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"BOOM. They knocked again. Dudley jerked awake.
'Where's the cannon?' he said stupidly."
—PS, Ch 4
Hello, all. Quite some time ago now, Rebecca began her last sally in our discussion about Snape's attitudes towards his old Slytherin classmates with a preamble regarding the nature of canon. Because issues of canonical purity have come to suffuse this exchange, and because I find them interesting in and of themselves, I'd like to take a bit of time here to examine the relationship between authorial fiat and reader desire: the space that lies between the two, the nature of the speculation that takes place within that space.
If theory gives you the screaming heebies, then you may want to give this one a miss, frankly. I am no po-mo warrior, but I do occasionally indulge myself in a few ugly little habits, like using the word 'privilege' as a verb. If that sort of thing upsets you, then please feel free to skip on ahead: I've extracted the parts of this discussion that did not, IMO, center on questions of canonical purity, and I'll be addressing those separately, in a different (and relatively theory-free) post later on.
This got long. It got quite long. I've therefore broken it up into two parts. Only part two has Snapestuff in it, sorry. This part does have a bit of Draco, though, for those who like that sort of thing.
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So. In message 33930, Rebecca wrote:
I'd like to make a brief preamble distinguishing between an interpretation based on canonical evidence and one based on ones own experience, imagination, influence from other writers and real world probability. Now if anyone tries to write a fanfic, which was Elkins original example, they must draw on all these things.
I would argue that all readers both can and must draw on all of these things. To do so is intrinsic to the very act of reading a text. Fiction in particular relies upon the reader's ability to make sense of the story through extrapolation from real life, and through inferences drawn from that extrapolation. Should the reader fail to do this, or should her inferences diverge too widely from what the author had anticipated (as might happen, for example, due to vast cultural differences between reader and author), then the story is likely to fall flat: it will not make sense to the reader, or it will fail to engage on any real emotional level.
(Yes. This is painfully basic. But please bear with me: I really am trying to go somewhere with this.)
Non-canonical sources such as the reader's real life experience, imagination, and understanding of probability, politics, and literary or genre convention are not the enemies of Authorial Intent. They are very important vehicles of Authorial Intent.
But the Author does not get to steer those vehicles.
We do.
And We Are Legion.
This is relevant because, as the endless quality of some of the debates here demonstrate (just how many students are there at Hogwarts, anyway?), canon itself is often ambiguous or self-contradictory, open to many equally-plausible interpretations; on many issues, it is simply silent. When this happens, then readers must turn to non-canonical considerations—themselves often ambiguous or self-contradictory—to decide which of competing potential canonical 'truths' they wish to privilege. Because there are so many non-canonical factors open for consideration, however, and because many of these are intensely personal, no two readers are likely to construct 'canonical suggestion' in precisely the same way. Some disagreement over what is in fact suggested or implied by the text is unavoidable.
It is, I believe, this very quality of fiction—the fact that it not only invites, but actively demands that the reader insert his own experiences into the text—that makes the act of reading fiction so highly engaging, and so deeply immersive. Fiction demands a great deal of active participation from the reader. It is intensely personal. The hazy indeterminate space which lies between What the Author Tells Us and That Which Canon Does Not Prohibit is the space in which the story lives and breathes. It is the space in which not only fanfic, but also reader speculation—such as gets discussed on this list—and to some extent reader engagement itself resides.
Canonical "suggestion" lives within this space.
But so do reader imagination...and reader desire.
Rebecca wrote:
But I'm trying to make a distinction between the way a reader imagines things ought to be (and here everyone can and should make their own interpretations) and what is actually suggested by the text (which we can still disagree on, but there's a difference).
Rebecca, while I understand (or believe that I do) the distinction that you're describing here, I also think that the situation is far more complicated than the above sentence might suggest. There is in fact a vast grey area lying between What The Author Tells Us and What We Would Like To Imagine, and many gradations of canonical 'purity' within that space. Canonical suggestion—"what is actually suggested by the text"—is itself, as you acknowledge, open to debate; it is so precisely because it is formulated through recourse to all of those non-canonical factors you mentioned earlier: extrapolation from experience, real world probability, literary convention, and so forth. Unlike canonical evidence (the actual words of the author), canonical suggestion is a matter of nuance and assumption and inference: it is inherently 'impure.'
That said, however, I think that we would both agree that there is such a thing as 'canonical purity,' and that some interpretations adhere to it far more strictly than others. Even on subjects about which canon is silent, we generally do recognize certain theories as more 'plausible'—by which we mean, 'more likely to be what the author intended'—than others. We recognize the existence of a thing called 'Spirit of Canon,' a spirit which can be either respected or violated. Because the Spirit of the Canon is a thing of nuance and inference and tone, it may be difficult to define in precise terms, but we believe in it nonetheless. It's a lot like pornography that way—we may not know exactly what it is, but we recognize it when we see it. ;-)
Within the vast grey realm of canonical possibility there lies a spectrum of what we might call 'canonical plausibility.' Some speculations are so strongly implied by the text that they hardly require any defense at all ("Dumbledore Is NOT Evil!"). At the most plausible end of this spectrum we might place those notions so overwhelmingly suggested by the text that they may often be mistaken for absolute canonical truth—until, that is, some crazed L.O.O.N steps in to clear up the misapprehension ("The Lestranges were two of younger Crouch's three co-defendents in the Pensieve scene of GoF").
Some theories, on the other hand, militate so strongly against what we perceive as the Spirit of Canon that while they can be defended (and often are, often by means of extensive citation), to do so requires both rugged determination and, one might argue, a healthy dose of perversity—or at the very least, of eccentricity ("Dumbledore Is In League With Voldemort!" "Snape and Sirius Are Actually Blood-Relations!"). At the far end of the spectrum on this side lie 'subversive readings,' readings whose proponents know full well that they are not Authorial Intent, and never will be canon, but which because they are not yet explicitly prohibited by the text are still "permissable" and may therefore be legitimately espoused. Subversive readings are those which deliberately and self-consciously violate the Spirit, if not the Letter, of Canon.
Readers might choose to privilege a subversive reading for any number of different reasons: political bias, aesthetic preference, philosophical protest, playful humor, or plain old-fashioned perversity. In most cases, though, the decision to espouse a subversive reading reflects some degree of dissatisfaction with one or more aspects of a work which otherwise holds great appeal. Subversive readings are usually a symptom of a deep reader ambivalence about the text as a whole.
Of course, true subversion is a matter of intent. For a reading to classify technically as a 'subversive reading,' its proponent must believe himself to be in deliberate opposition to the Spirit of Canon. It is therefore impossible to prove that someone else's speculation is truly subversive—particularly as an important part of the "game" of defending a subversive reading is the assumption of a painfully earnest and sincere tone ("No, really, this MUST be what's really going on in these books—just look at all the PROOF I've found!"). So, for example, while I strongly suspect that Eric Oppen's "Frank Longbottom Was Judge Dredd On Acid!" speculation was intentionally subversive, I cannot know this for sure. He may have been proposing what in his own mind he considered an "implausible" suggestion, rather than a deliberately subversive one.
I can, however, give with full confidence as an example of a subversive reading a post I wrote a week or two ago (but never sent out) with the subject line "Defending Avery," in which I embarked on a passionate defense of one of Rowling's most severely misunderstood and consistently maligned minor characters to date: Snape's old classmate, the unfortunate Mr. Avery. In that message, I objected strenuously to Rebecca's characerization of this poor man as a "grovelling toady" and outlined all of the ways in which the canonical evidence actually strongly suggests that Avery Is Not All That Bad A Fellow, Really.
And I did a fair job of it too, I think. (Hey, there's quite a case to be made for Avery, you know...) But the point here is that of course I don't really believe that JKR intended, or anticipated, or expected, or at all wanted us to read the text that way. Nor do I believe for a moment that Rowling's Avery, should he appear in later books, will bear any resemblance to the rather likeable figure I painted in that post. It is perfectly clear to me that we're meant to read JKR's Avery as...well, as a grovelling toady, actually.
However, the canon can be read to suggest otherwise. There is plenty of evidence to support such a reading, and nothing in the text proper that strictly opposes it. I was therefore not violating any of the accepted rules of engagement in my interpretation: I was, in short, not "cheating." But I was deliberately misreading the cues of canonical suggestion, and doing so with purely provocative intent. (I had at the time just been accused of extending unreasonable benefit of the doubt to criminals and other Very Bad Men; the post was my original response to that accusation, a rather aggressive "I'm going to commit the murder I was imprisoned for" tactic. It occurred to me only after writing the thing that it was likely an unduly inflammatory response, which was the reason that in the end, I never sent it out.)
"Defending Avery" was a truly subversive reading, a deliberate violation of the Spirit of Canon. It is quite possible, however, that someone else could make the exact same case for Avery with no subversive intent: they could merely have read the cues of canonical suggestion in a highly idiosyncratic manner and thus come to view what I consider virtually canonically impossible as the Author's Real Intent. People read very differently, and sometimes they can come to very different conclusions regarding the true nature of the Spirit of Canon.
Leaving aside for the moment the question of deliberately subversive readings, though (I'll return to them later), I think that for the most part readers are capable of differentiating between their own desires and the suggestions of the text. Statements such as "I would certainly like it if JKR redeemed Draco...but I don't really think that's ever going to happen," or "I don't really think that Snape is supposed to be a vampire...but it sure is fun to speculate!" attest to this understanding, as do the occasional explicit rejections of canonical statement of fact. ("I don't care what canon states, I always imagine McGonagall's animagus form as an orange marmalade, and I intend to continue to do so, no matter how many times the text tells me otherwise!") Generally speaking, readers do know when they are choosing to ignore or override textual suggestion.
Sometimes, though, disagreements arise over where along the spectrum of plausibility certain speculations or conjectures truly lie. This does not, IMO, happen simply because some readers are inept (although surely some are), or because some people have a tin ear when it comes to nuance and tone (although some undoubtedly do). Rather, it seems to me that when such disagreements arise, it is usually because different readers have chosen to focus on different aspects of canonical suggestion—and because many of these aspects are in direct (and often strident!) contradiction.
This situation is even further complicated in the case of the HP books because as the series progresses, the tone of the books has been growing steadily darker and the moral universe they present ever more complex and ambiguous. As a result, the 'Spirit of Canon' may itself be seen to be in a state of flux: as the series progresses, some of the rules seem to be changing. After reading only the first two books, for example, Rebecca's statement that "JKR's Slytherin is the House of Bad Guys" would seem incontrovertable. By the end of PoA it seems less so, and by the end of GoF, less so still. This aspect of the series weakens our sense of surety about what truly is or is not permissable to imagine about future developments: what once seemed improbable may come to seem not only plausible, but even strongly indicated; the formerly subversive may come to be reinterpreted as merely highly unlikely.
(Or it may even become canonical fact! Just after PoA came out, a friend and I entertained ourselves for a couple of days by racking up canonical "proofs" for the notion that Snape really had once been one of Voldemort's supporters, see, but that he'd since...well, recanted, sort of. Although we both loved this theory, neither of us believed for a moment that it was really Authorial Intent. We knew full well that such a plot development would be grossly out-of-character for Rowling's irritatingly morally simplistic universe. *vbg* No, this was a purely subversive reading that we were defending partly to amuse ourselves, but mainly to annoy the hell out of a mutual friend -- one who is often weirdly humorless about "heretical" interpretations of the books that she very much likes.)
(Needless to say, we were both thrilled with GoF. But the point here is that when an interpretation that you had assumed to be utterly opposed to the Spirit of Canon is revealed to be Authorial Intent only one novel later, that can leave you with some lingering doubts about your own ability to correctly interpret canonical suggestion.)
In the absence of direct canonical evidence, readers must look outside of canon proper for ways to construct a kind of model representing the Canonical Spirit, and this process is unlikely to be undertaken in the same way by every reader. We all believe in a Spirit of Canon, yes. But our respective images of what that Spirit of Canon looks like are not necessarily at all the same.
As an example of this phenomenon, let's take the (rather contentious) statement: "By the end of Book Seven, Draco Malfoy will have found redemption, if only in death."
The general consensus about this statement seems to be that it is canonically implausible, yet still well within the range of possibility (i.e., it is not necessarily a subversive reading.) There is, however, no very firm consensus on this particular issue. Whenever it gets raised here, you can easily find people arguing strenuously for its allocation to all points along the spectrum of plausibility, including its most extreme ends. "It is a virtual certainty that Draco will act in the service of Good before the end of the series: all indications point to that outcome; at this point it is practically a canonical inevitability" has its small group of adherents. So, however, does "Malfoy will never be redeemed in canon: the very notion is heretical and can only be defended as a deliberately subversive reading!"
The people who argue both of these extreme positions aren't coming to their vastly differing conclusions on the basis of nothing more than their own desires or personal neuroses (lingering resentment of schoolyard bullies, for example, or romantic preference for frail young blonds). Such factors might certainly play some role, but for the most part I think that the adherents of both of these extreme positions are looking at 'legitimate' sources of canonical suggestion. The problem is that while they're looking at the same types of sources, they're coming up with completely different answers.
The most vehement opponents of Redeemable Draco, for example, may be looking for clues to Authorial Intent to literary convention ("Draco is Harry's literary mirror: just as Harry both has and will be tempted by Evil, yet choose to turn to Good, so Draco will be given the opportunity to turn to Good, yet choose an Evil path"), or to genre convention ("This is a boy's coming-of-age story set in a fantasy universe; in such stories, the hero must be given opportunity to triumph over an adversary of roughly equivalent age and experience; Draco is the character who fills that function in these books").
They may also be gaining their impressions from certain conventions and shorthands that JKR has already exhibited a fondness for in the books to date ("Slytherin Is the House of Evil," "Children Resemble Their Parents," "History Repeats Itself Through the Generations," "Blondes Are Bad News"), or drawing analogies with other literary works that bear some relation to the HP books ("Draco Malfoy is the cowardly bully of a boarding school tale. He's the Flashman, for heaven's sake! And just as that character never got one whit of authorial sympathy [until another writer came along to make him the star of his own deliberately subversive text], so only through a subversive reading could Draco be painted in a sympathetic light—JKR herself will never do so.")
Assumptions about the author's personal philosophy, drawn either from observations of the work so far ("JKR has proven herself unsentimental about both the supposed innocence of youth and about the nature of evil; she will therefore not balk at sending even a character so young straight to the Dark Side"), or from statements the author has made in interview ("JKR herself has said that she wishes to depict Evil as truly bad: in order to do this, she will have to show the corruption of youth, and it would weaken her thematic point to provide such an antagonist with any last-minute redemption") may also play their part in their understanding of What Canon Actually Implies.
Finally, people who take this position may be drawing on their own understandings of real-life experience and real-world probability to reach their conclusions. ("People's predilections usually are visible by the age of 14," "It is rare for children to overcome beliefs instilled in them by their parents," "It just wouldn't be realistic if all of Harry's peers turned out to be Good Down Deep Inside").
And as for those who maintain that canon overwhelmingly suggests a redemption scenario for Draco?
Well, they're looking at exactly the same things.
They, too, are looking to literary convention ("Draco's literary double is Severus Snape: just as Snape managed to turn away from his evil path, so will Draco") and to genre convention ("This is the sort of story which must end with a decisivee victory for the forces of Good; only if Evil is abandoned by some of its former adherents can this victory be in any way satisfying, and Draco is the obvious character to serve such a function").
They, too, are drawing conclusions based on certain habits or tendencies that the author has revealed in the books to date (The most likely suspect is never the real culprit; Characters often surprise you; The lines of conflict are never drawn quite where you expect them to be; As the series progresses, the books grow increasingly morally ambiguous, so by Book Seven Draco cannot remain the one-dimensional character he has been to date). Also like their opponents, they are likely drawing comparisons with analogous characters in other fictional works ("Draco Malfoy is an envious, proud, disdainful aristocrat. He's Elidyr, for heaven's sake! And just as Elidyr gives his life to atone for his wrongs, so will Draco make the same decision.")
Redeemable Draco's most devoted supporters are also likely to be making some assumptions about the author's personal philosophy, based either on knowledge of her life experiences ("JKR used to work as a schoolteacher, so she knows that children often grow out of their cruelty," "JKR used to work for Amnesty International, so she's been immersed in a tradition of redemption narratives"), or from the moral precepts that she has chosen to emphasize most strongly in her work to date ("Don't Prejudge Others," "It Is Never Too Late For Redemption," "It Is Our Choices, Not Our Heritage, That Define Who We Are").
Finally, also like their opponents, these people are likely drawing off of their understanding of real-life experience and real-world probability to reach their conclusions ("The people who parrot their parents' beliefs most vehemently in early adolescence are those most likely to rebel later in their teen years," "You can't really tell anything about someone from the way they behave at the age of 14," "Adolescents tend to express cruel and callous opinions that they don't necessarily really believe as a way of covering for their own fears and insecurities.")
Now, neither of these groups of people is exactly ignoring canon. Nor are they going about interpreting canonical suggestion in an utterly wrong-headed fashion. Every single one of the above statements represents, IMO, a perfectly legitimate step in the effort to construct a model of the 'Spirit of Canon' from which future plot developments may be predicted. But these two groups of people have chosen to focus on completely different aspects of canonical suggestion while resolutely ignoring other aspects: they have therefore reached diametrically opposed—if equally extreme—conclusions.
In other words, people don't always disagree because they fail to read the signs. Sometimes they disagree because the signpost bears far too many signs—all of them pointing in different directions.
When we talk about certain readings being more strongly suggested than others, then, we can run into difficulties, because the aspects of canon that I choose to privilege might not be the same as the ones that you do. "Harry is the Heir of Gryffyndor" is another good example of this phenomenon—and a far simpler and less contentious one than Redeemable Draco. To some, the speculation that Harry might be Godric Gryffyndor's heir seems highly plausible: genre convention supports it, as do certain canonical plot events and their implications. Others, however, argue (with equal validity, IMO) that this theory is canonically IMplausible, or even downright anti-canonical ("That would totally violate the spirit of the canon!") because the work to date has placed such a strong thematic emphasis on the primacy of choice over blood in the affairs of men.
In fact, both "Blood Will Tell" and "Choice Over Blood" are strongly suggested by the text, despite the fact that these two statements are contradictory. This is one of the major 'fault lines' of the books: one of the areas where the work strikes readers as thematically inconsistent, and which therefore causes a high degree of reader anxiety.
Which brings us back to the issue of reader subversion.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on February 6, 2002 3:32 PM
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