I know the train’s pretty much left the station on this topic, but I wanted to jump on board anyway with my hobo bag and two cents. And it’s also an excuse to show some of the fun pictures that have resulted from the frenzy.

I followed a fascinating discussion on the child-lit listserv about Rowling’s obligations regarding gay characters, and a related discussion about whether Rowling can even make that decision for readers.

On the one hand, the discussions made me feel a bit like I was back in my old litcrit classes, which I did well in, but which always made me feel like I’d left my gravity boots at home.

If something isn’t written into the story, can it be a true part of the story?

What is an author’s obligation when dealing with something that’s politically charged?

Does the author even have the authority to say what’s true and what’s not about her story?

I wriggled my way out of litcrit and into creative writing for a reason, and for the same reason I don’t want to get tangled up in these topics. Nothing against them — I did find the discussion to be (largely) smart and interesting. But it’s just not the angle I’m primarily interested in. And a post by Roger Sutton, editor in chief of The Horn Book, summed it up nicely and pithily enough for me.

But I do want to add a couple of things to the overall discussion.

First, it’s important to read the actual transcript of what Rowling said. Context matters.

She said “My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.”

She seems to be leaving a door open for readers to bring their own interpretations to the character.

However, she then went on to hammer a number of nails into the story. With each “announcement,” with each pound of the hammer, she closed off avenues of imagination for her readers.
This is the second thing I wanted to talk about.

Rowling also did this with the epilogue in Deathly Hallows, which is why you find entire communities of devoted fan fiction writers making a pact to ignore the epilogue — essentially removing it from canon by mutiny — and writing their own epilogues.

I understand the impulse of a writer to stay in control of the story. The idea of fans making it their own can be unnerving.

But (in my humble opinion) when you are dealing with today’s generation of readers (particularly the younger ones), who are accustomed to inserting their own will into the media they consume, a good story belongs at least as much to the fans as to the author. A good story needs open spaces for readers to stick their own flags. It needs unwatered seeds, unfollowed threads, and characters with potential that transcends the author’s own imagination.

And a good story needs an author who admires and respects what the readers bring to the story.

After all, when an author describes something in a story, she is not transferring her own experiences and images into the minds of readers. It’s impossible, no matter how many adjectives she uses. Rather, the author is trying to make something flower inside the reader’s mind, from the reader’s own experiences and images, from the reader’s own soil, water, sunshine.

The author can hope that the image that flowers in the reader’s mind is similar to his own. Or he can hope that their version is even richer, more personal, more powerful.

If an author can’t control even how a reader sees a particular scene, it seems vain to attempt authority over so many plot threads.

The Harry Potter series had enough open spaces to spawn a fanfic leviathan. My personal feeling is that Rowling should have left it to her fans to continue filling in the blanks.

Tags: deathly hallows, dumbledore, dumbledore is gay, fanfic, harry potter, j.k. rowling, literary criticism, writing