Authors, readers and texts

[girlyswot]

Often I find myself thinking about the HP fandom when I'm supposed to be working and vice versa. Partly this is because of an interesting overlap in terminology - I'm reading through books on the formulation of the New Testament canon at the moment. Someone recently described JKR's interviews as 'deuterocanonical' and, of course, we're all accustomed to the terminology of canon in the HP world.

For the book that I spend most of my days and hours and weeks and years studying (the Christian bible), there is no possibility of interviewing the long-dead human authors. The only way to establish what they meant in their books is by means of the text itself (once the relevant historical, linguistic and other analyses and comparisons are done). The text must stand alone in creating meaning, telling stories, establishing characters and so on.

I think perhaps this is why I am so ambivalent about, oh all right, opposed to, treating JKR's interviews as if they are 'canon'. Someone recently made a comment about the HP characters only existing in JKR's head and that she knows them better than anyone and that's why we should listen to her interviews and take her comments as absolute.

I disagree. I don't think Harry Potter lives in JKR's head. I think he lives in the text of the seven books. I profoundly hope that JKR will never be tempted to write 'book 8' but if she ever were to take on such a task, I think she'd quickly discover that some of these things she's saying just wouldn't work in the world and with the characters who already live on the pages of her books.

I also think that we as readers shouldn't need to ask her questions. Before book 7, yes of course - there were questions that we knew we needed answers to (and we also knew they were the ones that wouldn't be answered in interviews) but now we have the whole story, the completed canon. And it is quite clearly complete. I thought DH was a tour de force and I have to say that it has changed my opinions of Rowling as a writer quite significantly. She has told a great story, one that has real depth and meaning, and one that has power to change its readers' minds and hearts. The story is done and should be allowed to speak for itself. The answers to all the questions we need to know are there already in the text and it's lazy to ask JKR to spell them out for us.

Comments

[rhetoretician.livejournal.com]

It really depends. For relatively short stories I know practically nothing about the characters except what I put on the page -- and that's true for other details as well. It drives some readers crazy that I can't tell them exactly what "The Emmigration" was in my Excavations story, example -- but I didn't need to know it for the story itself, so I didn't bother figuring it out.

There are some things, though, that I do have to know. When I'm doing a story like Counting to Five Thousand, which has a number of characters of different ages who appear in different years, I have to write a chronology of events and births because otherwise the whole thing will fall apart. So I knew exactly when Phillipe, Ned, Goerges-Jacques and Petra were born, exactly when each of the three scenes in the book happened, exactly when Ginevra died, etc. For Returning Were As Tedious I'm keeping a list of the students at Hogwarts at the same time Severus is (not all of them -- only the ones he meets or hears about), including their House and year. But not beyond that. Unless the detail is important to the story in some way, I don't bother.

I can understand JKR, though; especially with backstories. Sirius's dialogue had to be realistic from the word go, and she felt she could accomplish that only if she knew his family background etc. I get that.