(March 13, 2002)
(March 13, 2002)
I'll be posting this chapter in two, maybe three parts. This took longer than expected, and I still haven't got to where I wanted to get story-wise.
Major warning to those who like plot and action - there isn't any. You got that in chapter 2. This is ALL very detailed scene setting (some set-ups for the sequel to "Letter" included) some background and a bit more character interaction. Oh, and Salomé's finally made it to the page, punished for her lateness by being overtaken (at high speed and in glorious technicolour) by Esmé from Riley's "Pawn to Queen " (Salomé was conceived first and permitted her serpentine chum's creation. She has wisely decided not to compete with Esmé's spectacular appearance or ability to speak English.)
I've made a change in this corrected version, following a reader's query, about Snape's potential animagus form.
All literary references and borrowings from other fanfic writers (Morrighan, Earthwalk, Lupinlover , Silverfox and J.L. Matthews) are in the endnotes.
Those of you familiar with A Pilgrim's Progress will note that I am not following the exact order of the book's journey/geography. This is quite deliberate. In Bunyan's world, only Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs get to Heaven (those "who would valiant be" and the ones willing to slog at following the Correct Path.) Ravenclaw-types evade the ethical choices by sophistry, and the Slytherin tendency to look for alternative routes is seen as very dodgy, indeed punishable by exclusion from Paradise.
Bloody Patriarchal Narratives. I'm damn well going to jump around the text as I please.
Acknowledgements of other fanfic writers:
MORRIGHAN - Invented "scryscopes", wizarding surveillance, as they appear in "Staff Meeting"an under-read little fic. I didn't get all the technical details, but adapted the basics to my own use. And had the brilliant thought that Snape's 'lift restraint' hex had already worn off by the time the fight was over.
JL MATTHEWS. Snape's CD player, I imagine, is a gift from her OC Marlie Lovegood in "Slytherin Rising".
LUPINLOVER - "Stained Glass"- the idea of enchanting a photograph to keep still. Plus the orginal Snape-Granger shipper.
SILVERFOX - "Harry, Hogwarts Caretaker" - the idea of taking over from Filch. More importantly, Hogwarts' state of physical collapse after the war. That is going to be VERY useful - forcing our couple into places they wouldn't normally go. Thank you! Oh, and young Severus as a little hell-raiser in class from "My Name's Severus". And how DID you guess about Albus not taking his eyes of Severus for a moment? I planned that ages ago, and you picked up on it in your review.
EARTHWALK - Describes a Concealment charm in the Banshee chapter of "I Was Right".
LILITH MORGANA - The Latin spell for hiding wounds.
All I know about Indigo snakes is from Google. They grow up to nine feet long. Assume Salomé's born and bred in Britain, and magically protected from the climate. An indigo snake's the only kind I've ever had round my neck - and it WAS cool, dry and soothing. Not slimy at all....
Salomé's opening gambit is inspired by a Far Side Cartoon, wherein domestic pet dogs being taken for a walk in a city park greet each other in grandiose terms. For some reason this was hysterically funny. I found a sustained thee-ing and thou-ing very annoying to read, and assumed you would too. Salomé's version of Parseltongue owes a bit to George Orwell's "Newspeak" in Nineteen Eighty Four - though I didn't realise it until I'd written it. Quite appropriate though.
Severus' room. OK, so Romances have two purposes. One, to reduce the hero to desirable property. All romances could be subtitled "The Taming of the Sexy Bastard". Two - to get desirable property, as in Real Estate, that most women can't afford in reality. Hands up those of you who've read a romance winding up in a really grotty flat. Most fanfics make the desirable property Medieval, Georgian, Regency or Victorian at a pinch. I happen to like High Modernism, but I have an impeccable intellectual excuse for using it here. Modernism is THE aesthetic of transparency, the utopia of honesty, puritan lack of concealment. Plus devotion to "Form Follows Function" and "Ornament is Crime" (Adolf Loos) - which ties in with Snape as pure usefulness, reduced to his function. So there. I imagine the inner wall of his room looking like Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp, but without the naff stained glass he almost wrecked it with.
Severus' room part two. The panopticon prison, designed by Jeremy Bentham, was, believe it or not, meant to be a humane advance in prison architecture. It is what it says - all seeing. The governor is in a revolving tower at the centre, the prisoners in a circle of glass-walled, backlit cells around. Warders walk round an inner circle between the two, watched by the governor, watching the prisoners, who know they are under constant surveillance. Michel Foucault's description (in "Discipline and Punish", I think) is the most famous; but my favourite analysis of it is in Robin Evans' insightful, erudite, humane book on the history of prison buildings, The Fabrication of Virtue. Angela Carter's prison for female murderers in Nights at the Circus is a panopticon. All attempts to put Bentham's theories into practice resulted in mental breakdown for the prisoners. Visit Lincoln's old prison if you find yourself in Northern England - it's not a panopticon, but it used the ideas.
The date of Slytherin House's purging of the Tower coincides with the Terror in revolutionary France. This was also the beginning of the 'Modern' period of Progress, according to many cultural historians. EP Thompson describes the 'long' nineteenth century as being from the French Revolution (end 18th cent) to the First World War. (And the 'short' twentieth from 1918 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in '89.)
Charlotte Perriand - pioneer textile designer, interior designer and furniture designer. The soldier story is in her autobiography. Most people now give her joint responsibility with Le Corbusier for the final form of the chaise-longue. My absolutely fave description was in a crappy biography of Le C, which claimed that the piece was like "a very expensive French tart" (as if the author really knows, and not the kind you eat). He said English men would have made it comfy and sensible, like their wives, and German men would have made it even starker and more serious (like their wives. He obviously had no problem with national stereotyping, or with getting it wrong - Le C was Swiss, not French.) He clearly hadn't looked at Perriand's sketchbooks.
Aunt Lolita - the name's from Nabokov's titular heroine - an underage girl who has an affair with an older man. Plus a little joke for those of you who regularly email me. Cranky old aunts are the only relations I can imagine Sev having, and I'm not the first to give him one.
Thomas Tallis. I don't know much about music, but Mr Sphinx does, and this work is in his CD collection (Early Music section.) The score is huge because of the 40 parts, and I can never find a shelf wide enough to put in on. Think I better frame it.
Apologies to Hagrid fans (you exist?) for such disgraceful aspersions. But can't you just imagine him thinking he wasn't hurting his pets, he was making them have a good time... perhaps he'll try seeing how screwts blast their ends off, one of these days.... For the record, I don't have pets, never have had pets, and don't have much to do with the natural world. I hope I haven't started a terrible new genre for the NC-17s. Oh dear.
I've assumed the surveillance is still operational, but not really looked at, so Severus can be fairly sure that Poppy will only find out what's happened if she's told. Just in case the ministry clerks do have to trawl through his stuff again, though, he can't resist snarling at them from his chaise longue anyway.
Look up the sonnet yourselves then. You all found the T and C ref from Google, now, didn't you? (With one or two honourable exceptions - you know who you are.)
I'm trying to be fair to Sirius. The GOF scenes suggest he can be quite astute about people - ie, the description of the Crouch family.
Severus' mantra is a twist on the child's prayer: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take."