not have a literal game evolve into a battle she gives Harry a game-heavy dream immediately beforehand and goes from there to the war scenario.

Earlier, Cho Chang bumps into Harry in the Owlery and uses Quidditch as an opening gambit in their conversation. Harry tells her that Ron is Gryffindor’s new Keeper but she’s cool to the news, due to Ron challenging her loyalty to the Tornados. This segues into Cho calling Umbridge “foul”, as if trying to clear up any misconceptions Harry might have had about her loyalties. She also, perhaps not coincidentally, uses a sports term, since a “foul” is when someone breaks the rules of a game.

After a Quidditch practice, Ginny brings Harry a chocolate egg from Molly, which is decorated in iced Snitches, as if she is passing Snitches to him, a fellow Seeker who is completed by catching a Snitch, though you could also say that Ginny is completed by catching Harry, just as he is mutually completed by her. She also helps him speak to Sirius, the person he loves the most in Order of the Phoenix, so she is the conduit to love for him now but will soon be his romantic goal, and all of this is tied to the mock-war of Quidditch.

Metaphorical royalty don’t get short shrift in this book just because there is a rebel plot that succeeds, rather than being squashed. At Ron’s first practice as Keeper, war returns to the Quidditch pitch when Draco Malfoy and his friends heckle Ron, whose confidence is already low. People repeatedly tell Harry to ignore and not respond to Umbridge, and Harry in turn tells Ron to ignore these taunts. Ironically, the Gunpowder Plot is also echoed here, since the Slytherins are attacking someone’s belief: Ron’s belief in himself. They mock him as a “king”, but if he’s a king, that makes their behavior treasonous.

Ron is a mock-king in a mock-war, and his chief battle is to believe in himself. When he achieves this, he becomes a “king” of Quidditch, and a mocking song is turned around and becomes an ode to the “king’s” prowess in battle, just as the fireworks in Order of the Phoenix are turned around and become a weapon against the establishment instead of a way for the government to celebrate a victory over rebels. Again, loyalty to a sovereign and a belief are conflated and wrapped in the clothes of a mock-war that is also a real war.

After he returns from the Ministry real games trickle into Harry’s life again; Gryffindor wins the House Cup, receiving many points due to five of the six students at the Ministry being Gryffindors. A real war is a game again as their brave deeds become fodder for points in the House Cup Game.

The last game reference is a return to using game metaphors for love, not war, with a chess rook as a phallic symbol. When they’re riding home on the Hogwarts Express, Ron learns, during a chess game, that Harry and Cho have broken up and Ginny and Michael are also finished. He urges Harry to find someone more “cheerful” and Ginny to find someone “better” while giving Harry a furtive look and “prodding his queen forward towards Harry’s quivering castle”. Ginny calls Dean Thomas her next boyfriend; like Harry, he’s an archetypal Youth (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 7: Fountain of Youth). This double-entendre from Rowling prepares us for Harry and Ginny becoming a couple in the next book.

In previous essays I’ve written about how the seven obstacles to the Philosopher’s Stone in the first book of the series each align with one of the books. So far I’ve written about how and why Fluffy aligns with the first book, Devil’s Snare with the second, the flying keys with the third, and the life-sized chess game with the fourth.

The fifth obstacle to the Philosopher’s stone, a troll, is the one in particular that he might have had a great deal of difficulty with if he’d had to deal with it while on his way to the Stone, since by then it was just Harry and Hermione, Ron having fallen during the chess game, and Ron was most instrumental in defeating the troll in the bathroom. Since Harry encounters a troll earlier in the book, it would have been redundant for Rowling to have him fight one again, and it’s only right that Quirrell takes care of this. But we can treat the two troll “incidents” in the book as interchangeable, and when we do this, we can see that the first incident reveals many parallels with the fifth book, with which this obstacle is aligned.

Quirrell raises the alarm on Halloween, but the troll that’s in the dungeons is there because Quirrell put it there as a diversion, so he could try to reach the Philosopher’s Stone. He’s not afraid of trolls; they’re his specialty (which Dumbledore knows). If Dumbledore and Snape were in any doubt that Quirrell wasn’t to be trusted—and Quirrell says Snape wasn’t in any doubt—this definitely confirms it.

When Harry reaches the chamber with the Mirror of Erised in it, Quirrell tells Harry:

 “I have a special gift with trolls—you must have seen what I did to the one in the chamber back there? Unfortunately, while everyone else was running around looking for it, Snape, who already suspected me, went straight to the third floor to head me off–and not only did my troll fail to beat you to death, that three-headed dog didn’t even manage to bite Snape’s leg off properly.”

This links Quirrell, the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher in the first book, who provided the troll, to the teacher for this subject in the fifth book: Dolores Umbridge. She sent other creatures to attack Harry—Dementors. This didn’t defeat him, though, just as he, Ron and Hermione also conquer the troll. Another thing that Quirrell and Umbridge have in common is that when Umbridge is wearing the locket Horcrux in the seventh book, which has a piece of Voldemort’s soul in it, she is acting on Voldemort’s behalf by persecuting Muggle-born witches and wizards, serving as Voldemort’s surrogate, just as Quirrell carried a piece of Voldemort’s soul in the first book and also acted on his behalf.

Harry, Ron and Hermione are scolded for pitting themselves against the troll and receive a token number of house points as a “reward” for not getting themselves killed. When Harry and Ron initially see the troll enter a girls’ bathroom, they lock it in, accidentally trapping Hermione, who is a surrogate for Sirius, but a version of him who really is in trouble and really is saved, so this inverts part of the fifth book.

The method of the troll’s defeat is echoed in Order of the Phoenix: in the first book, the troll’s own club is used against him when Ron levitates it and lets it drop on his head. In the fifth book, other Weasleys—Fred and George—turn the usual method of celebrating Bonfire Night—fireworks—against Umbridge, who is a symbol of the political establishment and a bit troll-like herself, in addition to sucking joy and happiness out of people like a Dementor, which is a creature she manipulates, just as Quirrell manipulates trolls.

There are numerous mentions of trolls in the fifth book, often in connection to Umbridge. Hermione is surprised that Pansy Parkinson, who’s on the Inquisitorial Squad, is a prefect, calling her, “thicker than a concussed troll”, which is precisely how Harry, Ron and Hermione defeated the troll in the bathroom and how Quirrell appears to have subdued the troll they find after the life-sized chess game.

The troll incident cements Harry, Ron and Hermione’s friendship. This group is doubled to six when Neville, Ginny and Luna accompany the Trio to the Ministry. So even though Harry gets to skip the troll obstacle the second time he encounters it, because Rowling gave him a “troll obstacle” earlier that replaces it, she maintains her pattern of aligning the seven game-like obstacles to the Stone with each book in the series.

Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 22: The Phoenix Games, 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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