Spoiling the fun

[pippin_999]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "Barry Arrowsmith"
<arrowsmithbt at b...> wrote:

> 
> It does bother me that Jo is indulging in info by leakage. SSS was
suggesting that she doesn't want people to go off on the wrong track 
IIRC.

Erm...no, I don't think so. It's unlikely that an author would
deliberately insert red  herrings and then worry about readers
getting it wrong -just  the opposite, previously she seemed to 
derive a great deal of satisfaction at us barking up a whole 
succession of wrong trees.

Must  say, I enjoyed it myself, great fun. So what's changed? 

Pippin:
I think you nailed it with "deliberately insert red herrings." She
doesn't mind us sniffing after *deliberately* inserted red herrings.
We'll get to do that until the cows come home and the fat lady sings.
But I fancy the  gum wrappers, vampire!Snape, Mark Evans and other 
such debunked items weren't  intentional red herrings; they were 
based on clues read as JKR never expected them to be. 

Therefore they couldn't be debunked in the text without
distorting it. She had no plans to revisit the gum wrappers, no
exegis of the connection between Snape and bats, and we were never 
supposed to wonder if there were Lily relatives among the living 
besides Harry, Dudders and Pet. 

Rather than leave us bewildered, she gave us extra-textual
explanations.  It doesn't hurt the story she's telling to let us know
that the gum wrappers are just gum wrappers, because we were
never supposed to think they were anything else.

 Of course if  our theories are interesting in themselves
and not merely outrageous perversions of canon invented in the hopes 
of a scandalized response, then they might be worth exploring 
in their own right.

There is such a thing as *original* fiction, you know <g>.

Pippin