Controlling the Potterverse (Was Re: What JKR's up to)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 98816

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Eustace_Scrubb" <dk59us at y...>
wrote:
> Jim Ferer wrote:
> > What's going on is a struggle for ownership of the Potterverse with
> > its own creator!  You are right, it's HER series.
> > 
> > Jim Ferer
> 
> Eustace_Scrubb:
> I think you're right.  Which makes me wonder about the statement in
> the FAQ--
> "I often get suggestions about what I ought to insert into Harry
> Potter books, but these are my stories and mine alone; if anyone wants
> to write about American wizards they are of course free to write their
> own book!"
> 
> There are probably would-be authors all over the world ready to take
> her up on that, ummm, "invitation."
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Eustace_Scrubb

And yet, in a sense, the stories arent "hers alone," except that
she'll write and publish them and get paid millions of pounds. But
they're ours to interpret, and as long as we stay with the canon, we
don't have to agree with her. Like all of us, she's limited by her own
preferences and biases, which affect her own interpretation of her own
works. (To take one example, the group moderators see things in
Slytherin that she doesn't see and never intended, but that doesn't
mean they're not really there. And I very much doubt that any two
readers will ever see Snape in exactly the same way, much less the way
she "intended" him to be seen, even after the books are all
published.) As I've said before, literary critics would be out of a
job if all that could be said about a book is in the book itself or
the author's commentary on it. 

Whether JKR likes it or not, and clearly, she doesn't, her characters
have taken on lives of their own outside her control, not just in fan
fic but in serious (yet enjoyable) discussions like these.

Look what happened to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or rather, to
Frankenstein's monster. It became part of the culture that gave it
being and Mary Shelley had no more control over its destiny and its
various manifestations than Frankenstein himself did. And look what's
happened to LOTR. Would Tolkien recognize Faramir as he's depicted in
the films? Or the "pointy-eared Elven princeling"? Or the
computer-generated Golllum? Would he approve of the changes to Frodo,
who actually tries to hand the One Ring to a Nazgul? How can Peter
Jackson and his co-writers do that?

How? Because LOTR has its own life, its own mythology, that others can
shape to their liking. JKR doesn't "own" Harry Potter in anything
except the legal ownership of the copyright, any more than Homer
"owned" the characters in the Iliad. Just ask the Greek tragedians,
who wrote their own versions of Agamemnon and his relatives. Or ask
Brad Pitt whether Achilles is alive today and whether he must be
exactly as Homer depicted him.

No, I think JKR is wrong. What she's created is bigger than she ever
anticipated. All that's in her control is whether the characters live
or die, how Harry defeats Voldemort, what happens to them in the
epilogue. The events are in her hands. But the characters are already
ours.

Carol, who does *not* mean that speculation and wishful thinking can
take the place of canon-supported analysis or that any interpretation
is as good as any other