“In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything,” said J.K. Rowling in a July interview with Meredith Viera on the Today show. I would have preferred that she had said even less in Deathly Hallows than she did, but she’s the Author, and Authors get to make their own Important Decisions About Plots. Rowling has been a curious sort of Author, however, because her resistance to telling everything has weakened like a New Orleans levy the more time has passed. Indeed, ever since the receipts from the first weekend’s sales were totaled, Rowling has bestowed revelation after revelation (some of them contradictory) about her characters. Last week, during the Q&A session at a reading in Carnegie Hall, her resistance broke again:
Dumbledore’s outing, Ginny’s career as a Quidditch player, Ron’s life as a either an auror or shopowner (pick one): now that the novel’s finished, Rowling can’t resist saying anything, a fact that is causing no small about of hermeneutic trouble. The troublesomeness Rowling’s extra-textual characterization causes all sorts of consternation. For example, there are still people who believe that an author’s interpretation of her own work is authoritative, so they condemn Rowling for irrevocably tainting the series; Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News is tired of Rowling’s attempts to wrest ownership of the characters from him. Or take Patrick Ross’s claim in CNN’s story for example: “(But) a gay character in the most popular series in the world is a big step for Jo Rowling and for gay rights.” On the one hand, it’s probably overstating the case to say that a single gay character represents a “big step” for anything, no matter how popular something is; on the other hand, even if it were the case that it would be a big step, there’s still the small issue that, in the novels, Dumbledore isn’t gay. Nor is he straight, of course: his sexual orientation is part of no identity that he espouses; moreover, no other character interacts with him as a sexual creature. Indeed, throughout the series he’s rather sexless. And Rowling’s treatment of his gayness—if you can say he has any—is salacious. The queer reading of Deathly Hollows that seems to have sprung from nowhere, which interprets Dumbledore’s and Grindelwald’s relationship as a love affair, conveniently forgets the fact that Rita Skeeter’s book functions early in the novel like a tabloid smear campaign meant to out the good professor. The entirety of the book is Harry’s attempt to reconcile the Dumbledore Skeeter outs with the Dumbledore he knows; worse, the novel’s resolution comes when Dumbledore assures Harry that his tryst with Grindelwald was a mistake from which he had suffered all of his life. To the novels, Dumbledore’s homosexuality exists in one place only: the closet. That’s a problem of the books Rowling wrote, and her efforts to write them anew after the fact only makes the problem that much more apparent.
i think that both her revelation and her not writing a gay dumbledore evidence her two biggest flaws as an author… first and foremost, the inability to let her characters live on in their death. she just has to keep adding superfluous and titillating, if you can call this one that, epilogues, whether in book or in post-book press-conferences. secondly, and really
theirthey're (damn english language!) not ranked one or two in any particular order, it’s her desire to give the readers what she thinks they want, which leads her, if indeed dumbledore is gay, to betray those closest to her... by not writing him as such in the first place and then outing him post hoc.non sequitor
none of the good hogwarts professors have romantic lives, except hagrid, and his ends in disaster. all hogwarts professors are, with the exception of the smoldering snape, but even his is only a platonic lusting after a dead mother, unsexed beings. and, largely, this is the way these sorts of schools are set up. spinsters and bachelors are the lot of them.
by Balthasar Gracián—Oct 26, 08:09 PM
This sentimental Salon article relies too much on nostalgia as a critical tool, but it makes essentially your point, BG:
by greg—Oct 27, 04:33 PM