Ignoring JKR's "intentions" (Was: Could Harry have saved Snape?)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 178102

zgirnius wrote:
 
> I am less confident in my skills at Legilimency that you seem to be,
but I would guess her hope was that the reader would share Harry's 
experience, that the reader would move from hatred of Snape and the 
vicarious thrill of his death to the emotionally affecting reversal of
"The Prince's Tale". 
> 
Irene replied:
> It really gets embarassing, the way JKR keeps harping on about that
old teacher. OK, he gave you bad grade, get over it! He didn't set you
up to be eaten by werewolf, did he? Talking about vindictive people
who can't let go of their childhood grudges.
> 
> Even the audience of children seemed to think it is too much. I
don't understand how she can keep talking about Snape as being equal
to her chemistry teacher after book 7. What she did to him up to book
3 is covered by getting even by whatever childhood traumas there were.
But writing a traitor and a murderer, and killing him the most
horrible death, and still reminding everyone at every opportunity that
he is based on a real person - that really is too much. It's like she
wants children to start throwing stones at his windows or something.

Carol responds:

Make that a "traitor and murderer" who turns out to be a misunderstood
hero with a key role in the protagonist's defeat of the villain--not
to mention that JKR has recently expressed affection for Snape ("I
like him") as opposed to her former chemistry teacher, against whom
she nurses a Snapelike grudge. (No wonder she's so good at creating
adult characters who can't get over their own adolescence: Snape,
sirius Black, Lupin, even, to some degree, Dumbledore).

JKR, at times, doesn't seem to realize that, from the moment she put
that poetic introduction to Potions into Snape's mouth in SS/Ps, he
ceased to be the teacher he was based on (given a new setting and
black robes) and became a character in his own right, sarcastic and
unfair, but intriguing, mysterious, brilliant, and, for some readers,
sinisterly sexy. Obviously, the real teacher never interacted with her
as Snape did with Harry--never saved her life, never spent seventeen
years of his life atoning for his role in her mother's death, never
took on the hatred of the WW to honor an old man's wish to die in his
own way, never helped her to defeat a Dark Lord.

Maybe JKR needs to read Roland Barthes's essay, "The Death of the
Author" to understand that the moment her books appeared in print,
they ceased to be hers (except with regard to copyrights and
royalties). For Barthes, JKR is no more responsible for creating her
works than Trelawney for producing her prophecies. She's merely a
"scriptor," the person who wrote them down, as opposed to an "author"
who has "authority" over their creation and interpretation. (I'm not a
postmodernist and don't agree with Barthes, but I do agree with him
that the author is not the sole arbiter of the meaning of her books or
even their most, erm, "authoritative" or perceptive critic.)

http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/whatis.htm

Barthes is, of course, radical and postmodern, and I doubt that JKR
would agree with him that a text is only "a tissue of quotations drawn
from the innumerable centers of culture" [nothing original in it, just
a selection of images and ideas that have been previously expressed]
or that "the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that
is lost, infinitely deferred," but perhaps she would see some validity
in Barthes's assertion that the responsibility for interpreting the
text lies with the reader. Or, less radically, she might consider the
view of Barthes's New Critical predecessors (whose influence he fails
to acknowledge), Wimsatt and Beardsley, who argued in "The Intentional
Fallacy" that a poem [read "work of literature"] "is detached from the
author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend
about it or control it. The poem [or story or novel] belongs to the
public."

If we follow Wimsatt and Beardsley's reasoning, JKR is confusing the
internal meaning of her book(s), available to the public through
language (and subject to interpretation by the reader), with the
external meaning, her own thoughts and feelings, which may have
inspired the book but are not part of it:

1) internal--The internal is what is public: "it is discovered through
the semantics and syntax of a poem [literary work], through our
habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries,
and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general
through all that makes a language and culture."

2) External--The external is "private or idiosyncratic; not part of
the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations . . . about
how or why the poet wrote the poem."

The complete essay can be found at

http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/seminar/Fallacy.htm

and a simplified overview (from which the enumerated points are taken) at 

http://www.michaelbryson.net/academic/wimsattbeardsley.html 

What matters for Wimsatt and Beardsley (and for me) is the words on
the page and how the reader interprets them (within reason: no one
should think that Snape is from Mars, for example, or that Harry
healed Snape off-page but we just didn't see it). Not only is it
impossible (IMO) for any author to fully know, much less fully realize
(in the sense of bringing them into existence) his or her own
intentions, the author has no right to dictate how readers interpret
or react to a scene or character. A work of literature exists
independently of its author. (We don't rely on Chaucer's or
Shakespeare's letters--those few that have survived the ravages of
time--to interpret their works. Why do we need JKR's inconsistent,
ambiguous, and biased remarks to interpret hers?) Suppose that the HP
books were anonymous or that JKR had never given an interview or held
a chat. Would we be at a loss to interpret them without her
"authoritative" voice? I don't think so. In fact, we'd probably be
better off. At any rate, instead of blaming her for failing to
recognize or realize (bring about) her intentions, I think we should
ignore her intentions altogether and just look at the text. 

Is Snape redeemed or punished or both *within the context of the
novel* and without regard to JKR's mixed feelings about him? Is
Lupin's death a punishment? Is Tonks's? They die because they chose to
fight against the DEs, not because Lupin is a werewolf or a weak
person (who finally finds his courage). And, though Bellatrix
specifically kills her sister's "brat" (who dared to marry a werewolf)
to "prune" her family tree, is Tonks's death a punishment in JKR's
eyes? Is Colin Creevey's death a punishment? The poor kid was already
Petrified in CoS for the crime of being a Muggle-born. Now he's
"punished" in DH by being killed in battle. For what crime? Carrying
around a camera and annoying Harry? And how about Dobby, ignominiously
stabbed in the back by Bellatrix after performing a heroic rescue? The
only death that appears to me to be a punishment (unless Snape is
being "punished" for being the supposed master of the Elder Wand, a
mistake with ironic and tragic consequences) is Wormtail's, and his
punishment was engineered by Voldemort himself when he gave Wormtail
the cursed reward of the silver hand: "May your loyalty never waver."
It did waver, though only feebly and briefly, and he was killed by his
own hand. Does his death by strangulation mean that JKR is punishing
him? Maybe. But she kills innocent characters, too, starting with
Cedric Diggory in GoF. Some deaths are fitting: Bellatrix's
paralleling her cousin Sirius's. Others are just the result of being
in the way (the German mother and her children murdered by Voldemort).
If we're going to explore death in the books, IMO we should compare
the deaths of various characters and other characters' reactions to
them, and leave JKR, whose intentions even she can't fully know and we
can only dimly guess from the contradictory bits and pieces she gives
us in her interviews, out of the picture.

Within the context of the book itself, Snape dies helping Harry, and
he dies as he has lived for the last seventeen years, loving Lily and
atoning for his role in her death. Within the context of the book, we
see that there's an afterlife, and that remorse can save the soul.
Within the context of the book, we see that Harry comes to understand
Snape and to forgive him, publicly vindicating him, telling his full
story to Ron and Hermione, and ultimately, naming his second son after
him. He is the only dead character besides Dumbledore who is
specifically referred to in the epilogue as a headmaster and "probably
the bravest man I ever knew."

It does not matter, IMO, that JKR can't get over her feelings toward
her old chemistry teacher. We should be grateful to him for providing
the original model upon whom JKR's "gift of a character" was based.
But Snape is not that teacher. And if Snape's courage and love for
Lily and his role in Harry's victory and his ultimate redemption
qualify as revenge, then that's a very odd form of revenge which
perhaps suggests that Harry is a better man, erm, person than JKR is.

Carol, for whom the world and characters JKR has created are more
important and more interesting than JKR's own limited and biased views
of them