One reporter-JKR's revelations: Chapter & Verse

[Carol]

bboyminn:
> 
> Here is something we need to consider. When JKR makes statements
> that occur beyond the end of books Seven, I don't think she
> is intending to dictate this to us as if it were canon. 
> 
> She seems, most often when answering these question, to 
> answer with /qualified/ statements. In otherword, 'I picture...',
> 'I thought...', 'It seemed to me that...'. For example, she
> never said Dumbledore was gay, she said 'I always thought of
> him as gay'. 
> 
> In other words, she is imagining the Potterverse future beyond
> book seven the same way that we are imagining it. She isn't 
> flatly saying, Harry went to work for the Aurors Office. She is
> saying she imagines Harry working there. She pictures Ron helping
> his brother in the Joke Shop. It seems that Nevillie might marry
> Hannah, but that is JKR imagination, she has not written it down
> in any book or official publication, so I think we are free to 
> imagine our own alternatives. 
> 
> So, my point is until she officially writes something down, we
> and she are free to imagine what we want. We and she are even
> free to change our mind from day to day.
> 
> Right now, she imagines that Harry went to work for the Aurors 
> Office, but if she decides to write the further adventures of
> Harry Potter, the needs of that particular book and adventure
> may call for Harry to have done something else. When she write
> those further adventure and Harry does do something else then
> and only then does it become an absolute fact. Until then it 
> is merely the fluid speculations of the author, and that shouldn't
> inhibit our own fluid every changing speculations.
><snip>
> 
> So, part of my point is that I think at this stage JKR just
> considers herself another fan. She imagines the future she
> imagines, and we are free to imagine alternatives. If she ever
> feels the need to write down Harry and the gangs future then
> it takes on a more permanent air. Still even then, if she
> qualifies her statement as she sometimes does now, it does
> not make her written statements absolute. It merely makes 
> them her opinion of what happen. Now if she eventually
> writes a literary work chronicling Harry's future life in
> story form, that becomes canon. But you know what, canon
> has never inhibited the imaginations of wildly creative
> fan fiction writers.

Carol responds:

I don't think she regards herself as just another fan. "He's my
character" pretty much says the opposite--she's the creator; we're the
fans. She owns him.

Of course she has the right to speak about her own characters. The
problem is, as the article states, that each new statement she makes,
even if it's not a pronouncement of canonical "fact" or "truth"--just
"I always imagined him" or whatever--makes it more difficult to
interpret and imagine for ourselves. I never thought of DD as gay
before her announcement. I thought that he had an intense friendship
and intellectual infatuation with another brilliant and arrogant young
man (who happened to be charming as well) and that DD denied his
friend's sinister side because he saw him as a mirror image of
himself. Now I can't read the books without seeing him as gay whether
I want to or not and whether it adds to the story or not.

And it's not just that revelation. I think that JKR did the right
thing in pruning out all the information in the epilogue that she had
originally "crowbarred in"--her words, not the article writer's. The
open-ended epilogue leaves almost everything except HRH's personal
happiness/domestic bliss and Harry's new view of Snape unspecified, so
that the reader can choose to tie up the loose ends (such as the
future relations between Scorpius Malfoy and the Potter and Weasley
kids) or assign the various surviving characters (other than Neville
and Hagrid) the jobs of their choice and anyone not present the
husband or wife of their choice. I can live with Neville marrying
Hannah Abbot (though the Leaky Cauldron detail is just odd) and with
Luna marrying the previously unmentioned Rolf Scamander (a fellow
Ravenclaw?), but no more, please.

BTW, if JKR still thinks that DD is "the epitome of goodness" or that
James was heroic (what happened to that battle with LV), I'll feel
free to disagree with her. That's her intention, her view of those
characters, but it somehow doesn't translate to the page, at least not
for me. And, IMO, she really needs to understand that not all readers
see the characters as she does, and she has no authority to tell us
how to see them. 

I think I'm repeating, but I'll just say again that whatever JKR says
will influence the way the readers react to her novels and what they
see there. Reading should be an interaction between a text and a
reader, without the author leaning over the reader's shoulder telling
him what she means.

At any rate, I'd like to see some reactions to the article itself
because he said what I'm trying to say much better than I'm saying it,
and with better grace.

Carol, who has trouble reconciling "he's my character" with the
reader's freedom to view the character differently