Readers in the WW (was: JKR and "Think of the Children!")

[Neri]

No: HPFGUIDX 162100

> Neri:
> > JKR is actually playing this trick with Luna – she has Luna 
> > reading and believing the obviously fictional Quibbler stuff in 
> > order to keep the realty of the thestrals (in the beginning of 
> > OotP) and of the voices behind the veil (in its end) ambiguous. 
> > But this is not what JKR is trying to do with Harry. She's trying
> > to make Harry's adventures feel as real as possible for the 
> > reader. So this is why no fiction in the WW is allowed, and why
> > Harry and Hermione read a lot, but never fiction.
 
> Jen:  Does it work if the fiction isn't intended to be fiction 
<g>?  

Neri again:
Apparently it doesn't. It's indeed a subtle nuance, but since the 
Quibbler claims to publish true stories, it blurs the difference 
between "truth" and "non-truth" (as defined within the Potterverse, 
of course) rather than the difference between reality and 
imagination. JKR trusts that her readers can handle the complications 
of truth vs. non-truth because, after all, this is what the HP series 
is all about, isn't it? The whole series revolves around many 
mysteries of what is true and what isn't (in the Potterverse). The 
series is full to choke with red herrings, and the Quibbler is merely 
another source of red herrings. The only sophistication here is that 
the value of the Quibbler's red herrings is not so much in themselves 
(because most of them are too outrageous to be believable anyway) but 
in casting doubts on more serious things that Luna says. 

OTOH, blurring the difference between imagination and reality, this 
would be a whole different level, and it's a level that wouldn't 
contribute to the HP series. For example, take the theory that 
everything happening in the series is a dream or something that Harry 
is imagining in his closet in the Durselys. In the end of Book 7 he's 
going to wake up and find that none of it really happened. Most HP 
readers hate this theory, and for a good reason. If JKR started to 
cast doubts on which part of the Potterverse is real and which part 
is Harry's imagination, it would have screwed up our sense of 
realism, that things are really happening and are really important 
and we care about the characters and what will happen to them. We'd 
never care so much about what happens in, say, "Alice in Wonderland", 
because what happens to Alice never feels quite real and isn't 
supposed to. Which is why Alice *does* read fiction (providing it has 
pictures in it).


> Jen:  
> Besides blurring of reality, another reason for not having fantasy 
> characters read fiction books is that there's simply no time for 
> reading when Evil is taking over the Universe.  This is true in 
> Narnia and the other fantasy series I read, Star Wars.

Neri:
Since you mention Star Wars, has anybody noticed that Harry lives in 
the Nineties and he appears to never have heard of Star Wars? He 
hears about evil wizards "going to the Dark Side" and he never 
thinks "hey, this is like Star Wars". Harry not only doesn't read 
fiction, he also never goes to the movies, he never watches 
television (except for the news), he never watches video and he never 
plays computer games. All the things that Dudley does without being 
the great intellectual and imaginative type.

So the point here isn't that Harry doesn't like to read. The point is 
that the whole fiction element is totally absent from his life, or at 
least from what JKR chooses to tell us about his life. Why? Because 
it would interfere with our feeling of the reality of the 
Potterverse.  


Neri