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I've only read 50 or 60 comments on this affair, so I hope this isn't redundant, but. . . Aside from the talk-show "culture warriors" and their predictable screaming, most of the Dumblegayte fire has been focused on the question of Should: Should Ms. Rowling, or any fiction writer, make ex post facto comments about characters going beyond what existed on the page? But it's worth noting that according to many tenets of literary criticism, Ms. Rowling simply can't make these comments. Okay, okay, she can, but according to the now-old New Criticism and other schools of interpretation, her comments about the finished text are meaningless. Only what is on the page exists; her comments about Dumbledore's alleged sexual orientation change nothing because her creation is fixed and finished. If we learned that Mark Twain always thought of Pa Finn as a gentle, thoughtful guy who loved to curl up with a good book, what difference would that make--except to undermine our faith in Twain's abilities? As for the point made by some Rowling defenders--that she was just trying to keep the movie people from creating a Dumbledore girlfriend in a future pic--that's really a matter of the contract JKR signed for the millions she reaped from Hollywood. If the contract gives her veto power over such changes, great; if not, they can make Harry a Texan and Dumbledore a hard-drinking, hard-cussing ex-Marine if they like. |
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