JKR's opinon. was What JKR's up to

[abigailnus]

No: HPFGUIDX 98638

> Mandy wrote:
> Potter is JKR's universe that she is putting out 
> into the world and inviting us to take a share in. She has the right 
> to guide us in any direction that she chooses, and if people don't 
> want to hear or accept the guidelines that make up her stories 
> universe, they can always stop reading HP. 

Yes and no.  While it is certainly true that the Potterverse is JKR's 
creation, and that within that universe she is god, it doesn't follow 
that that world belongs exclusively to her.  Look around you.  The 
11,000+ members of HPfGU don't just like Harry Potter, they don't 
even just love it.  They love the books so much that they have 
actively sought out a place where they could discuss them with 
other people who also love the books.  And sure, most of started 
with some very basic questions, maybe one or two pithy observations, 
and a thirst for knowledge, but very few of us stayed there.  

Within a few months of joining HPfGU, or just about any HP discussion 
group, most members are spinning elaborate theories and analyzing 
characters.  This isn't passive participation.  This is fandom, and as 
anyone who has spent any time with any fandom anywhere knows, the 
characteristic that sets fandom apart from your average group of 
enthusiasts, fandom's escape velocity, if you will, is the point where the 
community appropriates the work as its own.

I'm a former X-Files fan, and I spent a lot more time than was strictly 
good for me hanging around XF newsgroups in the mid-90s.  It only 
took a short immersion in the fan community to become convinced 
that we, the fans, had a better grasp on the characters and the themes 
of the show than its writers and creators (of course, when discussing 
The X-Files, a show managed by manipulative liars who constantly ran 
their own show into the ground rather than infuse it with emotional 
honesty and continuity, that might actually be true, but back to the 
subject at hand).  This might seem presumptuous, and of course it is, 
but reading just a few messages on HPfGU will show you that we have 
done the same thing.  

Fandom immerses itself in a made up world, whether that world is 
similar to our own but contains a few imaginary people, or whether it 
is a complete fantasy.  I can never know if that immersion is deeper 
than the one that an author goes through when he or she creates that 
world, but I am certain that it is no less deep, and yet fundamentally 
different.

JKR wrote the story of Harry Potter.  That story didn't leap full-formed 
into her head, but neither was it revealed to her as a story in linear 
progression, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.  She created it, 
and so she must have had some fundamental idea of the story she 
wanted to tell while, and even before, she was writing it.  We are 
hearing the story, and so we are only slowly learning what it is as we 
hear it.  These are diametrically different methods of ingesting 
information.  And then, of course, there's the fact that the story that 
JKR thinks she's telling may not be the one that each of us hears.  

A fannish approach to Harry Potter is in effect a dismantling of JKR's 
careful creation.  Sometimes we find cracks and fittings.  Sometimes 
our own backgrounds and preferences influence how we see the 
characters and what we believe will happen to them.  Sometimes we 
stumble on the truth, but more often we create something of our own, 
and call it the truth.  Fandom is not passive, it is its own act of creation, 
one that JKR has no control over, nor any right to control.  Whether or 
not she realizes this or approves of this is beside the point.  There is an 
aspect of Harry Potter that belongs to the hearts and minds of the people 
who read and love and contemplate the books, and where they 
congregate, they make their own stories.  It is no accident, I think, that 
JKR was ignored on the forum she posted to.

Of course, this attitude isn't unique to fandom.  In literary analysis, 
the author's opinion on his or her own work is rarely taken into 
consideration.  Authorial intent should be made apparent through the 
work, or not at all.  Robert Frost vehemently denied that his poem 
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening expressed a desire for death, 
but that is how that poem was read by many.  JKR created her characters, 
and so in a way she knows them better than we ever will.  But if we see 
something in those characters that she may not have intended to put 
there?  JKR doesn't like Draco Malfoy, but some of us find him 
interesting or pitiable.  Are we wrong?

Mandy is right to say that JKR has the same right as any of us to 
express her opinions about her own creation.  What I'm saying is that 
her rights don't supersede any of ours to do the same, although for the 
record, I don't perceive her website as an attempt to curtail or control 
fandom.  In the world of Harry Potter, JKR is god, but that doesn't mean 
that her word, unless it comes between the covers of a book, is the 
undisputed truth.  An author has every right to say 'that's not what I 
wrote', but a reader has an equal right to respond 'that's what I read.'

Abigail