"This? It is called a Pensieve," said Dumbledore. "I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind."
[.....]
"At these times," said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, "I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form." (596)The Pensieve proves to be an extremely useful device from a narrative perspective--it provides instant flashbacks, and gives a character who is not a participant in a memory access to that memory from the perspective of the person who was there. Thus, the author is able to fill in a lot of gaps and give a character (Harry) the tools to figure out the puzzle and unravel the mystery--and of all of the novels, Goblet of Fire has a plot that is most like a mystery (well, ONE of its plots--there are a few).
But when I refer to the Pensieve, I refer to it as "Literacy" magic, not "Literary," magic. So its function as a plot- and flashback-enabling device is not what I have in mind. Rather, the Pensieve, in the story--in Dumbledore's description--in the wizarding world (we're suspending our disbelief now) functions rather like writing, and registers as symbolic of written accounts of thoughts (and, to a lesser extent, dreams).
Now, writing the above, it occurs to me that Harry has, in fact, gone into Dumbledore's office in order to tell Dumbledore about a dream. Meanwhile, he becomes absorbed in the thoughts that Dumbledore siphoned out of his head in order to be able to look at them more clearly (perhaps objectively?) and to make connections. Considering that Freud's method of dream analysis relied heavily on analysis of written accounts of the dream--whether written by the dreamer (often himself) after waking from the dream, or written down by a second party (himself) while the dreamer recounted them verbally--having Harry's quest to tell Dumbledore his dreams interrupted by the Penseive becomes somewhat more interesting. According to the model that Freud provides in The Interpretation of Dreams (or perhaps a different/shorter work on the subject?), dream analysis in fact looks much more like close reading than like the typical model of patient on the couch and psychiatrist in the chair. Had Harry written his dream instead of rushing to Dumbledore's office to wait, he might have had a fuller account of the dream as well as a text to analyze, though his written accound would be mediated by the choices he made as a writer--which would arguably be different than his choices if providing a verbal account. Freud saw significance in the representation of the dream in language; the Pensieve, however, keeps the memory contained in a nonwritten, verbal state. The extra layers of consciousness that go into writing a dream or memory do not create that overlayer, and the immediacy of the perceotion remains unmediated by the deliberate processes of inscription and the thought processes involved in forming the perceptions into words and sentences.
Nevertheless, for all of its immediacy, the Pensieve is like written language because, lacking a magical device to record memory as it actually happened, and to frame it without the application of additional layers of language and conscious thought, the tool we have to record memory is, in fact, writing. And writing functions, according to Walter Ong (and other literacy theorists, like Goody, whom he quotes), in much the same way as a Pensieve in Goblet of Fire and future books:
"Texts are think-like, immobilized in visual space, and subject to what Goody calls 'backward scanning.'" (Ong 97)Here's a nice summary of the concept:
Goody (1977) explains that writing transforms speech by abstracting its components. Words in written texts are more "thing-like" (Ong, 1982, p. 97). Their meaning can be looked up in other written texts and do not require direct ratification through interpersonal situations. Written texts enable backward-scanning of thought to make corrections and resolve inconsistencies. This self-analysis or criticism is inhibited by face-to-face communication in oral cultures.
Writing enables both the recording and the dissecting of verbal utterance. Literate cultures have permanent records of past thought which can be compared and questioned skeptically. Such skepticism enables the building and testing of alternative explanations of knowledge. In ancient Greece, the shift from oral to literate thought processes resulted in the "logical, specialized, and cumulative intellectual tradition" of Plato. (Goody and Watt, 1968, pp. 68-69)
So looking back over things and being able to make connections and draw conclusions is a consequence of literacy, according to the foundational 20th century theorists. It is the permanence and fixity of the written word--the knowledge that it will not change from one reading to the next--that allows us to refer back to what we read earlier at a later date, when some new idea occurs to us, or when some new data presents itself to us, or when we grow in knowledge or understanding. (And this, incidentally, is why I reread--and reread--and reread. The book does not change. But I do. And the situation of reading does as well.)
The Pensieve has all of this as well--without the mediation of written language, which can distort the actual memory. Memories can be modified and distorted, as we realize in The Half-Blood Prince, but in general, they are not mediated by the conscious process of writing. In Goblet of Fire, the Pensieve shows memories. They can be replayed and examined. They do not change because rather than being subject to retelling, they are direct and permanent records of the event as it was received by the mind of the person who experienced it. So like writing--only better.
But I still don't like the name Penseive. Too punny.
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