World Building And The Potterverse

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 167624

Ken wrote:
<snip>
> By contrast there already exists a complete version of the Harry
> Potter series that is 100% faithful to the author's intentions. We
> just don't have the last installment yet.

Carol responds:

I don't think any book or work of art has even been 100 percent
faithful to the author's intentions, even to the extent that the
author is fully aware of them. Tolkien said of LOTR, "This tale grew
in the telling," and the same is no doubt true of the HP books. JKR
has said that some of her characters grew and developed as she wrote
about them. Anyone who has ever attempted to write fiction knows that
characters will do that. They don't remain as they were originally
conceived, and if allowed to do so, they will run away from the author
and act in ways that the author did not initially plan. Plot
developments also sprout unexpectedly with consequences for the next
book, or developments that the author planned don't work out and have
to be rewritten from scratch (the Weasley cousin who had to be edited
out, for example). An author's unconscious mind also shapes the work
without, of course, any such intention (or even perhaps any awareness)
on the author's part.

Having already published SS/PS, JKR could not go back and rewrite it
to bring in what I take to be the new concept of a Squib. She had to
live with Neville's remark that his family thought he was "all Muggle
for ages"--hardly a thought that a pureblood family would have, but
perhaps she hadn't yet come up with the idea that Neville, in contrast
to Harry, was a pureblood. The importance of "blood" was quite
probably just becoming clear to her. New themes and new ideas occurred
to her as she went along. The DADA jinx placed by Voldemort many years
earlier may or may not have been planned from the beginning of the
series. Maybe she originally intended to have it begin with Harry's
entrance into the school but couldn't find a way to make that work.

In any case, no manuscript that I'm aware of ever perfectly followed
an outline because the outline can't possibly anticipate new
developments that occur in the writing. Maybe JKR should have been
more systematic, keeping a record of dates and events and knowing
exactly where to look to verify every detail. (Hm. Did Ron know about
Draco's Hand of Glory? Or did he ever actually purchase the Hand of
Glory, as far as Harry or the reader knows? Oops. That one slipped by.)

And, of course, she *is* deliberately planting both hints and red
herrings and misdirecting both the reader and Harry by having him
overhear, or hear at secondhand, incomplete conversations. And
sometimes, a character is simply wrong in his or her interpretation of
an event or another character and we can't know that until the truth
comes out. (I'm quite sure that JKR fully intended for Hermione's
explanation of Tonks's uncharacteristic behavior in HBP to be wrong,
for example. We have yet to find out who, if anyone, is right about
Snape's.)

So we're dealing, first, with a set of books that is still incomplete
from our perspective as readers. It's premature to judge the whole
based on 6/7. we're also dealing with a tricky, slippery author who
likes to misdiredt use. And we're dealing with a human being who, like
all human beings, makes mistakes. We've all misremembered scenes from
her books (well, I have and I know others on this list who have).
Human memory is not, unfortunately, as accurate as the objective
memories that a wizard places in a Pensieve. It's unfortunate that the
copyeditors haven't caught all the inconsistencies and called them to
her attention to be corrected before publication, but copyeditors are
human, too, and their time and resources are limited. JKR may be
exempt from deadlines; copyeditors aren't.

JKR is not writing about the real world and cannot, therefore, write
from experience (though certain elements of the books reflect or
perhaps parody their RW equivalents). She is not working from a
thoroughly invented Secondary World complete with maps and a history
(subject to revision as inconsistencies and improbabilities crop up).
She's creating her world as she goes along, and certain elements, such
as moving staircases at Hogwarts, tend to be left behind as the
characters develop and the themes become more complex. Her vision of
the later books and the characters who inhabit their pages could not
possibly have been clear. All she had was a general idea of where the
books were going, certain events that had to occur in each year, and
she had to fit the whole series into a preconceived seven-year framework.

Show me a book that doesn't contain any errors or inconsistencies and
I'll show you a book written by perfect beings who don't exist on this
planet. To err is human; to forgive divine. Let him who has never made
a mistake cast the first tomato.

Of course, we have every right to criticize JKR and point out her
inconsistencies or perceived inconsistencies. We can try, as Pippin
does with the Hand of Glory, to find what we consider a plausible
explanation for the discrepancy between CoS and HBP on that point. We
can argue, as Steve does, that the two eavesdropping accounts are just
incomplete, not inconsistent, as they appear to other readers
(including me). Or we can disagree with both of these interpretations
and perceive the inconsistencies as Flints, for which there are plenty
of precedents. But it really seems unfair to expect an author who sees
herself as a writer of children's books, and who seems to be focusing
primarily on plot, secondarily on characters and themes, and who seems
to be quite consciously manipulating the point of view for her own
purposes, to be overly concerned with world-building. Her world is our
world with a difference, not a long-ago and faraway Secondary World.
Let the reader worry about how Time-Turners work or how Hogwarts could
have had modern plumbing when the CoS was built. Those things are not
what JKR is focusing on, as far as I can determine. And, unlike
Tolkien, she doesn't have time to write and rewrite the books
"backwards." The previous books are already published and their
essentials are established, flaws, inconsistencies and all. 

Aragorn started out as a hobbit name Trotter, for crying out loud.
Imagine what would have happened had Tolkien retained that initial
conception of his story. But he didn't have to publish the earlier
"books" (using his division into six books) sequentially, with the
events of the first books set in stone as Frodo approached Mount Doom.
It's just not fair to JKR expect an equal consistency in the HP books.

Carol, who thought that her own standards of perfection were
impossibly high until she read this thread