Voldemort and Sauron and Others

[sigurd at eclipse.net]

No: HPFGUIDX 191487

Dear list

One of the things to remember in something like Harry Potter is that you don't get to have "the competing narrative."

In History you can have the "competing narrative" because there is a factual basis from which all narratives are drawn. Others can work with the same facts and draw a different narrative. Thus the traditional "narrative" of American History, what has been called the
"triumphalists" or sometimes "the melting pot" or a host of others have been essentially positive, a story of ascencion and triumphing over natural and social obstacles to attain a certain amount of exceptionalism to America. Lately (last 50 years or so) there have been "competing narratives" usually told from the standpoint of groups and subgroups in a society  which do not share, often, the triumphalism. Native, American, Women, Afro-Americans, immigrants etc. These, and proponents and adherents and members of these groups have penned these "competing narratives." The critics of these "other narratives" refer to them as "victim history" and most of the time-- they're right. Much of these competing narratives are overblown and show evidence of poor scholarship and a presentism that pretty much invalidates  the case (you guys screwed us then so you should pay now.). But to give them there due, there are many "competing narratives" that have their scholarship in line, and their desire is not to squeeze present political concessions but to honestly tell the story from the other side, and they do so impartially. This is what makes history-- well-- history! The competing narrative does not invalidate the narrative it competes against, it just is required to be heard.

But in a novel there is no competing narrative. No competing narrative is possible, unless of course the author creates one. For example JRR Tolkien, behind "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings"
 had a huge corpus of notes, data, maps, figures, even literature composed in "Elvish" and other of his mythical languages, such  that it went a long way towards providing the "corpus" of historical data that might suffice as if it were real historical data. Tolkien's "heirs and assigns" boiled this down into another book, the Silmarillion, but even that does not encompass the huge body of data that Tolkien wrote. One MIGHT be able to write a competing narrative from this (for example the War of the Rings from the Orks point of view) but in the end it is still a creation out of the mind. Even Tolkien cannot suffer an alternate Middle Earth, as even the view of the Orks is from his own mind.

Thus to speak of a "canon" of Harry Potter, one truly has an encyclopedic canon because that's what Rowling wrote. There is no room for a competing narrative, simply because Rowling is the only author, the only actor, the only agent in the book -- the puppeteer and the plots and puppets dance to her strings. Therefore, what she says IS, and we have to take the illustrations, examples, words and moods that she conveys in their obvious, and literal-- sense. Thus when she says "The Slytherin table was completely empty" there is no room for us to assert that someone was hiding under it, or that they were screwing their courage to the sticking point. Rowling means in every sense that every one of them was with the other side, otherwise she would not have created the enormously eloquent division between Slytherin and the other houses, and the metaphor of the "completely empty table."

In a novel, the author is not only the writer of the facts, they are the interpretor of the facts, and the meaning thereof. In fact, the images are the facts.
Otto