FF/SHIP: Authorial Intent, Canonical Plausibility, Draco/Hermione

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 39058

A few thoughts on authorial intent, canonical plausibility, popular
readings, and the extent to which speculation about Draco/Hermione 
can be said to derive from fanfic, rather than from the canon itself.

Please note that I am not going to be making any arguments either for 
or against Redeemable!Draco or Draco/Hermione in this message.  In
this post, I am just talking about where these notions come from in
the more general sense, and about the relationship between their
appearance in speculation and their appearance in fanfic.

I do hope to write a separate post dealing with Redeemable!Draco
in the next day or two, but for reasons which I hope might be clear, 
I would like to separate that discussion somewhat from this one,
which is more a question of general theory than of specific canonical
argument.

You will, however, wait in vain to see a Draco/Hermione shipping
post from me.  This is because I only ship big important *major* 
characters, like Mrs. Norris, the lunch trolley witch, Avery, and 
Florence. 

-----

So.  First off, a few words about authorial intent.

A while back, Penny cited a number of past exchanges that have 
appeared on this list in regard to the fanfic/fanspec debate.

Now, one of my constant problems with these conversations is that 
they tend to start from the assumption that the author's intent is of 
supreme importance to the work itself, that it confers legitimacy on 
textual interpretation, that it is, in fact, the final authority on 
the work's true "meaning."

This is problematic for me on a number of different levels, but 
primarily because I believe that it is complete and utter rubbish. 

My perspective on this has admittedly been quite strongly influenced 
by the fact that my academic background was in the field of classical 
literature: the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  "The 
Author Is Dead!" might be the battle-cry of certain movements within 
the field of literary criticism, but you know, I'm accustomed to 
dealing with authors who really *are* dead.  I mean, these guys are 
*so* dead.  They are so dead that you would not believe it.  They 
aren't only merely dead, they're really most sincerely dead.  Dead, 
dead, dead, as a Theory Bay post might put it.  They're history.  
Their bones are dust, their temples have collapsed to ruins, and in 
the case of the Romans, even their *language* is dead.

And yet their works still retain meaning and importance to very many 
contemporary readers.  The works themselves are very much alive.

So while as a classicist, one does indeed often try to reconstruct 
the cultural context as a means of determing the way in which the 
works might have been "meant" to be read at the time of their 
writing, to reconstruct that aspect of authorial intent, it is just 
such utter guess-work.  We don't even know for certain how a 
Sophoclean drama would have been *staged,* for heaven's sake!  It's 
all hypothesizing.  And unlike many more modern authors, classical 
writers didn't leave behind much in the way of correspondence or 
memoirs describing their conscious intentions either.  The temptation 
is therefore to adopt a critical approach which looks to the works 
themselves for meaning, while allowing the dust that was their 
authors' bones to rest in peace.

So that's my bias.  All the same, I think that it is a valid
approach to living authors as well.  Certainly it has been a very 
popular one for...well, for nearly a hundred years now, actually.

I never got around to weighing in on Luke's Nel discussion questions 
from several weeks ago -- the ones which centered around the issue of 
what makes a book a "classic" -- but if I had, then I might have said 
this:

(1)  A book may be said to be a "classic" only to the extent that it 
succeeds in *transcending* many aspects of its author's original 
intent.  

If a literary work cannot outlive the specific cultural and historical
context in which it was written, then it cannot possibly become 
a "classic," because it simply will not remain in circulation long 
enough to do so.  To stand the test of time, a work must continue to 
affect readers strongly and deeply even once those readers are no 
longer rooted in the same time, place, or precise cultural context as 
the text's original author.

(2) A book may also be said to be a "classic" to the extent to which 
it supports multiple interpretations.

A literary work that cannot support more than one interpretation is 
not only likely to be shallow and uninteresting; it will also prove 
far too inflexible to stand the test of time.  


In short:

Authors die, mores change, and Empires fall.  

But really good books remain really good books.



Penny wrote (quoting one her own posts from some time back):

<<< We all put our own spin on the characters. They're the same 
characters that JKR created. But, everyone looks at them in a 
different way.>>>>

Yup.  We call that "reading." <g>


Penny also cited herself here:

<<<< Anyway, I'm completely opposed to the notion that there is only 
one JKR interpretation of these characters and books and I'm 
especially opposed to the notion that this one interpretation is 
discernible by people other than JKR herself.>>>>

I'd go Penny one step further here.  See, even if there *were* a "One 
True JKR Interpretation," I don't see why on earth any of us should 
allow knowing it to influence our reading of her text.  Authors are 
very rarely the best interpreters of their own works, nor are their 
interpretations necessarily any more valid than anyone else's.  
Indeed, authors are often *notoriously* oblivious to the true import 
of what they themselves have written.  

The fanfic writers on the list will surely back me up here.  I 
imagine that most of them have stories to tell about those times that 
their readers have commented on a powerful running motif, or a strong 
thematic implication in their work, and by doing so just *astonished* 
them, because they themselves had no conscious awareness of having 
put that in there at all.  Everybody who has ever written fiction has 
had this happen to them.  It's par for the course.  It is also, in my 
experience, a large part of what makes the act of writing itself such 
a profound and personal endeavor.

So while the author can shed light on her original intent, and while 
this is indeed often very interesting, it does not, IMO, bear any 
relationship to the actual merit or value of any given reading of a 
literary work.


Penny wrote:

> I still stand by my position that it is impossible to say that you 
> are reading a work with authorial intent in mind, unless you've got 
> firm unequivocal written evidence of authorial intent from the 
> author.

I agree.  But honestly, even if it were possible to have such 
unequivocal evidence, what difference would it make?  Who cares how 
the author wants us to read her work?  

As far as I'm concerned, as soon as a written work is distributed, 
then the question of how it is to be read is out of the author's 
hands.  Authors may indeed own the right to their works in the legal 
sense, but they do not own the rights to the reader's 
*interpretation* of their works, and they certainly have no power to 
dictate the reader's emotional response to what they have written.
That is the inalienable right of the reader.

Some people view this approach as hostile to the author.  I do not 
consider it hostile to the author at all.  I consider it *respectful* 
to the author.  

You see, the author already had the chance to affect the reader's 
interpretation of the text.  She got that chance when she was writing 
the thing in the first place.  She got to choose her plot, and her 
characters, and her dialogue, and even the very words by which all of 
those things were conveyed.  

We call that "writing," and *that* is the means by which writers go 
about dictating reader interpretation.  Not through their interviews, 
and not through their authorized biographies.  Through their 
*writing.*

To grant the author's stated intent as conveyed through, say, an 
interview a higher authority than the author's own text is actually 
very condescending to the author, in my opinion.  It's disrespectful, 
because it implies that the author is so deeply incompetent that her 
actual *writing* cannot be trusted to convey any coherent or 
legitimate meaning on its own merits.  

This is the reason that while I do find interviews with JKR 
interesting, and I do find them compelling evidence as support for 
various future speculations, I do not really consider them "canon."  
They are not canon.  Canon is the text itself.  Literary interviews 
and literary memoirs are often fascinating -- but they are not the 
same thing as literature.

Okay.  So now that I've got *that* off my chest, let's look at the 
question of canonical plausibility, shall we?  


-----


Back in early February, I posted a two-part essay about how readers 
go about evaluating canonical plausibility.  Interestingly enough, I 
used poor old Redeemable!Draco himself as my primary illustrative 
example of the ways in which different readers might approach the 
question of how "plausible" a given speculation is.  I do feel a bit 
embarrassed about asking people to go back and read my own old post 
like this, but as the only alternative would be for me to write it 
out all over again, I'm going to grit my teeth and do it anyway, and 
just hope that people won't think it too hideously Lockhartish of me.

The relevant links here are:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/34802

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/34811


The first part is more relevant than the second, which returns at the 
end to a long running argument that I was having at the time about 
Snape and his old Slytherin buddies; I include it here, though, 
because it also contains my attempt to define my use of the 
term "reader subversion," which seems to have caused no small degree 
of dismay on the list over the past couple of days.  


-----


Now, on to my own take on the canonical "legitimacy" of the D/H ship.

First off, I don't want to get too deeply into the canonical 
arguments for or against D/H in this post.  For one thing, it's 
really not my favorite topic.  For another, I'd like to try to focus 
on the theory itself here, rather than getting all caught up in the 
specifics.  

Just for the record, though, I will say that while I myself do not 
consider D/H to be very plausible at all, I don't consider it 
a "subversive" (ie, only possible as a consciously revisionist 
reinterpretation of the text) reading either.  I think that it does 
indeed have some canonical suggestion, although I also agree with Jo 
in believing that the overall weight of canonical evidence militates 
against it.

I would like, however, to point out that the very fact that D/H *is* 
such a very popular fanfic convention is compelling evidence to my 
mind that it is also a reading of the text that many people have 
found to be instinctive.  Fanfic tropes don't come out of thin air.  
Occasionally they may develop purely within the fandom (the notion 
that Lupin lives in North Wales, for example, is AFAIK a "pure" 
example of "fanon"), but far more often, they derive from popular 
interpretations of the original text.  This is the reason that one 
tends to find exactly the same concepts appearing over and over again 
both in fanfic and on discussion boards like this one, even among 
people who do not, er, swim in both seas.  So to speak.  

Redeemed!Draco is both a popular fanfic protagonist *and* a popular 
focus of reader speculation because both of these phenomena derive 
from precisely the same source.

That source, of course, is the canon.


Jo wrote, in explanation of her assumption that Heidi's defense of the
D/H ship must have derived from fanfic, rather than from the canon 
itself:

> I was thinking that it was certainly unlikely that many readers (of 
> canon), would consider this a plausable possibility, without having 
> been influenced by any of a number of fanfics where both Draco and 
> Hermione have had their personalities altered in a way that would 
> make this possible.  

Mmmmm.  

Well, you know, I work in a bookstore.  And while I'm at work I often 
find myself eavesdropping on kids discussing the Potter books.  I do 
this because the question of how children read these books interests 
me, and as I have neither children of my own nor very much exposure 
to (or experience with) them, this is one of my few ways of finding 
out how the, er, target audience <nervous glance at Penny> is 
actually interpreting the text.

And you know what?  Adolescent boys 'ship.  They do, they really do.  
It's just a riot.  It cracks me up.  They sit around in our coffee 
shop eating cookies and engaging in romantic speculation all the 
*time.*  It's just like they're talking about a soap opera or 
something. It's hysterical.

And you know what adolescent boys like to talk about?  

Draco/Hermione.  

As far as I can tell, this is primarily because nearly all of them 
take it as read that Draco's got this *massive* crush on Hermione, 
and they're all quite naturally curious as to whether there is any 
chance at all that this crush could ever come to be reciprocated in 
canon.  (For what it's worth, most of them seem to be hoping that it 
won't be.)

This notion that Draco likes Hermione isn't even discussed among them 
as if it's some wild and out-there speculation.  They're not even 
bothering to *debate* that.  They're just *assuming* it.  To boys of 
around the same age as the books' protagonists, the notion that Draco 
has a crush on Hermione -- and that he has had since PoA, if not 
before -- seems to be a completely instinctive and unself-conscious 
reading of the text.

This really surprised me when I noticed it.  But then I went back and 
checked out the relevant scenes, this time keeping in mind that Draco 
Malfoy is not an adult, nor even an older teen, but instead a rather 
immature and disturbed adolescent boy, and um...

Well, yeah.  I have to say it: I've come around to thinking that 
Draco's got a crush on Hermione too.  I don't think that she 
reciprocates it at all, mind.  But I do think that it's there.

Of course, though, this all comes down to interpretation of 
character, which is always *highly* subjective, even more so than 
many other types of textual analysis.  (This is, I believe, the main 
reason that shipping debates at times seem so much more unresolvable 
than other types of canonical discussion.)  Every single bit of text 
that I interpret as evidence a crush, you might with equal validity 
interpret as evidence of Draco's disdain, dismissal, or even outright 
hatred of Hermione.  Which of these readings the author actually 
*intends* is unknown, and furthermore, to my mind, it doesn't really 
matter all that much.  The fact of the matter is that the text 
*itself* both can and does support both readings -- and that for 
whatever reason or set of reasons, the "crush" reading seems to be a 
very instinctive one for the series' adolescent male readership.

Now, somehow I doubt that all of those twelve year old boys are 
reading a whole lot of fanfic.  I think that they're probably just 
reading the books.  

Much like so many of the authors of D/H fanfics were doing, when they 
came up with the idea of writing fics about it in the first place.

Popular readings don't just come out of nowhere.  They are not 
spontaneously generated.  If a particular interpretation proves 
popular with a wide range of readers, then you can bet that there is 
*something,* either in the text itself or in the way in which the 
text interacts with contemporary mores and beliefs, that is leading 
all of those people to read it in the same way.  

I'm not an H/D shipper myself, but I don't think that the concept is 
wholly unsupported by canon, nor do I think that it has developed as 
a pure expression of "fanon."  I am certain that many readers first 
had the possibility of a future canonical Draco/Hermione ship drawn 
to their attention by fanfic.  But I am equally certain that plenty 
of readers came to it of their own accord, due to factors like the 
Jane Austen parallel that Heidi has mentioned, the fact that Draco so 
rarely speaks directly to Hermione at all, the tone of his dialogue 
when he *does* address her (particularly in _GoF_), the tenor of 
his "warning" gloat at the QWC, their own real-life experience of how 
immature adolescent boys often behave around girls that they like, 
the suspicion that JKR might have a redemption scenario in mind for 
Draco, and so forth.  In fact, I strongly suspect that these 
canonical suggestions were precisely what led to D/H's establishment 
as such a popular fanfic theme in the first place.

If JKR really didn't want for quite so many people to read her Draco 
as a possibly redeemable character, or to see the possibility of a 
future D/H ship embedded in the text, then IMO she ought to have made 
a number of her authorial choices somewhat differently.  As things 
stand, she has indeed written a text which encourages quite a lot of 
people to independently adopt such interpretations.  

If there is a disease here (which I personally don't think that there 
is, but which some people apparently do), then I don't think that 
fanfic is its cause at all.  

Fanfic is but one of its many symptoms.



-- Elkins